Somewhere in chapter 12 it quotes novelist C.P. Snow, who warns that society is starting to slit into 2 groups, one of them being scientifically illiterate, says that in a party people would be appalled if you haven't heard who Shakespeare is, but it would be perfectly OK (if not charming) not to know what is the Second Law of thermodynamics is about; I agree that scientific ignorance is a peril.
The quote is "The great edifice of physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have"
The book is well written, but intellectually demanding at times, is not an introductory book, it assumes you have some notion of basic algebra and calculus, it assumes you know what's a matrix (not the martial arts Matrix, but the vector arrangements). It does a good job at describing the equation, what does it mean, and the real world implications, it even peppers some chapters with a few historical or biographical notes about the mathematicians. It does try to walk you through the equations at a high level, but is not easy to do on a book, the same way is easier to learn calculus with a teacher on a room than reading on your own. Still, definitely worth the read, if a reader is not to keen on the math portions, they can always skip the hard parts and go straight to the implications.
The chapter on logarithms finally explained to me the musical scale (besides 'The Sound of Music' Do Re Mi song, that is) Sadly, it made me realize how much math I've lost in the 20 years since I graduated.
Chapter 12, is full of shocks and revelations, some minor, like the fact that even in 1900 most scientist still didn't favour the theory that matter is made from atoms, but mainly, the fact that the second law of thermodynamics may only apply to closed systems, "In the kinetic theory of gases, the forces that act between the molecules are short-range (active only when the molecules collide) and repulsive (they bounce). But most of the forces of nature aren't like that. For example gravity acts at enormous distance, and it is attractive" The philosophical implications are colossal! It means that the 'slow dead of the universe' scenario implied by entropy can be the result of mistakenly applying a model to a system where it doesn't apply.
A really great book, it is intellectually exciting, and it gives you a peek into some of the greatest minds ever. As I was reading the last chapter, I took a cab ride in Guadalajara with a driver that was Schumacher re-incarnated, and talking about his 12 year old taxi, I asked how many kilometres it had, he mentioned "I've never been good at math" and then laboriously put together the 7 and the 1 to guess 71,000km (it really was 711,000), but the fact that he could barely read numbers and could guess wrong by an order of magnitude gave me pause to reflect on the education gaps this society still has to close, and probably never will. Let's just hope that the gap is not closed by bringing down everyone to the scientific illiteracy level.
Some favorite quotes so far:
"“Actually, though, the null hypothesis is ‘the data are due to chance and the effects of chance are normally distributed’, so there might be two reasons to reject the null hypothesis: the data are not due to chance, or they are not normally distributed. The first supports the significance of the data, but the second does not. It says you might be using the wrong statistical model.”
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