James Burke (1) (1936–)

The pinball metaphor of the title is very apt, as James Burke sends readers of this book bouncing through history -- mostly the history of science and technology -- in truly a dizzying fashion, connecting events and ideas together through links that range from obvious to tenuous. The first chapter, for example, starts out with the invention of the permanent wave hair treatment, takes a surprisingly small step from there to borax mining, moves on through the California gold rush to Yankee show more clipper ships, the Irish potato famine, British trade restrictions, the invention of the postage stamp, French economic reforms, the building of canals and aqueducts, trench warfare, the American revolution, the rise of steamships and the advent of the luxury liner. All in the course 22 pages. And that's probably one of the simpler chapters; there's a lot less science in it than most.

Burke's stated goal is to make readers appreciate the intricate, interconnected web of history, and I do think he manages that fairly well. He also does a good job of presenting scientific and technological discovery as the messy, gradual, often partly accidental process that it is. And many of the historical and scientific tidbits he discusses here are important, or interesting, or both. Unfortunately, though, this kind of rapid careening from subject to subject can get more than a little disorienting and doesn't lead to a truly satisfying understanding of anything. It's pretty much the print equivalent of browsing around Wikipedia and following a new link every few minutes. Considering that this book was published in 1996, maybe Burke deserves some credit for creating the experience of random-walking through Wikipedia well before Wikipedia existed. In fact, he even includes notes at many points in each chapter indicating which bits of other chapters they can be linked into, and invites the reader to flip back and forth and skip around. I'd be very surprised if anybody did, though. This sort of thing pretty much requires hypertext to work properly. I guess maybe Burke was just a bit ahead of his time. show less

When James Burke's new series started on PBS, I had been back in school for a while. My first semester back, I took a course called the "History of Science to 1600," purely on speculation. I had always loved both science and history, and I had become an avowed medievalist during my long absence from the halls of academe, so ... sure! It sounds interesting.

Suddenly, here on my television was the Connections man, James Burke himself, talking about my newest love. Oh, he didn't call it show more "history of science," because if he had he would have never gotten more than a handful of people to watch. But he was talking about things I'd learned about in my classes.

This would have been a fascinating program even if I hadn't studied the subject. Burke always had a way of taking the complex and dumbing it down just enough to let everyone feel brilliant when they comprehended what he was talking about. At the same time, he kept his topics well-enough written that those of us who knew something about it interesting.

The Day the Universe Changed has a one-word central theme: "Epistemology," the study of how we know what we know. It isn't so much about the hows and whys of our knowledge as it is what we did about it before, during and after we figured it out. This is exciting stuff, at least it can be. When we understand how we learn, it's easier not only to apply both what we've learned but also how to build on it to learn more. [I know, I've just gotten kind of confusing, haven't I?]

In any case, if you can find a copy of either this book or the series itself, I think it's worth revisiting. You might find out that learning, in and of itself, is rewarding and fascinating work. And, then, you might go on to discoveries much great than you ever thought existed. show less

This book surveys the broad expanse of human history through the lens of a single, powerful argument: that from the time the earliest humans fashioned stone axes tens of thousands of years ago, humans have continually accepted the double-edged gift of new technology, using it to solve apparent problems and barriers, but in so doing creating new, unforeseen and often more severe problems than those that the technology solved.

As the authors see it, technology's power has been its danger as show more well. From the power of the first stone axes to cut the world up into pieces that could be more readily controlled and exploited, the unfolding development of technology has encouraged an increasing reductionism that has made it hard for humans to appreciate the damaging effects of their actions. Technology has also consistently deepened social inequalities, focusing power and wealth in the hands of those who understand and can use the new technologies, while excluding if not oppressing those who do not. At the dawn of the new millennium, the authors suggest that the seductiveness of the axemaker's gift presents humanity with the danger of so damaging the planet through anthropocentric global warming and other environmental damage that it may no longer be able to sustain human civilization.

The author's use of this simple argument to organize so much human history is, of course, itself an axe that cuts both ways. On the one hand, they have created a sweeping narrative that is never dull and is frequently dazzling in the fresh insights it brings to familiar historical events. They also manage to strike a nice balance between capturing the excitement of technological discovery while avoiding a naive techno-triumphalism. On the other hand, their reliance on a single, overarching argument forces them to limit their choice of historical material in a way that seems highly distorted. Moreover, their argument leads them to discuss inventors, designers, engineers and scientists from radically different historical periods, who worked in fundamentally different ways for fundamentally different purposes, as a single trans-historical group (the "axemakers"), contributing to a single process of technological development. Similarly, the chieftains, kings, presidents and other social elites who accepted and benefited most from the gifts of technology are seen as all engaged in the same project of world domination.

In short, this book is well worth reading for the insight it provides on human history. But, like the technology it describes, it should be read with equal consideration for the history it distorts or ignores. show less

I never saw the PBS show, though I had heard plenty about it, and this book has been on my mental To Do list for quite a long time. A chance encounter in a second-hand bookstore was fortunate. If you're not familiar with it, Burke's book is about the inter-connectedness of technical and social progress...how one thing invariably begets another, sometimes in spite of the goals of those involved.

While you may or may not agree with his premise that individual genius is less important in show more technical progress than might be expected, and perhaps question some jumps he makes, I think you cannot help but be fascinated by this charting of history, not in terms of dates and kings, but in terms of innovation.

It is, perhaps, hard to imagine a history book being a page-turner, but that is exactly what this is. show less