Chemical Education Today edited by
Book & Media Reviews
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science by Peter Atkins Oxford University Press: New York, 2003. 512 pp. ISBN 0198606648 (cloth), $30; ISBN 0198609418 (paper), $16.95 reviewed by Hal Harris
The dramatic title has not a great deal to do with the content of Galileo’s Finger; the subtitle is more descriptive. The mummified finger in question appears as the first photographic illustration of the book (does this make it a digital photograph?). This is the middle finger of Galileo’s right hand that was detached from his skeleton as his remains were moved for reburial at Santa Croce, in Florence; it is displayed at the Museo di Storia della Scienza. It is used as a literary device to symbolize the ability of great ideas to endure through the centuries, and Atkins takes Galileo as the turning point toward modern science. Peter Atkins, the man with a chemistry textbook for every course, ranges well beyond his usual genre to explore some of the great scientific ideas of mankind. His focus is not on the artifacts of the history of science, but instead on the intellectual developments that have brought “us” to our present state of understanding of our place in the universe. I put “us” in quotation marks because most people, even those of us who are supposed to be experts, are usually not well informed about the state of science outside of our own field. The author has chosen ten areas to discuss—not eight, not twelve—as if such a division of science were reasonable. One could easily argue with his choices, but they seem to me as good as any other such arbitrary categories. Atkins’ narrative leads generally from the relatively concrete to the increasingly abstract, avoiding the “hot” current applications of great ideas, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology. He begins with evolution and DNA, and ends his ten chapters with the branch of discrete mathematics usually called formal logic. Between, he discusses atomic theory and thermodynamics, particles and symmetry, relativity and cosmology.
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Teachers of chemistry will feel quite comfortable with some of the material in Galileo’s Finger. Even in those areas: “Energy” (Chapter 3), “Entropy” (Chapter 4), “Atoms” (Chapter 5), Atkins provides a perspective that is more general and less mathematical than is normally taught in courses, and could certainly enrich what we teach. I found his discussion of entropy to be especially good, in the same way as his excellent book The Second Law gets to the heart of thermodynamics. Another section that particularly appealed to me was Chapter 6, “Symmetry—The Quantification of Beauty”, which roams far beyond point and space groups that are often taught in physical chemistry courses to discuss the symmetries in quantum physics that largely define our understanding of fundamental particles. In discussing “Quanta” (Chapter 9) non-mathematically, most things have to be accepted on faith. For example, he says that the swinging of a 1-meter pendulum is a direct observation of the quantization of harmonic motion. One must swallow the assertion that the observed frequency of oscillation, when multiplied by Planck’s constant corresponds to the energy difference between quantum levels. I don’t think the argument would convince a skeptic. Atkins finesses the interesting phenomenon of zero-point energy in quantized systems by showing the quantized levels with the continuous classical ones, but not pointing out that there is not an allowed level at zero energy. For whom is this book written? Atkins seems to have intended this very ambitious project for the curious layman, but I judge that it will be most appreciated by us—teachers of science. No matter how well you write, it really is not possible to start from little background and ramp up to a real understanding of the forefront of a field of science within a chapter of forty pages or so. There just isn’t space enough to describe the scientific process, the data, and the reasoning that leads to what “we” know about the universe. Peter Atkins has produced a great appreciation of science, if not science itself. Literature Cited 1. Atkins, P. W. The Second Law; Freeman: New York, 1994.
Hal Harris is in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Missouri–St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63121;
[email protected] Vol. 81 No. 10 October 2004
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Journal of Chemical Education
1423
