Science Archives - Page 3 of 3

Rivers in Time – Peter D. Ward

Published on March 23, 2008

Cover of Rivers in Time

Rivers in Time
Peter D. Ward
315 pages including index
published in 2000

Rivers of Time is a new edition of The End of Evolution, a book originally published in 1994, roughly around the same time as E. O. Wilson’s Diversity of Life, with which it overlaps to some point. Like that book, Rivers of Time mixes exploration of the Earth’s evolutionary past with concern for the
present, focussing on the historical three mega extinctions as well as the one currently under way. Unlike E. O. Wilson’s book however, this is not a call to arms. Ward is much more resigned to the great extinction than Wilson is.

Partially this may be because in Ward’s view, this great extinction has already happened, with the disappearance of the megafauna of Europe, North America, Australia and many parts of Asia and Africa during the last 15,000-20,000 years, coinciding with the rise of modern humanity. The extinctions still taking place now are just the aftermath of this. I’m not sure how much I agree with this, but at the very least it puts the current destruction of ecosystems in place like Brazil or Borneo into a new perspective, when you realise the same thing had already happened in Europe thousands of years ago.

The Diversity of Life – E. O. Wilson

Published on January 30, 2008

Cover of The Diversity of Life

The Diversity of Life
E. O. Wilson
424 pages
published in 1992

The Diversity of Life is the first E. O. Wilson book I’ve ever read and I finished it impressed. Writing science books aimed at a lay audience is not an easy job to do, having to explain difficult concepts to an audience of whom you can’t assume they have the background to understand them immediately. And you need to do this without boring your audience or telling too many lies-to-children. E. O. Wilson manages to do this with a concept as big and fuzzy as biological diversity, is a tribute to his writing.

Wilson is a biologist, who first rode to a certain amount of fame and infamity in the seventies, for popularising the concept of sociobiology. As a biologist he spent a large part of his career studying social insects, especially ants, from the study of which he also derived some of his ideas about sociobiology. For his research he spent quite some time in developing countries, seeing the ongoing destruction of wild habitats up close, so it’s no wonder that he became a passionate environmentalist.

Time travel in Einstein’s Universe — J. Richard Gott

Published on November 16, 2006

Cover of Time Travel in Einstein's Universe

Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe
J. Richard Gott
291 pages including index
published in 2001

I have to say, Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe does exactly what it says on the tin, exploring the possibility and methods of timetravel in the universe as we know it since Einstein formulated his formulas about special and general relativity. In the process Gott manages to also explore some of the more exotic theories about our universe and how it came to be. It seems that science fiction writers got stiff competition from astrophysicists these days in dreaming up weird and wonderful posssible universes…

It’s this that I have a bit of a problem with here. Granted, this is of course a popular science book, written for thickies and ignoramuses like myself, but it seems to me that a lot of what Gott theorises here is put too strongly as the truth rather than as just a possibility, a theory. For example, at one point he is explaining how the universe might have used timetravel to come into existence, having a closed timeloop for an origin rather than a true origin, now safely in our past so that we can no longer use this timeloop ourselves. Now I’m sure this is all allowed by the maths, but is there any observable support for this theory? That is, can our measurements of the observable universe prove or disprove this theory? Because otherwise, what is the point?