Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
copyright 2005 Penguin Books ISBN 0-670-03337-5 (hc.) or 0 14 30.3655 6 (pbk.)
The author seeks explanation for the success or demise of various ancient societies.
Surprisingly, it appears that enough detailed information is known about some societies
that one can understand the likely multiple mechanisms that were at work in their
long term success or failure to survive. One can easily make inferences about the
next 50-100 years of our own industrial society: many of the same mechanisms are still
at work. Scientists will appreciate the treatment of a somewhat "soft" topic, in which
hypotheses cannot be tested by experiment but only by statistical analysis, analogy,
or counter-example. In this work, the author successfully synthesizes a life-long body
of personal experience and field research, including
much published work by others.
Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud
by Robert Park
This should be required reading for all scientists. On a superficial level,
the book entertains us with tales about cold fusion and more transparent
free energy scams,
homeopathy and other areas of alternative medicine, EMF from power lines,
etc.
But the real value of the book is to teach
us to understand the concepts of junk and pathological science, and the human
frailities which lead us astray: the character flaws which allow bad science
to evolve into fraud, and the role of non-objective "belief engine" in our
brains. As science increasingly searches for ever-smaller signals among
the statistical clutter of potentially biased experiments, we all need to be
on guard.
Chesapeake Invader: Discovering America's Giant Meteorite Crater
by C. Wylie Poag
Jefferson Lab stands near the rim of the largest meteorite crater in the
United States. Many of us cross the rim as we commute to work. The center
(now buried beneath thousands of feet of sediments) is located across the
Chesapeake Bay, near Cape Charles, VA. This remnant of a 35 million year old
impact (apparently too small to cause mass extinctions) has produced faults
in the crystalline basement rocks and overlying sediments, dictates the direction the York and
James rivers take as they empty into the Bay, and is the reason deep wells
in the area yield highly saline water. Morever, the continued slow subsidence
of material inside the crater means that the land there is sinking relatively
fast for reasons unrelated to global warming. It all makes for an interesting story for those
of us here in Hampton Roads.
Other Worlds: the Search for Life in the Universe
by Michael D. Lemonick
copyright 1998 Simon and Schuster ISBN 0-684-83294-1
This book covers several topics which are serve to constrain inputs to the Drake equation: the fraction of stars with
planets, the fraction of such planets which are habitable, etc. There is a particularly
good
description of planet discoveries by Marcy and Butler who looked for tiny red
and blue shifts in the spectral lines of stars as they are pulled to and fro
by their planets. Experimentalists will appreciate how they achieved a sensitivity
of 1/1000 of a pixel in the CCD detector at the focal plane of their spectrograph.
Other topics covered include the question of life in the martian meteorite, state of the
art developments in telescope manufacture and interferometry, and the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence using radio telescopes.