Science

The Next Book For London

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The next book I read to London has impossibly big shoes to fill. What can knock Screen Shot 2015-08-11 at 4.39.35 PM4,100 pages of Harry Potter off the top? Well, it isn’t Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything or ASHONE for short. That’s right, I went full nonfiction science writing for the next book. I needed a change of pace and I am quite sure London won’t notice, except for the expanded vocabulary in Bryson’s work compared to HP.

I love Bill Bryson’s writing. Somehow I had owned ASHONE for ten years and had never read it. London and I cracked open the book a couple of weeks ago, validating my purchase of this book in a Borders (remember them?) in Longmont, Colorado all those years ago. We are only a hundred pages in, but I’ve found that I am not enjoying this as much as his travel writing. There just aren’t as many opportunities in science writing for Bryson to add his signature humor. That said, it’s still an excellent book. Bryson makes the hardest of subjects accessible by writing about them in the common tongue.

One of my favorite passages early on in the book is from chapter two:

…it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.

I absolutely love reading about how huge space is. And this is just our solar system.

I always think about God when I think of space, its scale, its never-ending mysteries, because for me, space has always been one of those things in which I see the presence and power of God. Pure awe.

I’m looking forward to the rest of this no-longer-dusty Bryson book.

12 Classics: A Brief History of Time

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Inspired by the recent movie, The Theory of Everything, I picked up a nonfiction classic I had never 60899438read, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I have had this book around the house for five years and I had never cracked it open and, before doing so, I reminded myself that I may understand no more than 5-10 pages of it.

I’m happy to report I may have understood 11. For an English Major, I fared pretty well.

Someone had told Hawking that for every equation he puts in the book the book sales are going to drop by half. Hawking said he vowed to put only one in the book, Einstein’s famous equation. Hawking’s decision helped me understand 11 pages. Had he felt differently, I may not have understood such a high number of pages.

Most of A Brief History of Time was very difficult to follow even without equations thrown in here and there. The pages I really enjoyed were well written explanations of science factoids I had once heard, but had since forgotten, or they were completely new to me. For example, someone somewhere in my past had told me about the possibility of travel at the speed of light, that is, how it’s not really possible. Hawking very thoughtfully explained it this way:

As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there.

Yeah, I had completely forgotten about that. I guess I do not think about traveling at the speed of light enough because if I had I am sure I would have kept the “equivalence of mass and energy” fresh in my mind.

Abundant were the facts in this book that were completely new to me. One that I read over and over again was about the density of White Dwarfs:

…with a radius of a few thousand miles and a density of hundreds of tons per cubic inch.

That’s dense. But wait, there is more. Neutron stars have “a radius of only ten miles or so and a density of hundreds of millions of tons per cubic inch.”

Holy. That is crazy. I kept picturing one of those very popular whiskey rocks and imagining it weighing a hundred million tons. Trying to wrap my head around that made for a sleepy afternoon.

This book made for a lot of sleepy afternoons. Ultimately, I enjoyed it. There were two rewards for finishing A Brief History of Time. One, the typical joy one gets from finishing any book. Two, the deep satisfaction of knowing I will never have the desire or need to pick this book up again. It may as well weigh a million tons now that I have set it down.