Lost in Wonder
Imagining Science and Other Mysteries
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The splendors of science, delightfully demystified.
How do we make sense of the modern world? Science is a profoundly affecting aspect of contemporary life, and yet the gulf between experts and everyone else is widening. Colette Brooks bridges the gap by playing the role of curious layperson, serving as a tour guide to some of the most important discoveries and innovations of the last five centuries.
Through serious and absurd stories alike, Brooks takes readers back and forth in time, from dark, cavernous laboratories to the pristine facilities of the twenty–first century. Laugh along with Newton, peer at the moon with Galileo, work beside the Wright Brothers, ride with the astronauts of Apollo 11, watch for UFOs in the 1950s, probe the secrets of the fruit fly, visit Chernobyl, or examine suspicious packages in a Hazmat suit. With Brooks as the guide, it’s easy to become immersed in the twists, turns, and surprises of each imaginative leap forward.
Through a series of “thought experiments," Brooks also poses questions and offers helpful tips that ease the readers way into this strange but provocative territory. Bringing her unique perspective to the larger cultural conversation about science, Brooks ultimately unleashes the most powerful force of all: our own wonder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What is science, and what makes scientists so different from the rest of us? Brooks (In the City: Random Acts of Awareness) poses, but never really answers these questions in her argument for everyone learning the language of science. We must get over our fear of math, Brooks claims. Elaborating on the gap between scientists and laypeople, the author describes how the Wright Brothers' sister Katherine was mystified by their obsession with flight, and the superstitious Anna Roentgen was nervous as her husband, Wilhelm, used her hand to make the first X-ray image. Often, Brooks trivializes great work by juxtaposing it with the mundane: the creators of foam rubber slippers and Stove Top stuffing share a short chapter with Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter), who invented computer programming for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Many chapters offer little more than name-dropping, whizzing, for example, from Isaac Newton through Galileo to Werner von Braun and remarking that scientists are lonely men. Although Brooks writes of wanting to bridge the gap between experts and everybody else, this book merely skims the surfaces of ideas and the people behind them.
