[Book Reviews] Two for science
I have read two fabulous books about science recently, one about Cascadian geology, forestry, and public policy, the other about how and where science was advancing during Europe's Dark Ages. I enthusiastically recommend both of these. Steve Olsen's "Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens" wasn't the book that I expected it to be, but a valuable book to read nonetheless. Far more history of forestry and logging in the Northwest than I thought I was in for, and that's pretty depressing if you're an environmentalist, but it's essential to understanding the history of the region, why it looks the way it does now, and how most of the people who were in danger of being in range of the 1980 blast were Weyerhaueser employees and loggers. (It really was lucky that it happened on a weekend and not during the week, or far more people would have been killed.) So it's a doubly tough read -- clearcutting tales and then people dying horribly in the wake of a volcanic explosion since the people managing the emergency didn't guess correctly enough what kind of a blast might result and which areas might be affected. Excellent for people who do disaster planning and recovery, also excellent (if more brief by far) for people who do disaster response. I appreciated all the new information!
The things I was particularly interested in: I knew that the scientist who was famously killed on the ridge while taking observations of the mountain was also the first guy on scene a month and change before the blast. He made savvy observations about how it could explode (there were more, that's a short clip) and how bad it could be, even mentioning the possibility of a lateral blast, which few other scientists were considering. So if he knew how bad it could be, why was Johnston there? Part of it seemed to be that he was willing to take risks for science, going up to the forming lava dome by helicopter to run out and take gas samples even shortly before the blast. Part of it was that this was an unprecedented event, having not previously been observed by modern scientists. And part of it was that he took someone else's shift -- the other scientist had a graduate student in town and wanted to take the student to breakfast. He'd be back by lunch. Mount St. Helens blew at about 8:30 AM. Johnston was never found; they named the observatory and ridge where he died after him.
A highly relevant detail that I hadn't seen mentioned before: Mount Baker sent up a plume five years before, in 1975. The state government's response was to close off a lot of the area, which angered seasonal tourism business in the region. (Mount Baker's still at it.) But the plume at Baker never turned into harmonic tremors, and St. Helens did. Still, when the state government wanted to close off St. Helens, they met a lot of local resistance. "You did this five years ago. Lots of people went out of business. Nothing happened. Screw you, I pay my taxes, you're not doing this to me." In addition, the governor at the time was kind of baffling, praising an 84 year old guy who refused to evacuate from the emergency zone she declared, saying that we needed more of his kind of common sense in the state. When the mountain blew and he was killed, she then said "well, we told people to leave, it's their own fault if they stayed". Pick one! But the declaration of the zones was only partially based on the geologists' opinion on where the blast could reach... some of the boundaries were set on where the roads were delimiting the boundaries between Weyerhaueser's land. As the largest employer and economic engine in the state at the time, state politicians were reluctant to tell Weyerhaueser that they couldn't send their own employees onto their own land, so they didn't. Eek. Good thing it was a weekend. Four and a half daunting lava cones out of five.
British-Iraqi physicist Jim al-Khalili's "The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance" was also excellent, describing the massive translation effort of known texts from Greek and Roman scientists into Arabic during the Abbāsid Caliphate and the subsequent pursuit of and development of chemistry, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics by Arabic-literate peoples (al-Khalili characterizes the science being done by its common language of communication, which at that time was Arabic rather than Latin or English -- the scientists he highlights were Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and a few pagans, but they wrote in Arabic as their lingua, um, franca.) His discussion of the overlap between alchemy and chemistry as the science of chemistry developed was particularly interesting to me, as many people throw out actual science being done by scientists who also worked on alchemy that we now know to be flawed. I appreciated his setting the record straight on how many scientists known to the Western canon and Arabic-literate people alike held beliefs that we now know to be incorrect, but that this does not negate their contributions that we now know to be correct. It can be challenging to look at historical figures further back in the development of knowledge and see them with the understanding of their time, and not just with judgement far clearer in retrospect than it could possibly have been at the time.
It was also interesting to see the genesis of state-funded big science projects in the caliphate, verifying Ptolemy's astronomical observations and then extending the realm of the observed to perform new calculations. If you are a fan of librarians, you'll be cheering for the House of Wisdom, the Companions of the Verified Tables (nerdiest science posse name ever!), and the Arabic Egyptologist publishing hieroglyph-to-Arabic translation dictionaries in the ninth century. Kind of disturbing to think of all the scientific insight and knowledge that one misses by not speaking or reading the language of the discoverers; one can see why the translation phase of the texts of the time preceded the scientific and intellectual flowering. I'm grateful to all the Arabic texts that eventually got translated into English -- we have a lot of the Greek and Roman texts via this route, much like the medieval Irish monks -- but how much more might we know if we had done better and more thorough translation into English ourselves? Kinda also want to go find books on the history of Indian science and the history of Chinese science -- I know a lot of good work was done there too! The sections on the development of zero, decimals, and decimal fractions show some of this interaction of scholarship, both in the places where an idea was successfully communicated to other cultures and in the places where it had to be rediscovered in different places at different times, since it hadn't managed to make it out into the general global knowledge of scientists, insofar as such a thing existed (which was not very far). Clearly, we need a better babelfish. Scientists? Also interesting on the multicultural science-doing front, al-Khalili draws some parallels between the decline of Arabic intellectual centers and governments which exiled or persecuted their Jewish residents, particularly in Andalusian Spain. But his final theory on what caused the decline of those Arabic-literate cultural centers, which I wish he'd given more than a few pages to, was neither the encroachment of religious conservativism, the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols, nor European colonialism. Instead, he credits the lack of adoption of the printing press, due to the difficulty of setting correct grammatical Arabic in movable type. I would have really liked to hear more about that theory, but alas, the book is short. Four rational inquiries with measurable values out of five.
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/539598.html and has
comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.
The things I was particularly interested in: I knew that the scientist who was famously killed on the ridge while taking observations of the mountain was also the first guy on scene a month and change before the blast. He made savvy observations about how it could explode (there were more, that's a short clip) and how bad it could be, even mentioning the possibility of a lateral blast, which few other scientists were considering. So if he knew how bad it could be, why was Johnston there? Part of it seemed to be that he was willing to take risks for science, going up to the forming lava dome by helicopter to run out and take gas samples even shortly before the blast. Part of it was that this was an unprecedented event, having not previously been observed by modern scientists. And part of it was that he took someone else's shift -- the other scientist had a graduate student in town and wanted to take the student to breakfast. He'd be back by lunch. Mount St. Helens blew at about 8:30 AM. Johnston was never found; they named the observatory and ridge where he died after him.
A highly relevant detail that I hadn't seen mentioned before: Mount Baker sent up a plume five years before, in 1975. The state government's response was to close off a lot of the area, which angered seasonal tourism business in the region. (Mount Baker's still at it.) But the plume at Baker never turned into harmonic tremors, and St. Helens did. Still, when the state government wanted to close off St. Helens, they met a lot of local resistance. "You did this five years ago. Lots of people went out of business. Nothing happened. Screw you, I pay my taxes, you're not doing this to me." In addition, the governor at the time was kind of baffling, praising an 84 year old guy who refused to evacuate from the emergency zone she declared, saying that we needed more of his kind of common sense in the state. When the mountain blew and he was killed, she then said "well, we told people to leave, it's their own fault if they stayed". Pick one! But the declaration of the zones was only partially based on the geologists' opinion on where the blast could reach... some of the boundaries were set on where the roads were delimiting the boundaries between Weyerhaueser's land. As the largest employer and economic engine in the state at the time, state politicians were reluctant to tell Weyerhaueser that they couldn't send their own employees onto their own land, so they didn't. Eek. Good thing it was a weekend. Four and a half daunting lava cones out of five.
British-Iraqi physicist Jim al-Khalili's "The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance" was also excellent, describing the massive translation effort of known texts from Greek and Roman scientists into Arabic during the Abbāsid Caliphate and the subsequent pursuit of and development of chemistry, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics by Arabic-literate peoples (al-Khalili characterizes the science being done by its common language of communication, which at that time was Arabic rather than Latin or English -- the scientists he highlights were Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and a few pagans, but they wrote in Arabic as their lingua, um, franca.) His discussion of the overlap between alchemy and chemistry as the science of chemistry developed was particularly interesting to me, as many people throw out actual science being done by scientists who also worked on alchemy that we now know to be flawed. I appreciated his setting the record straight on how many scientists known to the Western canon and Arabic-literate people alike held beliefs that we now know to be incorrect, but that this does not negate their contributions that we now know to be correct. It can be challenging to look at historical figures further back in the development of knowledge and see them with the understanding of their time, and not just with judgement far clearer in retrospect than it could possibly have been at the time.
It was also interesting to see the genesis of state-funded big science projects in the caliphate, verifying Ptolemy's astronomical observations and then extending the realm of the observed to perform new calculations. If you are a fan of librarians, you'll be cheering for the House of Wisdom, the Companions of the Verified Tables (nerdiest science posse name ever!), and the Arabic Egyptologist publishing hieroglyph-to-Arabic translation dictionaries in the ninth century. Kind of disturbing to think of all the scientific insight and knowledge that one misses by not speaking or reading the language of the discoverers; one can see why the translation phase of the texts of the time preceded the scientific and intellectual flowering. I'm grateful to all the Arabic texts that eventually got translated into English -- we have a lot of the Greek and Roman texts via this route, much like the medieval Irish monks -- but how much more might we know if we had done better and more thorough translation into English ourselves? Kinda also want to go find books on the history of Indian science and the history of Chinese science -- I know a lot of good work was done there too! The sections on the development of zero, decimals, and decimal fractions show some of this interaction of scholarship, both in the places where an idea was successfully communicated to other cultures and in the places where it had to be rediscovered in different places at different times, since it hadn't managed to make it out into the general global knowledge of scientists, insofar as such a thing existed (which was not very far). Clearly, we need a better babelfish. Scientists? Also interesting on the multicultural science-doing front, al-Khalili draws some parallels between the decline of Arabic intellectual centers and governments which exiled or persecuted their Jewish residents, particularly in Andalusian Spain. But his final theory on what caused the decline of those Arabic-literate cultural centers, which I wish he'd given more than a few pages to, was neither the encroachment of religious conservativism, the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols, nor European colonialism. Instead, he credits the lack of adoption of the printing press, due to the difficulty of setting correct grammatical Arabic in movable type. I would have really liked to hear more about that theory, but alas, the book is short. Four rational inquiries with measurable values out of five.
This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/539598.html and has
comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.