Book: Boltzmann'sTomb by Bill Green

Travels in Search of Science

Bill Green has been interested in science most of his life. He is a "geochemist and professor emeritus at Miami University" with far-ranging interests in the men and women of science, especially those of the "scientific revolution"of the last 500 years. So he tells of Kepler, Galileo, Lavoisier, Mendeleev, Newton, among others..and of how their brilliant minds made possible for us to: "walk on the moon;carry on conversations over thousands of miles; build weapons that in a few seconds can obliterate an an entire city; design molecules that can alter our blood chemistry; perform calculations at speeds beyond comprehension; fly by the thousands in comfort above cloud and storm into the fading sun; see deep into the human body without surgery, what is there, what fractures, what cells, what imminence of death lurking, that may be countered, held in abeyance."

He travels to the cities where these men and women lived and worked in order to come as close as he can to them. He stands in awe before the monuments and statues and laboratories and tombs. As a young student, he learns of Ludwig Boltzmann (and who has even heard of Boltzmann?) One of Boltzmann's students was Lise Meitner "who would be the first person to understand nuclear fission" and who, when asked, refused to work on the Manhattan Project. Boltzmann "believed in atoms..a fundamental world of particles underlying the beauty of mountain and sea..." before nearly anyone else. He was ridiculed and mocked. Is is amazing that this was not that long ago...just a bit over 100 years.

While there is a vocabulary of electrons, atomic mass, entropy, fission, isotopes...there is much more which captivates and charms a reader because the author is just as comfortable writing in non-scientific jargon. On nearly every page, there are lovely, ruminative sentences and paragraphs such as:

"But at the Hotel Glocke, I was thinking, for some reason, of photovoltaic cells, of sunlit fields and deserts...of vast arrays of silicon cells laid out awaiting the sun....just as Einstein imagined here in Bern, to be sent as current, as pure electricity from the sun's rays without all of commotion, the steam and noise of coal and oil--so nineteenth-century, so classical and disruptive of this thin shell of air--with just the silent turning and tracking as the Earth turns, as it warms itself before the great fire. This vision of photons and electrons--light and matter interacting in ways that we never understood until then, until Einstein thought one day how, just maybe, we could think of light as something other than a wave--would in time light the cities with a softer glow and send the engines spinning wheel to wheel, and all without the carbon that darkens our dreams and sends the oceans closer to our doors and the glaciers retreating far into distant hills."

He walks in European towns and drinks in pubs, absorbing the same air and noting the same quality of light as those he so admires and whose lives he presents to us in brief glimpses.

"Nature loves mixing, dispersal, spread-outness. Always the crushing failure of order: The crude oil pouring from the pipe, unconfined at last, comes to the surfaces roaring, mixes into marshes, encroaches onto beaches, rides the loop current, encircles the whole peninsula, flows northeastward along the coast of Florida and up toward CapeCod, and then abruptly north toward England."

Most of us in the United States do not know about or care about science. But a book like this is a toe dipped into those waters that so many perceive as "somewhere close to dry toast on the scale of earthly excitement." And once dipped, perhaps intrigued enough to read on, to learn more.

To name just two elements:

Take nitrogen: This gas "...serves as a kind of diluent for the explosively reactive gas, oxygen.." Nitrogen is 78% of our atmosphere.

Take phosphorus: "...the eleventh most abundant element in the [earth's] crust. But such is its chemistry that it forms highly insoluble compounds, and these are hardly disturbed by the passage of water. No dissolution. No coaxing into solution. Only a kind of obduracy in the face of water's challenges, its legendary ability to dissolve all that it touches. So in the past, the quantity of algae was kept in check by the grip of phosphorus minerals, which in their miserly way dispensed of their phosphorus atom by atom, never in displays of magnanimity. " But then scientists learned to make phosphorus more easily soluble, and it became part of detergents and fertilizers, and inexorably found its way via water into lakes, and thus eutrophication such as Lake Erie (and thousands of other lakes) whose algae fattened and grew with this unexpected banquet.

Anyway, obviously, I was taken with this book. The author says that a recent pole showed "23% of us could not name a single scientist; a little more than 40% could name only Einstein."

Science affects every moment we breathe and eat and every decision we make. Every politician we elect who is ignorant of science will help cloud our future.

Again, this book is not tedious or strictly scientific. It is a series of essays about the beauty of science, about those who did the outrageous experiments and were able to make intuitive leaps, but also one man's lyrical way of writing about them.