A review of Nick Lane’s “The Vital Question” is easy to write: just re-arrange a dozen of his own passages. The book itself, though, is not easy to read.
Unless… you understand at least the main principles of #physics, #chemistry and Latin. pic.twitter.com/ZIkm4GNIco
However interesting the author’s main thesis — “I will lay out a hypothesis that connects #energy and #evolution” — it won’t resonate with those of us who’ve slept through the high school hard science classes, or have erased #thermodynamics, electromagnetism and valence
from their memory after graduation, the seemingly useless prerequisites for adulthood.
The author promises to describe his point “in enough detail that I can be proved wrong, while writing as accessibly and as excitingly as I can.
I’ve tried to avoid unnecessary jargon and have included occasional reminders of the meaning of terms; but beyond that I hope you will gain familiarity with recurring terms. With the occasional double check, I hope this book will be wholly accessible to anyone who is interested.”
And therein lies the problem. A few pages later, the jovial language of grandeur and metaphor shifts to “isotopic fractionation reported in the #graphite inclusions” and hops to the discussion of “prions — perfectly normal proteins that spontaneously refold into semicrystalline
structures that act as a template for more refolded prions, where the overall entropy barely changes.”
If you can follow the meaning of the above — hey, congrats, you’ve kept your knowledge sharp and up-to-date. Read on.
Actually, this thread is getting so long, it might be easier to continue reading the book’s review on my website:
anatolyivanov.com/prose/en/AI.7.…
Awesome for those of you who skipped / slept / yawned through #chemistry classes in school. 😀
Click on each element’s box.
elements.wlonk.com/ElementsTable.…
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