A theme to theme jumping game
This book is a journey guided by many themes. The first page is the beginning of an article on sulfuric acid and the last page is the end of an article on Louis Pasteur. And in the middle pages are introduced many other articles following a kind of thread.
It relates sulfuric acid to medieval scientist Geber, whose original name is Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan. Geber, with the "stone of the philosophers" of the alchemists. The stone of the philosophers, with Paracelsus. And so, jumping from one subject to another, Pedro Gómez Esteban, author of the book, has elaborated a succession of articles until ending the article on Louis Pasteur.
In this way, it brings chemistry, history, physics, medicine and many other fields to this text of more than 200 pages.
In the preamble he recognizes that this way of linking the themes occurred to him when he saw the BBC Connections series. In this series, presenter James Burke showed many discoveries, with little time assigned to each (according to Gomez-Esteban, without getting enough time to get bored), and highlighted the relationships between different subjects. That was precisely the thesis of Connections, which from the historical point of view all things are related to each other.
The article has not been written by Gomez-Esteban to complete the book. They are the entries of your scientific outreach blog. It is a collection of articles written for years. The blog is called The Sieve (http://www.eltamiz.com/) and the section that collects these articles has the same title as the book Talking about...
The author continues to write for the succession of articles, but in book format he has only published the first twenty. The section has not ended. The issues have not been exhausted. In fact, the last sentence of the final article is as follows: "But we have mentioned silk... (will continue in the next book)." Therefore, the first article in the following collection will be dedicated to silk.
The book has not made the usual way for publishers. It can only be purchased online at the Lulu digital store (http://www.lulu.com/).
The author, Pedro Gomez-Esteban, is a physicist and teacher and from the point of view of disclosure has two main characteristics: he understands very well the topics and explains very well what is understood. In fact, the philosophy of the blog El Tamiz is summarized in the phrase that Gomez-Esteban often uses: "More than incomprehensible, more than simplistic." Speaking of... the book offers a good opportunity to affirm in the articles that addresses this philosophy.
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