Entropy and the Magic Flute [Hardcover]

Harold Morowitz has long been regarded highly both as an eminent scientist and as an accomplished science writer. The essays inThe Wine of Life, his first collection, were hailed by C.P. Snow as some of the wisest, wittiest and best informed that I have read, and Carl Sagan called them a delight to read. In later volumes such asMayonnaise and the Origin of LifeandThe Thermodynamics of Pizza, he has established a reputation for a wide-ranging intellect, an ability to see unexpected connections and draw striking parallels, and a talent for communicating scientific ideas with optimism and wit.Kirkus ReviewspraisedMayonnaiseas wonderfully diverting and very wise. Naturewrote ofThermodynamics, his chocolate-coated nuggets of science will continue to entertain and do surreptitious good.
WithEntropy and the Magic Flute, Morowitz once again offers an appealing mix of brief reflections on everything from litmus paper to the hippopotamus to the sociology of Palo Alto coffee shops. Many of these pieces are appreciations of scientists that Morowitz holds in high regard. In the title piece, for instance, Morowitz tells of his pilgrimage to the grave of Ludwig Boltzmann, buried in the same cemetery--Vienna's Central Cemetery--as Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms. He also writes of J. Willard Gibbs ( thought by many to be the greatest scientist yet produced by the United States ), Jean Perrin (author ofLes Atomes, a now-forgotten classic that convinced virtually everyone in science of the validity of the atomic hypothesis), Einstein, Newton (on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of hisPrincipia, a date that passed virtually unnoticed except by Morowitz), Murray Gell-Mann, and Aristotle. Of Aristotle, Morowitz observes that most people whose information comes from academic philosophy fail to appreciate that--among his many fields of expertise--first and foremost, Aristotle was a bil£Ý