Book Review : All the Power and Beauty of Science

Oasis in Space: Earth History From the Beginning by Preston Cloud (W. W. Norton & Co. Inc.: $29.95; 309 pp., illustrated).

Besides being true, science has the advantage of being aesthetically appealing. It is a rational, ordered account of reality. The same laws of nature apply everywhere. It all hangs together in a unified whole.

Many occult, supernatural or magical assertions about the world lack this unifying explanatory power. People who believe in reincarnation, for example, are at a loss to say how it happens. Their major premise is, “Well, anything is possible,” and that is not very persuasive.

Science, on the other hand, requires each piece of knowledge to fit with all the other pieces in the same field and in other fields. The laws of chemistry fit with the laws of physics, and the laws of biology must be compatible with both of them, and with everything else, for that matter.

This fitting-togetherness is what gives science its power and its beauty. Each bit of knowledge is not a wild guess but a well-tested part of a whole. There is evidence to support each link in the structure, and the cumulative effect is all-but unshakeable.

Structure and evidence are the essence of scientific explanation, and they are broadly displayed in “Oasis in Space: Earth History From the Beginning,” a monumental work of synthesis of the natural history of the Earth.

Sun’s Origin

Starting with the origin of the sun and the agglutination of the planets from matter in space, Preston Cloud, emeritus professor of geology at UC Santa Barbara, tells everything that is known about the development of the planet and the development of life on the planet.

He writes with sweep and passion. Early in the book he explains his task, which is to show that, “We are made of star-stuff, processed through supernovae, concentrated from the contracting solar nebula, spun into biochemical aggregates with a difference, and graced, during our tenure here, by the ability to imagine, to conceptualize, to hypothesize, to create science, poetry, music, and works of art and technology.”

Here is the story, as best as science knows it, of how we and all we see around us came to be here. This is the rational, factual account, based on evidence. It is all of a piece. The evidence is sometimes less than we would like (especially for early Earth history billions of years ago), but our conjectures are more than guesses, and they are not without support.

“Oasis in Space” encompasses cosmology, plate tectonics, the origin of life and evolution and the effects of all these on what Cloud calls “the human habitat.”

Gaps in Evidence

At each stage he discusses the evidence and the gaps in the evidence. But the fact that there are gaps does not mean that the explanation is faulty, just incomplete. Cloud’s exposition makes it clear that the structure itself is stable and that it would take a tremendous amount of evidence to overthrow it.

Cloud says in the preface, “This wet, mobile, and ever-evolving Earth needs no hyperbole to be seen as a pretty amazing place. Its story needs no embellishment. But many an unresolved puzzle invites the attention of fertile minds.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is that despite Cloud’s able and in places lively prose, this is a difficult book. If it is at the level of interested laymen, as Cloud asserts, the laymen must be very interested indeed. No fooling around. The arguments and the evidence are densely packed, and, though Cloud starts each subject from the beginning and works his way up, the level is tougher than science writing in newspapers and magazines.

To be sure, each chapter begins with a short, easily accessible summary and ends with a longer, somewhat more difficult conclusion, but the material in between tends to be demanding. It is possible to read just the beginning and ending summaries, but that makes for a book much shorter than Cloud has written.

Not an Easy Book

“Oasis in Space” is a good book but not an easy book. Science can be written about in detail in a way that invites nonspecialists, but Cloud has not done that. What he has done is an admirable piece of work in its own right, though it will have a smaller audience.

Though most of the book is fairly dry, Cloud enlivens it with descriptions and his genuine concern for things human. He reminds us that for all we have accomplished, human beings are still at the mercy of the Earth. In the last 1,000 years, he says, 4 million people have died in earthquakes, and though the explosion of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 killed 60 people in a remote part of the United States, that event was minor as such things go.

Cloud’s account of the history of the planet leads, not surprisingly, to us, and, to the extent he can, Cloud peers briefly ahead into the future. “Humankind has come a long way over a geologically brief time,” he writes. “Its path has been generally upward, its migrations far and resolute, its achievements heady, its follies distressing and sometimes appalling. It can do better. . . . People alive and healthy today stand at the threshold of what could be, on average, a continuing ascent toward better lives for all or a descent into a new dark age.”

Readers willing to tackle the scientific-journal writing that these ideas come wrapped in are encouraged to do so; others should wait for a more popular account.