Suggested Summer Reading for SCI 1300 Students

Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest.

“Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was the earliest and most ardent advocate of the then heretical view Charles Darwin expounded in The Origin of Species. "My good & kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel," Darwin called him. In fact, it was Huxley, not Darwin, who enraptured and outraged audiences in the 1860s with talk of our ape ancestors and cavemen.

Adrian Desmond is a renowned historian not only of 19th-century British science but also of 19th-century Britain altogether. We learn about the social structure of England after the Napoleonic wars in vivid detail, and within this context we learn why T.H. Huxley came to endorse the Darwinian gospel with almost messianic zeal.”

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.

“The Origin of Species is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable.

To a certain extent it suffers from the Hamlet problem--it's full of clichés! Or what are now clichés, but which Darwin was the first to pen. Natural selection, variation, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest: it's all in here.

Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T.H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence--on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal--that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement.”

Eli Maor, June 8, 2004 – Venus in Transit.

Venus will orbit across the face of the sun on 8 June 2004. This transit across the solar plexus has not been seen since 1884, ancient history in astronomical terms. Professor Eli Maor, mathematician and amateur astronomer, looks back at the history of Venus' solar transits. Very few transits have been recorded by Western astronomers; the first was in 1639 by an obscure astronomer named Jeremy Horrocks. Many astronomers have become obsessed by the transit, sometimes even falsifying information when weather prohibited them from clearly observing the transits. Data regarding the transit of Venus were considered to be extremely important and thus the subject of international intrigue, treaties, and cooperation (even during times of war). Early astronomers were sent all over the world to record the transits, and such voyages contributed to the discoveries of Australia, the Cook Islands, and Antarctica. Maor brings science history vividly alive in a manner reminiscent of Eco, with tales of eccentric astronomers, political corruption, and conspiracy. A delight to anyone interested in astronomy or the history of science.

Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson.

The 14 lighthouses dotting the Scottish coast were all built by the same family that produced Robert Louis Stevenson, Scotland's most famous novelist. Surprised? Bella Bathurst throws a powerful, revolving light into the darkness of this historical tradition. Robert Louis was a sickly fellow, and--unlike the rest of his strong-willed, determined family--certainly not up to the astonishing rigors of lighthouse building, which is vividly described here. Constructing these towering structures in the most inhospitable places imaginable (such as the aptly named Cape Wrath), using only 19th-century technology, is an achievement that beggars belief. One thinks of the pyramid building of ancient Egypt. At the Skerryvore lighthouse, the ground rocks were prepared by hand (even though the "gneiss could blunt a pick in three blows") in waves and winds "strong enough to lift a man bodily off the rock" and that "it took 120 hours to dress a single stone for the outside of the tower, and 320 hours to dress one of the central stones. In total 5000 tons of stone were quarried and shipped"--and all by hand. It is mind-boggling stuff: you'll look at lighthouses with a new respect.

Robert P. Moses and Charles Cobb Jr., Radical Equations.

The ongoing struggle for citizenship and equality for minority people is now linked to an issue of math and science literacy," argue Moses, an educator and civil rights activist, and Cobb, a cofounder of the National Association of Black Journalists. Moses's Algebra Project, which he initiated in McComb County, Miss., in 1982, is not a traditional program of school reform. It aims to nurture collaboration between parents, teachers and students in order to teach middle-school kids algebra--a course that Moses believes is a crucial stepping-stone to college level math and, thus, lifelong economic opportunity. Drawing its inspiration from the civil rights movement's organizing tactics, the first part of this book is devoted to detailing how black Americans undid the white choke hold on Southern politics. In part two, Moses shows how the same grassroots organizing can be applied to make change in the classroom. He also explains why the project's success rate is so much higher than that of traditional math programs. Peppered with anecdotes and quotations from participants, this dense book is surprisingly captivating.

Amir D. Aczel, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity.

The search for infinity, that sublime and barely comprehensible mystery, has exercised both mathematicians and theologians over many generations. Jewish mystics, in particular, labored with elaborate numerological schema to imagine the pure nothingness of infinity, while scientists such as Galileo, the great astronomer, and Georg Cantor, the inventor of modern set theory, brought their training to bear on the unimaginable infinitude of numbers and of space, seeking the key to the universe.