I haven't posted to the Electron in a few days, and the reason is that I have been finishing reading a big fat and very popular book, namely HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX by J.K. Rowling. In case you have no contact with children whatsoever, this is the fifth installment of the famous children's series by British author Rowling about the education and adventures of young wizard Harry Potter in magical school. The sixth book is just about to be released, so I needed to keep up with the series, having read the four previous ones. ORDER OF THE PHOENIX is a massive tome, 870 pages long, and yet the kids (and many adults) just ate it up. As a moderate fan of the series, my opinion is that this epic could have used some editing, like maybe 300 pages worth. But those 300 pages are full of the character interaction, chitchat, descriptions, and other non-story-line stuff that the Rowling fans crave, so no editor dared make the cuts. I was disappointed in the ending, which I thought was kind of trite, but then as I said, I am not a true "fanatic" Harry Potter fan.

When it comes to massive books, I've got a couple of favorites. There are no young wizards or Dark Lords in them; they aren't even fiction, but reference books. One of my favorites, which is so huge I have to store it sitting on its side rather than vertically, is THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VOLCANOES edited by Icelandic volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson. This massive volcanic bomb of a book contains highly technical articles on everything volcanological and geological, all written by experts in the field. It also has lots of excellent photographs both in color and black and white. And it goes beyond just crunchy geology; it has well-written articles on the cultural and social impact of volcanoes, and even articles on volcanoes in art, literature, and film. I am much more of a volcano fan than I would ever be a Harry Potter fan. So let us recite a reading from the Book of Phreatoplinian Eruptions:

"…In phreatoplinian eruptions, formation of pyroclastic density currents occurs both on a local scale by lateral ejection of material directly from the base of an otherwise stable plume and through partial or complete column collapse, forming flows on a large scale."

This is known in more common language as "blowing up real good." Better than a Harry Potter spellcast any day!

My most recent Big Fat Book is the answer to many of my nagging questions about the history of science. I found it on my latest visit to the Harvard University Coop/Barnes and Noble bookstore in Cambridge. Its size made me hesitate; how could I ever schlep this book home? But when I looked in its pages, I had to have it. It is THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, written by Bryan Bunch with Alexander Hellemans. The history is presented in the form of a timeline of years, packed with thousands of small articles describing what was invented or discovered during those years. Side boxes and illustrations go into more depth. Each mini-article is categorized into a field, for instance mathematics, transportation, physics, energy, construction, or biology. The Encyclopedia goes all the way back to the earliest works of humanity in prehistory, for instance the use of fire by hominids. Ancient history is well-represented, for instance the mathematics of ancient Babylon and the early Greek scientists such as Democritus or Hippocrates. The timeline also covers science and technology in non-European places, for instance a Chinese calculation of Pi to eight significant digits in what would be our seventh century CE. Turn to the seventeenth century in Europe and there is my new acquaintance Isaac Newton and his law of universal gravitation. This is in the 1660's. Now I am well aware that the simple physics that I am learning is hardly as sophisticated as the math and physics that was really being done during that period. But the equations that I'm learning in my high school physics book came from these decades in the seventeenth century. This book is definitely worth the weight.

Posted at 3:28 am | link