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When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That |  | Author: Martin Gardner
Publisher: Hill and Wang
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 9036
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.3 x 1
ISBN: 0809087375
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN: 9780809087372
ASIN: 0809087375
Publication Date: October 13, 2009
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Product Description
Best known as the longtime writer of the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American—which introduced generations of readers to the joys of recreational mathematics—Martin Gardner has for decades pursued a parallel career as a devastatingly effective debunker of what he once famously dubbed “fads and fallacies in the name of science.” It is mainly in this latter role that he is onstage in this collection of choice essays. When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish takes aim at a gallery of amusing targets, ranging from Ann Coulter’s qualifications as an evolutionary biologist to the logical fallacies of precognition and extrasensory perception, from Santa Claus to The Wizard of Oz, from mutilated chessboards to the little-known “one-poem poet” Langdon Smith (the original author of this volume’s title line). The writings assembled here fall naturally into seven broad categories: Science, Bogus Science, Mathematics, Logic, Literature, Religion and Philosophy, and Politics. Under each heading, Gardner displays an awesome level of erudition combined with a wicked sense of humor.
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| Customer Reviews:
An American treasure November 11, 2009
Theodore A. Rushton (PHOENIX, Arizona United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
As a library volunteer who deals with about 250,000 books, including about 40,000 listed for sale on Amazon.com, I've become aware that Americans read two categories of books -- either irrational fantasies or the best nonfiction in the world.
Irrational fantasies sell by the multi-millions and are quickly discarded; which is why so many are listed on Amazon.com at a penny apiece. Fact is selective but draws good prices; in September, our highest price art book sold for $246. Many of Ann Coulter's used books are in the penny apiece range (the difference between Coulter and a book is that you can shut up a book). I couldn't find any Gardner book of such low value in intellectual appeal or cash value.
I mention this only because the opening essay debunks and defangs Coulter. There's a delightful essay on 'The Wizard of Oz,' explaining "It is a superb, skillfully written fantasy . . ." Is not Coulter a similar fantasiest, except she writes for even more childish readers? It's likely more people believe 'Blaze' romances than Coulter's paranormalism. Granted, Harlequin and Coulter are wildly profitable, but both have zero impact in changing serious minds and improving our future.
Gardner is one of the pre-eminent writers who keep America in world leadership in science and technology. He encourages independent rational thought; he writes about a wide range of arcana. His science and mathematics are pure logic, as are his essays on literature, religion and politics. His closing essay which asks 'Is socialism a dirty word?' is a gem so clear that only poltergeists and Coultergeists cannot see through it.
The charm of Gardner's writing is impeccable logic. In 'Was the Sinking of the Titanic Foretold?' he explains, "One of the most difficult of all problems involving scientific method is finding good ways to evaluate unusual patterns of data to determine if they are based on a law of nature or are no more than the normally expected anomalies of random coincidence."
Such rigorous logic makes anything Gardner writes a delight of impeccable fact. His monthly column in 'Scientific American' from 1956 to 1981 was one of the first items I read; this collection of 24 essays brings back fond memories of facts mathematical and otherwise which are eloquently and concisely explained. He is an American treasure, and this book is a gem of his wit, acumen and wisdom.
Gardner the Great November 11, 2009
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I was lucky to get to know Martin Gardner's writings when I was a kid. For me, Gardner will always be the guy who wrote the celebrated and long-running (25 years) monthly column "Mathematical Games", found in the back pages of _Scientific American_. It is true that Gardner didn't always confine himself strictly to mere mathematics; his column was the first introduction I got to the pictures of M. C. Escher, for instance. And the columns were not necessarily games, although games like Reversi were often featured. The wide-ranging subjects were not just an introduction to mathematics, broadly defined, but to the oddities and the beauties that mathematics might reveal. They also showed the enormous instructive power of puzzles. The columns are now collected in lots of books, and they will never go out of date. Gardner also annotated the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, and went on to annotate "Casey at the Bat" and "The Night Before Christmas". He wrote in different forums about science, hoaxes, literature, skepticism, magic, and religion. He has published over seventy books, and I learn in his latest, _When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations about This and That_ (Hill and Wang), that he is 94 years old, and resides in an assisted living home. And still writing! Thank goodness, he is still writing! His current book is a miscellany, reprints of pieces published in many arenas. "The only thing these scribblings have in common," he writes, "is that I wrote them all." That's good enough for me!
The essays herein cover a lot of territory. There is politics, like a chapter on Ann Coulter. "I never took Ann seriously until I read her fifth book, _Godless: The Church of Liberalism_." Coulter promotes Intelligent Design, which is religious creationism in as best a new scientific guise as it can muster. Coulter says that Christianity fuels everything she writes, so Gardner wants to know what sort of Christian she is, so she could inform us of the background for her insults against scientists. There is a review here of Frank Tipler's book _The Physics of Christianity_, and it is scathing about Tipler's belief that miracles are not supernatural events violating laws of science, but highly improbable natural events performed deliberately by God without such violations. Gardner reports sadly that this absurd book is not a hoax. Gardner is not an atheist; one of his chapters has a title borrowed from a similar one from Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not an Atheist". He believes in God, but is content to confess "... that I have no basis whatever for my belief in God other than a passionate longing that God exists and that I and others will not cease to exist." He also confesses that this is a leap of faith that he understands "as little as I understand the essence of a photon." There are a couple of "Mathematical Games" style chapters, one about the Fibonacci sequence (always fertile ground for recreational math) and one on tiling chessboards with L-shaped tiles. The title of his book comes from the 1895 poem "Evolution", the only poem ever published by Langdon Smith, about whom Gardner knows more than anyone in the world, and knows next to nothing because no one besides him has taken much interest in Smith. "Evolution" is a sweet, comic, romantic poem of 108 lines. It starts:
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish,
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.
And by the time of the last verse, the couple are sitting at Delmonico's and toasting their evolution from amphibians to mammals and to hominids, quite a performance. In the chapter "Why I Am Not a Paranormalist", Gardner excoriates the astrological beliefs of President and Mrs. Reagan and the support of the teaching of creationism by President George W. Bush. A chapter on Isaac Newton reminds us that as great as his writings were on physics and mathematics, he wrote a lot more about alchemy and about his strange religious beliefs, including his opposition to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. "What else might he have discovered," wonders Gardner, "had he not squandered his energy and talents on alchemy and Biblical exegesis!" If you are already a Gardner fan, you don't need to be told to get this book; if you are not yet, here is a perfect introduction to the broad interests and sharp, entertaining writing of a great American original.
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