| THE MAGIC FURNACE: The Search for the Origins of Atoms Marcus Chown Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-19-514305-8 | ||||
| ISBN 0-19-514305-1 | 232pp. | HC | $25.00 | |
| Page 24: | "Whatever the truth, Becquerel developed the plate. And what he saw when he did so left him open-mouthed with incredulity." |
| Well, it's a nit, but I wonder how the author knows the condition of Becquerel's mouth at this moment. |
| Page 25: | "Two minerals – pitchblende and chalcite – were far more radioactive than their content of uranium and thorium implied." |
| This could be a spelling error (for calcite), but calcite is not radioactive at all. It must be the British or European name for some other mineral. |
| Page 42: | "The sun, on the other hand, was a paragon of constancy. There was absolutely no reason to believe it had beamed down on the land of the first pharaohs any less brightly than it had on Anaxagoras' Greece." |
| Since the Pharaohs came before Greece, and the subject is how long the Sun could burn, this probably S/B "more brightly". |
| Page 53: | "Assuming that helium had been produced at a constant for thousands of years..." |
| Missing word: S/B "at a constant rate". |
| Page 57: | "Half a century later, the problem came to the notice of Isaac Newton. He realised that if Galileo's crude lens telescope were ever to be improved, it would first be necessary to understand the nature of light. Newton's subsequent investigations did not, as it turned out, lead him to a better lens telescope. However, they did provide important insights into why the images formed by lenses were fringed by rainbow colors." |
| It seems to me that this ought to be "telescope lens", both places. However, it might be intended to differentiate lens telescopes (refractors) from mirror telescopes (reflectors). Or, it might be another Britishism. |
| Page 71: | "The man he turned to supply that proof was his motor-racing, surfing assistant Francis Ashton." |
| Missing word: S/B "man he turned to to supply that proof". Probably the result of accepting the correction of a spelling checker. |
| Page 73: | "Today, carbon not oxygen is used as the atomic mass standard, and it is assigned a weight of 12." |
| Extra commas needed: S/B "carbon, not oxygen, is used". |
| Page 76: | Footnote: "However, the dramatic result of the Michaelson-Morley experiment was unknown to Einstein when he began his attempts to reconcile mechanics and electromagnetism." |
| I find this remarkable — the more so since Michaelson-Morley took place in 1887 and Einstein began work in 1905. |
| Page 89: | "But although Eddington was renowned as the world's worst lecturer, a man who never finished a sentence before starting another, paradoxically he wrote with extreme clarity for both academic and popular audiences." |
| No paradox there. As means of expression, speaking and writing often seem to be allocated from some fixed supply of ability. Whoever gets much of one gets little of the other.[1] (Also, in the book there is an extra space between "But" and "although", as if a comma failed to print following "But".) |
| Page 90: | "Einstein's theory predicted that if the light from a distant star passed close to the sun on its way to earth, its trajectory should be bent about twice as far as Newton would have predicted." |
| I would be very surprised to learn that Newton made any sort of prediction about the bending of light by gravity. |
| Page 101: | "By applying his theory to the sun, [Eddington] concluded that the matter at the centre is a staggering 77 times as dense as water, and that its temperature is 40 million degrees." |
| Compare this with the values Eddington is described as finding at the top of page 100: a density 13 times water's, and 18 million degrees. Nowhere does Chown explain the discrepancy between these two sets of numbers. |
| Page 139: | "Whatever the cosmic furnace that forged all atoms, it therefore had to support a very great extreme range of temperatures and densities." |
| Not just "a very great range", but "a very great extreme range", eh? |
| Page 145: | "They found that nuclear reactions in the furnace of the big bang converted roughly 25 per cent of the mass of the universe into the helium, the second lightest element." |
| Extra word: S/B "into helium". (Also notice how Chown does not capitalize certain proper names and terms: "Earth", "Sun", "Big Bang".) |
| Page 163: | "Answering such a question required a knowledge of both the abundances of different elements and the binding energies of different nuclei. However, Hoyle had no access to such data, marooned as he was in West Sussex." |
| The following paragraph relates how, in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Hoyle "was confident that he would find a table of nuclear masses from which he might calculate the all-important nuclear binding energies." What concerns me about this passage is why tables of nuclear masses were so hard to obtain. That knowledge was old, based on the mass-spectrograph work of Ashton and his successors, and widely disseminated among scientists. Was it wartime hysteria? |
| Page 196: | "The two astronomers [Penzias and Wilson] trapped the birds and dispatched them in the company mail to a faraway Bell Labs site in New Jersey. They then climbed into the gloomy interior of the antenna with stiff brooms and swept away the droppings." |
| Penzias and Wilson did this themselves? The mind boggles! No wonder they got that Nobel Prize. |
| Page 228: | Index entry: "Einstein, Albert 8, 11, 69-80, 143" |
| Inaccurate: S/B "Einstein, Albert 8, 11-12, 75-81, 90, 143" |
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