Boltzmann's Tomb
Travels in Search of Science
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A selection of the Scientific American book club
Recommended by MSNBC, Los Angeles Times, & American Association for the Advancement of Science’s SB&F magazine
“This wonderful scientific memoir captures the romance and beauty of research in precise poetic prose that is as gorgeous and evocative as anything written by Rilke, painted by Seurat, or played by Casals.” —Mary Doria Russell, author of Doc and The Sparrow
“A radiant love letter to science from a scientist with a poet’s soul . . . Green is an exquisite writer, and his fierce focus and mastery of style are reminiscent of the biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas.” —Kirkus Reviews
In Boltzmann’s Tomb, Bill Green interweaves the story of his own lifelong evolution as a scientist, and his work in the Antarctic, with a travelogue that is a personal and universal history of science. Like Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder—this book serves as a marvelous introduction to the great figures of science. Along with lyrical meditations on the tragic life of Galileo, the wildly eccentric Tycho Brahe, and the visionary Sir Isaac Newton, Green’s ruminations return throughout to the lesser-known figure of Ludwig Boltzmann. Using Boltzmann’s theories of randomness and entropy as a larger metaphor for the unpredictable paths that our lives take, Green shows us that science, like art, is a lived adventure.
Bill Green is a geochemist and professor emeritus at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is also the author of Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes which received the American Museum of Natural History’s John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing, was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and was excerpted in The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers who prefer skimming a topic to immersion should enjoy Green's (Water, Ice & Stone) slim and thoughtful journeys to key places in the history of science. Green, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Miami University in Ohio, starts with Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, the brilliant but depressed scientist whose certainty about the then-unpopular theory of "atomism" (the idea that all matter was made of smaller bits) led to his suicide in 1906. For Green, Boltzmann reveals "what it meant to be a scientist, what it meant to be life-and-death passionate about an idea." Copernicus's defiance of papal authority to insist that the Earth orbited the Sun, followed by the precision work of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo's astronomical observations, all reveal that, for scientists, data trumped a priori belief. Moving from astronomy to chemistry, Green reviews Lavoisier's painstaking work with gases and how Dmitri Mendeleev found a way to order the elements. Green's route meanders, but his writing is always graceful, often lyrical. This is science by way of Camus (whom Green enjoys citing), a book "about time and chance and dreams we bring with us and which shape who we are and what we become." Photos.
