Title: 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense – The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
Author: Michael Brooks
Genre: Nonfiction/Science
This is another one of those books that I picked up at the library because of the title. And I’ll admit, I thought “This must be the advanced course for people who have already believed six impossible things before breakfast,” and “Only 13? Really?”
Of course, any book that detailed everything that didn’t make sense would be far too long for me to read and review for this particular project. Besides that, these are fairly broad topics, like life, sex, death, free will, and the universe. I’m sure that it’s not a surprise to any of us that those things don’t make sense. But it’s how and why they don’t make sense that’s interesting. And these aren’t things that don’t make sense because you skipped half of your freshman biology class fifteen years ago, or never bothered to take a physics class. These are things that don’t make sense to people who study them for a living.
So, in that context, there’s a survey of current knowledge, assumptions, and work on several concepts in cosmology, astronomy, physics, and biology. The really cool thing about this book is that it doesn’t really matter what side of a problem your knowledge and opinion incline you to believe. What you get a really good look at is the process of science. Theories are formulated, tested, analyzed, over and over again, in an attempt to prove or disprove them. For example, there are a lot of scientists whose collective panties are in a wad over the possibility that some of the physical constants aren’t necessarily constant—one of the constants Brooks discusses in this chapter is mu, which is the ratio of proton mass to electron mass. However, mu was only declared a constant in 1953, and we actually have no idea why constants have the values that they do. Plenty of other ideas have been modified or proven wrong since 1953.
What all thirteen things that don’t make sense have in common is that science my be approaching the limits of current paradigms, and what may be necessary for further breakthroughs is a sea change in the way we look at things, on the level of a Newtonian, Copernican, or Einsteinian revolution. But the real value of this book is that it does what a lot of other popular science literature and media don’t do. It demonstrates that science is an ongoing process, constantly changing as we learn more. New information constantly comes along, and is often ignored early on. Just because a theory turns out to be wrong doesn’t mean it isn’t useful—it may eliminate a strain of research that hasn’t been productive and direct resources and intellectual energy down a more fruitful path. Sometimes negative results are a lot more interesting than positive results.
Also, we learn that just because you’re a Nobel laureate doesn’t mean you can figure out an elevator at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels (something Donald Norman could’ve told you, but that’s another book entirely).