Lenten Blogging Challenge: Day 3 (Recommended Reading)

What's a great book you wish more people had read? (Sell it like you're the publisher, or you know we won't read it.)


Great question, Gina! I have two related great books that everyone should read. One is more political and makes my blood boil/teeth gnash/skin crawl, etc. and the other weaves in a historical narrative of the quest to find the invisible. Both, unsurprisingly, involve science. 


Book 1: The Climate War - by Eric Pooley
Reading the NYT or watching MSNBC regularly is a good way to keep track of the biggest stories of the day, in bite-size forms. Political coverage can be quite extensive, but unless you read The Hill or obsessively follow Politico, you're not likely to get the full story of the political wheeling and dealing that goes on behind the scenes. To add another layer, think of the coverage of climate change legislation. Pretty awful, right? Now, imagine combining the best political coverage with the most pressing issue of our time (besides, of course, the creeping socialism of Barack H. Obama, blah blah blah). The result is The Climate War, by Eric Pooley. Pooley recounts the past 20 years of efforts by industry and environmental leaders to achieve progress in combating the effects of global warming. Spoiler alert: the electric power industry, particularly BIG COAL, is against action on climate change and has systematically weakened efforts to pass meaningful legislation and push bad science by throwing money and confusion into the mix. The bastards. Pooley's book takes the reader to the ground level dealings of the leaders of industry and environmental groups as they struggled to appease their bases while tackling solutions that might actually work. This is an especially interesting book for anyone with an interest in politics and/or science. Working in DC on climate and energy issues during the passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill in the summer of 2009 was a special experience, but it seems like all of that hard work was for naught.


Book 2: The Four Percent Universe - by Richard Panek
This is a less-depressing read than the previous book and one I actually just read for fun. Anyone who knows me well knows that I love to read about science history. If you don't know me well, then yes, I am a nerd. The title of the book comes from one of the most remarkable discoveries of science, ever. 


Imagine the following exchange between you (reader of the book) and a random passerby. 
YOU: How would you weigh the Universe?
PERSON ON STREET: Like, the ENTIRE universe -- planets, stars, black holes, comets -- everything?
YOU: Yes. The entire universe. All of creation.
PERSON ON STREET: Simple. You would weigh the universe by weighing each individual, tangible object that exists.
YOU: And after weighing each of these tangible objects, would you expect that you would've thus weighed the entire universe?
P ON STREET: Umm, yes -- weighing all of the stars and planets and dust particle in the universe would mean that you have weighed the ENTIRE universe.
YOU (taking appropriate care not to sound too pretentious. This is, after all, some random person on the street, not a Cal Tech professor...): Would it shock you if I told you that by weighing all of the tangible objects in the universe, the total would only add up to 4% of the universe?
FLAVA FLAV (turns out he was the person on the street all along! (the clock necklace should've been a dead giveaway but you were too wrapped up in the beauty of the science knowledge you were about to drop on this innocent bystander to notice): "Yeeeaaah booyyyy! I'm SHOCKED."


I was shocked too, to learn that we can't see 96% of our universe. We tend to think of celestial objects as incomprehensibly immense. It's awesome in the original sense of the word to think that the shining carpet of stars we see on a clear night only makes up a meager percentage of all "matter" in the universe. 


What makes up the rest of the universe? Dark matter and dark energy. I'm not going to try to explain it here, because it's way over my head. But basically, the laws of physics, prior to the 1950's, said that the expansion of the universe was slowing down, losing energy after the Big Bang only to eventually come back together in a cycle after gravity overcame the initial force of expansion. The balloon of the universe was eventually going to lose its air and we'd be back to the beginning. The notion of a cyclical universe, of a series of Big Bangs, can be comforting. But it's wrong. What scientists found confounded these fundamental notions of science -- the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion. The balloon is infinite, and something much stronger than gravity is propelling it outward in all directions. The thing is, we can't see the dark matter and dark energy that scientists believe is causing this unbridled expansion. 


For me, it's less about detecting neutrinos than examining the struggle of humanity to understand our past, present, and future. Religion is not capable of achieving this task (Lenten blog, whaddup!) and so science must forge ahead if we are ever to discover who the Creator really is. Science has made it possible to peer over 13 billion years into the past, to a time when the hot mess (the Charlie Sheen years, acc'd to NASA terminology) of gas began to form stars and universes, just 480 million years after the Big Bang (for context, it took much longer than 480 million years after Earth's creation for life to form; just 480 million years after our entire universe formed, galaxies were already taking shape (i.e. in just a blink of a cosmic eye)). 


The quest for knowledge defines our species and this book captures the magic of discovery and makes me more optimistic that we can do the same for issues like climate change in the future.