H2O by Philip Ball

The 'biography' of water. 

It's not just the school science that Ball tells us such as the hydrological cycle. Ball tells us how water arrived on earth (from the meteorites and comets that coalesced into the earth) and assesses the chances of liquid water on Venus, Mars and the moons of Jupiter. One fascinating chapter considers the various theories of the origin of life and shows how the chemistry of water acts as evidence against some of these theories. He looks at the history of science with regard to water, considering pre-Socratic philosophers up to alchemists and beyond. Two chapters are devoted to the rather odd chemistry of water and the hydrogen bonds that can produce strange results, as well as different types of water. Then he goes back to the role that water plays in living processes One amusing chapter considers some scientific dead ends in which water played a part, including one which initially seemed to validate homeopathy. A final epilogue considers water as a resource and considers the possibility of water wars.

It is an exhaustive, and at times exhausting, study. Ball explains ideas extremely clearly, on the whole, without dodging the difficult stuff. I found his predilection for quoting statistics a little wearisome but my main criticism is that I read it too late. It was only published in 2015 yet it is already out of date in several places. Not Ball's fault!

Ball spends a lot of time and energy trying to impress with very big (and sometimes very small) number but there are also many fascinating moments:

• "The Polynesian cosmogeny reproduces that of the Old Testament in extraordinary detail: the supreme being Io says ‘Let the waters be separated, let the heavens be formed, let the earth be!’" (Ch 1)
• "Water on Earth ... nurtured and sustained civilization – yet the fresh waterways that fed the cultures of ancient China and Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indian continent make up barely a tenth of a thousandth of all the liquid water on the planet. Just about all of the rest is salty, and lethal" (Ch 2)
• "at a mythological level, the natural waters of the Earth offer humankind a journey into death. The Styx is the conduit to Hades, the Ganges even today a repository of the deceased. The Nile and the Tigris were not only holy in Near Eastern belief but the dwelling place of the dead, ruled by demigods with the power of resurrection. From the association of streams and rivers with death and rebirth comes the Christian practice of baptism." (Ch 2)
• "The Ship of the Dead is a potent and recurring symbol: the Flying Dutchman, the Marie Celeste." (Ch 2)
• "In deserts, evaporation is about equal to precipitation and there is essentially no run-off." (Ch 2)
• "Once mariners considered that there were seven seas to sail: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans, the Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas and the Gulf of Mexico." (Ch 2)
• "ninety-five per cent of all land points have antipodes – equivalent points in the other hemisphere – in the sea." (Ch 2)
• "Because of the fifty-minute difference between a terrestrial day and the lunar rotation period, high tides come twenty-five minutes later on each successive half day." (Ch 2)
• "in Persian, in which the first word of the dictionary is ab, meaning ‘water’. Herein lies the root of the word ‘abode’, from the Persian abad" (Ch 2)
• "There is now a rumour, however, that at least some parts of London’s water table are rising again because the big breweries, which consumed much of the water in the city’s aquifers, have moved out of town (or out of business). Londoners are warned of an impending threat of flood rising from the deep, because the capital no longer makes its own beer." (Ch 2)
• "around six million years ago ... a period of particularly dry climate lowered the sea level and cut off the connection to the Atlantic through the shallow Straits of Gibraltar, leaving the Mediterranean a land-locked sea. Without replenishment from the global oceans, the Mediterranean then slowly dried out." (Ch 2)
• "The floor of this desert reached two thousand metres below global mean sea level, and the rivers feeding into it from Europe and Africa faced a huge plunge at the dried-up coast, carving great gorges into the rock." (Ch 2)
• "About five million years ago the dam at Gibraltar seems to have been breached, and the resulting waterfall, as the Atlantic fed back into the dry basin, would have made Victoria Falls look like a leaky tap. The torrent was one hundred times larger than that at Victoria, feeding about a hundred cubic kilometres of Atlantic water into the basin every day to fill up the Mediterranean again in about a century." (Ch 2)
• "Today around forty per cent of deaths from acts of nature, as well as forty per cent of the societal costs of natural disasters, are the result of floods." (Ch 2)
• "Egyptian civilization is one of the very few that has no legend of a deluge, presumably because the Nile is so vast that it was always able to act as a buffer against intense meteorological events." (Ch 2)
• "William Hobbs, who related this tale in 1907, was also moved to speculate that a tsunami might have been responsible for the parting of the Red Sea that allowed Moses and the Israelites to evade their Egyptian pursuers. Later commentators suggested that it was perhaps not the Red Sea that the Israelites crossed but the Sea of Reeds on the Mediterranean coast, and that the tsunami was produced by the eruption of Santorini volcano in the Aegean Sea in the fifteenth century BC – an outburst that may have inundated the northern coast of nearby Crete, triggering the collapse of the Minoan civilization." (Ch 2)
• "Certain types of phytoplankton produce a gas called dimethyl sulphide (DMS), apparently as a by-product of their metabolism. The distinctive odour of DMS is responsible for the invigorating smell of the coastal sea." (Ch 3)
• "A fine drizzle consists of droplets of typically 200 micrometres or so across, which reach free fall at a leisurely half a metre or so per second. Cloud droplets about a millimetre across become fully fledged raindrops, heading earthwards with a terminal velocity of about nine metres per second." (Ch 3)
• "cyclic changes in the Earth’s three orbital parameters, now called Milankovitch cycles, alter the distribution of solar radiation that the Earth receives, and their net effect triggers long-term climate change." (Ch 3)
• "when dinosaurs were still at large ... the Earth may have been so warm everywhere that no ice sheets existed." (Ch 3)
• "Medieval shrines to goddesses were nearly always close to wells, springs, lakes or seas;" (Ch 5)
• "the Lady of the Lake can be identified with Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love." (Ch 5)
• "Many of the earliest autotrophs seem to have extracted hydrogen from hydrogen sulphide; some very primitive bacteria, called purple sulphur bacteria, still do. Take away the hydrogens and what’s left is sulphur. Many of the bright yellow sulphur deposits in the world today are the waste heaps of primitive autotrophs." (Ch 8)
• "To early organisms faced with oxygen from water-splitting photosynthesis, it was as though their neighbours had started dumping toxic waste in their back yard." (Ch 8)
• "Organelles are thought to be the remnants of once fully-fledged prokaryotic individuals, with which the eukaryotes fused in a symbiotic relationship." (Ch 8)
• "The icefish Chaenocephalus aceratus has refined its oxygen consumption to such a degree that it can make do with no haemoglobin at all: it moves sluggishly enough that the oxygen dissolved in its blood plasma is sufficient to meet its needs. The blood of the icefish is therefore a translucent white." (Ch 8)
• "Many people perceive something unnerving in human body fluids. Alien abductees seem to regard them as highly prized amongst extraterrestrials, and General Ripper considered his to be the victim of a Communist plot in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove." (Ch 8)
• "Centuries of over-irrigation in the Middle East and in the Indus valley of Pakistan have led to acute problems of salinization, in the latter case giving the region one of the lowest crop productivities in the world." (Epilogue)
• "Dumping of ‘dung and filth’ into England’s rivers was outlawed in the fourteenth century," (Epilogue)
• "human excreta can be composted to dark, crumbly fertilizer within a year. There seems to be no strong reason other than aesthetics why compost toilets are not standard items in many modern houses." (Epilogue)

An important study, designed for the more intelligent general reader. April 2021

• Other brilliant books by Philip Ball that I have read include:
  • Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another 
  • H2O: A Biography of Water
  • The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
  • The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
  • Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different 
  • How Life Works

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Seven brief lessons on Physics" by Carlo Ravelli

This was the last book read by my dad before he died. He was an electronics engineer all his life. He worked on radar during World War II. Later he worked on the very first computers, meeting Alan Turing and Norbert Weiner. After that he researched radiocarbon dating, discovering that a fragment of wood found on Mount Ararat wasn't old enough to come from the Ark, and finally he worked as part of the team that created radio-controlled clocks.

In fewer than 80 pages, Rovelli talks about General Relativity, Quantum Physics, Cosmology, Particle Physics, Loop Quantum Physics, Thermodynamics and the nature of time, and Ourselves; I have taught Physics for 33 years and I have been a human for even longer and yet I still, repeatedly, learned fascinating things from this brilliant book. Plus it is superbly written and it tells so eloquently of the joys and challenges of being a scientist.

Just some of the brilliant insights from this wonderful little book.

• "the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself." (p 6) This is a triumph of Descartes over Newton: a vortex space rather than one filled with action-at-a-distance. Space undulates. :
• light curves round heavy objects
• time goes more quickly at altitude
• black holes exist
• "space cannot stand still; it must be expanding" (p 8)
• "space moves like the surface of the sea" (p 9)
• "Why does the periodic table have this particular structure, with these periods, and with the elements having these particular properties? The answer is that each element corresponds to one solution of the main equation of quantum mechanics." (p 15)
• "an electron is a series of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any particular place. It is not in a 'place' at all." (p 15)
• Loop Quantum Gravity proposes that space is quantised in very small linked rings: "Space is created by the linking of these individual quanta of gravity" (p 41) 
• "The passage of time ... is born in the world itself in the relationship between the quantum events that comprise the world and are themselves the source of time." (p 42). 
• "Our universe may have been born from a bounce in a prior phase, passing through an intermediate stage in which there was neither space nor time." (p 47)
• "How the gravitational field behaves when it heats up is still an unsolved problem. ... when heat is diffused to the gravitational field, time and space themselves must vibrate ... what is a vibrating time?" (p 56)
• "There is a detectable difference between the past and the future only when there is flow of heat. Heat is linked to probability; and probability in turn is linked to the fact that our interactions with the rest of the world do not register the fine details of reality ... due to the limitations of our consciousness we only perceive a blurred vision of the world, and live in time." (p 60)
• "The heat of black holes is a quantum effect upon an object, the black hole, which is gravitational in nature. ... The heat of black holes is like a Rosetta Stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages - Quantum, Gravitational and Thermodynamic - still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time." (p 62)
• "We are like an only child who on growing up realizes that the world does not revolve around them alone, as they thought when little. They must learn to be one among others. Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are." (p 65)
• "All things are continually interacting with each other, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about each other." (p 68)
• "It would be absurd to ask whether 'I' can do something different from what the whole complex of my neurons has decided: the two things ... are the same." (p 71)
• "Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past which haunts us and serenity." (p 74)
• "We are nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions." (p 74)
• 
  
• "And to the very last: doubt." (p 19)

What a way for my dad to end his reading career.

Magnificent. July 2017, 79 pages

"Big Bang" by Simon Singh

This is a delightful and fascinating history of cosmology up to and slightly after the near-universal (pun not intended) acceptance of the Big Bang theory of the creation of the Universe. Having taught Physics for 33 years I knew most of the Science and understood the arguments but there were still aspects I had not fully appreciated. These were carefully explained and I am confident that this book would be accessible to the general reader. Singh also explained the philosophical issues and weighed up the various arguments carefully so that their merits and demerits could be easily compared. But the icing on the cake was his affectionate portrayal of the very human astronomers and cosmologists who contributed to (or fought against) our present understanding.

There were so many characters. Here are just a few:

• Fritz Zwicky, for example, was famously rude. His favourite insult was to call you a 'spherical bastard' because,just like a sphere, he thought you were a bastard whichever way he looked at you. 
• Lord Rosse owned an estate in Ireland and gave up astronomy to look after his tenants during the Irish Potato Famine; he built a huge telescope on his lands but was rather foiled by the fact that there are two sorts of weather in Ireland: raining and about to rain. 
• Walter Baade, a German emigre in USA during the Second World War experienced similar frustrations when the authorities decided that, as an enemy alien, he should be confined to his house between sunset and sunrise despite working on the Mount Wilson optical telescope. 
• George Gamow, a practical joker, who had to defect from the USSR; his first attempt involved trying to canoe across the Black Sea which he had to give up after two days. 
• Fred Hoyle, the proponent of the Steady State Theory, who shot himself in the foot not once but twice: first when he developed the theory for nucleosynthesis which removed a significant problem for the Big Bang theory and secondly during a radio broadcast when he scornfully referred to what was then called the dynamic evolving model as a Big Bang, thus creating a catchy name to popularise the idea.

The book ends with a short epilogue in which the continuing issues facing cosmology are outlined. Why is the expansion of the Universe apparently accelerating? What is the mysterious dark energy that might explain this? Why are the six numbers that govern the Universe so perfectly aligned that humans can exist? Does this mean that we are just one bubble in a multiverse? And most of all, of course: What happened before the Big Bang?

A thought-porvoking book that takes you for a ride through the mysteries of the Universe and yet explains them so well that you understand some reallt difficult science.

April 2015; 493 pages

Other books by this author:

• Fermat's Last Theorem: I have not yet read this
• The Code Book: I very much enjoyed this history of cryptography
• The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets: a fun book about Maths which I have reviewed in this blog