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Title: Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos by K. C. Cole ISBN: 0-15-100816-7 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Science made readable, relevant and enjoyable
Comment: In this collection of mostly columns that she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, science writer K.C. Cole relies on her wide reading in science, and on her interviews and friendships with scientists as a basis for appreciations, observations, interpretations, reports, and just plain musings on science and how science is transforming the planet. Employing a style that ranges from gossip column cute to poetic, Cole (who teaches at my alma mater UCLA) works hard to make science as relevant to the general public as the personalities in, say, People magazine, and just as accessible.

The task in writing about science is making it intelligible without dumbing it down or making simplistic statements that are not accurate. Cole recognizes this problem; indeed in reading these small essays (almost all are under a thousand words) I can feel her struggling mightily to get it just right: to make her expression as accurate as possible and as readable. She muses on these problems in the final essay, entitled, "Oops!" in which she confesses to some slips including confabulating Caltech physicist Robert Millikan with junk bond king Michael Milken. Ah, yes, I know well that sort of error, having stumbled thereabouts myself a time or two!

But it is not her ability to popularize science (by the way, she is now doing pieces for National Public Radio) that impresses me about Cole. It's her ability to understand science and its place in society that sets her apart from other writers. She is especially good are relating science to the social, political and personal worlds in which we live. Indeed, Part IV of this book is entitled "Political" Science with just the "Political" in quotes emphasizing that Cole is talking about both the internal political affairs of science and how the political world in general affects science and how science affects the political world. Some of the best essays in the book are from this section.

In "Dreamers," beginning on page 269, for example, Cole laments the loss of funding for some science projects (e.g., particle physics, the mission to Europa) as money is being redirected toward the wars on terror, drugs, and cancer--"missiles and medicine." She understands the pragmatic view of politicians who want tangible results from grants and under writings, but makes the powerful point that it is the "dreamers in the hinterlands who often come up with the most practical inventions." She directs our attention to PET scans, magnetic imaging, and laser surgery, all products of dreamers. But most saliently she recalls the physicists behind the development of the atom bomb, "dreamers" like Einstein and Oppenheimer. She notes that Germany might have won that war had Hitler been able to keep most of the German and Austrian scientists from fleeing to the United States. It is one of the great and most delicious ironies of history that so-called "Jewish" science helped to defeat the Nazis.

In "Unnatural" (p. 291) she addresses the controversy about genetically modified foods, noting first that seemingly unnatural plastic is mostly made from petroleum products, natural "plant matter that brewed for millions of years in the bowels of the earth"; and second that we have been modifying foods since the pre-history. ("You could even say that falling in love is nature's way of genetically modifying the species.") In conclusion she makes one of my favorite arguments: "We evolve...There's nothing special about this particular point in the history of any species--corn, humans or dogs. We're all on our way from someplace, going somewhere."

I've read this argument elsewhere and indeed have presented it myself, but nowhere have I read it put so succinctly well. We are NOT an unchanging construction (as from a creator God); instead we are a perpetually evolving entity, immersed in, and part of, an ever changing cosmos.

Some things learned: why Brazil nuts rise to the top in cans of mixed nuts (p. 117); there is a human wave of wake-up calls constantly going around the earth as we travel in our mind's eye with the sunlight though the time zones (p. 204); a comet or meteorite impact on the scale of the one that hit Siberia in 1908 happens about once every hundred years (p. 295); you can't get a suntan indoors because glass is opaque to ultraviolet light.

And much more.

I have read three of Cole's previous books and reviewed two of them (First You Build a Cloud: And Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life 1999 and The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything 2001) and I read every essay in this book and can say this is her best work. I found almost all of her arguments agreeable and informed, very well and gently expressed. I was fascinated at how her distinctive style--sometimes cute (sometimes too cute!) but often understated--partially obscures her nimble and trenchant intellect. Cole knows science and she knows why science matters, why it matters more than we can know, and she works hard at getting that message across to a sometimes reluctant public.

Science writers are as necessary to the modern world as electricity is to our homes. In some places in the world there is neither. We are lucky to be able to turn on the lights and to read someone as lucid and pertinent as K.C. Cole.

Rating: 5
Summary: The world of physics made clear at last
Comment: K.C. Cole has the rare ability to make the physical world both comprehensible and entertaining. I never thought I'd curl up with a good physics book but I found her brief commentaries obliterate the usual arbitrary separation between science and the humanities. In fact, it is by making physics so humanistic that she makes it clear to those of us who have difficulties understanding numerical concepts or apparently obscure ideas like space-time, quarks, and black holes. "Physics is simple," she writes, ". . . .consider the harmonics of a bottle of beer. Blow over the top, and you can make a series of different sounds, depending on how hard you blow and how much beer is left in the bottle. And lo and behold, it is by analyzing a very similar set of harmonics set up by the sloshing of gas and light in the early universe that astronomers have been able to put their ears to the cosmos, listening in on its babblings from the first moment of time. And here's what Cole, the mistress of metaphor, has to say about how Einstein's theory of relativity explains gravity as a curvature of space-time: "It's like an elephant sitting on a waterbed. Heavy objects bend space-time into "gravity wells" that pull other object in." If Einstein had put it that way in the first place, I wouldn't have had to wait this long to get it. Thanks, K. C. Cole.

Rating: 5
Summary: Enjoyable and Accurate
Comment: Back during the brief period when the Los Angeles Times pretended to care about science it ran a weekly column by K. C. Cole. The Times, unfortunately, has reverted to viewing science as something to egregiously misrepresent in its daily reporting. But Cole's columns live on, and are now available to a larger audience. A physicist by training, I am often disappointed by science books because they achieve understandability by subtly misrepresenting the essence of difficult concepts. Cole, on the other hand, has a knack for explaining difficult concepts in simple terms without sacrificing veracity. This book is both a pleasurable and accurate read on topics of current interest in science. I highly recommend it to people wanting to better understand modern science.