Watching the Universe

Title: Watching the Universe
Author: John Gribbin
Publisher: Universities Press, India 1998 (First Edition 1998)
ISBN: 81-7371-143-7
Pages: 221

A slightly outdated book – is the first impression the reader gets. The volume consists of 17 essays first published in the Griffith Observer over twenty years from mid-1970s to mid-1990s. Gribbin, a famous science author confesses tat he started writing them as light relief from his day job at the science journal Nature. The author has updated many chapters with later information, but the lack of focus and outdated nature of the topics covered is disheartening. On many essays, he has cautioned that the material is now out-of-fashion and needn’t be taken too seriously, particularly the example of white holes or cosmic gushers, as they were called at that time. This note of caution prompts the reader to take all chapters with some apprehension and the authenticity of the book is totally lost in the process. Gribbin adds another apology that some of the topics may also be seen in other works by him and it is indeed so. The repetition of the same ideas is quite boring while at the same time helping to refresh our memory, depending on the way one chooses to look at the question. The lack of subject focus is apparent in the selection of essays. One’d have wondered that the author would include anything in the universe for discussion! The cover page showing a long-exposure photograph of an observatory on the background of concentric circles of star loci is not altogether apposite to the course of the book, as the author mainly discussed sub-atomic particles and the origins of the universe. The sad state of affairs is further brought forth in cold focus by the absence of any diagrams or illustrations. How the author could do away with them is beyond our comprehension, particularly when the ideas of space-time and wormholes are discussed.

The fact that the essays were written in the pre-global warming period is made amply clear by the argument that the world is in fact cooling (see chapter 3 – Waiting for the Next Ice Age). Gribbin argues that the temperature is dropping and the current inter-glacial period is moving slowly to an ice age like the one which prevailed about 12,000 years ago. This is a classic example of how an idea gets outdated in the scientific literature even after a short period of a decade. Immediately after the publication of this essay, scientists began to consider anthropomorphic climate change and global warming as serious issues. Sadly, this book conveys the negative idea regarding climate change. It is mentioned that the warming caused by greenhouse gases will be balanced by reduced solar activity (see chapter 6 – The Curious Case of the Shrinking Sun).

A brief and enlightening narration of thermodynamic principles is a plus-point for the book. As given in Chapter 14 – Time and the Universe, “Rudolf Claussius, a German physicist who was one of the pioneers of thermodyanmics, summed up the first and second laws thus in 1865: ‘The energy of the world is constant; the entropy of the world is increasing.’ Equally succinctly, some unknown modern wit has put it in everyday language: ‘You can’t get something for nothing; you can’t even break even’.”

Altogether, the book should be read by a reader who follows scientific ideas with a curious and insatiable mind. Even though the book can only be considered as a review of many ideas presented elsewhere by various authors and Gribbin himself, its worth as a compendium is not to be under-rated. The recommendation is very clear - If you find this book in a library, read it by all means, but if you look forward to purchase it, you can safely save some money.

Rating: 2 Star

Does Anything Eat Wasps?

Title: Does Anything Eat Wasps and 101 Other Questions
Editor: Mick O’Hare
Publisher: Profile Books 2006 (First South Asian edition)
ISBN: 1-86197-973-8
Pages: 211

This book is a collection of 102 questions asked by readers of New Scientist magazine and answered by other readers through the ‘Last Word’ column of the magazine over many years. The column is driven entirely by the enthusiasm of readers, and we would be much impressed by the profound knowledge and wisdom behind some of the answers. As the editor notes, the Last Word is devoted to the small questions in life and queries like mystery behind the meaning of human existence are not entertained while answers will be ready for questions like why the tea changes colour when lemon juice is added to it.

The book is divided into several sections on Our bodies, plants and animals, domestic science, our Universe, our Planet, weird weather, troublesome transport and Best of the rest with the questions neatly categorised to match the title of the sub-section. Several interesting questions like how the dew forms on grass blades, why potatoes with a green colour should be avoided, why do people have eye brows, how much does a human head weigh etc, are answered, with clever and witty replies also interspersed along with the more serious ones, thereby providing humour while discussing scientific concepts. Since the correspondents are of widely different temperaments, some uninteresting and outright boring questions are also included, which is inevitable when the global nature of the readership of New Scientist is taken into account.

A good book overall, which is sure to benefit the reader of any class or category. It helps us to think about the things which are around, but we are still ignorant of. The magazine encourages the users to pose such questions through the link http://www.newscientist.com/lastword.ns. So, don’t lose time and shoot that question which always nagged your mind when you were a child! Only children ask questions. Adults are too preoccupied.

Rating: 4 Star

The Horseshoe Table

Title: The Horseshoe Table – An Inside View of the UN Security Council
Author: Chinmaya R Gharekhan
Publisher: Pearson Longman 2006 (First)
ISBN: 81-7758-453-7
Pages: 322

The Horseshoe Table is the table around which discussions are being made in the UN security council. It is a privileged reserve of the five permanent members (P5) who wield veto power. The tolerance and accommodation displayed by the haughty P5 is limited and many a times the ordinary members with a term of only 2 years are forced to toe the line of one of the big powers. Chinmaya Gharekhan, the author was a member of the Indian Foreign Service, who had served in Egypt, Congo, Laos, Vietnam and former Yugoslavia. He spent nearly a quarter-century in the UN in varying capacities from first secretary of Indian mission, Permanent Representative to the UN, and as India’s Ambassador to the UN for over six years. He was appointed Under-Secretary-General in 1993 and he was the personal representative of the Secretary-General to the Security Council which afforded him to get a first-class eye witness account of the wheelings and dealings of the world’s most popular diplomatic body. The book is adorned with a foreword written by Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali, the former UN Secretary General, the only one who didn’t obtain a second term so far.

The author was a confidante of Ghali and when he stopped the practice of attending the discussions at Security Council citing excessive work load, he appointed Gharekhan as his personal representative in the Council, which was an unheard-of practice in the UN. Ghali became more and more unpopular with the USA as time went by and was vetoed by them when he tried and failed for a second term. The book also shows the arrogance and condescension displayed by some of the US diplomats, the most noted being Madeleine Albright who later went on to become the US Secretary of State in the second Clinton administration. The book describes several events which the world body discussed and acted upon when the author served in the Council. These issues include the Gulf War of 1991 and consequent sanctions on Iraq, the civil war and disintegration of former Yugoslavia, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Libya after Lockerbie disaster, Haiti and the Rwanda genocide. The tussles and lobbying attendant to the election of the Secretary-General in 1991 and 1996 are given. The book ends with a very relevant chapter on the reform of the Security Council which is noted for the prescience writ upon it in every sentence.

The essential point one discerns from the book is that the UN is not so elegant or effective as it is often made out to be. People of developing countries look to the UN to rectify some of the injustices occurring in several parts of the world, but it is a prisoner of the might of the permanent members of the Security Council, which is the most powerful body of the world organisation. Gharekhan doesn’t mince words when he says that the UN as well as the Secretary General are often force to go along the line USA adopts. Since they are the largest contributor to UN’s coffers and the principle of ‘who pays the piper calls the tune’ is made out clearly by subsequent actions.

The passages are witty in some chapters, but the momentum is not generally kept up. Regarding the role of the Secretary of UNSC to assist its President in matters of rules and regulations are impressively narrated. “It is the Secretary of the Council who is the more useful to the President since he is the one who must instantly advise the President in case he is confronted with a difficult issue related to a point of order from a member quoting some rule of procedure of which the President almost certainly has never heard. Mercifully, members of the Council themselves hardly have a nodding acquaintance with the rules of procedure and are understandably reluctant to expose their ignorance. As a result, the Secretary is seldom put to test about his knowledge of the rules” (p.17). UN’s obsession with its official languages are brought out in another passage. “It is the practice in the Council for each speech to be translated consecutively in all the working languages. When a statement was made in Russian or Chinese, it was interpreted in other languages one by one! This was in addition to the simultaneous interpretation, which was available to the members as the statements are delivered. The real reason for this absurd, time-consuming and highly expensive practice was that it gave time to diplomats to seek instructions from their governments, since consecutive interpretation could at times take several hours. Very often, the delegates left their seats and either went home for meals with their families or, more likely, patronised the bar and ‘held consultations’ with fellow delegates” (p.16). The resolutions are often colour-coded to reflect their status. Drafts are circulated in blue and once they are adopted, the text is distributed in black.

US ambassadors often treat the UN as one of their departments and an incident is described regarding the UN mission in Yugoslavia represented by Akashi. Madelline Albright’s tirade against him is put down as “In the Security Council consultations on the 26^th, Mrs. Albright lashed out at Akashi for the remarks attributed to him in the New York Times. She said it was ‘totally unacceptable for an international civil servant, whose salary for the most part we pay’ publicly criticise President Clinton or any other government leader. When I told Akashi about all this, he was quite cool. ‘I thought she was my friend. Do the Americans pay?’ This was a reference to the fact that the US at the time was heavily in arrears in the payment of its dues to the UN budget” (p.141). The critical difference between ceasefire and cessation of hostilities is given. Ceasefire stopped fighting but left the opposing forces where they stood. Cessation of hostilities called for the withdrawal of forces to an agreed distance from the ceasefire line and the interposition of neutral or UN forces.

One would naturally expect to find some references in this book about UN to have some references to Shashi Tharoor, the present Minister of State for External Affairs of India who was also an Under-Secretary-General and tried unsuccessfully to contest to the post of Secretary General when Kofi Annan’s term ended. In fact, there is only one reference regarding the naming of the UN forces to the various states in disintegrating Yugoslavia. “The operation in Croatia would be called UN Confidence Restoration Operation (UNCRO). The Croats were happy since ‘CRO’ sounded very much an abbreviation of Croatia. The mission in Bosnia would continue to be called UNPROFOR. The mission in Macedonia would be called UN Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP). All these names were suggested by Shashi Tharoor, the great Indian novelist, and the most able deputy of Kofi Annan” (p.166).

The book is really worthy at getting a feel of matters going on in the world body of ‘united nations’. After reading the book, we would get a feel that the member states should behave more properly in dealing high international policies and to try to transcend the barriers of petty nationalism and regionalism. Ever since the cold war ended, the practice of putting religion in international affairs is also seen to be going strong in the UN, particularly Islamic countries. The problem in Bosnia was a case in point.

However, there are obvious drawbacks to the narration as well. At several places, it degenerates to copying from a diary kept by the author. Also, the various problems discussed are not followed till the natural conclusion. The issues are narrated only for the period the author was in the UN! Some issues like Palestine have neither the beginning nor the end. Some other issues like Iraq have the beginning because Gharekhan was in the UN when it occurred, but don’t have the end properly explained. The reader is thus kept in a state of limbo after reading the book. Also, since the issues were international and involving neighbours, some maps would have been valuable. There is not even a single map in the book. Use of terms not explained was particularly troublesome when the Yugoslave crisis was considered. The word ‘Pale’ was used intermittently and it was not clear whether the author meant a person or place. I had to search Google to find out that “Pale is a town and a municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina, located southeast of Bosnia's capital Sarajevo. The municipality of Pale is one of the six municipalities of the City of Istočno Sarajevo in is located in the Republika Srpska entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina”. The author could have saved me the trouble! Any way, this is a good work and recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Greatest Show on Earth

Title: The Greatest Show on Earth – The Evidence for Evolution
Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Bantam Press 2009 (First)
ISBN: 978-0-593-06174-9
Pages: 437

Undoubtedly one of Dawkins’ master pieces of scientific books! A confirmed atheist and popularizer of science, Dawkins shines supreme among the authors. In addition to the several works he has produced on evolution and the mechanisms by which it works its magic, the present volume is the capstone of them all. As he commented, he was motivated to write a clinching piece of book on the bicentennial year of Darwin’s birth. Evolution is a fact, but surprisingly, there are quite a lot of people with strange ideas like creationism, intelligent design, etc. As the author lists out the results of a survey, 40% of Americans believe in the literal truth of the Bible and that the world was created about 6000 years ago. This book lists so many examples and convincing arguments to establish the truth behind evolution beyond any reasonable doubt. It’d truly astounding if any one continue to vouch for creationism after reading the chapters on skeletal and genetic uniformity among various species.

Change continually happens to animals. This can be artificial, like domestication or spontaneous, like natural selection. The genetic differences imparted on dogs in a very short span of time is immense and the fact that they are genetically evolved from the wolves is difficult to digest now, by just looking at two members of the respective families. If so much change can occur in so short a time, imagine what’d happen if the time available for evolution is large, in fact so huge as to involve billions of years. We have evidence of the elapse of the enormous amount of time from radioactive dating. In addition to such long time scales, evolution can also fact as in the case of the tusk weight of elephants in Africa and in a controlled experiment on frogs on two Adriatic islands done in a span of 37 years. The evidence of evolution is also displayed by fossils and one of the pet arguments of creationists-designers are that there are some missing links. The author strongly refutes such allegations and explains with examples that there are no missing links and every thing is accounted for. We have obtained fossils of intermediate hominids like australopithecus and several home-species to show the intermediate steps when humans evolved from the common ancestor from whom us and chimpanzees diverged. It is not difficult to understand why species diverge, how the so called speciation takes place. When two life forms are separated by islands, not just land surrounded by water, but desert oases, Alpine mountain peaks etc, gradual changes begin to take place such as those seen in Galapagos and Madagascar islands. When these new species encounters the parent species after a sufficiently long span of time, no interbreeding can take place and a new species is established. The process of forming islands is natural in geologic time scales as predicted by plate tectonics. Hence, the mechanism of speciation is clearly proved. The similarities in the bone structure of all vertebrates is striking as exemplified by a comparison between the skulls of a human and a horse. There are 28 bones in the human skull and the structure and number is the same for a horse too, with the difference only in size. The similarities abound in molecular structure of the genes too, as several genes performing the same functions in various animals are in fact similar. The final chapter on ‘intelligent design’ renders an apt and accurate summing up of this old wine in a new bottle, or in other words, creationism in a new garb! Design of animals, if it ever was, is not so intelligent as evidenced in the laryngeal nerve in mammals, the pipe called ‘vas deferens’ which connects testis to the penis. With masterful illustrations, it is made clear that the ‘design’ of these organs are in no way intelligent and if at all they had a designer, he is seriously wanting in intelligence. The animals are cute and elegant only from the outside, and the innards of them are such a mess. This sums up the chain of arguments in the book.

The section on radioactive dating is very illuminating as the detailed mechanism is not described in many books of this genre. Carbon-14 which has a half-life of 5730 years is used for dating fossils of life forms, but for longer duration dating like that of rocks, Potassium-40, which has a half-life of 1.26 billion years is used. In this decay, Potassium-40 is morphed to Argon-40. This section also discusses the controversy surrounding the ‘Shroud of Turin’ which was discovered in the 13^th century claiming to contain a blood stained image of the Christ, but was proved to be a hoax. In 1983, Vatican decided to test the integrity of the piece of cloth in a rare show of scientific temper and allowed three labs in Europe and USA to test the relic with carbon dating. The labs in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich came up with convincing results, 1304 C.E, 1200 C.E and 1274 C.E.

A parody of the song ‘All things bright and beautiful’ praising God for creating all things is given in page 212 and offers excellent humour.

All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous
All evil great and small
All things foul and dangerous
The Lord God made them all

Each nasty little hornet
Each beastly little squid
Who made the spiky urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous
All pox both great and small
Putrid, foul and gangrenous
The Lord God made them all.

The scientists have come up with a unit for evolution, in a bid to make it quantitative and to bring it in line with the exact sciences. The name of the unit, as expected, is darwin. It is the natural logarithm of a measured characteristic of an animal such as the mean leg length over evolutionary time. It is assessed that the rate of evolution of the horse is approximately 40 millidarwin, where as for some domestic animals including dogs, it is measured in kilodarwin.

The five fastest runners among mammal species are the cheetah, the pronghorn (a kind of antelope), the gnu (another kind of antelope), the lion and the Thomson’s gazelle. It is a mix of the predator and the prey. One thing about such arms races that might worry enthusiasts for intelligent design is the heavy dose of futility that loads them down. If we are going to postulate a designer of the cheetah, he has evidently put every ounce of his designing expertise into the task of perfecting a superlative killer. One look at that magnificent running machine leaves us in no doubt. The cheetah, if we are going to talk design at all, is superbly designed to kill gazelles. But the very same designer has equally evidently strained every nerve to design a gazelle that is superbly equipped to escape from those very same cheetahs. For heaven’s sake, whose side is the designer on? When you look at the cheetah’s taut muscles and flexing backbone, you must conclude that the designer wants the cheetah to win the race. But when you look at the sprinting, jinking, dodging gazelle, you reach exactly the opposite conclusion. Does the designer’s left hand not know what his right hand is doing? Is he a sadist, who enjoys spectator sport and is forever upping the ante on both sides to increase the thrill of the chase? Did he who made the lamb make thee? (p. 384). Powerful argument indeed!

As another illustration of the ‘unintelligence’ of design, animal eye is described. Our retinas consist of photosensitive cells with nerves attached to them. But strangely, the sensors are placed back-to-front and the nerve connections are blocking light from reaching the sensors. It is our brain which filters out poor clarity and presents a good picture. Hermann von Helmholtz, the great nineteenth-century German scientist opined about the deficiencies of the eye thus, “If an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which had all these defects, I should think myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms, and giving him back the instrument”. The sole motive of creationists is the desire to uphold the origin myth of a particular set of Bronze age desert tribesmen!

A superb book, fully endorsed and recommended. Three profound discoveries, that of DNA as carriers of heredity, plate tectonics which changed the continents of the world and carbon dating of fossils came very much after Darwin published his ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859, but each discovery only corroborated his theory rather than presenting even one instance of deviance! This book explains several of them in detail this is a must-have for every man of self-respect.

Rating: 5 Star