Einstein Adds a New Dimension

by Deborah Markus, one of four product reviews from Secular Homeschooling, Issue #5, Winter 2008

The Story of Science: Einstein Adds a New Dimension by Joy Hakim, $27.95, Smithsonian Books

I had heard of Joy Hakim before her publishers sent me this book. Her American history books are always being talked about on homeschooling loops. I hadn't read them yet, though, or known that Hakim has also written books on the history of science, when her publisher contacted me about reviewing the latest in that series, Einstein Adds a New Dimension. I came to it completely fresh.

The book doesn't read like a sequel — it stands alone perfectly well (though, as Hakim mentions frequently in the text, those wanting to know more about certain scientific concepts can read the previous titles in the series).

I'm writing not merely a review of this book, but a review for readers who are secular enough in their homeschooling lives to read a magazine called Secular Homeschooling. Secular homeschoolers want to know how well any particular book or curriculum or workbook tackles its subject; we also want to know if we'll be picking our way through a religious minefield.

In this case: not a minefield. But there are a few bombs to be aware of, a few patches of ground that need to be treaded with care.

I read the entire book, slowly and thoroughly — not just to be conscientious, but because I don't have a natural bent for science and if I skimmed even a little, I'd be completely lost. I now feel better informed on the science front than I've ever been. Carefully studying this book is the mental equivalent of sticking to that daily exercise program for a few solid months. Hakim's writing and deep enthusiasm for her subject have inspired me to pursue further science reading for my own sake, quite aside from what I hope to teach my son.

But exactly because so much of this book is so very good, I was deeply disappointed when it let me down.

The first thing any reader of this magazine needs to know about any science book is, of course, how does it handle the big "e"?

Hakim's book describes a universe billions of years old, in which "intelligent life has needed almost all of Earth's 4.5-billion-year history to evolve." This is an especially decisive statement in a book that is primarily concerned with the quantum world. So, good news.

Story of Science is also very strong on the readability front. The prose has a good conversational flow — Hakim really does seem to be talking to the reader. This book could be used as a spine for a science course, or as a textbook; but it doesn't feel like a textbook. It is, in the best possible sense of the word, a storybook. It is quite literally the story of science.

My husband, who is deeply interested in many aspects of science (and whose willingness to drop everything and answer my panicked questions when I felt as if I were about to drown in a sea of unfamiliar science terms made this review possible), picked up the book when I first got it and began paging through it. "Wait," he said, confused. "Is this a science book, or a history book?"

Which should tell those who favor Charlotte Mason that this is a living book. Science is presented as a very human story: the story of the many, many curious people who didn't stop looking and searching and thinking and experimenting until they got some real answers. Hakim doesn't wander as she tells her story; but as much as possible she tries to give the reader a sense of the people who made important discoveries. Quirks, habits, hobbies, even habits of dress and political beliefs are presented as an integral part of the telling.

This book made me realize that I learned more about science from Eve Curie's biography of her mother than I did from all my junior high and high school science classes combined. At heart, I was (and am) a story-oriented person, and the brilliantly told story of Madame Curie captivated me and made me understand an obsessive love of science even when I didn't share it. Obviously Hakim couldn't give such an in-depth report of every scientist she mentions; but she told enough about many of them to interest me in learning more on my own.

That's another strength of this book. Hakim doesn't expect her book to be the only one students of the subject will want or need. She hopes her readers will seek knowledge elsewhere as well. She encourages them to find other good books on the subject, and suggests quite a few they might enjoy.

This next point is either a strength or a weakness, depending on your taste and the taste of the young reader you might get this book for. Every page spread of Story of Science includes at least the first three of the following, and often all of them: the narrative text; a photograph significant to the text; a paragraph about the photo and why it's significant to the text; a timeline, with years, names, and several photos of famous scientists; a paragraph in the margin in green print, explaining a word or phrase from the narrative text; a paragraph in the margin in red print, giving more information about a concept described in the narrative text that the reader may need more information about; a quotation from a famous scientist or science writer; and a box of text, set apart from the narrative text, giving more information about a science concept or relating an anecdote about one of the scientists under discussion.

When I brought this book to read at a park day gathering, a friend of mine asked if I knew how to get it as a recorded book. She said that she loved the information this series gave, but the busy pages really made it difficult for her to stay focused.

When my husband saw it, he talked about how stimulating and enjoyable he found books like this, and how if he'd seen this book when he was a kid, he would have picked it up and dived right in.

Busy pages are not necessarily bad, or good. You or your young reader may find them enriching, or distracting — or both, which was how I felt by the end of the book. I realize that I don't know enough about typesetting and layout to be allowed to talk like this, but I really wish that the narrative text could have ended with a clean paragraph ending on each right-hand page, so that I could finish reading the narrative text, read the extra bits, and then turn the page neatly, if you see what I mean. I found timing my page-turnings rather difficult with this format. But many of the diagrams and other extra bits of information were extremely important. If I was struggling with a particular concept, it sometimes made all the difference to have more information presented differently.

One flaw in Story of Science is that although there's an index, there's no glossary. Frankly, if I knew enough about science to keep even the basic terminology straight in my head, I wouldn't need this book. Yes, I really ought to remember what an isotope is, especially when the author gave a thorough explanation of it on page 134; but almost a hundred pages later, isotopes are important to the story, and I have to admit that with all the other reading and thinking I've done in that time, their definition might have slipped my mind. Hakim realizes this might be an issue — on page 241, she notes in the margin, "Remember, an isotope is an atom with a different number of neutrons in its nucleus but the same number of protons and electrons as its sibling atoms." But if you knew I'd forget, why didn't you put all the definitions in one place, rather than sprinkling them throughout the text and hoping that they'd be right where I need them when I need them?

More seriously, Hakim occasionally throws a new term into the story without defining it until the next page or so. I felt like an idiot reading about experiments being done on hydrogen atoms and suddenly hearing them referred to as ions. When it comes to this kind of science, I can be accurately described as hanging on by the tips of my fingers at the best of times. I'm reading every word and just exactly keeping up. More often, I'm reading a paragraph and then reading that paragraph again before I go on to the next, because I really need to have even basic concepts hammered into my head. This isn't my field; I have no fluency or ease here. In that respect, I consider myself to be an ideal candidate when it comes to an adult reading a book meant for young readers. If the writer can get me to understand this science, a young reader should be able to really get something out of it. And I'm here to say: in a science book, no tossing new vocabulary words out without defining them right away. The definition of ion was a page-turn away, and I think it was put there because of typesetting issues. Rather than just give us the definition of an ion, Hakim wanted to offer the reader a song a scientist had written about ions. And that wouldn't fit on the same page as the initial mention of ions. Considering that even in this song, the definition is given parenthetically (ions are "charged atoms"), Hakim should have gone ahead and put it into the narrative text.

This kind of thing doesn't happen often, but it comes up enough to be occasionally frustrating — not something you want to do in a science book for young readers — and that abovementioned lack of a glossary becomes glaring at just such points.

"Young readers," I keep saying. How young are we talking? Many, perhaps most homeschoolers (especially the ones who would really enjoy this book) despise describing a book by the age or (worse) grade level it would be appropriate for. And this book doesn't say anything about ages or grades. Hakim defines plenty of words from the text that I would think a high school reader would already have under her belt — "momentous," for instance, and "incongruity." (But she left me on my own with "ion" for a whole page. Yes, I'm still bitter.) She's right, though — there are plenty of bright young readers who could keep up with the science offered, but might still have trouble with some of the longer non-science words in the narrative.

There are two ways to judge whether your child, regardless of age, is ready for this book. One is simply to take a look at the text itself and see if your child can handle it. Here is what I think can be taken as a representative sampling from the narrative:

How can light be both continuous waves and also quantized bits of energy at the same time? That idea is impossible to accept, for [Max] Planck himself or for anyone brought up with classical physics — Isaac Newton's physics — where you can expect something to be one thing or another but not both. So, Planck doesn't buy what his results tell him: that electromagnetic energy comes in "packets" of only a certain magnitude (those quantum units). He is sure that other amounts of energy also exist (to create the continuousness of a wave), but he can't find them.

This is the kind of writing that makes up the book: heavy concepts lightly thrown. Though the science is complex, Hakim keeps the telling of the story of this science straightforward and lively.

The other thing to keep in mind when deciding if this is a book that would be right for your young reader is that this book is not just the story of science, but the story of why science was important in World War II. Hakim gives full context to why the problem of splitting the atom was given so much attention. She mentions the Holocaust several times. She includes a small black and white photo of what for one horrified moment I thought was a pile of murdered bodies, but what is actually a mountain of shoes from the murdered in a concentration camp. On another page, there's a photo of one of the yellow stars European Jews were forced to wear. Hakim says in so many words that millions of Jews and others were murdered. If your young reader is not ready yet for this kind of information, or to learn that tens of thousands of people in Japan were killed by the dropping of atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima (there is a picture of a mushroom cloud, and a non-gory but serious photo of a woman and child injured in Nagasaki), wait to get this book.

Up until the last few chapter of this book, mention of religion is limited to what must be discussed in order to give a meaningful context to the story. It's impossible to talk about Galileo, Copernicus, or Giordano Bruno without bringing up the church's attitude toward science in general and astronomical discovery in particular. A statement such as "Copernicus's theory appeared to contradict both the revered Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Bible" isn't a religious statement. It's a statement summing up the attitude of certain religious authorities at a certain place and time, and is completely appropriate — necessary, even — in a history book.

Hakim includes as an illustration a cartoon of what looks like Moses holding up a stone tablet — but the tablet has "Constants" written at the top, and then a list of scientific constants such as the speed of light (c), electron mass (me), and other "numbers found in nature that have the same value as measured by everyone," as Hakim puts it. The cartoon is appropriate to the material being covered in that section, though I did find some of Hakim's accompanying text rather ironic: "Like the Ten Commandments given to Moses, they never change." Okay, except that first off, ask a Jew what the first two commandments are, and then ask a Catholic, and you'll get two different answers. Then ask a Catholic and an Anglican Christian the same question, and you'll get two different different answers. Holding the Ten Commandments up as a model of stability isn't exactly historically accurate. But the comic itself didn't strike me as a religious reference — it could be read almost as the opposite of one, if you wanted to read it as a bit of irony about the laws that the Judeo-Christian deity really handed down — and Hakim was simply trying to provide some context for it.

For hundreds of informative, fact-filled and fascinating pages, religion is handled in this fashion: exactly the way one would expect from a science book one might find on the shelf of an ordinary mainstream bookstore. And then, quite literally an hour after my husband had teased/complimented me on taking my job as a reviewer so seriously as to never allow myself to skip or even skim a page, paragraph, or caption — on page 384, in the midst of the gripping story of how scientists pieced together what the young universe must have been like, I got a big fat disappointment.

...The newborn universe must have been awesomely hot — a seething, dense, gassy plasma of tiny subatomic particles (quarks and electrons) so scorching and fast moving that particles wham into one another and nothing holds together.

But gases cool as they expand, and, right away, the universe starts expanding. Quarks combine in threesomes, becoming neutrons and protons (known as baryons). The interaction between the baryons and electrons creates photons (EM radiation) and a blinding light. (The book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, describes it this way: "And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.")

WHAT???

Sorry. Didn't mean to hurt your ears. But really? The writers of the Bible were talking about THE BIG BANG? Like, on purpose? They knew all about it, and those are the words they decided to use to describe it?

This really leaped off the page at me, because it's so unlike almost anything that had come before. Almost. On page 329, there is a quote from Georges Lemaître, a scientist who was also a priest. "There is no conflict between science and religion," Lemaître says. "Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes." Which is interesting, and not inappropriate in a science book. But Hakim adds a paragraph of text in the margin:

Did God play a role in Big Bang creation? Scientists can't answer that question. God is not a provable theorem. That doesn't mean the God theorem is not true or that eventually it might be proved by a new discipline different from our current science.

That paragraph is incredibly problematic. It reads as if it had been split exactly down the middle, because the first half is absolutely true and scientifically rigorous, as well as perfectly in keeping with everything Hakim has written up to this point; while the second half reads as if someone with no understanding of what science really is had snuck in and started typing while Hakim was taking a coffee break.

"Did God play a role in Big Bang creation? Scientists can't answer that question." Very true. Science can't and doesn't answer that question, because that question lies completely outside the realm of science. Science does not address the existence of the Judeo-Christian god. Science doesn't argue with the idea that such a deity could or does exist. Science simply doesn't, to use the vernacular, go there.

"God is not a provable theorem." Very true. God is not a theorem at all. So far, so good.

"That doesn't mean the God theorem is not true... " Hang on. What God theorem? Hakim just said — or sounded as if she said, or ought to have said — that God and theorems have nothing to do with one another.

"...or that eventually it might be proved by a new discipline different from our current science." First off, there's a negative missing there. The sentence, in order to make the kind of sense Hakim wants it to, should read, "That doesn't mean the God theorem is not true, or that eventually it might not be proved..."

Leaving that aside, though: what does that mean? A new discipline? What would it be called? Religion? We already have a discipline by that name, and it handles the concept of a deity just fine.

And how different from our current science does Hakim want this new discipline to be? She just spent several hundred pages describing and admiring the kind of work scientists are willing to do in the name of the scientific method. Does she disapprove of that method now? What does she want in its stead?

If she means that Lemaître was right and one can be a scientist and still hold religious beliefs, why didn't she just let his eloquence on that issue speak for itself?

I don't know what makes me more unhappy: the fact that a writer like Hakim could be so good for so much of the book only to trip this badly so close to the finish line; or having to point it out in such careful detail that I'm afraid these flaws will dominate the review and make it sound as if the entire book is riddled with this kind of thing. It isn't. The third volume of The Story of Science really is worthwhile, even for secular homeschoolers. Hakim is good at explaining science, and even better at telling a story. I went ahead and ordered one of her earlier science books when I finished reading this one.

But this book's strengths make me that much angrier about the fact that Smithsonian Books would put their name on a science book by a writer who doesn't seem to understand the distinction between science and religion.

Story of Science is good enough that I intend to hang on to it and haul it out again when my son is ready for the information it presents. The faults I've mentioned don't destroy the rest of the book. Rather, the excellence of the rest of the book throw those faults into sharp relief.

One thing this book offers secular homeschoolers is the idea that science is exciting not just because of what we've learned, but because of what we have yet to learn. "Do you ever worry that you were born too late?" Hakim asks toward the end of the book. "That all the important discoveries have already been made? Well, forget that worry. Cosmic explorers are needed. Twenty-first-century science is bursting with questions to be answered." This comment is tucked into the story of Vera Cooper Rubin, who was turned down when she applied to Princeton because at that point in time, Princeton was turning people away if they were women who wanted to study astronomy. "Undaunted, she became one of America's outstanding astronomers while raising four children and fighting for women's rights," Hakim writes jubilantly. This is Hakim's writing at its most inspired and inspiring. Fortunately, this is a representative sampling of the book.

To sum up: Good book? Yes. Disappointing book? Yes. Mixed review? As always, my least favorite kind — but as always, I hope I've given you what you need to make an informed decision on buying it.

More about Issue #5