- Sullivan, Robert.
Rats.
New York: Bloomsbury, [2004] 2005. ISBN 1-58234-477-9.
-
Here we have one of the rarest phenomena in publishing: a
thoroughly delightful best-seller about a totally disgusting
topic: rats. (Before legions of rat fanciers write to berate
me for bad-mouthing their pets, let me state at the outset that
this book is about wild rats, not pet and laboratory
rats which have been bred for docility for a century and a
half. The new afterword to this paperback edition relates the story
of a Brooklyn couple who caught a juvenile Bedford-Stuyvesant
street rat to fill the empty cage of their recently deceased
pet and, as it it matured, came to regard it with such fear
that they were afraid even to release it in a park lest it turn
and attack them when the cage was opened—the author suggested
they might consider the strategy of “open the cage and run
like hell” [p. 225–226]. One of the pioneers
in the use of rats in medical research in the early years
of the 20th century tried to use wild rats
and concluded “they proved too savage to maintain in
the laboratory” [p. 231].)
In these pages are more than enough gritty rat facts
to get yourself ejected from any polite company should you
introduce them into a conversation. Many misconceptions
about rats are debunked, including the oft-cited estimate
that the rat and human population is about the same,
which would lead to an estimate of about eight million rats in
New York City—in fact, the most authoritative estimate
(p. 20) puts the number at about 250,000 which is
still a lot of rats, especially once you begin
to appreciate what a single rat can do.
(But rat exaggeration gets folks' attention: here is a
politician
claiming there are fifty-six million rats in
New York!)
“Rat
stories are war stories” (p. 34), and this book
teems with them, including The Rat that Came Up the Toilet,
which is not an urban legend but a well-documented urban nightmare.
(I'd be willing to bet that the incidence of people keeping
the toilet lid closed with a brick on the top is significantly
greater among readers of this book.)
It's common for naturalists who study an animal to develop
sympathy for it and defend it against popular aversion: snakes
and spiders, for example, have many apologists. But not rats:
the author sums up by stating that he finds them “disgusting”,
and he isn't alone. The great naturalist and wildlife artist
John James Audubon, one of the rare painters ever to depict
rats, amused himself during the last years of his life in New
York City by prowling the waterfront hunting rats, having
received permission from the mayor “to shoot Rats
in the Battery” (p. 4).
If you want to really get to know an animal species, you
have to immerse yourself in its natural habitat, and
for the Brooklyn-based author, this involved no more than
a subway ride to
Edens
Alley in downtown Manhattan, just a
few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, which was
destroyed during the year he spent observing rats there.
Along with rat stories and observations, he sketches
the history of New York City from a ratty perspective, with
tales of the arrival of the brown rat (possibly on ships carrying
Hessian mercenaries to fight for the British during the
War of American Independence), the rise and fall of rat fighting as
popular entertainment in the city, the great garbage
strike of 1968 which transformed the city into something
close to heaven if you happened to be a rat, and the 1964 Harlem
rent strike in which rats were presented to politicians by the
strikers to acquaint them with the living conditions in their
tenements.
People involved with rats tend to be outliers on the scale of human
oddness, and the reader meets a variety of memorable characters,
present-day and historical: rat fight impresarios, celebrity exterminators,
Queen Victoria's rat-catcher, and many more. Among numerous fascinating
items in this rat fact packed narrative is just how recent
the arrival of the mis-named brown rat,
Rattus norvegicus, is.
(The species was named in England in 1769, having been believed to
have stowed away on ships carrying lumber from Norway. In fact, it appears
to have arrived in Britain before it reached Norway.) There were
no brown rats in Europe at all until the 18th century (the rats
which caused the Black Death were
Rattus rattus,
the black rat, which followed Crusaders returning from the Holy Land).
First arriving in America around the time of the Revolution, the brown
rat took until 1926 to spread to every state in the United States,
displacing the black rat except for some remaining in the South and
West. The Canadian province of Alberta remains essentially rat-free to
this day, thanks to a vigorous and vigilant rat control programme.
The number of rats in an area depends almost entirely upon the food
supply available to them. A single breeding pair of rats, with an
unlimited food supply and no predation or other
causes of mortality, can produce on the order of fifteen
thousand descendants in a single year. That makes it pretty clear
that a rat population will grow until all available food is being
consumed by rats (and that natural selection will favour the most
aggressive individuals in a food-constrained environment). Poison or
trapping can knock down the rat population in the case of a severe
infestation, but without limiting the availability of food, will
produce only a temporary reduction in their numbers (while driving
evolution to select for rats which are immune to the poison and/or
more wary of the bait stations and traps).
Given this fact, which is completely noncontroversial among
pest control professionals, it is startling that in New York
City, which frets over and regulates public health threats
like second-hand tobacco smoke while its denizens suffer
more than 150 rat bites a year, many to children, smoke-free restaurants
dump their offal into rat-infested alleys in
thin plastic garbage bags, which are instantly penetrated by
rats. How much could it cost to mandate, or even provide,
rat-proof steel containers for organic waste, compared to the budget
for rodent control and the damages and health hazards of
a large rat population? Rats will always be around—in 1936,
the president of the professional society for exterminators
persuaded the organisation to change the name of the occupation
from “exterminator” to “pest control
operator”, not because the word “exterminator”
was distasteful, but because he felt it over-promised what could
actually be achieved for the client (p. 98). But why not
take some simple, obvious steps to constrain the rat population?
The book contains more than twenty pages of notes in narrative
form, which contain a great deal of additional information you
don't want to miss, including the origin of giant inflatable
rats for labour rallies, and even a poem by exterminator guru
Bobby Corrigan. There is no index.
- Staley, Kent W.
The Evidence for the Top Quark.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
ISBN 0-521-82710-8.
-
A great deal of nonsense and intellectual nihilism has been committed
in the name of “science studies”. Here, however, is an
exemplary volume which shows not only how the process of
scientific investigation should be studied, but also why.
The work is based on the author's dissertation in philosophy, which
explored the process leading to the September 1994 publication of the
“Evidence for top
quark production in
pp
collisions at
√s = 1.8 TeV”
paper in Physical Review D. This paper is a
quintessential example of Big Science: more than four hundred
authors, sixty pages of intricate argumentation from data produced
by a detector weighing more than two thousand tons, and automated examination of
millions and millions of collisions between protons and antiprotons
accelerated to almost the speed of light by the
Tevatron,
all to search, over a period of months, for an elementary particle
which cannot be observed in isolation, and finally reporting
“evidence” for its existence (but not
“discovery” or “observation”) based on a total
of just twelve events “tagged” by three different
algorithms, when a total of about 5.7 events would have been expected
due to other causes (“background”) purely by chance alone.
Through extensive scrutiny of contemporary documents and interviews
with participants in the collaboration which performed the experiment,
the author provides a superb insight into how science on this scale is
done, and the process by which the various kinds of expertise
distributed throughout a large collaboration come together to arrive at
the consensus they have found something worthy of publication. He
explores the controversies about the paper both within the
collaboration and subsequent to its publication, and evaluates claims
that choices made by the experimenters may have a produced a bias in
the results, and/or that choosing experimental “cuts”
after having seen data from the detector might constitute
“tuning on the signal”: physicist-speak for choosing the
criteria for experimental success after having seen the results from
the experiment, a violation of the “predesignation”
principle usually assumed in statistical tests.
In the final two, more philosophical, chapters, the author introduces
the concept of “Error-Statistical Evidence”, and evaluates
the analysis in the “Evidence” paper in those terms,
concluding that despite all the doubt and controversy, the decision
making process was, in the end, ultimately objective. (And, of course,
subsequent experimentation has shown the information reported in the
Evidence paper to be have been essentially correct.)
Popular accounts of high energy physics sometimes gloss over the
fantastically complicated and messy observations which go into a
reported result to such an extent you might think experimenters are
just waiting around looking at a screen waiting for a little ball to
pop out with a “t” or whatever stencilled on the side.
This book reveals the subtlety of the actual data from these
experiments, and the intricate chain of reasoning from the
multitudinous electronic signals issuing from a particle detector to
the claim of having discovered a new particle. This is not, however,
remotely a work of popularisation. While attempting to make the
physics accessible to philosophers of science and the philosophy
comprehensible to physicists, each will find the portions outside
their own speciality tough going. A reader without a basic
understanding of the standard model of particle physics and the
principles of statistical hypothesis testing will probably end up
bewildered and may not make it to the end, but those who do will be
rewarded with a detailed understanding of high energy particle physics
experiments and the operation of large collaborations of researchers
which is difficult to obtain anywhere else.
- Wilczek, Frank.
Fantastic Realities.
Singapore: World Scientific, 2006.
ISBN 981-256-655-4.
-
The author won the
2004
Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of “asymptotic
freedom” in the strong interaction of quarks and gluons, which
laid the foundation of the modern theory of Quantum Chromodynamics
(QCD) and the Standard Model of particle physics. This book is an
anthology of his writing for general and non-specialist scientific
audiences over the last fifteen years, including eighteen of his
“Reference Frame” columns from
Physics Today and
his Nobel prize autobiography and lecture.
I had eagerly anticipated reading this book. Frank Wilczek and his
wife Betsy Devine are co-authors of the 1988 volume
Longing for the Harmonies,
which I consider to be one of the best works of science
popularisation ever written, and whose “theme and variation”
structure I adopted for my contemporary paper
“The New
Technological Corporation”. Wilczek is not only a
brilliant theoretician, he has a tremendous talent for explaining
the arcana of quantum mechanics and particle physics in lucid
prose accessible to the intelligent layman, and his command of
the English language transcends pedestrian science writing and
sometimes verges on the poetic, occasionally crossing the
line: this book contains six original poems!
The collection includes five book reviews, in a section
titled “Inspired, Irritated, Inspired”, the author's
reaction to the craft of reviewing books, which he describes as
“like going on a blind date to play Russian roulette”
(p. 305). After finishing this 500 page book, I must
sadly report that my own experience can be summed up as
“Inspired, Irritated, Exasperated”. There is
inspiration aplenty and genius on display here, but you're left
with the impression that this is a quickie book assembled by throwing
together all the popular writing of a Nobel laureate and rushed out
the door to exploit his newfound celebrity. This is not something you
would expect of World Scientific, but the content of the book argues
otherwise.
Frank Wilczek writes frequently for a variety of audiences on topics
central to his work: the running of the couplings in the Standard
Model, low energy supersymmetry and the unification of forces, a
possible SO(10) grand unification of fundamental particles, and
lattice QCD simulation of the mass spectrum of mesons and hadrons.
These are all fascinating topics, and Wilczek does them justice here.
The problem is that with all of these various articles collected in
one book, he does them justice again, again, and
again. Four illustrations: the lattice QCD mass spectrum, the
experimentally measured running of the strong interaction coupling,
the SO(10) particle unification chart, and the unification of forces
with and without supersymmetry, appear and are discussed three
separate times (the latter four times) in the text; this gets
tedious.
There is sufficient wonderful stuff in this book to justify reading
it, but don't feel duty-bound to slog through the nth
repetition of the same material; a diligent editor could easily cut at
least a third of the book, and probably close to half without losing
any content. The final 70 pages are excerpts from
Betsy Devine's Web
log recounting the adventures which began with that early morning
call from Sweden. The narrative is marred by the occasional snarky
political comment which, while appropriate in a faculty wife's blog,
is out of place in an anthology of the work of a Nobel laureate who
scrupulously avoids mixing science and politics, but still provides an
excellent inside view of just what it's like to win and receive a
Nobel prize.
- Scalzi, John.
The Ghost Brigades.
New York: Tor, 2006.
ISBN 0-7653-1502-5.
-
After his stunning fiction debut in
Old
Man's War (April 2005), readers hoping for the
arrival on the scene of a new writer of Golden Age stature
held their breath to see whether the author would be a one
book wonder or be able to repeat. You can start breathing
again—in this, his second novel, he hits
another one out of the ballpark.
This story is set in the conflict-ridden Colonial Union universe
of Old Man's War, some time after the events of that
book. Although in the acknowledgements he refers to this
as a sequel, you'd miss little or nothing by reading it
first, as everything introduced in the first novel is explained
as it appears here. Still, if you have the choice, it's best
to read them in order. The Colonial Special Forces, which are
a shadowy peripheral presence in Old Man's War, take
centre stage here. Special Forces are biologically engineered
and enhanced super-soldiers, bred from the DNA of volunteers who
enlisted in the regular Colonial Defense Forces but died before
they reached the age of 75 to begin their new life as warriors.
Unlike regular CDF troops, who retain their memories and personalities
after exchanging their aged frame for a youthful and super-human
body, Special Forces start out as a tabula
rasa with adult bodies and empty brains ready to be programmed
by their “BrainPal” appliance, which also gives them
telepathic powers.
The protagonist, Jared Dirac, is a very special member of the
Special Forces, as he was bred from the DNA of a traitor to
the Colonial Union, and imprinted with that person's consciousness
in an attempt to figure out his motivations and plans. Things
didn't go as expected, and Jared ends up with two people in his
skull, leading to exploration of the meaning of human identity
and how our memories (or those of others) make us who we
are, along the lines of Robert Heinlein's
I Will Fear No Evil.
The latter was not one of Heinlein's better outings,
but Scalzi takes the nugget of the idea and
runs with it here, spinning a yarn that reads like Heinlein's
better work. In the last fifty pages, the Colonial Union
universe becomes a lot more ambiguous and interesting,
and the ground is laid for a rich future history series set
there. This book has less rock-em sock-em combat and more
character development and ideas, which is just fine for this
non-member of the video game generation.
Since almost anything more I said would constitute a spoiler,
I'll leave it at that; I loved this book, and if you enjoy
the best of Heinlein, you probably will as well. (One
quibble, which I'll try to phrase to avoid being a spoiler:
for the life of me, I can't figure out how Sagan expects to open
the capture pod at the start of chapter 14 (p. 281),
when on p. 240 she couldn't open it, and since then nothing
has happened to change the situation.) For more background on the book
and the author's plans for this universe, check out the
Instapundit
podcast interview with the author.