Image: Chad Orzel
This is Chad Orzel’s (@orzelc and blogger at Uncertain Principles) third book. His first two were How To Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Both of these are fine books, but this one is different. You could think of the previous two books as an entertaining version of a physics class (without the test), but this is more like a case study on the process of science.
What is science? I think Chad does a great job of describing science right in the first chapter. He says that science is a lot like playing Angry Birds (yes, he mentions me in the very first footnote). In the game (please tell me you know about Angry Birds) you have some idea of how to knock over a pig and you try it out. If it doesn’t work, you try a different idea. Of course, this isn’t exactly what science is all about. If it were, this would be a very short book.
One way to get a better understanding of the nature of science is to see the progress of different scientific ideas. This is the whole point of the book – to show the process of science by looking at the great stories in science. Some of the interesting chapters:
- How do we know evolution works? Of course, this would be difficult for a physicist to write since we don’t know all the details about evolutionary biology beforehand.
- What about the periodic table and the organization of the elements?
- How do we know about the atomic structure of matter?
Chad does an excellent job mixing these classic stories along with some actual science content in a conversational style. I honestly enjoyed reading the book.
Here is TL;DR – this is an enjoyable book that presents the process of science through entertaining stories. Oh, and it’s way better than those dumb “The Scientific Method” posters you see hanging up in classrooms.
Disclaimer: A review copy of this book was provided by Basic Books.
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