Scientific American, New Scientist, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Riordon is currently a senior science writer with NASA's Earth Science News team.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity, and reported the following:
What's on page 99:Visit James Riordon's website.
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were the best of frenemies. As two of the greatest mathematicians in the last 500 years, they independently invented calculus, and feuded brutally over who deserved credit for the powerful new branch of math. All the while, Newton and Leibniz deeply admired each other’s genius.
Page 99 of Crush features my attempt at a bit of Newton/Leibniz fanfiction. I exploit Newton’s tortured relationship with Leibniz to show how he could have studied gravity by petulantly hurling things at a portrait of his rival hung on a dining room wall. With a little poetic license, including the gift to Newton of a laser pointer from a passing time traveler and his dining room being hoisted on a crane and then released to free-fall to Earth, I imagine how Newton could have compared his version of gravity with the one Einstein discovered centuries later.
Does the Page 99 Test work for Crush?
Page 99 isn’t a perfect reflection of Crush as a whole, but it’s pretty good. Throughout the book, I strived to explore gravity with examples, analogies, and stories that are different from the standard fare in the field. A few sections, including the portion on page 99, are fanciful. Most are based firmly on historical facts. In either case, I worked to accurately depict what we know about gravity, from the microscopic scale to its role in shaping the cosmos, and through time from the Big Bang to the ultimate fate of the universe eons from now.
One of the challenges of a book about gravity is ensuring that it’s compelling to a broad spectrum of readers, including curious nonscientists and experts in the field. The anatomy of snakes and elephants, the possibility of life inside black holes, and the challenges of living without gravity for extended trips in space are among the entry points to important subjects related to gravity that I believe would surprise readers of nearly any expertise level.
I could have stuck with the more straightforward and pedantic approach. But wouldn’t you rather know that Galileo pondered how many dogs and horses you could stack before their bones would break; why gravitational waves are crucial for the existence of life as we know it; or how you can explore the structures hidden inside black holes with simple experiments in your kitchen sink?
I’m guessing that most people prefer the fun and fanciful approach to pondering gravity. For those readers, I give you Crush.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
