Ostensibly a book about the Greek alphabet, this is really more like a book about Greek culture. The overall effect is not unlike that of Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, reviewed elsewhere. Following are some of the fun facts I learned from as much of this book as I read.
Gamma is for gyne: In ancient Athens, girls were fed less than boys, but in Sparta they went to school and had property and inheritance rights. Given this cultural heritage, how did Sophocles come to write so sympathetically about the plight of women?
Delta is for diagignesthai, to discern, from which we get diagnosis. Dr. Benjamin Lee Gordon points out that the Persians "resorted more frequently to spells than to drugs on the grounds that, although spells might not cure the disease, they at least would not kill the patient." Hippocrates seems to have originated the doctor-as-God problem that we still have in Western medicine. He said, "The physician must wear an expression of sympathy and understanding, never showing the slightest perplexity.... by predicting-- and making explicit-- who will live and who will die, the physician will ensure himself against censure."
Zeta is for zoon ("living thing), from which zoo. The first recorded zoo in the Western world was that of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, 16th c BC, focusing on animals of Africa. Aristotle's groundbreaking work, Inquiries on Animals, full of Nature Channel-type behavioral observations, was written at the urging of his pupil, Alexander the Great.
Theta is for theater and Thespis, a legendary, possibly mythological innovator credited by Aristotle with introducing the individual actor to drama, which had previously been confined to the choral recital of mythology. It was Sophocles who increased the number of individuals all the way to 4!
Iota is for isos, meaning equal: isosceles triangles, which have two equal sides; isotopes ("equal places"), elements that share the same space on the periodic table; isobars, lines on a weather map denoting areas of the same barometric pressure.
Kappa is for kentron, a pointed object, from which "center", as of a circle when you draw it with a peg and a piece of string. Not to be confused with the Latin cingere, to cinch, from which we get the more specialized meaning of "center" as in the curved wood that supports a stone arch as it is being built. In the 5th c BC, Pythagoras said everything in the sky spun around a central fire. In the 3rd C BC, Aristarchos said the earth and planets circled round the sun.
Lambda is for Logos, the "Word" of John 1. Actually "word" usually refers to epos, from which we get "epic" (originally told by the spoken word) or rhema, from which "rhetoric" (another kind of spoken word). Logos refers simultaneously to the outward expression of a concept, as opposed to a mere name, and to the actual concept itself, and is a combination of the thought and its verbal expression. It could be akin to the Latin ratio, meaning thought, as opposed to oratio, meaning the expression of thought. The logos is the whole sentence, the complete thought, or the power and process of reasoning itself. It refers to whatever is said: a fable, a story, a thing spoken of, a principle, or an explanation. It comes from the verb legein (to gather, select), which also gives us lexis, which refers both to words (as in "lexicon") and manners of speaking (as in "dialect").
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
500-509: General Science. A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
Okay, I've finally emerged from the 400s with one big takeaway: my Spanish is improving all the time as I read with a pencil and dictionary and boldly speak every chance I get. On to the 500s, which is all hard science, all the time. "Everything under the sun"... or rather "everything in creation," as all the stuff beyond the sun is also included. The first decade is, as usual, for general introductions, and Bill Bryson seems like he would be an entertaining guide to life, the universe, and (almost) everything. I should have known better when I didn't read him in the 390's, and again when I so didn't read him in the 420's that he didn't even get a mention. Maybe I should confine myself to his travel books, having listened to both A Walk in the Woods and The Road to Little Dribbling with great enjoyment.
To be fair, A Short History is also a travel book of sorts... if time travel counts. Not only time travel as in, "I will begin the story of the Universe at the beginning of the Universe," as Dickens might have said, but also and even more time travel through the development of our ideas about the development of the Universe. Because, as it turns out, Bryson doesn't really want to write about neutrinos. He wants to write about how they were discovered-- and, more importantly, he wants to gossip about their discoverers.
He starts innocently enough, by detailing how the sound of the background radiation resulting from the Big Bang was simultaneously heard by two Bell Labs employees and described theoretically by a team of Princeton researchers. So, that's a pretty interesting story, and along the way you get a very clear idea of what this noise is and how much it matters. But one thing leads to another, and the next thing Bryson knows, the book has really become a series of anecdotes about the wacky antics of geologists, astronomers and the like, which is not exactly what I wanted. I was looking for a popularization of science, not a popularization of scientists. Oh well.
The stories I read were very entertaining, I'll give Bryson that, and along the way I did learn some very fun facts. My favorite fact is that good old Bishop Ussher, who dated the six-day Creation of Earth to October 23, 4004 BC, had long since ceased to hold sway over the thinking of even deeply religious scientists before Darwin made his discoveries. In 1770, for example, George-Louis Leclerc tried to estimate the earth's age based on patterns of heat loss, arriving at a figure very roughly in the neighborhood of 100,000 years. By the middle of the nineteenth century most educated people were thinking in terms of millions or tens of millions of years. Darwin did not knock down the "young Earth" theory--that had already been done. What he did do, along with Lord Kelvin, was turn the millions of years into hundreds of millions of years (current estimates are running about 4.6 billion). So that's an interesting little tidbit.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that what Bryson really wants to do in this book is what he did so well in the books I enjoyed-- he wants to tell human stories. He wants to talk about people, not ideas. So if you want to meet a lot of very smart, very odd people, and get a whirlwind tour of life, the universe and everything, I guess this is the book for you. As for me, nearly everything turned out to be a little too much.
To be fair, A Short History is also a travel book of sorts... if time travel counts. Not only time travel as in, "I will begin the story of the Universe at the beginning of the Universe," as Dickens might have said, but also and even more time travel through the development of our ideas about the development of the Universe. Because, as it turns out, Bryson doesn't really want to write about neutrinos. He wants to write about how they were discovered-- and, more importantly, he wants to gossip about their discoverers.
He starts innocently enough, by detailing how the sound of the background radiation resulting from the Big Bang was simultaneously heard by two Bell Labs employees and described theoretically by a team of Princeton researchers. So, that's a pretty interesting story, and along the way you get a very clear idea of what this noise is and how much it matters. But one thing leads to another, and the next thing Bryson knows, the book has really become a series of anecdotes about the wacky antics of geologists, astronomers and the like, which is not exactly what I wanted. I was looking for a popularization of science, not a popularization of scientists. Oh well.
The stories I read were very entertaining, I'll give Bryson that, and along the way I did learn some very fun facts. My favorite fact is that good old Bishop Ussher, who dated the six-day Creation of Earth to October 23, 4004 BC, had long since ceased to hold sway over the thinking of even deeply religious scientists before Darwin made his discoveries. In 1770, for example, George-Louis Leclerc tried to estimate the earth's age based on patterns of heat loss, arriving at a figure very roughly in the neighborhood of 100,000 years. By the middle of the nineteenth century most educated people were thinking in terms of millions or tens of millions of years. Darwin did not knock down the "young Earth" theory--that had already been done. What he did do, along with Lord Kelvin, was turn the millions of years into hundreds of millions of years (current estimates are running about 4.6 billion). So that's an interesting little tidbit.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that what Bryson really wants to do in this book is what he did so well in the books I enjoyed-- he wants to tell human stories. He wants to talk about people, not ideas. So if you want to meet a lot of very smart, very odd people, and get a whirlwind tour of life, the universe and everything, I guess this is the book for you. As for me, nearly everything turned out to be a little too much.
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