Graeme Donald

In my review of The Accidental Scientist, I raved about how much I enjoyed the book, but that I had reservations about the way the author's style, no matter how entertaining it was. Turns out those reservations are well founded. In When the Earth was Flat, his penchant for pedantry and generalisations are so broad as to be misleading.

The book is broken up into chapters that each cover a "scientific" theory believed to be fact at some point in history. Flat Earth, Hollow Earth, Phrenology, Hysteria, etc. Each includes a basic description of the belief and the effect it had on humanity both at the time, and sometimes, up to the present day.

Most of these are, I believe, pretty well researched, and they are well written; I learned a lot, and while I won't take any of it as gospel truth without some additional fact-checking, I have a level of confidence that the book is generally sound. I'm agog at the implications of certain medical "advancements" of the 1920's and their possible links to HIV.

But where he loses ground is in his breakout boxes that list "Popular Scientific Ideas Debunked". These are just bullet point statements refuting what are widely believed to be scientific facts. Most of them are gimmes; anyone who has read any similar book would recognise them as myths rather than facts. But a number of them are - while factually correct if your pedantic - irresponsibly phrased. For example:

Heat does not rise but disperses itself equally and evenly throughout its environment.

Yes, but no. Or not immediately. A gas that is heated up will have less mass and more volume, and therefore will rise up through a colder gas until the heat is dispersed equally and evenly throughout. That's how weather works. Anyone who has ever seen a thunderstorm form, especially a microcell, has seen the hotter air rising up through the atmosphere (really, the colder air is sinking, but anyway...). This is nature's way of re-establishing equilibrium, or as close as it can get before the sun comes back out.

The same applies to water (until water hits the freezing point); cold water is denser than warm water, so the colder water sinks to the bottom and the warmer water rises to the top, until the temperature is equal throughout. We're lucky that that equilibrium is never achieved in our oceans, else life on Earth would become rather untenable.

So while his statement is factual, it's oversimplified to the point of being wrong, and since he does not trouble himself, or the reader, to explain beyond these casual, throw-way refutations, I find them incredibly irresponsible. This is why there are so many ignorant people who cannot see that they are ignorant: they read things like this and think themselves informed... and then run for political office. Simplification, like everything else in life, should only be practiced in moderation.

To sum up, it's not a bad read; I believe 90% of the information can be relied upon and for the reader who is new to science or just enjoys fun facts, this is entertainingly written. But, as in any non-fiction book, the reader should be cautious of single sentence statements of facts. It's rarely that simple.… (mere)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. With reservations. I learned three things I didn't know in the first paragraph of the introduction, so needless to say I was off to a ripping good start.

(Showing the gaping holes in my knowledge of history I didn't know that 1. Serendip used to be the name of Sri Lanka, 2. that the UK didn't officially have a "Prime Minister" until 1937 - before that the title was First Lord of the Treasury - and 3. that the word 'serendipity' was invented by Horace Walpole.)

I continued to learn a lot, as Donald skipped across a variety of scientific and engineering advancements that were found accidentally rather than searched for. Some I'd heard before: the invention of the Post-it note, lobotomies, and LSD; some were completely new: Starlight (a material that can withstand temps over 3,000C but whose formulation died with its creator), Pykrete (would this work on the ice caps?), and cellulose. The section on cellulose was my favorite - I laughed out loud at the end of it. And a lot of sections covered topics I was familiar with, but learned a lot more about. I had NO idea Hedy Lamar slept with both Hitler and Mussolini, which has no bearing on the topic at hand but still...I did not know that. And IBM should be eternally ashamed of their early history. After reading that section I'm damn happy Apple stole their mouse technology back in the 70's.

The writing was engaging too, but here's where my reservations start to come into play, because what makes the writing so fun to read also makes the integrity of the information questionable. Donald does not hold back. He's witty, he's dry in the best possible way, and he's not at all un-biased. It's refreshing, but it's also un-nerving when it's in a work chronicling scientific advancements. A glaring example of this candidness being a problem is when he bluntly calls Coco Chanel a nazi agent. As I've mentioned, I have huge holes in my historical knowledge, but from what I've read there's no conclusive evidence one way or the other as to Chanel's definitive guilt. Or, at least, there was evidence that pointed in both directions. If that's still the case, it's irresponsible to condemn her as he does. There's a short bibliography in the back, but no notes, so I can't easily track down his source for this statement.

There are two other errors made in the text that should have been caught by anybody with general scientific knowledge. In the section on Darwin (in which he is weirdly harsh and determined to make Darwin sound useless and lazy), he refers to the Galapagos 'Turtles'. They're tortoises. There's a distinct biological difference. And in the section on scurvy he refers to "95% proof" rum. Either it's 95 proof, which is 47.5% alcohol by volume, or it's 95% alcohol (by vol) – in which case everybody on board ship would be dead after their first day's rum rations – but saying 95% proof is like saying I'm 5ft173cm tall.

For all my reservations, I still really enjoyed the read and I tortured MT with a constant stream of "listen to this!". It turns out that I, by pure coincidence, have another of his books on my TBR that's been there for years. Now that I know I can look forward to entertaining writing, I'll be picking it up sooner rather than later. But I will be reading it with a certain level of caution.… (mere)

This is a rather short, but interesting, book that takes a look at the history behind various scientific discoveries and inventions. All of the topics were chosen because chance or luck were involved in their discovery/invention. Each chapter is a separate unit that covers a particular topic, such as botox, explosive cellulose, synthetic dyes, penicillin, post-it notes, lobotomies, the cellphone, LSD etc. This book isn't in-depth science or history but is entertaining and informative without being boring. The writing style is particularly conversational and witty.… (mere)