Measuring earthquakes, regenerating brains and conquering space.

By Science
Sunday, March 4, 2007

RICHTER'S SCALE Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a ManBy Susan Elizabeth Hough Princeton Univ. 335 pp. $27.95

If you asked Americans to name a single seismologist, most would almost certainly name the same person: Charles Francis Richter, the man who devised a scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes across the globe. In her new Richter's Scale, Susan Elizabeth Hough explores his personal and professional arc, which began at the turn of the 20th century and ended in 1985.

This thoughtful, well-researched book explores a central question: why Richter -- an admittedly quirky, plainspoken scientist -- became so much better known than some of his more accomplished colleagues. Many earthquake researchers believe that fellow Caltech seismologist Beno Gutenberg deserves just as much credit for developing the Richter scale, and even Richter himself acknowledged in a 1979 interview that the label "somewhat underrates Gutenberg's part in developing it for further use." But as Hough notes, public scientific acclaim often involves a paradox: Some of the most gifted scientists "are not necessarily the ones who make the most profound, or the most enduring, contributions. Nor are they necessarily the ones whose contributions capture the public imagination, or the ones whose contributions have the largest societal impact." Richter's ability to communicate his findings with a general audience through the press, Hough demonstrates, gave him the kind of public profile that cemented his position in the popular lexicon.

The fact that Hough is a seismologist herself shows in her mastery of the science underpinning Richter's work and occasionally in her prose, which includes more than a few clichés. But the author deserves credit for delving into Richter's letters, poems and scientific papers to understand her complicated subject. She not only explains that he was an avid poet and nudist but shows how this "nerd among nerds" found his first intimate circle of friends within the nudist colony he frequented with his wife. Above all, Richter's Scale provides an honest assessment of a researcher who, when faced with a radio show caller who asked him what to do about her fear of earthquakes, replied without missing a beat, "Why don't you get the hell out of the state?"

-- Juliet Eilperin

THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain ScienceBy Norman Doidge Viking. 427 pp. $24.95

Not long ago, the suggestion that parts of the human brain could take on functions "controlled" by other parts was scientific blasphemy. In The Brain That Changes Itself, psychiatrist Norman Doidge chronicles the experiences of researchers and patients that he says prove the brain's "plasticity" -- its unique ability to recover from injury or even disuse. The brain is not the hard-wired machine that science once supposed it to be, Doidge shows, but a continually changing organ with an amazing power to rejuvenate itself.

Most of us think of brain recovery in terms of restoring movement to stroke victims. Doidge, who teaches at Columbia University and the University of Toronto, goes well beyond that, showing how people with autism, compulsions and even the motor and memory lapses of old age improve dramatically through therapies that "rewire" their brains. A scientist with a magician-like mirrored box that ends the torture of phantom-limb pain in amputees, a woman plagued with a constant loss of balance, a man whose son helps him recover from a stroke by teaching him the way we would teach a baby -- all link scientific experimentation with personal triumph in a way that inspires awe for the brain, and for these scientists' faith in its capacity.

Unfortunately, in describing such quests, Doidge relies too heavily on narration and editorializing. When he lets his subjects speak, his iconoclastic scientists and triumphant patients tell their stories better than he does. In describing stroke recovery, Doidge spends pages on a researcher's troubles stemming from his work with monkeys -- which, though appalling, sacrifices space better spent on the man's rather considerable achievements. In his heavily Freudian chapter about how learned experience affects love, Doidge dwells too long on pornography addiction and sexual deviance, clouding an otherwise fascinating, even moving story on the physiology of emotion.

Overall, however, The Brain That Changes Itself is a valuable compilation of work that seeks to prove the unsung adaptability of our most mysterious organ. Readers will want to read entire sections aloud and pass the book on to someone who can benefit from it.

-- Elizabeth Williamson

SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST The Evolutionary Origins of BeliefBy Lewis Wolpert Norton. 243 pp. $25.95

How can the same species that is able to send itself to the moon and read out the entire message of its genome also believe in ghosts (30 percent of Americans) and think that human beings were directly created by God (65 percent)?

Lewis Wolpert, a distinguished developmental biologist at University College, London, takes on that question in this semi-slim volume (whose arresting title comes from one of the White Queen's responses to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, urging the girl to work harder at believing in the absurd). I wish I could say he provides a good answer. His discursive book is peppered with interesting facts and observations about biology, psychology and religion (and also with a fair number of non sequiturs), but it doesn't hold together as a coherent argument. In the end, the book offers little more than the repeated observation that a lot of weird ideas and practices exist in the world and that most people, including some very intelligent and rational ones, believe in some of them.

Wolpert makes one particularly interesting argument, however. It's that technology is the evolutionary wellspring of the believing brain. Using tools, he writes, "requires a deep understanding of the physics of the human body" and of the body's interaction with the environment over both space and time. "Making a tool requires a concept of cause and effect of which no animals other than humans are capable." The mental capacity to understand causes and effects, Wolpert argues, is then applied to events that hand-held mechanics can't explain: the change of seasons, natural disasters, illness and death. Beliefs -- that is, ideas for which there is incomplete evidence -- then result.

And those who hold them have an evolutionary advantage. "I think that religious beliefs were adaptive for two main reasons: they provided explanations for important events, and offered prayer as a way of dealing with difficulties," Wolpert writes. "Those with such beliefs most likely did better, and so were selected for."

Wolpert is a thoroughly secular man, clearly amazed at how many ridiculous things people believe. But he lacks the shrillness and intolerance of his fellow biologist and skeptic Richard Dawkins, author of last year's bestselling The God Delusion. Wolpert writes, almost sweetly, on his last page: "While we may be hostile to the beliefs of others, we need always to remember that it is having beliefs that makes us human."

-- David Brown

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON The Magnificent Madness of The American Lunar QuestBy Gerard J. DeGroot New York Univ. 300 pp. $29.95

As the United States revs up the engines for a return to the moon by 2020 and further travel to Mars, a solid look at the costs and benefits of the nation's earlier experiences with lunar exploration seems especially timely. Was Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" in July 1969 worth the billions spent to make it happen? Did it fire the imagination in any long-lasting and positive way that subsequent unmanned missions could not? One might expect that Dark Side of the Moon, Gerard J. DeGroot's new look at the Apollo space missions of the 1960s and '70s, would offer valuable insights into these questions. Unfortunately, it does not.

From its first pages, the book bristles with hostility toward virtually everything associated with America's drive to the moon. The lunar quest that DeGroot, a historian at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, describes is scientifically barren, unconscionably costly and absurdly risky -- little more than an ill-conceived Cold War race to outshine the Russians in space. The semi-heroes of the book are President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw no reason to race into space, and Alexei Leonov, the cosmonaut of the 1960s and '70s tapped to lead the first Soviet mission to the moon, who is liberally quoted saying enlightened things -- including recalling that his fellow cosmonauts applauded when Armstrong first touched the lunar surface. The goats are just about everyone else -- especially John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Walter Cronkite (a great space buff) and the leadership of NASA.

There certainly was a lot of hyperbole associated with America's early trips to the moon, but by focusing so relentlessly on the "dark side" of the quest, the author becomes blind to its wonder and value. There is, of course, no "dark side" of the moon that never experiences sunshine. There is a far side that we never see. But it, too, is sometimes bathed in light.

-- Marc Kaufman

The reviewers are Washington Post staff writers who cover science and national affairs.