Elegance in Science

From the point of view of this reviewer, elegance in science combines the dedication and intense focus of the scientist on the question to be answered, a sudden ingenious insight (often triggered by an unexpected experimental result), followed by a surprisingly simple explanation which, after its discovery, seems obvious to all. Therefore, I was absolutely delighted to read this book which provides so many examples from so many different fields of research – movement of planets, laws of motion, the nature of heat, electricity and light, the conduction of signals in nerves, information handling in the brain, and the genetic code. Some of these areas I had not visited since school and it was wonderful to recall the stories and discoveries of Pythagoras, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Mendel, and Darwin and right up to Watson and Crick - to name just a few of my heroes.. The book is challenging in a good way as it requires reader participation in working out the process and principles of the new discoveries as they occurred. But that level of involvement is exactly the experience of being a scientist – and we are all scientists whether we are labelled by work in that profession or not. These days we have forgotten how to be involved at the level of first principles. As one who remembers understanding log to the base 10 (or base e for that matter), square roots and the derivation of the parameters of measurement of circles and spheres, today I feel rather insecure about my computer's answers derived almost instantaneously. But the author of this book on elegance in science, Ian Glynn, invites us to join the lives and times of the scientists and work along with them. This is wonderful. In addition, he writes very clearly and the intertwining of the lives of the scientists and their discoveries is fascinating. The book can be readily understood by the average reader, practising scientist or not. As an example, in chapter 1, we see elegance clearly demonstrated by looking at different ways at arriving at Pythagoras' theorem, viz., the square of the hypotenuse of a triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. The elegant solution stands out and, as you 'get it', there is a sense of pleasure and 'wow' – like a sharing of the eureka moment. There is a sense of simplicity as part of the elegance. It reminded me of the course I took in Vedic mathematics which I experienced as a natural way to understand maths and which does not depend on learning one's tables by rote. It is so satisfying to understand at the level of first principles – like the feeling of writing QED at the successful end of a mathematical challenge. Chapters 2 and 3 review the progress of discoveries made about our place in the universe, from the geocentric view of Ptolemy on the movements of the planets, to the heliocentric view of Copernicus, and thence on to the lives and discoveries of Keppler, Brahe and Gallileo in the 17th century. Then, Galileo moved to the invention of the telescope and to the laws of motion on inclined planes, thus leading on to Newton and his concept of inertia and his three laws. This book covers the history of the development of ideas whilst weaving in the human stories of the inventors and their lives and times. Chapters 4 and 5 are concerned with heat and convection (Rumford and Joules in the 18th century), electricity (Franklin and Faraday in the early 19th century), and the interconversion of electrical and mechanical energy (and v.v.) - the prelude to the electric motor and the dynamo. Chapters 6 is concerned with light and its two main theories – corpuscular (matter) or undulate (waves) from Thomas Young in latter part of 18th Century to Einstein's quantum view in the early 20th century. And on to the origin of quantum mechanics which sees light as both a particle and a wave depending on how you are observing it. Chapters 7 and 8 are concerned with the mode of function of nerves and information processing in the brain. It was known for a long time that nerves work by the flow of something but the story twists and turns for several hundred years, from 17th Century Descartes to Matteucci's work in 19th century. The latter demonstrated transmission of a stimulus between nerves activating frog leg muscles and this led to the measurement of speed of transmission (Helmholtz) and the discovery of its mechanism as movement of ions across membranes. The story of information processing in the brain is fascinating although mostly limited to the studies on vision distortions in people who have suffered brain injury or disease. It is intriguing that, as pointed out by Helmholtz, we largely see what we expect to see. The information from our eyes is modified by past experience and expectations. Chapter 9 is on the genetic code and the four main phases of the history of its discovery. First, Darwin documented how the characteristics of parents are adapted and selected by their environment. And Mendel showed the particulate nature of units of inheritance (now known as genes) by his observation of predictable ratios of segregation of characters in progeny of peas (e.g., smooth or wrinkled, yellow or green). In other words, characteristics are not blended but shuffled. Second, Morgan working with fruit flies, showed that the genetic material resided as a linear array of genes on the chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell. Third, Avery used extracts of bacteria to transfer a virulent trait to other bacteria and showed that the transforming principle was the molecule known as DNA. And fourth, the work that showed the structure of DNA and thus how it contained the information specifying heritable characteristics. DNA was known to consist of sugar phosphate moieties each with one of four bases, A, T, C and G, attached. Chargaff showed that whatever the composition with respect to the bases, the amount of A was always equivalent to T and the amount of C was always equivalent to G, leading to the concept of pairing of bases. Then Lane and Bragg established the principles of X-ray crystallography that uses the diffraction pattern produced by passage of rays of known wave length to infer structure and Perutz extended this to measure the structure of a biological molecule, haemoglobin. Then Wilkins and Franklin produced beautiful wave patterns of DNA, and Watson and Crick worked out the structure which fulfilled the requirements of replicating itself (pairing of the bases). Later it was shown that the code resided in 64 possible triplets of bases to specify stop and start codons of genes and the 20 different amino acids of their specified proteins. This is a wonderful book elegantly written about elegance in science. It is a serious book for serious scholars, yet it is easy to read, and a lot of fun. It is also great as a reference book for the particular fields of interest in the different chapters and a useful book for parents to revise their science, and to help their school children gain a real understanding of these important discoveries that are the basis of our civilisation. Working through the major concepts from first principles promotes an understanding that stays in the memory.