Skip to main content

A popular science blooper that stands on the shoulders of giants

Every book I've ever read contains errors. Mine certainly do. But recently I came across a statement in a popular science book that was so outrageously incorrect that I read it three times, because I was sure I was missing something. I wasn't. Here it is, in all its glory:


Let’s be clear. This was not some self-published diatribe by an individual who thinks that Einstein was a fraud and Tesla was an alien. It was written by a scientist (admittedly from the biological sciences) with considerable experience of science communication. And it was produced by a significant mainstream publisher with all the panoply of editing and proof reading processes that occur before reaching this final copy.

If you are of an arts-oriented bent, you might be wondering what the fuss is about. It’s as if someone wrote that Botticelli painted Guernica, that Bach wrote The Rite of Spring and that Shakespeare wrote War and Peace, all rolled into one. It’s not for nothing the C. P. Snow used the Second Law of Thermodynamics as his prime example of the relative ignorance of the arts world of science in his famous Two Cultures lecture at the end of the 1950s:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
In case you are in any doubt, Newton did indeed have a second law - of motion, which in its modern form is the equivalent of saying that force is equal to mass times acceleration. It had nothing to do with thermodynamics, which, as the name, suggests began as a study of the way that heat moves from place to place, a solidly 19th/20th century science that started as a way of improving steam engines and ended up being one of the central aspects of our understanding of physics. The names that should be attached to it are the likes of Sadi Carnot and Rudolf Clausius, who respectively laid the groundwork and effectively first expressed the law, and Ludwig Boltzmann, whose statistical version made it far, far more than had first been intended.

I’m not going to name the author, book, or publisher responsible for the blooper. As I mentioned at the start, every book I’ve ever read has mistakes in it. But they are typically typos or silly memory errors. This (which is repeated later) is so fundamental that the mind truly boggles. I read it. I re-read it. I tried to find some way it could be ironic or some such clever thing.

But I couldn’t.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope