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 98. Many animals, particularly insects, go through distinctive stages of life.
Illustration. Life cycle of the Schistosomes that infect humans. Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Deduction. Each stage of life of such organisms occupies a separate ecological niche.
Resolution. We humans think of ourselves as the most complex form of life on the planet. This is most certainly not the case. Many organisms pass through a series of distinctive life forms as they mature from embryo to adult. For example, all insects of order Endopterygota pass through four life stages: embryo, larva, pupa, and adult. Each stage is morphologically and physiologically distinct from the other stages. Imagine the genetic complexity required to accomplish this life cycle! Moreover, the Endopterygota are not the only animals to have a complex life cycle. Nematodes (roundworms), trematodes (flatworms) have such life cycles. Even one-celled protists, such as the Apicomplexans, can boast a more complex life cycle than we humans.
Why do so many organisms have a complex, multi-stage life-cycle? The answer almost certainly relates to the distribution of resources. The different stages of these organisms have different diets, different hosts, different modes of travel (e.g., flight, crawl, or passive transport by hosts), and different survival options (e.g., cyst, tissue invasion). In short, each stage of a complex life cycle occupies its own ecological niche that does not compete with the other life cycle stages. With each stage of the life-cycle, the organism is brought closer and closer to the adult stage, in which a new generation of eggs is created; and thus the cycle of life repeats.
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
