Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
Jason Roberts
Random House
Copyright 2024 by the author

The Scientific Revolution kept rolling on. The Copernican Revolution changed how we look at the universe. Isaac Newton crystallized several lines of inquiry into modern physics. Now it was time to tackle the life sciences.

Two geniuses would set things in motion by taking on the huge task of organizing and classifying living things. In Sweden, Carl Linnaeus was set on becoming a doctor, but he found the field of botany more fascinating. In France, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the self-styled Comte de Buffon, used a lucky inheritance to indulge his passion for “natural history”. A brief work in statistics (“Buffon’s Needle”) got him noticed, and soon he was picked to be the “superintendent” of the Royal Garden* in Paris, where he was given the task of cataloging the massive collections.

Roberts treats these two contemporaries with a dual biography, showing how they approached the matter of the abundance and variety of life from two different directions.

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Decoding the Heavens
A 2000-Year Old Computer – And the Century Long Search to Discover its Secrets
Jo Marchant
Da Capo Press
(c) 2009 by the author

I suppose that anyone interested in the history of science in the years BCE or archaeological oddities has heard of the Antikythera Mechanism. Found in a shipwreck off the coast of a Greek island, the box of gears and dials has been a puzzle and a marvel (a puzzling marvel?) for decades.

Marchant has dredged up the history of the device, from its collection off the Aegean seabed up through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Well, to be honest, the object itself hasn’t done much. It sat in storage in the National Museum of Athens for years before anyone decided to take a look at it. The museum – and the divers that worked on the wreck – were more interested in the statues and other objects of obvious value.

The Mechanism turned out to be a specialized device for computing the many lunar cycles – and possibly some dials that compute planetary positions as well (parts are still missing). Marchant doesn’t spend much time on the astronomy or mathematics behind it; she’s far more interested in the archaeology and personalities in its story.

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