By Bill Green
ISBN-10: 1934137529
ISBN-13: 9781934137529
“This fantastic clinical memoir captures the romance and wonder of analysis in targeted poetic prose that's as wonderful and evocative as something written by means of Rilke, painted by means of Seurat, or performed by means of Casals." —Mary Doria Russell, writer of document and The Sparrow
“A radiant love letter to technology from a scientist with a poet's soul . . . eco-friendly is a beautiful author, and his fierce concentration and mastery of favor are comparable to the biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas." —Kirkus Reviews
In Boltzmann's Tomb, invoice eco-friendly interweaves the tale of his personal lifelong evolution as a scientist, and his paintings within the Antarctic, with a travelogue that may be a own and common background of technological know-how. Like Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder—this ebook serves as a wonderful creation to the nice figures of technology. besides lyrical meditations at the tragic lifetime of Galileo, the wildly eccentric Tycho Brahe, and the visionary Sir Isaac Newton, Green's ruminations go back all through to the lesser-known determine of Ludwig Boltzmann. utilizing Boltzmann's theories of randomness and entropy as a bigger metaphor for the unpredictable paths that our lives take, eco-friendly indicates us that technology, like artwork, is a lived adventure.
Bill eco-friendly is a geochemist and professor emeritus at Miami college in Oxford, Ohio. he's additionally the writer of Water, Ice & Stone: technology and reminiscence at the Antarctic Lakes which acquired the yank Museum of typical History's John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing, used to be a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and used to be excerpted within the Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the best Writing at the Arctic and the Antarctic, edited through Elizabeth Kolbert.
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Additional info for Boltzmann's Tomb: Travels in Search of Science
Sample text
Back at McMurdo, they had a soft-serve ice cream machine that anyone could use. I filled cups and soup bowls with it after every meal. In the Dry Valleys, I had so many questions. Why were we finding so much dissolved oxygen in the water? I had expected there would be none. Maybe our methods were wrong; maybe one of the reagents had gone bad. After all, the water was under twelve feet of ice. It was no longer in contact with the atmosphere. And why did the ice, which was so perfectly blue, have these long columns of bubbles embedded in it?
The white volcano, when it hove 49 Boltzmann's Tomb - 2nd pass:Layout 1 4/1/11 3:05 PM Page 50 BILL GREEN into view, rose thirteen thousand feet, and the tiny village of McMurdo —like something under Popocatapetl—lay at its base. The sea ice, where the Scotts’ ships had once anchored, was solid far off into the north, and the white peaks of the Society Range lay in near-darkness to the west. You could still see the moon and the southern stars. Antarctica looked as big and dead as a Jovian satellite when you stood on a prominence in the silence.
Standing at the entrance to the park grounds, before the observatory domes, there is an alabaster sculpture completed in the 1930s in honor of the great astronomers. Among the thin monkish figures standing in a circle around the central obelisk are the grand architects and authors of modern astronomy: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. In these names there was hardly the resonant beat of chemistry. None of these explorers of the heavens, of the planets and stars and the paths of comets, had ever heard of ions or molecules, the jostlings of sodium and nitrate in the midnight furnaces of Virginia.
Boltzmann's Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green
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