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Discovering Your Inner Scientist
by Chad Orzel
Even in the twenty-first century the popular image of a scientist is a reclusive genius in a lab coat, mixing formulas or working out equations inaccessible to all but the initiated few. The idea that scientists are somehow smarter than the rest of us is a common, yet dangerous, misconception, getting us off the hook for not knowing - or caring - how the world works. How did science become so divorced from our everyday experience? Is scientific understanding so far out of reach for the non-scientists among us?
As science popularizer Chad Orzel argues in Eureka, even the people who are most forthright about hating science are doing science, often without even knowing it. Orzel shows that science isn't something alien and inscrutable beyond the capabilities of ordinary people, it's central to the human experience. Every human can think like a scientist, and regularly does so in the course of everyday activities. The disconnect between this reality and most people's perception is mostly due to the common misconception that science is a body of (boring, abstract, often mathematical) facts. In truth, science is best thought of as a process: Looking at the world, Thinking about what makes it work, Testing your mental model by comparing it to reality, and Telling others about your results. The facts that we too often think of as the whole of science are merely the product of this scientific process. Eureka shows that this process is one we all regularly use, and something that everybody can do.
By revealing the connection between the everyday activities that people do - solving crossword puzzles, playing sports, or even watching mystery shows on television - and the processes used to make great scientific discoveries, Orzel shows that if we recognize the process of doing science as something familiar, we will be better able to appreciate scientific discoveries, and use scientific facts and thinking to help address the problems that affect us all.
"Starred Review. This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." - Publishers Weekly
"Recommended for undergraduate students, science educators, and readers with an amateur interest in science or science history." - Library Journal
"There will be false leads, dead ends and red herrings, but the beauty is in the chase and in the pleasing fact that the practice of science is open to all races, genders and persuasions. Orzel's point is well-taken: Like breathing, we are engaging in the scientific process much of the time, even if we don't know it." - Kirkus
This information about Eureka was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Chad Orzel is a professor, blogger, and author of popular-audience books about physics. He has a BA in Physics from Williams College and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he did his thesis research in the laboratory of William D. Phillips (1997 Nobel laureate in Physics) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, studying collisions between laser-cooled xenon atoms less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. He then spent two years as a post-doc at Yale University in the group of Mark Kasevich, studying quantum effects in a Bose-Einstein Condensate. In 2001 he joined the faculty of Union College in Schenectady, NY, where he is now an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Since 2002 he has run the physics weblog Uncertain Principles (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/ ), now part of the ScienceBlogs network. He lives in Niskayuna, NY with his wife, Kate Nepveu, their two children, and Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna.
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