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Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos – How Physics, Cosmology, and Astronomy Relate to Art, Politics, and Human Society
The universe comes down to earth in K. C. Cole's Mind Over Matter, a fresh and witty exploration of physics, cosmology, mathematics, astronomy, and more. Like no other science writer, Cole demystifies scientific concepts and humanizes the people who study them. Beginning with a discussion of how "the mind creates reality as well as muddles it," she then peeks into the stories behind science's great minds and into their playful side, and concludes by illuminating the relationship between science and society. Cole's remarkable work brings science to the reader's doorstep, revealing the universe to be elegant, intriguing, and relevant to politics, art, and every dimension of human life.
319 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
50 people are currently reading
139 people want to read
About the author
K.C. Cole
14 books37 followersFor the past ten years, K.C. Cole has been a science writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times; she has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, Discover, Newsweek, Newsday, Esquire, Ms., People and many other publications. Her articles were featured in The Best American Science Writing 2004 and 2005 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002. She has also been an editor at Discover and Newsday.
Cole is the author of several nonfiction books, including Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos; The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything; and The Universe and the Teacup, the Mathematics of Truth and Beauty.
Cole is the author of several nonfiction books, including Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos; The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything; and The Universe and the Teacup, the Mathematics of Truth and Beauty.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 20, 2014
If you know science well and think quickly and shallowly and like to skim over the surface of ideas, you may enjoy this book. This book is composed of short, two- to three-page chapters. It was extremely slow reading for me because it seemed choppy and shallow. I kept trying to see deeper, but no luck.
One example: there is one sentence stating that Archimedes discovered principles of floating. I thought he discovered how mass displaces water. In other words, if you sit in a bathtub, the water level will rise. I don't know what the author meant about floating, there is only the one sentence. The whole book is like that.
To me, there were only quick, shallow references to physics and science which were often confusing. I wanted some connecting explanations between the sentences, and more depth. (I studied a lot of science and math and even once received a cash award for having the highest grades in math and science over 3 years of study.)
I love science and math, but to me, most of this book was a bunch of superficial conclusive sentences which often did not relate to one another.
If you have watched a lot of television, you may have the type of hyperactive mind that will enjoy the mental soundbites.
One example: there is one sentence stating that Archimedes discovered principles of floating. I thought he discovered how mass displaces water. In other words, if you sit in a bathtub, the water level will rise. I don't know what the author meant about floating, there is only the one sentence. The whole book is like that.
To me, there were only quick, shallow references to physics and science which were often confusing. I wanted some connecting explanations between the sentences, and more depth. (I studied a lot of science and math and even once received a cash award for having the highest grades in math and science over 3 years of study.)
I love science and math, but to me, most of this book was a bunch of superficial conclusive sentences which often did not relate to one another.
If you have watched a lot of television, you may have the type of hyperactive mind that will enjoy the mental soundbites.
July 18, 2019
Science made readable, relevant and enjoyable
In this collection of mostly columns that she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, science writer K.C. Cole relies on her wide reading in science, and on her interviews and friendships with scientists as a basis for appreciations, observations, interpretations, reports, and just plain musings on science and how science is transforming the planet. Employing a style that ranges from gossip column cute to poetic, Cole (who teaches at my alma mater UCLA) works hard to make science as relevant to the general public as the personalities in, say, People magazine, and just as accessible.
The task in writing about science is making it intelligible without dumbing it down or making simplistic statements that are not accurate. Cole recognizes this problem; indeed in reading these small essays (almost all are under a thousand words) I can feel her struggling mightily to get it just right: to make her expression as accurate as possible and as readable. She muses on these problems in the final essay, entitled, "Oops!" in which she confesses to some slips including confabulating Caltech physicist Robert Millikan with junk bond king Michael Milken. Ah, yes, I know well that sort of error, having stumbled thereabouts myself a time or two!
But it is not her ability to popularize science (by the way, she is now doing pieces for National Public Radio) that impresses me about Cole. It's her ability to understand science and its place in society that sets her apart from other writers. She is especially good at relating science to the social, political and personal worlds in which we live. Indeed, Part IV of this book is entitled "Political" Science with just the "Political" in quotes emphasizing that Cole is talking about both the internal political affairs of science and how the political world in general affects science and how science affects the political world. Some of the best essays in the book are from this section.
In "Dreamers," beginning on page 269, for example, Cole laments the loss of funding for some science projects (e.g., particle physics, the mission to Europa) as money is being redirected toward the wars on terror, drugs, and cancer--"missiles and medicine." She understands the pragmatic view of politicians who want tangible results from grants and under writings, but makes the powerful point that it is the "dreamers in the hinterlands who often come up with the most practical inventions." She directs our attention to PET scans, magnetic imaging, and laser surgery, all products of dreamers. But most saliently she recalls the physicists behind the development of the atom bomb, "dreamers" like Einstein and Oppenheimer. She notes that Germany might have won that war had Hitler been able to keep most of the German and Austrian scientists from fleeing to the United States. It is one of the great and most delicious ironies of history that so-called "Jewish" science helped to defeat the Nazis.
In "Unnatural" (p. 291) she addresses the controversy about genetically modified foods, noting first that seemingly unnatural plastic is mostly made from petroleum products, natural "plant matter that brewed for millions of years in the bowels of the earth"; and second that we have been modifying foods since the pre-history. ("You could even say that falling in love is nature's way of genetically modifying the species.") In conclusion she makes one of my favorite arguments: "We evolve...There's nothing special about this particular point in the history of any species--corn, humans or dogs. We're all on our way from someplace, going somewhere."
I've read this argument elsewhere and indeed have presented it myself, but nowhere have I read it put so succinctly well. We are NOT an unchanging construction (as from a creator God); instead we are a perpetually evolving entity, immersed in, and part of, an ever changing cosmos.
Some things learned: why Brazil nuts rise to the top in cans of mixed nuts (p. 117); there is a human wave of wake-up calls constantly going around the earth as we travel in our mind's eye with the sunlight though the time zones (p. 204); a comet or meteorite impact on the scale of the one that hit Siberia in 1908 happens about once every hundred years (p. 295); you can't get a suntan indoors because glass is opaque to ultraviolet light.
And much more.
I have read three of Cole's previous books and reviewed two of them (First You Build a Cloud: And Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life 1999 and The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything 2001) and I read every essay in this book and can say this is her best work. I found almost all of her arguments agreeable and informed, very well and gently expressed. I was fascinated at how her distinctive style--sometimes cute (sometimes too cute!) but often understated--partially obscures her nimble and trenchant intellect. Cole knows science and she knows why science matters, why it matters more than we can know, and she works hard at getting that message across to a sometimes reluctant public.
Science writers are as necessary to the modern world as electricity is to our homes. In some places in the world there is neither. We are lucky to be able to turn on the lights and to read someone as lucid and pertinent as K.C. Cole.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
In this collection of mostly columns that she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, science writer K.C. Cole relies on her wide reading in science, and on her interviews and friendships with scientists as a basis for appreciations, observations, interpretations, reports, and just plain musings on science and how science is transforming the planet. Employing a style that ranges from gossip column cute to poetic, Cole (who teaches at my alma mater UCLA) works hard to make science as relevant to the general public as the personalities in, say, People magazine, and just as accessible.
The task in writing about science is making it intelligible without dumbing it down or making simplistic statements that are not accurate. Cole recognizes this problem; indeed in reading these small essays (almost all are under a thousand words) I can feel her struggling mightily to get it just right: to make her expression as accurate as possible and as readable. She muses on these problems in the final essay, entitled, "Oops!" in which she confesses to some slips including confabulating Caltech physicist Robert Millikan with junk bond king Michael Milken. Ah, yes, I know well that sort of error, having stumbled thereabouts myself a time or two!
But it is not her ability to popularize science (by the way, she is now doing pieces for National Public Radio) that impresses me about Cole. It's her ability to understand science and its place in society that sets her apart from other writers. She is especially good at relating science to the social, political and personal worlds in which we live. Indeed, Part IV of this book is entitled "Political" Science with just the "Political" in quotes emphasizing that Cole is talking about both the internal political affairs of science and how the political world in general affects science and how science affects the political world. Some of the best essays in the book are from this section.
In "Dreamers," beginning on page 269, for example, Cole laments the loss of funding for some science projects (e.g., particle physics, the mission to Europa) as money is being redirected toward the wars on terror, drugs, and cancer--"missiles and medicine." She understands the pragmatic view of politicians who want tangible results from grants and under writings, but makes the powerful point that it is the "dreamers in the hinterlands who often come up with the most practical inventions." She directs our attention to PET scans, magnetic imaging, and laser surgery, all products of dreamers. But most saliently she recalls the physicists behind the development of the atom bomb, "dreamers" like Einstein and Oppenheimer. She notes that Germany might have won that war had Hitler been able to keep most of the German and Austrian scientists from fleeing to the United States. It is one of the great and most delicious ironies of history that so-called "Jewish" science helped to defeat the Nazis.
In "Unnatural" (p. 291) she addresses the controversy about genetically modified foods, noting first that seemingly unnatural plastic is mostly made from petroleum products, natural "plant matter that brewed for millions of years in the bowels of the earth"; and second that we have been modifying foods since the pre-history. ("You could even say that falling in love is nature's way of genetically modifying the species.") In conclusion she makes one of my favorite arguments: "We evolve...There's nothing special about this particular point in the history of any species--corn, humans or dogs. We're all on our way from someplace, going somewhere."
I've read this argument elsewhere and indeed have presented it myself, but nowhere have I read it put so succinctly well. We are NOT an unchanging construction (as from a creator God); instead we are a perpetually evolving entity, immersed in, and part of, an ever changing cosmos.
Some things learned: why Brazil nuts rise to the top in cans of mixed nuts (p. 117); there is a human wave of wake-up calls constantly going around the earth as we travel in our mind's eye with the sunlight though the time zones (p. 204); a comet or meteorite impact on the scale of the one that hit Siberia in 1908 happens about once every hundred years (p. 295); you can't get a suntan indoors because glass is opaque to ultraviolet light.
And much more.
I have read three of Cole's previous books and reviewed two of them (First You Build a Cloud: And Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life 1999 and The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything 2001) and I read every essay in this book and can say this is her best work. I found almost all of her arguments agreeable and informed, very well and gently expressed. I was fascinated at how her distinctive style--sometimes cute (sometimes too cute!) but often understated--partially obscures her nimble and trenchant intellect. Cole knows science and she knows why science matters, why it matters more than we can know, and she works hard at getting that message across to a sometimes reluctant public.
Science writers are as necessary to the modern world as electricity is to our homes. In some places in the world there is neither. We are lucky to be able to turn on the lights and to read someone as lucid and pertinent as K.C. Cole.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
December 20, 2012
I've never read anyone else so skilled at making science transparent to the lay person. I didn't like this as much as the book of hers I read last year, however, ("The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty"), purely I think because this book is much shorter, choppier pieces (most taken, I believe, from her columns in the Los Angeles Times). That said, I thought the last section " 'Political' Science" was very powerful and very right on the money. There's no bullshitting here.
March 12, 2008
Conversations with the cosmos! Comprised of short articles by K.C. Cole published in the LA times.
December 20, 2022
an extra star, cause it's witty & funny without sacrificing any details, for the lay reader.
Still it's approach in the Physics spectrum, is rather rudimentary, but on the other hand, it's guaranteed to spark an interest of people, who are outside of the field, while simultaneously it gives a trove of details (mashed up, still stms on advanced ideas) for the scientist, who wants a relaxing read, on his porch, while sipping some tea.
Still it's approach in the Physics spectrum, is rather rudimentary, but on the other hand, it's guaranteed to spark an interest of people, who are outside of the field, while simultaneously it gives a trove of details (mashed up, still stms on advanced ideas) for the scientist, who wants a relaxing read, on his porch, while sipping some tea.
May 2, 2018
I thought this was a very interesting compilation of short and informative essays about the space we occupy and more.
January 22, 2008
This book is really cute. I has short little essays on topcis such as "Interference" or "Love" or "Clouds" where KC Cole draws analogies from real life to explain the cosmos. I read a chapter everytime I use the bathroom :P and find its contents inspirational and neat to think about, and despite its simplicity, the clarity of the writing borderlines poetic.
June 22, 2009
Great writer and interesting, make-you-think topics. While reading this book I started most days with one or two of these science essays before getting out of bed. K.C. Cole used to write for the LA Times.
March 10, 2013
An excellent and entertaining book for anyone interested in science, especially physics. The author, K.C. Cole does a fantastic job in drawing her readers with very engaging anecdotes from everyday life that are beautifully weaved into the fabric of their connections to science.
July 4, 2009
She's a terrific writer--and a great person.
November 28, 2016
Really enjoyed the well-written prose, and the essays' length (3-4 pages each) was perfect for reading one or two before bed.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews