Armchair Science is a Kindle ebook available at Amazon. It contains over 120 short mysteries of science that can be solved from a single observational clue, without the need for experimentation.
Science is not a collection of facts. Science is what facts teach us; what we can learn about our universe, and ourselves, by deductive thinking. From observations of the night sky, made without the aid of telescopes, we can deduce that the universe is expanding, that the universe is not infinitely old, and why black holes exist. Without resorting to experimentation or mathematical analysis, we can deduce that gravity is a curvature in space-time, that the particles that compose light have no mass, that there is a theoretical limit to the number of different elements in the universe, and that the earth is billions of years old. Likewise, simple observations on animals tell us much about the migration of continents, the evolutionary relationships among classes of animals, why the nuclei of cells contain our genetic material, why certain animals are long-lived, why the gestation period of humans is 9 months, and why some diseases are rare and other diseases are common. In “Armchair Science”, the reader is confronted with 129 scientific mysteries, in cosmology, particle physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Beginning with simple observations, step-by-step analyses guide the reader toward solutions that are sometimes startling, and always entertaining. “Armchair Science” is written for general readers who are curious about science, and who want to sharpen their deductive skills.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
Clue 60. Red cells have no nuclei.
Deduction. Genetic material must be located in the nucleus.
Illustration. Blood smear from patient with chronic myelogenous leukemia. There is an increase in white blood cells, with lobed nuclei. The red cells are much smaller than the white blood cells, with pallid interiors, and lacking a nucleus. Source: Panton PN, Clinical Pathology. P. Blakiston's Son and Company, Philadelphia, 1913.
Resolution. It seems second nature to us now, but at the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists did not know the chemical nature of genetic material. They correctly inferred the existence of genes, because they knew that some cellular constituent must convey inheritance from parent cells to daughter cells. They did not know the chemical nature of genes, and they did not know that genes resided in the nucleus. By 1910, Thomas Hunt Morgan had demonstrated that genes live in chromosomes, in the nucleus, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize, in 1933.
In retrospect, it would seem that scientists should have suspected, all along, that genes reside in the nucleus of cells, simply by observing that red blood cells have no nucleus.
The red blood cell is a highly specialized cell, designed to squeeze through tiny capillaries, as it carries oxygen throughout the body. Basically, a red blood cell is an elastic, but durable bag of hemoglobin. Red blood cells do not divide; they live for about 120 days, and then they die, to be replaced by new red blood cells produced by stem cells of erythroid lineage. During the development of the mature red blood cell, the nucleus dissolves; from this point on, the red cell has no chance of dividing. It seems reasonable to suppose that if all the dividing cells of the red cell lineage contain nuclei, while the non-dividing cell of the red cell lineage lacks a nucleus, then the nucleus must carry the cell's heritable information (i.e., the genes).
I urge you to read more about this book. There's a good "look inside" of the book at the Amazon store.
- Jules J. Berman, Ph.D., M.D.
tags: deductive science, science mysteries, deductive reasoning, ebook, general science reading, general science book, science puzzles, scientific amusements
