Book Reviews : On the Jigsaw Puzzle of the Universe

Meditations at 10,000 Feet: A Scientist in the Mountains by James Trefil (Scribner’s: $16.95)

Every course in high school seemed to begin with the question, “Why do we study history?” or geometry or economics or whatever. And the first day was spent listing the reasons that supposedly justified having to learn what was to follow. It was in biology that I began to wonder about those reasons.

We studied biology, we impressionable youths in the Bronx were told, because, among other things, biology helps the farmers.

Though helping farmers might indeed be socially useful, that didn’t impress me as much of a reason to study biology. What’s more, I doubted that any real biologists had been drawn to their life’s work by a desire to help farmers--or even to increase the world’s food supply.

People who do biology, I reasoned, do it because they enjoy biology. And people who don’t enjoy biology do something else. Lucky people are those who get society to pay them to do what they like.

Pleasure in the Game

This pleasure-in-the-thing-itself is a characteristic of many--some would say most--scientists, for whom the search for knowledge is at least as interesting as the knowledge itself. They take pleasure in the game, and they are delighted when what they find out is elegant and simple.

It’s the same pleasure that people who do crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles feel when they finish one. To the best scientists, the universe is a big puzzle, and the task is to figure out the elementary rules that explain it. They never lose that sense of puzzlement.

James Trefil, a theoretical physicist by trade, is one of that small group of scientists who can convey to the general reader both the facts of science and the pleasure of it. He never asks why we study the subject at hand. In his pen, the subject speaks for itself.

Whether he is writing about the oceans, the cosmos or the Earth itself, he exudes awe and wonder that things are as they are. He is the best kind of teacher: His knowledge of the subject is expert, but he conveys it with the enthusiasm of a beginner.

Trefil’s method, which he used superbly in previous books, is to observe the world around him and ask questions about it. The answers lead him to the laws of nature that underlie the observations, and from there to other examples, small and large, that demonstrate the same laws.

A Noble Achievement

“The reduction of the complexity of the physical world to a few basic principles surely represents one of the noblest achievements of the human mind,” Trefil says.

Each of his 14 essays begins in a mountain walk (from which comes the title) that leads to observations. On one walk, he notices the rocks: “Any handful of individual rocks you pick off the ground shows a wide variety of types. Some are sandy-colored and rough to the touch, others hard, smooth and glassy. Some are solid colors, others show streaks and speckles. Some are dull, others very beautiful. Where do they all come from, and why do they differ so much among themselves?”

What follows is a fascinating and clear lesson in elementary geology. Next he asks, where do the atoms come from that make up the rocks, and how were they formed? This takes him to cosmology. The atoms were made in the interior of stars after the Big Bang kicked off the universe.

“The atoms that compose everything interesting around you--the Earth, the sky, your own body--were fabricated in a series of events that took place in hardly more than a few hours,” is the end of the path that began with asking where rocks come from.

Mountains themselves are an opening for Trefil to discuss plate tectonics. The existence of mountains is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the theory. Mountains are formed when the Earth’s plates collide with each other as they move around the globe.

The Earth Alone

In fact, the Earth is the only planet in our solar system that has mountains, indicating that it is the only planet whose land masses are still moving. Trefil wonders whether the development of intelligence is related to changing environments on Earth.

Along the way, Trefil explains how the waves in a rapidly moving stream are like a sonic boom. He shows how insect populations, the weather and boiling water are linked by chaos, a promising new field of research. He shows why scientists are convinced that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. (It’s been determined to be that old by three independent methods of estimation.)

He answers a question I have wondered about since those high-school days, when we learned in physics that the speed of a falling object is one-half of the product of the acceleration of gravity (32 feet per second squared) and the square of the number of seconds the object has been falling.

This formula produces a very large number in a fairly short time. So why don’t raindrops, which have been falling for quite a few seconds, hit the ground with astronomical speed?

Terminal Velocity

It turns out that air friction and other factors impose a terminal velocity on falling objects that varies with their size and shape. The terminal velocity of raindrops is about 3 miles an hour. The terminal velocity of a skydiver is about 100 miles an hour. I guess I should have known that. Maybe I was sick that day.

These well-wrought essays are not a gee-whiz recitation of some interesting science trivia that happen to hang together. Under the simplicity of Trefil’s prose is much about how scientists think, how their ideas unfold and how they test them. There are asides into the history of science and a spirited defense of the scientific method even when it leads to the wrong conclusion.

This is science writing at its best, a broad sweep over many disciplines that helps make the outlines of the jigsaw puzzle of the universe clearer. We study these things because we are curious. Inquiring minds want to know.