Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes [Paperback]

If you love science, you love humor, and you are a student of human behavior, this is a book for you. I enjoyed virtually every one of these nine score vignettes.

But these are not just stories. Most are [] tales, in which good tends to triumph over [bad]. Some are about brilliant female scientists who overcome male chauvinism, and other about the numerous afflictions beset upon Jewish scientists in the Nazi era. Several illustrate the intrinsic carnality of science--scientists who experiment on themselves and who revel in human bodily fluids.

The stories are also often quite instructive, in case you are not totally up to snuff in chemistry or physics, and could use a non-technical refresher.

Each of the 181 anecdotes here relates the tale(s) of a scientist or a discovery, many affectionately humorous, in short passages varying from one paragraph to several pages. There is no apparent order to the anecdotes, nor is there any editorial narrative to bind them together, so this becomes a book for serendipitous browsing. Each passage is attributed, and the book is supplemented by a name and subject index, though these are not exhaustive.

This is an interesting and fun set of disjointed stories, with editorial energies devoted to their selection rather than cognitive cohesion.

I was going to call this book an encyclopedia of pedantic lectures, but it doesn't qualify: encyclopedias are organized.

For the 181 anecdotes in the book, there is no organization at all, that I can tell. If you prefer the stories about physicists, or from the 1900s, or about Newton, you're out of luck. The brief indexes are inadequate, and the shuffled nature of the stories makes searching for the type that you are looking for impossible.

Maybe I was under the wrong impression, but I thought that anecdotes were supposed to be funny and revealing stories. Tragically, Mr. Gratzer instead uses the Oxford English Dictionary definition as: "Secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history." His anecdotes, instead of being funny, well-timed, and enjoyable, end up as thorough, thick, and plodding details of scientific history.

Some sections of the book are actually funny, but they tend to be the blockquotes that the author has lifted from other sources. Mr. Gratzer even stoops so low as to include, verbatim, the common [...] Neils Bohr barometer spam that a brief trip to the urban legends site snopes.com can debunk. I was hoping for little-known, insightful and inside stories, and was disappointed to find things like this annoying forwarded spam included in the book.

Finally, the author's understanding of the underlying science that he is writing about is shoddy. The author tries to relate an understanding of some complex topics in physics, chemistry, and biology, but I don't trust any of it because he doesn't understand Archimedes' principle. From page 44: "Archimedes's Principle, as it is still called, states, of course, that the upthrust of an immersed object is equal to the weight of water displaced." Despite the use of the phrase 'of course', this definition is wrong. Gratzer digs his hole deeper: "So when the crown was lowered into a vessel full of water the amount of water displaced, or the apparent weight of the immersed crown, would give a measure of the volume of the metal; this, with the weight of the crown in air, would deliver the density of the metal and thus its composition." This is the most opaque, convoluted, and confusing wrong explanation I have ever heard. The whole point of Archimedes' Principle is that although measuring the weight of the crown is easy, directly measuring its volume is difficult. Since both are needed to determine the object's density, from which you can infer composition, the genius in Archimedes' idea is that you can *indirectly* measure the crown's precise volume by lowering it into water, and then measuring the volume of water that it displaces instead of trying to measure the dimensions of the crown itself. What this has to do with Gratzer's "amount of water displaced, or the apparent weight of the immersed crown" I have no idea.

Although the idea behind this book is great, I was greatly disappointed by its execution. Perhaps had the author tried to tell a few stories well, rather than every story he could find and in as concise a manner as possible, I would have been able to read past story #88 without growing so bored as to be unwilling to finish the rest.

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