Great Calculations: A Surprising Look Behind 50 Scientific Inquiries. By Colin Pask. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2015. ISBN 1633880281. 414 pp. Softcover, $18.00.
Back when I taught high school physics, I’d lug those giant Stephen Hawking anthologies down from the shelf a few times every year. During the gravity unit, for instance, I’d select On the Shoulders of Giants, all 1,264 pages, and pass it around so students could appreciate its impressive heft. Most of them would hand it off uninterested, but the interested few would flip through its pages. These anthologies, after all, presented history’s geniuses (On the Shoulders of Giants collects Copernicus, Galilei, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein) with minimal intros by Hawking—another genius. Those brave students who borrowed such books would return them reverently, impressed by all they didn’t know and having learned almost nothing at all.
The longer I worked as a teacher, the less eager I was to recommend Hawking’s anthologies. At a certain point, I realized that these books—however unwittingly—encouraged two big misperceptions: first, that science is the story of a few lone geniuses; second, that science is usually too opaque to understand. Of course, the first of these failings isn’t really the books’ fault (any finite “history” requires a culling of the herd), but the second still seems unforgivable. In the era of Rap Genius, surely the science greats deserve some lucid annotation.