“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come. ... Field of Dreams”
Have you ever wondered about science?
Ok, that is a little broad. I will rephrase the question.
Have you ever wondered what particle physics is?
Still too broad, I will try one more time.
Have you ever wondered what protons, neutrons, and electrons are made of?
Well I have. I may be confessing my inner nerd but I wonder about these things all the time. I constantly am wondering what happened before the Big Bang, or matter could appear out of nothing, or how the universe can keep expanding, and what the theory of relativity really means. I constantly get lost on Google searching what a neutrino is and what dark matter is made of. I even watch NOVA for fun.
Unfortunately for me whenever I can actually find the answer to one of these questions it is usually such an abstract concept that I cannot even begin to make sense of it.
This is the part where I start talking about the book I read this week.
But first a confession: I didn’t finish the entire book. Actually I only got about a third of the way through it. This is totally my fault because I got the unabridged version which is somewhere in the realm of 550 pages. I don’t know the exact count because I have a Kindle and it uses Loc which no one actually knows what it means or how it derives it.
I am going to finish this book. I will also buy the hard copy. I will also encourage other people to read it, especially people who have ridiculous misunderstandings about scientific topics that when better understood will make them a lot less ignorant.
So the book I read was Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I’m not going to do a book report because the title tells it all.
I am not going to write about the funny anecdotes used to engage readers while reading about the history of geology, that is obviously an upside to this book.
I am not going to write about the vast amount of information that this book contains either, the length and title should allude enough to that.
I really think that one thing is worth mentioning other than sincerely expressing how great a book this is in all ways. So, what I would like to mention is that what Bryson does especially well is take complicated physics theory’s and put them into words that regular humans can understand. Furthermore, when he feels that the theory is just plain ol un-understandable (based on the physicists own inability to understand their own theorem) he doesn’t make you feel inferior. All Bryson does in these situations is tell you that people don’t need to understand such things, nor could they.
I think this is the true genius of this book. Too often non-science types are made to feel inferior because we can’t grasp the concept of space-time. The truth is that space-time, and many other science concepts, are extremely complicated and difficult for everyone to understand. If it weren’t difficult to understand physics wouldn’t be a specialized field of study that requires years of education to enter into.
There are people out there that do what to know what is going on at CERN and what the edge of the universe is. Regular people with these questions should not be left out of the loop when it comes to the answer just because they don’t have two PHDs and can speak in binary code.
I once had an instructor teach me that when in a child asks about black holes or dark matter to steer the conversation towards a more answerable topic.
I say bullshit to this!
If a student asks me about something really complicated and difficult to explain, not to mention way beyond a middle school science class curriculum, I will tell them that I would gladly help them find out what ever there is to find out.
If a fourth grader is curious about dark matter awesome! Real learning is driven by curiosity and I would never what to shut that down.
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