Michael D. LemonickReseñas

Lonni Sue Johnson was a person of huge abilities. She was a gifted artist who, among other things, created many ‘New Yorker’ covers. She was a skilled and passionate violist. She got her private pilot’s license and had her own plane and airfield. She wrote a newspaper column. She, with a partner, started an organic dairy. When she was interested in something, she flung herself headlong into it and mastered it. She never met a challenge she couldn’t best.

Then she got sick. She ran a high fever with encephalitis. For a while it looked like she wouldn’t live, or, if she did, that she would have severe brain damage, and possibly never wake up. The fever burned out the temporal lobes of her brain- the hippocampus- which is where our memories are made and stored. While she remembered her family, she remembered little else of her past. And she couldn’t lay down new memories- everything that happened to her was forgotten in ten or fifteen minutes. Anyone other than her sister and mother were greeted with “Hello. My name is Lonni Sue; what’s yours?” even if the person has just returned to the room after an absence of mere minutes.

Her abilities, on the other hand, remain intact, although they took time and work to regain. She can play the viola, but her music is deemed emotionless. She can draw and paint, and her passion right now is creating word search puzzles that are embellished with drawings. But… the four page puzzles are never finished. Not a single one. Something makes her give them up before that final page is created.

She has been endlessly tested by neurologists, and has contributed to the knowledge base about the working brain. She charms everyone she meets; scientists and techs love her as a subject and a person.

The book is a combination of personal history and neurology, including information on another famous case of hippocampus destruction, H.M., although in his case, the hippocampus was removed surgically in hopes of stopping uncontrolled seizures. While the book is interesting, it’s not in the same league as other neurology/neuropsychology books like those written by the late Oliver Sacks or V. Ramachandran. There are a large number of pages devoted to Johnson’s family (who dedicated their lives to keeping Lonni Sue as normalized as possible), and to her past that, while they make us closer to her, don’t really advance the story of her brain. It’s an okay book, but not a really gripping one.

A well done bio of the astronomers.

A workmanlike biography of a workmanlike figure. This biography focuses on William Herschel and his sister Caroline. Their major accomplishment was the discovery of Uranus, the first new planet to be discovered since around the time of the Babylonians. Although I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Herschel was neither the first to see it and that even after months of detailed observations he thought it was a small, near-by comet -- and only after others decided it was a planet did he go along. In addition to being a keen observer, Herschel was also a top-notch instrument maker and a theoretician.

It's not entirely obvious that it is the fault of the biographer (Michael Lemonick), but somehow the book is not as interesting as one might have hoped. It spends too much time on Herschel's early life as a court musician, which is not really informative about his future scientific pursuits nor is it a topic that is intrinsically interesting enough to justify spending much time reading. Lemonick is good on the science and context, but somehow that too ends up not being overly exciting or revealing.

But none of these are obvious faults or flaws, just not the highest priority book I would recommend reading.

Books written by science journalists are always suspect, but Lemonick does a good job of parsing the science while still keeping the language of the layman. He discusses the history of the Big Bang theory, and the process of collecting evidence to support or disprove Big Bang. The book goes into great detail about the process of acquiring and launching the satellite, and as such is probably more interesting to engineers and technophiles than to those who are interested in the actual science of the Big Bang. There is a decent discussion of what was discovered, but it is condensed into small bits that are less than fully satisfying. If you're interested in the ins and outs of the building of the satellites, or the process of obtaining grants from NASA and others, than this is the book for you. If you're looking for the actual science in detail, there are books that do a better job of covering this, and several that are more recent, which is crucial in cosmology.½

The "exoplaneteers". As the era of exoplanet discovery nears its 20th birthday, this easily readable history focuses on the many people (not just big names like Michel Mayor and Geoff Marcy) who have pushed the various detection methods (radial-velocity measurement, transit photometry, gravitational microlensing) to ever greater effectiveness. Included, of course, are the people associated with the transit-detecting Kepler space mission. Now if only the launch of the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission were not on indefinite hold, there would be a good chance of exo-life being proven to exist while I still do.

The only problem with writing about the history of extraterrestrial worlds is we have neither met any organism from another planet nor received any transmission from another planetary system. So, Michael Lemonick’s Other Worlds focuses on how Earth’s inhabitants are trying to find planets outside the Solar System.

All of this attention is due to the Drake equation, first posited in 1961. This equation was devised to try to calculate the number of extraterrestrial planets and the probability of interacting with them.

So, Lemonick traveled around the country, visiting with top-tier astronomers and cosmologists to gain a better insight into the ongoing experiments designed to help us gain a better understanding of the universe. From the Keck Observatory in Hawai’i to the many projects underway at NASA, he delves into both the mechanisms required to find extraterrestrial life and the implications for mankind in general.

The book has a more journalistic tone than a scientific one, but on the whole, this volume fits more in the 500s (science) than the 900s, but who am I to argue with the Library of Congress? I enjoyed it a lot, though. So much so, that upon buying a house, I plan to buy a decent telescope to investigate local astronomical interests.

Full review at: http://lifelongdewey.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/999-other-worlds-by-michael-lemoni...

I sometimes think that Shakespeare's sonnets contain as much wisdom about humanity as his plays or the novels of Proust. I keep finding connections with other reading or thinking in which I am engaged and that gives me pause to reflect and enjoy yet another of Shakespeare's fine sonnets. I recently read the biography of William and Caroline Herschel, The Georgian Star, by Michael D. Lemonick. And then I encountered, again, Shakespeare's fourteenth sonnet, below, and was taken with the resonance. The discoveries of Herschel about real planets, stars, and galaxies are matched and mirrored by Shakespeare's imagination.

XIV.

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well,
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
- William Shakespeare

A workmanlike biography of a workmanlike figure. This biography focuses on William Herschel and his sister Caroline. Their major accomplishment was the discovery of Uranus, the first new planet to be discovered since around the time of the Babylonians. Although I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Herschel was neither the first to see it and that even after months of detailed observations he thought it was a small, near-by comet -- and only after others decided it was a planet did he go along. In addition to being a keen observer, Herschel was also a top-notch instrument maker and a theoretician.

It's not entirely obvious that it is the fault of the biographer (Michael Lemonick), but somehow the book is not as interesting as one might have hoped. It spends too much time on Herschel's early life as a court musician, which is not really informative about his future scientific pursuits nor is it a topic that is intrinsically interesting enough to justify spending much time reading. Lemonick is good on the science and context, but somehow that too ends up not being overly exciting or revealing.

But none of these are obvious faults or flaws, just not the highest priority book I would recommend reading.½

Easy-reading account of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP satellite) which determined in 2003 that the observable universe is 13.7 gigayears old and consists of 4% ordinary matter, 23% dark matter, and 73% "dark energy" (connected with accelerating expansion).