Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish.
A STORM IN A TEACUP FULL
A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. Light but genuinely informative writing for readers who have forgotten their high school science.Ī Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence. Throughout, the author’s voice is enthusiastic, and most readers-physicists excluded-will learn something about physics. Although many healing philosophies teach that perfect health requires balance in all internal processes, living creatures achieve equilibrium only in death. Staying alive requires continual extraction of energy from the environment, and the chemical reactions inside our bodies that sustain life must keep matters far from equilibrium. Humans interrupt an energetic process-e.g., falling water with a dam, solar radiation by a silicon panel, decaying ancient plants in a coal furnace-and then allow it to proceed in ways that benefit us. Thus, the energy in the universe remains constant it can’t be created or destroyed but only changed from one form to another. Each of nine long, anecdote-filled sections revolves around a basic element of physics. She loves weird facts (a duck can stand on ice without freezing its feet) and extremes (the deep water of the Atlantic is moving south at one inch per year), but she is also a thoughtful educator who has done her homework. London) accompanies her entertaining, somewhat scattershot material with personal stories, jokes, and cute footnotes. In her debut book, Czerski (Physics/Univ.
A British physicist and science presenter for the BBC joins the growing genre of popular authors who assure readers that science is fun.įor two decades, a simple Google search has answered our questions about why the sky is blue, how popcorn pops, and the reason you have to whack the bottle in order to make ketchup flow, but this hasn’t yet stemmed two centuries of traditional books that explain science to readers who don’t know any or may have forgotten it.
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