Boltzmann's Tomb: Travels in Search of Science

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A selection of the Scientific American book club

Recommended by MSNBC, Los Angeles Times, & American Association for the Advancement of Sciences SB&F magazine

This wonderful scientific memoir captures the romance and beauty of research in precise poetic prose that is as gorgeous and evocative as anything written by Rilke, painted by Seurat, or played by Casals. Mary Doria Russell, author of Doc and The Sparrow

A radiant love letter to science from a scientist with a poets soul . . . Green is an exquisite writer, and his fierce focus and mastery of style are reminiscent of the biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas. Kirkus Reviews

In Boltzmanns Tomb, Bill Green interweaves the story of his own lifelong evolution as a scientist, and his work in the Antarctic, with a travelogue that is a personal and universal history of science. Like Richard Holmes The Age of Wonderthis book serves as a marvelous introduction to the great figures of science. Along with lyrical meditations on the tragic life of Galileo, the wildly eccentric Tycho Brahe, and the visionary Sir Isaac Newton, Greens ruminations return throughout to the lesser-known figure of Ludwig Boltzmann. Using Boltzmanns theories of randomness and entropy as a larger metaphor for the unpredictable paths that our lives take, Green shows us that science, like art, is a lived adventure.

Bill Green is a geochemist and professor emeritus at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is also the author of Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes which received the American Museum of Natural Historys John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing, was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and was excerpted in The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.

Author Bio

Bill Green is a geochemist and professor emeritus at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He first went to Antarctica in 1968 and began doing his own research there in 1980. To date he has been there nine times and has published many articles on biogeochemical processes in the pristine lakes and meltwater streams of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. In addition to Boltzmann's Tomb, he is also the author of Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes, which received the American Museum of Natural History's John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing, was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and was excerpted in The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.