The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

Several years ago I read Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson’s , a book of popular science whose title came from a theory about Napoleon’s botched invasion of Russia during the winter. The theory goes, as Le Couteur and Burreson reported, that the buttons of Napoleon’s soldiers, which were made of tin, turned to powder in the extreme cold, thus exposing their tender torsos to the wind. Though it seems implied, the authors don’t come down strong on either side of the historical reality of this. Though the confluence is in doubt—indeed, it seems unlikely—the individual components of the tale are true: there were a lot of dead Frenchmen that winter, and tin—a perfectly solid metal under normal conditions—does turn into powder in extreme cold.

In The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean revisits this tale, but as a side note to yet another tin tale, namely Robert Scott’s fatal 1910 expedition to the South Pole. Many of his caches of food and fuel, which he left on the initial trip, had leaked in the interim, wasting the kerosene and spoiling the potables onto which it spilled. It’s speculated that the fuel cans, soldered with tin, might have succumbed to what is known as “tin pest”. This, too, is largely speculative; the tin pest problem is apparently too tricky to resolve, even for relatively recent history.

Obviously, it's barely changed in 150 years

But such is the sort of story that Kean likes to reproduce in his new book, a rather jovial romp that uses two main storytelling threads. The first is a history of the periodic table itself, beginning with Mendeleev and his contemporaries and leading all the way to Glenn Seaborg’s reorganization in the mid-20th century. This narrative intertwines with the discovery of elements which fill in or append to the known list; though Kean skips the elements that were known early on—e.g., nitrogen or oxygen—he details the discovery of the more difficult substances such as Aluminium, and certainly all of the trans-uranic elements, whose discoveries paralleled our knowledge of atomic science (and, unfortunately, nuclear weapons).

The second narrative thread is that of anecdotes, wherein Kean relates the funny stories, tricks, and other errata that accompany some of the elements. The name of the book, in fact, derives from a popular chemist prank: spoons made of gallium (which melts at just above room temperature) are served with tea or coffee, and dissolve when uses to stir. Often, these quirky stories are simply part and parcel of the discovery of the element itself; a mine near Ytterby, Sweden, produced no fewer than four eponymous elements: Yttrium, Ytterbium, Terbium, and Erbium; these latter three are all Lanthanides, one of two rows stuck mysteriously at the bottom of the Periodic Table, the way Alaska is shown floating nebulously off to the side of U.S. maps. The Lanthanides and Actinides disrupt the careful lines of the table because of the way electrons behave; the lanthanide series all have to do with the filling of “f-orbitals“, the science of which is beyond me, but which Kean spends no small amount of time explaining. While the f-orbitals are more complicated, the more basic and predictable tenets of electron behavior which govern the chemical properties of elements, such as their propensity to form bonds, are a little easier, and rather important in understanding why the table is arranged the way it is. In this, Kean does the job well enough; it’s difficult writing such concepts for what is essentially a lay audience.

Later elements, of course, necessarily introduce the concept of radiation, and all of the various and grisly stories that go along with it—though Keen tends away from the morbid, eschewing most talk of The Bomb, or the death of the Curies, for instance. Curiously, the race to produce new trans-uranic elements in the lab—even if they exist only for seconds or fractions of a second as they follow a chain of radioactive decay—gets a lot of page space, as Kean brings us up to the state of the art (as of about 2009), which has as much to do with politics now as it did during, say, Germany’s 20th-century dustups or America’s long staring contest with the Soviet Union.

By and large, The Disappearing Spoon is a wonderful little book that is manages to be an entertaining history of the period table and its elements, and a relatively easy [re]introduction to the basic principles of chemistry that make it all happen. I’m a little disappointed that Kean’s history skips over so many primordial elements with their own storied histories and instead focuses a bit too much on the historically-recent quest for synthetic elements, but I suppose that the former has been done before and the latter has not, so perhaps it’s to our benefit that the book mixes historicity with recency.

Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax' by Philip C. Plait

Phil Plait’s Death From the Skies! was one of my favorite books the year I read it; it was not only solid science writing, but also just lurid enough to appeal to my nascent morbidity.

When I first saw Bad Astronomy, I thought it was a new book, but in fact it’s almost ten years old; published in 2002, it is Plait’s foray into the world of popular science, and something of a companion piece to the blog of the same name he started in 1999.

Bad Astronomy is just what you might expect, especially if you’re familiar with Plait’s work; unlike Death From the Skies, which was a somewhat narrowly-focused work about impending doom, and which maintained a narrative tone through which was geared by its topic, Bad Astronomy is a loosely-coupled collection of articles about astronomical topics that people get wrong. Such topics include pervasive and important misconceptions such as the moon landing qua hoax or astrology, while others are merely pedantic corrections of malformed phrases such as “the dark side of the moon”. Yet other items aren’t even really “bad astronomy” at all, such as when Plait explains why stars appear to “twinkle”.

Venus is in the third house; therefore, the moon landing is a hoax

As so often happens, I find most satisfying the sections wherein Plait tears down the peddlers of snake oil, googly-eyed astrologists, tinfoil-wearing conspiracy loons, and phony corporations selling nonexistent naming rights to stars. Of course, Plait excoriates them in a book read by people who don’t believe in them in the first place, so it doesn’t take the same chutzpah or create the same glee as watching, say, James Randi humiliating psychics and astrologers on national TV. But while taking fraudsters to task may seem more satisfying, I feel as though Plait is at the top of his game when he’s not dealing with antiscientific malcontents, but rather with simple misconceptions, phrasal foibles, and human interest stories.

The chapter on balancing an egg on its end during the equinoxes (spoiler: it has nothing to do with equinoxes), for instance, is wonderful for its playfulness; it includes Plait’s own voyage of discovery, including a marathon session of attempted egg balancing which did prove that it is possible to balance eggs on any day of the year—the relatively difficult has much to do with the care of the balancer and the perturbations in the eggshell. If you’ve ever looked closely at an egg, you may have noticed tiny imperfections, which can act as kickstands. Part of what makes the egg-balancing chapter such a good one is that it manages to cover all the bases. Plait identifies a problem: every equinox, local news and even (perish the thought) misguided science teachers repeat a well-worn fiction, namely that eggs can only be balanced on their long ends during the equinoxes. The justification for this is never explicit, but rather vague hand-waving about the gravitational alignment of the earth on the equinoxes. What’s more, as Plait points out, it is trivially easy to disprove: if hypothesis is that eggs can only be balanced on the equinoxes, the null hypothesis is that eggs can be balanced at any time. And yet, no one seems ever to bother trying to balance on egg on non-equinoxes. Except Phil Plait, of course, who did just that with the aid of his wife.

Of course, there’s no perfidy here; the egg-balancing error is simply the result of a poorly-worded mid-20th-century article in Time which managed to get so thoroughly entrenched in our cultural consciousness because it’s repeated so very often by well-meaning people who don’t understand science very well. Such is our plight.

If you’re a follower of Plait’s blog, there won’t be much new in Bad Astronomy; it mostly serves as a “best-of” which cleans up and expands upon topics he’s already covered. As a formal compendium of Plait’s best stuff, it’s a decent addition to any bookshelf and certainly worth the read.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

There must be something about Dan Gardner that coerces me to read his topics in pairs. When I read Gardner’s last book, The Science of Fear, I immediately read Physics for Future Presidents as well, which had a fair amount in common.

Now Gardner’s latest book, Future Babble, is largely a sociological study, and what should I read immediately afterward but another sociology book, with no small amount of overlap. In fairness, Watts’ book ends up being the superior of the two.

When I was young, and first getting into classical music, I used to imagine that I was, say, the genius who wrote Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto #3, instead of Sergei himself. I would then wonder, because I was occasionally precocious, if the work could still be a widely-respected and deeply-loved member of the classical canon if it were written by some American schmuck in the last years of the 20th century. Sadly, I reasoned, probably not.

This is also one of Watts’ central points, albeit made with the Mona Lisa rather than a concerto. Watts builds up his argument around the notion of “common sense”, a notion we all know but would find difficult to accurate define or quantify. He falls back and punts with Carl Taylor:

By common sense I mean the knowledge possessed by those who live in the midst and are a part of the social situations and processes which sociologists seek to understand. The term thus used may be synonymous with folk knowledge, or it may be the knowledge possessed by engineers, by the practical politicians, by those who gather and publish news, or by others who handle or work with and must interpret and predict the behavior or persons and groups.

Our common sense tells us that the Mona Lisa is a great painting because, as Watts puts it, “it has attributes X, Y, and Z. But really what we’re saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it’s more like the Mona Lisa than anything else.” What we perceive to be common sense—namely, that a famous piece of art is great—is really backformed from our knowledge that the art is already famous. At this point, the subtitle(?) “Once You Know the Answer” should have an obvious meaning.

The same effect occurs in prediction-making, whence comes much of the overlap with Dan Gardner’s book. After an event has happened, it’s very easy to explain why… except that so often, this is never the explanation we would have given before it happened. Our common sense also tends to favor individual, dynamic actors, rather than an aggregation of low-level, systemic causes. In this, Watts politely savages Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which ascribed major changes to the activity of a few significant people enacting large change. In fairness, I believe Gladwell acceded the point that a few “influencers” alone could not enact change without an otherwise critical mass; Watts suggests, however, that these kinds of social network dynamics are nondeterministic, with predictions thwarted even by small random variations.

The problem, as Watts repeatedly points out, is that unlike repeatable experiments, the iconic stories which inform our common sense only happen once; we cannot rewind them and try them a different way to see if our hindsight explanation is the correct one. Is Apple successful because Steve Jobs is a dynamic leader and a visionary? Our common sense tells us it is, but we really don’t know for sure with any scientific certainty.

Watts’ particular milieu, at least lately is the technological incarnations of those social networks—e.g. Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which he once used for a “Tipping Point”-style experiment. Sample size helps to illustrate Watt’s second big point, namely that no matter how well we understand the individual parts of a situation, it doesn’t necessarily mean we understand the whole. We see the trees, in other words, but manage to miss the forest. But the sum of most things is greater (or less, I suppose), than its parts, which is why point to a part in retrospect doesn’t make us any better at predicting the future. It’s also perhaps why Watts, who emigrated from the field of physics, virtually always formulaic and rational, understands better than anyone how social science is a trickster god in the pantheon of scientific disciplines; his introduction (which I thought strange at the time) was the story of his defection and the generally poor reception of social science by those who are expecting functional, mechanistic knowledge of the engineer or the chemist.

Personally, I’m just glad I’m not the only one who can’t explain Facebook.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

I was hesitant to pick up The Emperor of All Maladies; a quick glance at the dust jacket made me leery that the book would devolve into sickly-sweet sentiment. Cancer is, indeed, a terrible disease, and has wrecked havoc on millions of lives; at the same time, the very nature of this problem lends itself to hysterics and tearful reminiscences. I’m not so vain to think that my writings about my father mean as much to anyone else as they do to me, wonderful though my commenters may have been.

In other words, I feared that book All About Cancer would drift into histrionics and phrases like “The War on Cancer”, and too many sad stories about individuals that would quick devolve into the incessantly maudlin. Mothers, brothers, sisters, children; all of this we know about cancer, but we know it also about death in general. What’s interesting to me is where cancer comes from, and where science is looking for answers. A skim through the chapters gave me hope, I gave it a try.

The bad news is that the phrase “War on Cancer” occurs almost a hundred times. The good news is that Mukherjee avoids the maudlin and uses personal stories only as frame narratives for what turns out to be a more intellectually-engaging history of oncology (the scientific study of cancer).

Mukherjee points out that cancer is, in a way, the most brutal of afflications if for no other reason that it is the body’s own resources turned against itself. Cancer cells, after all, are mutated cells whose rate of growth is no longer regulated. This torrent of mutated cells is what causes, e.g., tumors. In this respect, cancer seems particularly ignominious… though the same can be said for all autoimmune diseases.

I was surprised just how far back cancer stretches; even early Egyptian records note what is likely an abnormally large tumor. Yet our understanding of the fundamental forces behind such malignancy is a product of the last fifty years, when we came to under the relationships between genes, DNA, and chromosomes. Humanity has tried since its earliest “understanding” of the body, of course; for a long time, Galen’s model of bodily humors (i.e. black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm). Our understanding of cancer, in many ways, paralleled our understanding of the body in general; the first indication that cancer could be both caused by external factors and be studied epidemiologically was Percival Pott’s study of squamous cell scrotal cancer which was common among chimney sweeps in the 1800s (see Chimney Sweeps’ Carcinoma). This simple statistical correlation, regardless of the physical mechanism by which the cancer was created, was, in a sense, the first “treatment” of cancer, as it prompted a series of legislation protecting chimney sweepers to some degree, until the job itself eventually disappeared. Ironically, legislation as a form of treatment is revisited much later in the book, when Mukherjee spends no mean amount of time covering the emergence of lung cancer as an epidemic, and the long (and disgusting history) of tobacco advertisement, corporate and legislative backrubbing, and the various and sundry ways in which the U.S. is still laissez-faire about the marketing and distribution of cigarettes.

Scrotal cancer and lung cancer are only two types which Mukherjee covers. Of particular note are leukemia and breast cancer; he both begins and ends the book with stories about leukemia, which he considers somehow representative the fundamental nature and challenge of cancer. Early “oncology”, after all, consisted of waiting until a tumor was big enough to notice, and then having a surgeon excise it and all its surrounding tissue. This “radical” surgery (from the Latin for “root”) was the de facto treatment for many years, especially for breast cancer. But of course leukemia had no tumors to excise until perhaps it had metasticized beyond all hope, and it seems only appropriate, then, that the treatment of leukemia spawned the field of chemotherapy; “aminopertin”, a vitamin derivative, was shown to have a beneficial effect in the treatment of certain types of leukemia.

Is this considered irony? I forget...

But cancer isn’t just about medicine. That’s true in two respects: one, which which Mukherjee mentions at several points but doesn’t dwell upon, is that the (terminal) nature of cancer tends to refocus the effort not on a cure as such, but on palliative and social care. The other (and more practical) respect is that way in which organized cancer awareness and research has required a dedicated body—specifically, the American Cancer Society, which arose out of the effort of the famous socialite Mary Lasker (1900-1994), and was the first (and remains the most visible and viable) major marketing and fundraising agency with respect to cancer. Arguably, the major advances made in the last fifty years would not have been made without the financial support and cultural clout of that organization.

It would be nice if The Emperor of All Maladies could end with an easy declaration of victory over cancer, but it doesn’t. It would also be nice, given our relatively recent discoveries (e.g., Mukherjee cites research up through about 2006) about the protein receptors in certain types of leukemia, if it estimate with some confidence that we’ll have the genes mapped and a suitable pharmacopiæ created within some convenient timeframe. Unfortunately, cancer is not a single disease with a single cause, even if all cancers share the same essential malady; similarly, when the body turns against itself in this way, it seems determined to see its betrayal through to the end. It’s sobering to realize that, in studies of cancer drugs, the elongation of remission by, e.g., a year (not a cure, but a slightly longer pause in active illness) is considered medically important and a victory for chemotherapy. Perhaps what’s so maddening about cancer and all it represents is that it haunts one like spectre; one can never be sure it’s been exorcised completely.

Mukherjee is not the most engaging writer ever to put pen to paper; nor should he be, nor supposes he to be, since his chosen profession is that of an oncologist rather than a popular science writer. Still, he does a bang-up job for all that, at least surpassing my expectations for the book. The Emperor of All Maladies, while perhaps no brilliant cultural exposé on cancer (not that it ever pretended to be), is a wonderful primer on the causes and history of the illness, with some marvelous scientific minutiæ for the patiently pedantic. It is worth it for no other reason than it’s much more insightful, far-reaching, and realistic than one is ever likely to receive in popular media.

The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios

Quantum physics (or mechanics) has become something of a metonym for impossibly-abstruse concepts; it’s a new-millennium update to the classic “brain surgery” and “rocket science”. I own a t-shirt with a pithy joke about Schrödinger’s cat, and when people are unfortunate enough to ask and I tell them about undefined states and the collapse of probabilistic wave functions, I often get glassy stares in return.

But don’t let me fool you: I know, on a high level, about Schrödinger’s cat, and I remember my Pauli Exclusion Principle from high school chemistry, and I’ve read enough Scientific American to have gotten short primers on some of the fundamentals, but my real understanding of quantum mechanics is like a half-rotted shack in the forest, while Kakalios’ knowledge might be a large McMansion in a new suburb; the real geniuses at the forefront of the field would be palatial estates with Robin Leach narrating.

One major impediment to any complicated physical science is the math; luckily for readers, Kakalios promises in the subtitle a “Math-Free Exploration of the Science that Made Our World”, which is not quite true but close enough for government work. What he actually means by his subtitle is that, although he’ll mention some of the complicated formulæ like the Schrödinger Equation, the only math he’ll actually ask you to understand is some relatively simple algebra (such as the notion that the product of two negative numbers makes a positive number).

Quantum mechanics has been around for a while now—in practice, about a hundred years, beginning with Max Planck’s “quantum hypothesis” of 1900—and there seemed a time, in the 1950s, when our knowledge of particle physics was growing by leaps and bounds and science fiction was proposing jetpacks and rocket cars and personal housecleaning robots, that we’d surely be an advanced Quantum Age society by the turn of the century. Why, Kakalios begins, are we not there yet? Part of the problem is that quantum physics has given us a revolution in information, not a revolution in energy. Jet packs and rocket cars presuppose a safe, lightweight, long-lasting energy source, but our technology in this arena is paltry to say the least (we’re still burning fossil fuels for locomotion). Our information sciences, on the other hand, have leaped and bounded into the future. We now have working quantum computers (admittedly expensive and nowhere near general availability), advanced LED technology, and an up-and-coming “spintronics” sub-field of materials sciences that may soon revolutionize the computer architecture we know and love.

I have to give credit to Kakalios for explaining what quantum physics is in about a clear a way as is probably possible. Don’t mistake this sentiment to mean that the entirety of the subject is somehow now accessible; there’s still a great deal about quantum physics that’s as opaque as brick to me, and of course what The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics gives you is a heavily-abstracted and greatly-simplified version of the science, and some interesting scientific history of the heavy hitters of the field, including the famous Erwin Schrödinger, the spiritual father Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli (whose exclusion principle forms an important part of quantum physics even though it’s also the province of high school chemistry), and Max Born (not an exhaustive list). It helps if you’d had at least some exposure to physics, as Kakalios assumes a high-school level science education and assaults into quantum mechanics from that beachhead. Particularly illuminating (I thought) was the more clear explanation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is often misinterpreted by amateurs like myself. It is not, as it is sometimes explained, that one cannot know the vector and location of a particle simultaneously; it is rather that the certainty with which you know one diminishes the certainty of the other by an equal amount. One does not track individual electronics, after all, but rather the probability of electrons.

There’s also a lot that isn’t covered, especially in terms of more recent contributions to the theory. There’s no mention of Richard Feynman at all (that I recall), even though his path integration formulation (a completion of an earlier idea by Dirac) is important in the field. I suppose, however, that getting into the complexities of the science would be little more than nominal comparison, since the math behind each is likely too difficult to explain in a work of popular science. Then, too, Kakalios plays historian as often as he plays physics professor, which I think was his goal; like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything shows, scientific history can often be just as interesting (or more interesting) to the lay man than the science itself.

What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

I’ve read all three of Malcolm Gladwell’s previous books before; in order from most to least recent, there’s Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point. I’ve said in each review that I believe Gladwell’s books have generally improved as a function of time; as a columnist, his ability to adapt to a longer form of writing (where his point must be sustained for several hundred pages without diverting into obscurity) has evolved noticeably with practice.

But Gladwell has been writing for the New Yorker for about fifteen years now, and in that time amassed a much larger collection of short (the word here is relative) pieces than he has larger themed works. In a move designed both to make money (I’m sure) as well as disseminate his best work to those without the benefit of access to the New Yorker‘s last fifteen years worth of archives, Gladwell collected his favorite pieces from that rag into a big, this time without concern for an overarching theme. It’s a collection of essays, though given Gladwell’s polished narrative style, it feels often more like a compendium of short stories by a particularly pedantic fabulist.

The formula here is unvaried from the Gladwell we know and love: pick several topics, as if pulled from a hat of audience-submitted errata, and then find some unifying principle which explains their common behavior, or to a less extent, in the excrescent tradition of “everything you know is wrong” books like SuperFreakonomics, explains why our commonly-held beliefs about the How? or Why? of the bespoke phenomenon is wrong or at least vastly incomplete. There’s a bit less of this latter form in What the Dog Saw, in stark contrast to some of Gladwell’s more recent books. In fact, the essays here seem like confrontational in their revelation and more like your nerdy friend explaining how tides work.

Its highlights include an exposé on ketchup, and why the general vinegary Heinz flavor we know and love has resisted encroachment on its market share in precisely the same way that yellow mustard did not when Dijon-style mustard exploded onto the American culinary landscape in the late 70s. The latter’s success may have less to do with the general superiority of the Dijon-style and more to do with the brilliant ad campaign rolled out by Grey Poupon—we all remember the Rolls Royce and the crisp, English “Pardon me… do you have any Grey Poupon?”—and in fact Gladwell’s essay is just as much a history of advertising geniuses and hopeful gourmet ketchup salesmen (with an aside about the history of ketchup generally) as it is about the way in which modern ketchup as it’s currently institutionalized manages to invoke all our various senses of taste, which may account in part for our resistance to new and different varieties of it.

Another essay—a republication of what appears to be his first column for the New Yorker—examines the space program’s various mishaps over the years, and—counterintuitively—why laying blame for disaster like the explosion of the Challenger is not as straightforward or satisfying as it may first appear, since it may have much more to do with the sheer statistical probability of failure in complex systems than with the fiendish ineptitude of Martin Thiokol or the arrogance of NASA bureaucrats.

Its title essay explains the (admittedly controversial) success of Cesar Millan, the “dog whisperer”, noting how the nuts and bolts of what Millan does in a course of training matters much less than the way in which he does it—that is, in a calm but assertive manner that doesn’t allow dogs to notice and “channel” any fear, uncertainty, or anxiety from its owners.

I can’t help but enjoy the friendly rivalry (or perhaps less friendly and more passive-aggressive) between Gladwell and Stephen Pinker. I have no idea when it began, but Pinker’s shot across the bow appeared in the New York Times. Notice the rising action which appears to compliment Gladwell without ever really speaking to his abilities as an author: he’s “indefatigably curious”, he’s “become a brand”, he’s “popular”, “prolific’; Pinker crescendos thus and peaks with the left-handed compliment that Gladwell is “a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.”

Ouch. Since Pinker is as well known for being a writer (an elucidator of science in the grand tradition of Steven Jay Gould, though perhaps less well known) as he is an intellectual, it’s no surprise that he leaps praise upon Gladwell for being an excellent writer with a knack for prose and the ability to explain complicated concepts in relative small spaces. But he more or less lambastes Gladwell for talking about things he doesn’t understand (which appears to be, well, everything, according to Pinker), and follows up with this jewel:

It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

And that seems to be it as far as Pinker’s assertion is concerned; we are left to take it on his word (as an authority on linguistics, I suppose?) that the preceding sentence is true. With Gladwell, anyway, we at least get the benefit of a generously-sized narrative that leads readers from initial assumption to rebuttal (and sometimes to contrary conclusion, though not always). Of course Gladwell is not the most brilliant mind ever to put pen to paper; of course the act of writing science for a lay audience will have the consequence of allowing ambiguity where previously there was none. Additionally, it’s possible that Gladwell’s conclusions may sometimes be wrong; after all, he’s one man interpreting evidence as he reads it. But this is a risk one takes with any sort of popular science; it’s no reason to avoid Gladwell, and in fact I would call Gladwell one of the most interesting pop-sci writers working today.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Sam Harris is best known as part of the “Four Horsemen”, or the “New Atheists”; his book, The End of Faith, was one of many which came out a few years ago and effectively sparked media coverage of the “movement”. There was also Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Some of these were better than others; some I haven’t bothered to read.

Harris is the youngest of these authors, but in some ways the most prominent. Since his initial publication, he received a Ph.D. in neuroscience at UCLA, and it is the scientific approach to cognition which informs the content of his new book, The Moral Landscape.

Harris is like Dennett insofar as he casts religion as a sociological or anthropological phenomenon, which to some degree it is. Even dedicated Christians understand that participation in a shared religious belief is heavily influenced by culture and society; for an impressionistic—if actively hostile—example, see Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement.

In the world of Christian apologetics (I suppose religious apologetics generally), perhaps the most resonant argument is that which hangs our moral sense upon religion and dares the scientist and the antitheist to come up with a plausible alternative for not only how we appear to have a shared moral sense, but why we should feel obligated to follow it without a larger metaphysical scaffolding such as provided by many religious beliefs. Most replies to this either shrug and say that Morality-with-a-capital-M as we generally consider it doesn’t exist (unpalatable), or is completely relative (positively vomitous), or arises from a shared biological imperative. This last has been the most convincing of these arguments and the de facto response for many years; see Robert Wright’s Nonzero.

The Moral Landscape is a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to update the argument that morality is a product of biology and culture; importantly, it’s also an argument against the sort of ultra-liberal relativism that infects academia, against which Harris has also written and debated. Why do I call it unsuccessful? First we have to understand Harris’ first principles.

He’s a consequentialist. Perhaps it would be fair to say that he’s some variant flavor of consequentialist, but a consequentialist nonetheless, and anyone familiar with the different schools of moral philosophy will not be at all surprised by his stances. As opposed to a more absolutist moral doctrine like that of many religious traditions, consequentialism argues that a given outcome is the sole determinant of an action’s morality—often colloquialized as “the ends justifies the means”. Thus, Harris’ spectrum of morality (or what he calls the “Moral Landscape”) largely a measure of our maximization of general human well-being. The term “landscape”, evincing a many-peaked vista of a snowy mountain range and green-bedecked valleys below, is important, because Harris does not employ a spectrum of morality in the traditional sense, wherein maximal morality marks the right extreme, a lack thereof marks the left, and gradations fill the middle; rather, well-being may be maximized (peaks) in several different ways for any given problem. Sometimes, as the relativists always argue, there’s no right answer.

The phrase “human well-being” seems simple enough until one remembers just how many cultural relativists there are. Anticipating these criticisms, Harris makes the—admittedly persuasive—argument that figuring out whether controversial cultural hotspots are morally good or bad is relatively easy, at least once you strip away religious or traditional justifications for doing so. To use one of Harris’ examples, consider enforced burkas for Muslim women (or general conservative Middle-Eastern disenfranchisement of women)? Posit a single benefit that isn’t simply a deflection of responsibility (i.e. removing sexual temptation from men). This conclusion is fair enough, and the machinery is one shared with religious folks as well, even if the product of that machinery is different. In fact, the only real villains in this respect are cultural relativists, apparently the sickly product of collective white guilt of several centuries of persecution and ethnocentrism. But of course Harris’ argument is that we don’t need revealed religion to tell us what these universal maximizers of well-being are—that, contrary to some popular opinion, we’re perfectly capable of intuiting it on our own.

Remember, however, that the subtitle of the book is “How Science Can Determine Human Values”. So far, there’s been a lot of talk about commonsensical approaches to morality, assuming we can agree that morality is a measurement of the “well-being” of conscious creatures like humans (and, I suppose, higher-functioning animal). We’re taking for granted that health and conscious happiness are inarguable gauges of well-being, a deceptive a priori assumption. To that effect, Harris’ book is not about scientifically determining moral values: Harris’ opinion about moral values must be accepted a priori before he can tell us about his fMRI studies about the brain and what constitutes neurochemical happiness and harmony. At least insofar as Harris has written, there’s nothing in his argument that confirms his initial premise; assuming you agree with it, this is no hindrance to the rest of the book, but if he’s attempting to persuade the religious to accept his moral basis and abandon their own, it’s a fumbled start from which he never recovers.

The Moral Landscape is not a badly written book, and in fact one gets the impression that Harris has a point (or points) somewhere, but it seems to lack focus, and ultimately fails to execute its promises.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

Mary Roach has become somewhat well known for her short, palatable pop-sci pieces about things like the scientific study of sex (Bonk or cadavers (Stiff); for her latest book, Packing for Mars, her publicist even managed to get her on The Daily Show, a thriving demographic if there ever was one.

Her topic this time doesn’t have the immediate lurid appeal of coitus, or the morbid fascination of dead bodies; in fact, we hear very little about the space program anymore except that it’s dying a death from a thousand cuts, and a longstanding dream of reaching Mars is looking more and more like it will remain relegated to bad science fiction movies. In 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia cracked up on reentry, killing all seven astronauts and representing NASA’s worst accident since the Challenger incident in 1986. About the only good PR that space travel has received in my memory is 1996′s Apollo 13.

But Roach isn’t particularly concerned about either the glorious moments or the harrowing incidents; she’s interested in all the unanswered (because they are largely unasked) questions about space travel, such as “How do astronauts go to the bathroom?” and “Has anybody ever had sex in space?” In this respect, she reminds me of Bill Bryson, fascinated by the minutiæ of his topics; this is the journalistic equivalent of diving between the couch cushions, sometimes coming up with long-lost tokens and rare items, sometimes leaving with crumbs and bric-a-brac.

Bonk was a curious thing; though I would hardly call her prudish, Roach approached the topic of sex with some trepidation, at least insofar as her “gonzo” journalism was concerned. When it came time to copulate with her husband inside of a medical scanner—this illustrative of some scientific study of sex she was covering—she seemed downright uncomfortable, and the chapter suffered because of it. Contrast that to her account of riding in a NASA jet as it does parabolic flight in order to simulate weightlessness for 20 or 30 seconds at a time: she was giddy as a schoolgirl, clearly more at home with this topic.

She’s stretched her journalistic legs on this one, not simply for managing to tag along on a parabolic flight, but visiting a number of institutions as far away as Japan, and apparently spending a long time poring over NASA oral histories (another main source of her best bits). Roach flips between these two scenarios: the tourist-journalist, shown functioning space toilets by NASA management, and the armchair historian, apparently having done no small amount of reading of official NASA documents and aeronautical biographies. Mostly, Roach revels in all the lurid, raunchy, or disgusting little trivia about the space program, even if she’s not particularly lurid, raunchy, or disgusting herself.

Consider that she dedicates an entire chapter to pooping in space (from whence her tour of the space toilet). Apollo-era approaches to the subject included pooping in bags, but had the extra requirement of squirting in germicide and kneading the bag like dough, in order to halt the production of gasses. As a bonus, Roach includes radio transmission transcripts where somber, officious astronaut chatter for ground control is interrupted by “—wha? Is that a…? That’s a turd.” As one might well imagine, these delectable narrative morsels appeal both to the puerile instinct in us all, but, as Roach takes great pains to point out, things like astronaut poop became just as important as rocket fuel recipes or guidance computer design, though neither you nor I may have ever considered it before. NASA has spent no small amount of money on dietary testing, after all, in search of food that (a) is well-designed for space, (b) gives the crew proper nutrition, and (c) minimizes the frequency, amount, and odor of their bowel movements. Some trials sought to eliminate solid waste entirely for the duration; some astronauts deliberately don’t eat in order to avoid the unpleasantness. Steak and eggs are a traditional meal before launch, since protein-heavy foods produce the least solid waste; vegetables are, for once, the enemy.

Space travel is full of gold like this: the engineering is the easy part (relatively speaking), but humans are the wrench in the gears, and the history of man’s quest to conquer space is filled with concern about extended weightlessness on health (heart problems, significant loss of bone mass, muscle atrophy, etc.), about the perils of sex and possible impregnation in weightlessness, about the mental health of people locked in a box with each other for weeks on end while hurtling through the cold vacuum of space. It was easier, to some degree, when we simply sent chimpanzees (U.S.) or dogs (Russia) instead.

When Roach is on a roll—as she often is—it’s difficult to avoid catching her enthusiasm for her subject, and she gets the same hobbyist glee that Bill Bryson does. Packing For Mars is not the most intellectually robust piece of journalism ever created, but it succeeds as a gonzo-style look at the marginalized aspects of space travel: it’s entertaining, occasionally funny, and often enlightening.

The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers

With the exception of Powers’ latest novel (which, admittedly, felt more like a novella, for him), or at least everything of his that I’ve read, invariably contains two parallel plots, one current and one historical, that converge around some central idea. The Gold Bug Variations is no different, and it may be easily be Powers’ most well-known work, and I daresay his most lengthy and daring.

To put it glibly, The Gold Bug Variations draws connecting lines between genetics, music (specifically Bach’s Goldberg Variations), and to some degree, computer science. While the book certainly has a long reach, its ultimate impact fails to be quite as impressive as it promises to be.

Three stories in one

The briefest of summation as can be applied: Stuart Ressler, a young molecular biologist, joins a team at the University of Illinois in the 1950s to crack the genetic code. His first year, he manages to fall in love with a married colleague, and comes upon the cusp of a major breakthrough by happenstance when he begins to listen to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and realizes the similarity between the music’s variation from four bass notes and DNA’s variation from four base chemical pairs. Fast forward to the mid-80s: Ressler is now working at a data processing facility in New York, where he plays the father figure to a young colleague named Todd, who works as a night operator even though his real passion is obscure Flemish painters. Todd meets and courts a librarian named Jan, who immediately falls in love with him (romantically) and with Ressler (not romantically). Jump ahead several more years: Ressler has recently died, Todd is apparently somewhere in the Low Countries, and Jan is falling apart at the seams as she attempts to figure out what went wrong with Todd, understand Ressler’s abandoned work in genetics, and cope with the loss of both of them.

In mechanical terms, I would not call Powers the greatest writer of our generation. Even in his other books which I prefer to Goldbug have rhetorical flair but relatively uncompelling characters. See William Deresiewicz’s article for The Nation:

[W]hat’s missing from the novel is, well, a novel. The characters are idealized, the love stories mawkish and clichéd, the emotions meant to ground the scientific speculations in lived experience announced rather than established. The thinnest of devices are introduced to allow Powers to suspend the plot for dozens of pages at a stretch while he lays out the genetic and musicological basics that will ultimately enable him to get to the interesting stuff.

[...]

He has been called an experimental novelist for some reason, but aside from a predilection for double plots, his approach to narrative is quite conventional, even naïve. Rather than Pynchon and DeLillo, the writer he most reminds me of is Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and much of what Powers does is closer to science writing than to fiction.

There’s an important point to be had here: Powers’ characters don’t usually act, or speak, or even think as we expect real people to, but instead do whatever he feels is necessarily to illustrate his next large-scale point about whichever topic he’s covering; thus, every character sounds like Richard Powers, even when narrated in the first person (as Jan is). I think Deresiewicz’s point stands: Powers seems to be a wonderful science writer who, for reasons unbeknown to us, insists upon writing fiction.

That’s not entirely fair: Powers isn’t a bad fiction writer, but when he’s particularly excited about whatever “macro” idea he’s integrating, he tends to forget himself, as was the case with The Gold Bug Variations. Paradoxically, though his characters were thin and weak, his writing was as rhetorically-exciting as I’ve ever seen it, which may account for some of the novels girth; it seemed at times he gets so wrapped up in adjectives and similes to describe the new morning that he forgets his character needs to get out of bed.

Encryption and Variation

The book’s name, and in some ways its content, is an elaborate pun about the aforementioned Goldberg Variations by Bach and The Gold Bug by Edgar Allen Poe, the first book to popularize the notion of simple encryption and substitution ciphers. Powers has muddled the three all up until the reader is almost convinced that it’s there’s an elaborate connection between the three in nature; that music, the building blocks of life, and mathematical theory are all vines intertwined around the same academic tree. But they aren’t; at least, not in the fulfilling sense that we’d like it to be, hoping against our better sense for Dr. Ressler’s sudden appreciation of the Goldberg variations to spark some revolution in the field. At best, you could say that these things are metaphors for each other, and that they have a vivid and romantic similarity.

This knowledge is why, when Powers has finally climaxed, one feels distinctly underwhelmed; in the words of Peggy Lee: “Is That All There Is?” It’s all very clever, but it doesn’t invoke the melancholy or somber gravity of Three Farmers, and our relative distance from the characters has preempted much personal involvement. There isn’t a nice ending to be had, anyway; in retrospect, The Gold Bug Variations was as much about failure and disappointment and mistakes as it was ever about the grand relationship between nature, art, and math. The characters are irreparable misfits with unlovable flaws who remain largely unloved and unsuccessful and unimpressive. I can’t give details without spoiling the second half the book, but needless to say, Powers’ usually static characters were positively immobile this time around—once again, perhaps because Powers was too busy waxing eloquent about his hobby horses to dedicate much time to writing characters or plot.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Nuclear weapons are so common both in their physical number and media saturation that it’s easy to dismiss them. Paradoxically, the level of import which our cultural corpus has attached to them (imagine the number of books/movies/games wherein terrorists seize control of a nuke and plan to unleash it on an American city) and the degree to which their use is always thwarted places all of the significance in the threat of their use and the drama of their acquisition. We easily forget that these devices have twice been used on populated areas, and the resulting holocaust is so much more terrible than the insinuations of 24 or a Tom Clancy novel.

We also forget just how massive an undertaking it was to build the weapons in the first place, and Richard Rhodes, a Pulitzer-winning author and perhaps the greatest living authority of the history of nuclear weapons, wrote a book whose size is commensurate. At almost a thousand pages, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is not light beach reading, but one sees immediately why it won a Pulitzer.

The history of the atomic bomb is actually a number of histories rolled into one: the history of physics, the history of the physicists in question (disproportionately Jewish), and the history of World War II. Like John Barry’s history of the Influenza outbreak circa 1917, it is necessary for Rhodes to begin with the state of science’s understanding about the atom and the important personages who contributed to that understanding. Some of it is standard introductory physics stuff, including the various models of the atom, most importantly that of Neils Bohr. I had always known that the Bohr model was incorrect, and mistakenly believed that he was a minor figure in the history of atomic physics, but it turns out he is one of the stars of the book; though his model (the one with electrons orbiting a nucleus like moons around a planet) was quickly superseded by one which more accurately describes electrons as existing in a probability “cloud” around the nucleus, he was nonetheless a giant in the field—and he was more or less directly responsible for saving 7’000+ Danish Jews.

Approximately the first 300 pages of The Making of the Atomic Bomb have nothing to do with atomic bombs; rather, it’s a concise history of physics up through the 1930′s. Much of this is establishing the histories of the dramatis personae, from early founders of nuclear physics like Ernest Rutherford (and Bohr) to the breakthrough scientists like Leó Szilárd (who first discovered chain reactions and was arguably the theoretical leader of the Manhattan project) and Enrico Fermi. Rhodes notes that a disproportionate number of European Jewish scientists ended up in the United States or Britain during the first quarter of the 20th century due to either antisemitism (Leó Szilárd in Hungary) or looming institutionalized persecution (Einstein in Germany), and readers with the benefit of hindsight can appreciate the irony that if Germany hadn’t killed or driven away so many smart physicists, it may have been the first to the bomb.

As it was, Germany was never even close to completing a bomb, in large part to the this very and reason, and also because an Allied saboteur destroyed Germany’s supply of “heavy water”, severely retarding development of their program, which was lead rather casually—Germany never appeared to devote the same level of resources to the work as the United States—by none other than Werner Heisenberg, he of the Uncertainty Principle which bears his name. Japan, too, had its own nuclear program, but the lack of resources and lack of manpower also retarded it to a state of impotency.

To make a long story short, by the time World War II was in full swing, the United States had assembled under the auspice of a secret government program some of the most brilliant physicists in the world, adding to the previous list such notables as Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner. The combined efforts of these scientists and a literal army of engineers, eventually in a specially-built compound in New Mexico, culminated in the “Trinity” test—the first detonation of an atomic bomb and the event which prompted Oppenheimer to famous quote the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

I’ve commonly heard it said that while the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was an “atomic bomb”—that is, an explosion created by the self-sustaining chain reaction of fissile material—the bomb dropped later on Nagasaki was a “hydrogen bomb” or “thermonuclear bomb”—that is, an explosion created by the fusion of hydrogen isotopes. In fact, this is incorrect, as the first thermonuclear device, based on the work of Edward Teller, wasn’t tested until 1952. The different between the first “Little Boy” bomb and the later “Fat Man” bomb is the former was trigger by a gun-type mechanism, wherein a uranium bullet is fired into a uranium spike; the latter was a core of plutonium compressed by conventional chemical explosive lenses.

Rhodes’ description of Hiroshima is perhaps the most horrifying and paradoxically the most lyrical and poignant of the book, which may very well be his intent. What follows the successful deployment of the weapon by the Enola Gay is a nightmarish sequence of burned and mutilated Japanese as told by survivors and narrated from source material. The Making of the Atomic Bomb is, it must be said, a somewhat dry affair, however interesting it may be, and so the sheer pornographic violence unleashed by the eventual detonation of the bomb was startling. Rhodes, it must be notes, never comes down on either side of the long debate about the wisdom of using the bomb; he provides enough evidence for Japan’s obstinate resistance to traditional warfare of attrition to give credence to the notion that “saving American lives” was the primary impetus. However, he can’t help but sneer somewhat at Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb” who not only encouraged the ongoing research into nuclear weaponry, but even proposed using them for civil engineering purposes. He [Teller] is, I think, the Henry Kissinger of nuclear physics: brilliant and not a little sociopathic.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is so dense and historical that it almost goes without saying that at least some of it—be it political minutiæ or the vagaries of particle physics—will fail to sink in; at almost a thousand pages, it’s a lot of historical in a tight space. Don’t let its length or its breadth dissuade you from reading it, however; otherwise you’ll miss the best book on the nuclear bomb ever written.