The book has strangely become ever more interesting and comical. Well, comical in a kind of dark way. This section is mostly about the workings of the earth, including chemistry. Probably one of the most horrific things described in this section is about a guy named Thomas Midgley, Jr. who discovered that lead could be used to stop the "knocking" of an engine. Unfortunately, he also helped to discover the many other uses of lead including sealing cans, water storage tanks, fruit pesticide, and even part of packaging in toothpaste tubes. It's unfortunate that he discovered these things let alone that it became widely used. Also the company that produced lead for consumer usage, tried everything within their power to keep people unaware of the poisoning effects of lead. Also in this section, Bryson goes into detail about the discovery of the building blocks of matter. Personally it was kind of boring until he started to talk about how scientists thought there might be other dimensions and how on the atomic level, all of the general rules of matter that we know about the bigger world are completely different on this level. Bryson also talks about astroid and their effects that they have and have had on the planet. Probably more comically, he also talks about how most geologists avoided a theory were originally there was land mass (also known as pangea) and that many times throughout history the continents have moved and spinned around almost like a top, and so to avoid this theory geologists came up with land-bridges to explain how ancient fossils of animals ended up across an ocean, or across an ocean but on the other side of the continent facing away from the continent that also contain the ancient fossil. Wow, this is probably the funniest part in that none of the geologists could prove that these land-bridges existed. Bryson also talks about how scientists tried to understand what could have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Scientists guessed that it was caused by a giant meteor and as a result looked for a crater that would have proven to be massive enough to wipe out most of the dinosaurs. Also Bryson talked about the earth and the discovery of tectonic plates, and the layers of the earth. I assume that this topic is probably more interesting to most scientists because scientist have yet to find out exactly what is in the center of the earth or how the different mantles interact.
On a different note about the topic of the book, I am finding it difficult to answer any of the suggested topic questions from the packet- mainly because my book doesn't have a main plot line nor does it have any main characters. The only time it follows any form of a story is when Bryson talks about how a certain scientist discovered something, how and the story behind how the scientist made the discovery. I think I should've come up with better questions on my own.
1 comment:
1 really good out of 4 entries for 3/31/10.
I agree that you should make up your own topics--with the exceptions of the "how does the author..." questions, most questions on the list presume a narrative.
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