Weighing the Soul: Scientific Discovery from the Brilliant to the Bizarre [Hardcover]

Weighing the Soul : Scientific Discovery from the Brilliant to the Bizarre by Len Fisher (Arcade Publishing) F From the man who "puts the fizz in physics" (Entertainment Weekly), here is an entertaining and thought-provoking foray into the science of the bizarre, the peculiar, and the downright nutty!

Winner of the IgNobel Prize in physics, Len Fisher showed just how much fun science can be in his enthusiastically praised debut, How to Dunk a Doughnut. In this new work, he reveals that science sometimes takes a path through the strange and the ridiculous to discover that Nature often simply does not follow common sense. One experiment, involving a bed, a plat-form scale, and a dying man, seemed to prove that the soul weighed the same as a slice of bread-or roughly 21 grams, as the title of the popular movie put it. But other experiments and ideas that seemed no less fanciful in their time led to the fundamentals of our understanding of movement, heat, light, and energy, and such things as the discovery of electricity and the structure of DNA.

As in his previous book, Len Fisher uses humorous personal stories and examples from everyday life to make the science accessible. He includes a catalogue of the necessary mysteries of modern science: the anti-commonsense beliefs that scientists now hold and use as tools in their everyday work. In chapters that feature figures from Galileo and Newton to Benjamin Franklin and Erwin Schrödinger, among many others, he touches on topics from lightning to corsets and from alchemy to Frankenstein and water babies, but he may not claim the last word on the weight of the soul!

Excerpt: This book tells the stories of scientists whose ideas appeared bizarre, peculiar, or downright nutty to their con-temporaries but who stuck to their guns through ridicule, oppression, and persecution. Some of their ideas were nutty, and most of these ideas (though by no means all!) rapidly be-came extinct. Other concepts, seemingly every bit as bizarre, passed every test that could be thrown at them and survived to be accepted and used by scientists such as myself as part of our everyday work.

The ideas that scientists now use routinely can still seem ridiculous to people outside science. My wife certainly thought so when she came home one evening to find me riding her bicycle down the road with the wheel nuts removed, explaining to a radio interviewer that the counterintuitive physical laws discovered by Galileo and Newton predicted that the wheels would stay on. Her brief, pungent comment about scientists and their lack of common sense was duly recorded and broadcast on national radio.

My wife was right; science and common sense often don't mix. It's not the scientists' fault; Nature is the principal culprit. Those who proposed bizarre-sounding ideas about its behavior were often forced to do so after recognizing that the accepted wisdom, or "common sense:' of their eras was simply insufficient to understand what was going on. Their contemporaries, with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, were not always as receptive to new ideas as the popular image of the dispassionate, rational scientist would have us believe, and the fates of those who advanced new ideas ranged from the loss of their jobs to the loss of their lives. Their histories belie the popular image of science as an orderly, logical progression. It is more like a procession, with leaders and followers, which is unwillingly forced to change direction each time it comes up against the barrier of a revolutionary new idea. This book traces the route of the procession through the stories of those who forced the changes and shows how many of their ideas, which seemed to be so at odds with the common sense of the time, are now used by scientists to under-stand and tackle everyday problems. It also reveals the true process of discovery, where the brilliant has often met the bizarre and only the wisdom of hindsight allows us to distinguish between the two. The message is that we need to allow for a certain amount of laughable nuttiness if we are not to lose genuinely original insights and developments. If we can't tell the difference between oddity and insight, then maybe it's wise not to laugh too loud.

I am a scientist, not a historian, and when I write about scientists from earlier times it is from my perspective as a scientist. In consulting copies of original diaries, papers, and notes, I have often found I was reading about people who thought in the same way that modern scientists do but who happened to be working with a different set of questions and in a different environment of belief about the way in which the world works. I was particularly struck to discover the parallels between their struggles to understand how Nature works and my own efforts (rather less successful) as a child to understand for myself everything from movement, studied by Galileo, to light, space, and time, elucidated by Einstein. I have included some tales from this part of my life, partly to show that thinking like a child isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to science, and mainly to show that you don't have to be a genius to understand science - it just needs persistence, and the wish to know.

The book is written in a very basic form, which does not invite or inspire the reader. It is repetitive at times, and the personal examples are frankly a little silly rather than ways of better understanding the science being discussed. It may be appropriate for high school kids, but then it may even be boring for them.

Review of Weighing the soul; scientific discoveries from the brilliant to the bizarre.
Len Fisher.
New York: Arcade Publishing (2004).
Reviewer: William P. Palmer

This book is very entertaining, written by a British academic physicist, Len Fisher, who believes that one of the duties of scientists is to popularise science through their writing. Len is, in fact the winner of the 1999 `Ig Nobel' prize for his research on `dunking doughnuts'.

The title of the book comes from the first chapter which is entitled `Weighing the soul' and refers back in time to the Egyptian painting of the God, Anubis, weighing the soul of a person who had died recently using scales counterbalanced by a feather. I was rather taken with this idea and on a recent trip to Egypt purchased a copy of the painting. On further reading about the concept that was being portrayed, it appears that the feather was not actually a feather, but represented Ma'at, the correct conduct in life. If the balance was in equilibrium, then the soul passed the test and the deceased had lived a good life.

This is unlike the further Western experiments described by MacDougall which seek determine if there is a physical change in weight when someone dies. A loss of weight on death would indicate that the soul exists. On the other hand, does not Fisher take The MacDougall experiments at face value, but uses MacDougall's own self-doubts and other experimental results to consider the whole question of `scientific method'. Between times Fisher manages to bring Rumford's historic experiments on the nature of heat and the yet to be proven existence of the Higg's boson, into the discussion.

Yes, Len Fisher certainly writes entertainingly about science. Other chapters are entitled Making a move, A salute to Newton, The course of lightning through a corset, Fool's gold, Frankenstein lives, what is life and Conclusion: necessary mysteries.

As a chemist too, I liked the story of Fisher as a student preparing manganic acid in the back of the classroom, while the chemistry teacher `droned' on: as Fisher says, the explosion which could easily have occurred might well have destroyed the entire classroom.

There are also an additional sixty pages of notes an a index. The book is good value and makes an excellent read.

BILL PALMER