Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 15, 1995 TAG: 9506150013
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Naturally we called our lawyers at Swindle, Berns, Koffslott, Dithering, Wanker and Grones, and asked them to sue these people for billions of dollars, if not more, since we clearly are the people who own the concept of (Something) Things Are.
(Some readers of this column, in crazy little towns where it is run under odd titles like ``Ask Dr. Geewillikers,'' may not be aware that its official name has always been "Why Things Are.")
But we've decided instead to just review the book, peevishly if necessary.
The shocking news is that ``How Things Are: A Science Tool-Kit for the Mind'' is quite good, nicely tilting toward the cosmic rather than toward the trivial. This isn't a bunch of fun factoids with useful diagrams showing sprockets and gears. Edited by John Brockman and Katinka Matson, it is a collection of essays by eminent scientists who are more concerned with how people think than what they know.
Although it's not a Q-and-A book, it has a lot of implicit ``Why'' questions:
Why are there so many different elements on Earth, like carbon, oxygen, gold, lead and so on? Martin Rees, an astrophysicist, gives the lovely answer: They were formed in the heat and pressure at the core of stars that exploded many billions of years ago. The atoms drifted aimlessly in interstellar space. Eventually gravity brought them together as the Earth formed from a vast cloud of dust. Some of the atoms became us.
``Every carbon atom - those in every cell of your blood, or in the ink on this page - has a pedigree as old as the galaxy,'' Rees writes.
(No wonder we feel so worn-out half the time.)
Why do we die? Because we are programmed to, writes biologist Lynn Margulis. Programmed death is the first sexually transmitted disease, she writes. Countless forms of microbial life don't have sex and don't ever age. A healthy elephant drops dead at the end of a century. In beautiful weather at the end of summer a cornstalk withers and dies. The advantages of sexual reproduction - the mixing of genes - come with the penalty that death is inevitable.
That's the difference between us and the stuff that grows inside yogurt.
Why can't you go faster than the speed of light? You already know this one. Because as you near the speed of light, your ``mass'' (sort of like your weight) approaches infinity. But computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis adds an interesting footnote about throwing a baseball. The harder you throw it, the heavier it is, at least theoretically.
``When I throw a baseball, I put energy into the baseball by pushing with my arm. According to Einstein's equation (E equals MC squared), the baseball actually gets heavier when I throw it. ... I calculate that if I could throw a baseball one hundred miles an hour (which I can't, but a good pitcher can), then the baseball actually gets heavier by 0.00000000002 grams.''
Why do people have different skin color? Biologist Steve Jones says that lighter skin may be an adaptation designed to help the body synthesize Vitamin D in places where there's not much sunlight. He writes that there are many explanations for the dark skin of Africans; one possibility is that the pigments shield vitamins within the blood from the harmful effects of solar radiation.
``The rays destroy vitamins - so much so that a keen blond sunbather is in danger of vitamin deficiency. Even worse, the penetrating sunlight damages antibodies, the defensive proteins made by the immune system,'' he writes.
Some essays are unsatisfying, such as the noble attempt by physicist Paul Davies to explain why the universe came into existence. He admits that his answer - that quantum physics permits things to just happen spontaneously - leaves people feeling cheated. ``They want to ask WHY these weird things happened, WHY there is a universe, and why THIS universe. Perhaps science cannot answer such questions. Science is good at telling us how, but not so good on the why.''
(Our own answer to why the universe came into existence is, ``Because it wasn't there.'')
Some essays are tendentious, as when biologist Richard Dawkins rails against religious belief, pointing out that dogma is based on tradition rather than hard ``evidence'' (Stop the presses!).
All told, we liked ``How Things Are.'' But ``How'' is still not as good a question as ``Why?'' How is shallow. Why is deep. How is factual. Why is mysterious. The only How question we'll ever really like is ``How Come?''
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB