Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

I’ve managed to go through several books lately – a semi-rare thing of late, especially considering that they are not computer books – and up until now I haven’t had much of a chance to talk about them. So, here we go...

The Mummy Congress, by Heather Pringle
Just finished this one off. I picked this up from a local bookstore prior to heading off to Montreal for the weekend, and managed to finish much of it off on the trips to and from Montreal. I have always been fascinated with the subject of mummies, and I suspect few people out there are not (though they may not readily admit it). This book provides a rough overview of what the latest in mummy research, and provides a veritable who’s who of researchers in the field.

The book begins with a trip to the eponymous congress, which is held every few years in various places around the world. The author is a general science writer, with published articles in magazines like Discovery, who heard about this congress from a researcher in the field, and she could tell from the gleam in his eye that this was something she had to see for herself. The author then goes on to look at mummy research around the world, ranging from a rather somber dismemberment of mummies in aide of medical research in a remote desert region in Egypt, to the bog bodies of Northern Europe, the eerie Chinchoro mummies created more than a thousand years before the earliest Egyptian mummies, to the latest efforts of cryogenicists. Along the way you run into a bunch of different characters, mainly medical professionals who all seem to share a passion for mummies – I was a little bit surprised to see a bunch of names I recognized whose efforts had been portrayed in various documentaries I’ve seen on The Discovery Channel. The book also looks into the subject of how mummies have aided medical research, how the dead have been used by the living for their own purposes time and time again (including a fascinating chapter dealing with a mummy “researcher” and slavery issues in the pre-Civil War American South). I would have liked a book with a bit more depth, though I recognize that such a book would have been at least twice as long. A very good current overview of the subject, and a tantalizing glimpse into the lives of the long dead.

There is a somewhat meager web site by the author that might interest readers of the book. Not much more in the way of material, though there are some interesting pictures to see.

The Dragon Seekers, by Christopher McGowan
I finished this book off while in Montreal. I first heard about it from a Quirks and Quarks show earlier this year, and knew I had to get it. It talks about the early days of the dinosaur hunters in England, and how their successive discoveries in the field eventually added more and more weight to Darwin’s evolutionary theories (the subtitle of the book illustrates this point: “How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin”) – much to the dismay of several of the researchers, who would be classified as “creationists” in today’s terminology. Probably the single most fascinating character is that of Mary Anning, a woman who became a legendary fossilist in an age that offered few opportunities for women. I remember first hearing about her story while on a visit to the Natural History Museum in London, where one of her plesiosaur skeletons was on display adjacent to a small plaque commemorating her life, depicting a small picture of a woman in early Victorian garb. Then there’s the Gideon Mantell, the country doctor with a passion for fossils who sought recognition and advancement through his paleontological achievements. Or the decidedly eccentric Thomas Hawkins (he sued his landlord over a strawberry eaten by a visitor), who expertly fabricated missing pieces for some of his ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons, which led to questions in the house of commons (oddly enough, the book expands on this story which I first heard in Trilobyte, read only a couple of months or so ago). Part of the fascination for me is the glimpse into early Victorian scientific studies and the accompanying social fabric in which these people lived, and the increasingly Byzantine logic used to set discoveries within the scope of the Noachian flood and other biblical events. In fact the evolutionary link to Darwin is almost tacked on as a convenient conclusion to the tale in a single chapter, though the book picks away at the increasingly inventive creationist theories by its protagonists. A fun read, though again I would have liked more depth, especially in knowing more about the lives of the fossilized creatures whose bones played such pivotal roles in the book. The book is also somewhat isolationist, looking only at British researchers, while I am aware that major discoveries were being made in America at roughly the same time. Still, a fascinating read for people interested in the history of science.

Another reason I purchased this book is that it is by a Canadian author, who happens to work at the University of Toronto and does work for the R.O.M.

Just Six Numbers, by Martin Rees
I picked this book up from a sale at the local Oakville Library, and breezed through it in just a few days. It’s less than a couple hundred pages, but it is a fascinating read.

Rees is Britain's Astronomer Royal, and in this book he looks at the Universal constants that have shaped the Universe: the force that binds atomic nuclei, the strength of gravity divided by the forces that bind atoms together, the number of spatial dimensions in the Universe, the density of matter in the Universe, the number defining the “smoothness” with which material is spread throughout the Universe, and the value defining the energy in “empty” space – six numbers in total. Rees makes his way through the implications of each of these numbers, looking at how even the minutest variation in some of them would lead to profound implications for the development of the Universe, and ultimately leads to the conclusion that we exist in this Universe only because it is relatively friendly to the development of life. He does not take a Deist viewpoint on this, but instead postulates that there may be other “alternate” Universes where these 6 numbers vary, leading to barren or abortive Universes.

While this book was only written a couple of years ago, I was aware that the book is already getting somewhat dated, thanks to the most recent discoveries in astrophysics, one of which I ran across while reading the book. Still, it provides a good overview of its subject, and was another highly enjoyable, though too brief, read.