Reviews for Science A Closer Look, Grade 2: Earth Science [Teacher's Edition]

The average rating for Science A Closer Look, Grade 2: Earth Science [Teacher's Edition] based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-10-03 00:00:00 Jonathan Duff Chaos: The Tip of a Giant Iceberg Gleick only gives an introduction about the actual science and beauty of Chaos. Instead he focusses on giving a poetic account of the scientists who first stumbled on it -- and their great surprise and their struggles form the narrative crux of the book. While some may say this makes it a less informative book, for me this made it one of the most intriguing non-fiction books I have read. Gleick's way of telling the stories makes the reader share in the wonder and incredulity of each pioneer as he stumbled upon this hitherto unguessed truth of nature. Each stumbling step, each misguided attempt and every remonstration expected in such a new endeavor is traced out in loving detail and these scientists come alive as insecure dramers daring to step beyond the realms of the possible. Gleick makes heroes out of Mandelbrot Benoît and the others and weaves an otherworldly charm around their ideas. This made the book pure poetry for me. The amazing pictures and illustrations and the quotes accompanying each chapter all add to the feeling of reading an art text book rather than a science book. And this ultimately was the real achievement of Gleick in writing Chaos - He manages to convey to us that this is the first foray of science into the realm of art - not just of explaining art but of being art. But ultimately none of this is going to be the lasting impact of this book. The reading pleasure and the hero worship of these daredevils is transient after all. For me, the real impact is that it has changed the way I look at the ordinary everyday world - the leaves, the trees, the pebbles, the pattern on the peels of an orange - everything is strangely magnified and beautiful now. I see the poetry of constant motion and evolution everywhere and I can feel the science of Chaos intuitively as I take my long walks. I can see Strange Attractors and Fractals and unstable equilibriums in the most mundane places. And this is the greatest gift of the book. P.S. Don't miss out on the exhaustive endnotes. They are indispensable.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-12-10 00:00:00 Matthew Sarratt "The future is disorder." ― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” ― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia Half of what draws me to physics, to theory, to Feynman and Fermat, to Wittgenstein and Weber, is the energy that boils beyond the theory. The force living just beyond the push. I'm not alone. Many of my favorite authors (Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) and musicians (Mahler, Beethoven, etc) all dance around this same wicked fire. This burn of the natural world, this magic of the unknown, is what draws me to read physics and philosophy as an absolute amature. There are pieces and fractures in these books that actually DON'T escape me. They hit my brain and spin and keep spinning forever. I imagine this is something felt also by Gleick, one of the top tier science writers out there. My big grievance with this book is it falls too short. His narrative is compelling, yes, the stories are interesting, sure, but he doesn't grab the central characters as well as a new journalist like John McPhee does. He floats too far above the actual science and complexity. He shows you pictures and dances around the pools of chaos and clouds of complexity, but never actually puts the reader INTO the churning water or shoots the reader into energized, cumuliform heaps. This is a book for an advanced HS senior or an average college Freshman. It is pop-science and definitely has its place. This is a book that is more about translating the story of the science (not the science) for NOT the layman, but really the lazy layman. That is probably one of the reasons it did so well. Anyway, I'm glad I read it, but just wish it was deeper, thicker, and way less predictable.