Title:
The Pinball Effect
Subtitle:
How renaissance water gardens made the carburetor possible and other journeys through knowledge
Author:
James Burke
Publisher:
Little, Brown, and Company, 1996
ISBN
0-316-11602-6 (pb)

I think most USAns, and certainly most from the UK, are familiar with James Burke. He first appeared on our TV screens in 1979, in a series called "Connections". The program was incredibly popular, and still enjoys some demand 20 years later. (I find it strange how I never thought to remark that his clothes were odd, back in 1979.) A few years later he reappeared, this time doing a series entitled rather dramatically, "The Day the Universe Changed." Another ten years after that, there was "Connections2." Evidently, here is an idea that sells.

Each series presented pretty much the same premise: that the level of technology we enjoy today depends on a number of preceding inventions, discoveries, and ideas. Of itself that is a fairly obvious notion, and not one that might lead to lucrative TV contracts. However, Burke manages to dress up this basic premise with twists and turns, and in the end created a definitely intriguing proposition: that some amazing (or not so amazing) thing we have today may be connected to an apparently unrelated thing in the distant past. In the second series he takes that a step further, and implies that these connections might be world changing events.

These series were so successful, possibly in no small part due to Burke's infectious excitement, that he's now writing a monthly column for Scientific American. He's also written this book, which is much in the spirit of "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed." In The Pinball Effect Burke also uses a device meant to illustrate how technological innovations and scientific discoveries are connected, by footnoting such connections in the text, with a pointer at the other places in the text to which the connection is made. (It is a work-a-day version of hypertext, I suppose.)

The book is quite readable, of course. As I've already pointed out, Burke is nothing if not entertaining. However, the book's premise tends to be supported only weakly, if at all, by the narrative. For example, Burke illustrates the connection between the gaming tables of Boulogne-sur-Mer and earthquake prediction by starting his story with Alexander Fleming (of penicillin fame), who was a volunteer doctor there in a field hospital during WWI. Fleming is connected to the next "link" in Burke's chain by virtue of the fact that Fleming was (maybe) a messy person, while the next person, Virchow, who preceded Fleming by 80 years, was tidy. These kinds of "links" are commonplace in Pinball Effect, in fact form the bulk of Burke's connections. If Burke were telling these stories as a survey of the history of science and technology, then there is little to fault the book. However, Burke places great emphasis on the connections that he values. This creates the temptation to read more into the stories than they in fact can support.

Science and technology are certainly part of human history. But, unlike Burke's implicit claim, they are not series of connected events, forming chains that leads back to the dawn of human technology. Mostly, they form an integral part of human culture, advancing where circumstances permit, or not, in other cases. Burke's attempt to overlay on this some retrospective order are misleading and unnecessary.

I think the book (and others of its ilk) is fine, as long as readers firmly keep in mind the limits of Burke's premise to avoid Burke's unjustified (and probably unjustifiable) conclusion.