Martin Rudwick, contributor
WHEN a book's subtitle mentions a geologist and Noah's flood, alarm bells ring. Will this be creation science, peddling flood geology and ideas of a "young Earth"? Not in the case of The Rocks Don't Lie. As head of the geomorphology group at the University of Washington, Seattle, David Montgomery is well placed to provide the scientific evidence underlying ancient tales of floods.
This book may not change the minds of any creationists, but with luck it may cause some of the undecided - of whom, in the US, there are alarmingly many - to pause before supporting claims that creationist ideas deserve "equal time" in the public sphere.
He wraps together the history of Earth with the story of those who have unravelled it, and shows how and why creationists are out on a limb, and a precarious one at that. Yet Montgomery doesn't fall into the trap of simply rubbishing their ideas. In refusing to pitch science against religion, he relates how scientific investigation and biblical interpretation have generally matured in tandem.
He provides, for example, a lively account of climbing out of the Grand Canyon, passing through the material records of an Earth history of unimaginable duration. He shows why the creationist explanation of the canyon, in which a sudden flood event deposited thousands of feet of varied rocks and then scoured out the canyon through them, is simply untenable - unless the physical world worked utterly differently a few millennia ago.
From his own fieldwork in Tibet, he recounts clear evidence of a geologically recent local catastrophe that is matched by a local folktale about such an event.
He then argues that the most notorious flood story of all may likewise be a faint trace of a real historical catastrophe somewhere in the Near East. Geologists who have come to that conclusion before have been attacked both by creationists, for demoting the biblical flood to a merely regional event, and also by scientists, for allowing even a little historical reality into the Genesis narrative.Wouldn't it be better, Montgomery argues, if we took pointers from these ancient tales, which may be rooted in real events? We can only hope that his book will be received with the same open-mindedness with which it was written.
Martin Rudwick is a historian of geology and the author of Worlds Before Adam (Chicago, 2008)
Book information
The Rocks Don't Lie: A geologist investigates Noah's flood by David R. Montgomery
Published by W. W. Norton
?17.99/$26.95
Coping with the noisy neighbours
Andy Coghlan, reporter
MOST days it started around 9 or 10 am, and carried on until early evening. Usually it was Chopin, played ad nauseam by the piano student next door. The playing wasn't bad, just incessant - for nearly two years.
After an experience like that, it didn't surprise me to learn in Mike Goldsmith's spectacularly good book that the word noise is derived from "nausea". But Discord is far from a morose dirge about one of today's major blights. It is full of rich anecdotes, scrupulously researched historical narrative and lucid descriptions of the sometimes bewildering science of sound.
Goldsmith shows that noise pollution is no modern problem. The Greek colony of Sybaris, founded in BC 720, banished potters, tinsmiths and other noisy tradespeople to outside the city walls. In London, the first official noise complaint was in 1378, against an armour-maker.
London rapidly became the world's noisiest city, followed inevitably by New York, but the actual science of sound took longer to mature. Goldsmith hilariously describes how Isaac Newton used "fiddle-factors" to "calculate" the speed of sound. With the industrial revolution came a new thrum to modern life, which only grew with the rise of trains, planes and automobiles. Yet it wasn't until the 1930s that the decibel was born, providing a way to measure sound levels and impose some control over them.
Goldsmith points out that managing noise is not just about being pernickety. Research shows that constant exposure to noise can increase stress and lead to heart attacks. Our bodies react to noise even when we're asleep.
Great strides have been made to control big sources of background noise, particularly in Europe, but neighbour nuisance remains largely untackled. Goldsmith hopes that inconsiderate noise will become as socially unacceptable as other antisocial habits, such as smoking in public. "Unwanted noise is bad; inescapable noise is terrible," he writes.
I will keep that in mind because, ironically, I'm getting my own piano tuned today. I have been revisiting some Chopin pieces that I grew to loathe - only when the neighbours are out, of course.
Book information
Discord: The story of noise by Mike Goldsmith
Published by Oxford University Press
?16.99/$29.95
Are you really making your own decisions?
Jacob Aron, reporter
HOW did you decide to read this review? If you were holding the magazine in your hands, the decision was probably yours alone, but online, what you clicked on may have been influenced by curating bots run by the likes of Google and Facebook. In Automate This, journalist Christopher Steiner details how we have ceded decisions about stock trading, music-making, medical diagnoses and more to computer algorithms - and how they often do a better job than human professionals.
Steiner recounts how the algorithmic takeover began as long ago as the 1970s, when a computer programmer, Thomas Peterffy, wrote software to help him spot money-making trades on the New York Stock Exchange. Peterffy made printed summaries of his algorithm's output and consulted them in the hustle and bustle of the trading floor.
After a few teething troubles, Peterffy was scoring deals that left professional traders baffled. Now he is one of the richest people in the world, and algorithms carry out 60 per cent of all stock trades in the US. It is a story repeated in many other walks of life, with algorithms spotting chart-topping musicians who had been overlooked by talent scouts, and AI-based computers like IBM's Watson muscling in on medicine with faster diagnoses than any human doctor.
Steiner's book is an informative, entertaining and sometimes terrifying look at this new algorithmic world. It's so good, in fact, that I wonder if he had a little help from a computer...
Book information
Automate This: How algorithms came to rule our world by Christopher Steiner
Published by: Portfolio
?16.99/$25.95
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