The Pinball Effect: Journeys Through Knowledge - The Extraordinary Patterns of Change That Link Past, Present, and Future [Anglais] [Cassette]

James Burke takes us on an intersected voyage through the web of history, and in the process shows the intricately connected nature of our lives in a chaotic mishmash of intersecting events. The mental imagery I concocted while reading his book was one of a small worm making its way through a biscuit of shredded wheat. With thousands of intersecting strands, and billions of route possibilities open at each juncture, my biscuit gives a feel for the intricate connection that every event in history shares with everything else. In fact, Burke has written his book from the worm's perspective, with branch points identified in the margins so you can follow a thread (instead of the book) as it weaves its way through history. You do not need to read this book sequentially, and quite possibly might choose to read it worm style rather than cover to cover.

When I first began Burke's book I looked for the obvious connections, but soon learned that was not his objective. Though he illustrates obvious connections, much of the interelatedness in Burke's book deals with subtle effects that changed people's lives and resulted in dramatic changes in history. Sometimes the stories become so intricate I found myself taking notes so I could mentally trace back through the web of events.

Most of the historical events he covers relate in some way to scientific or technical achievements and discoveries. In some of these, I found myself confused about the terminology used. Burke is not always clear when he comments about a particular discovery, whether he is making a statement about the way things are viewed today, or how they were viewed by the original discoverers. Because of this, I found myself sometimes irritated by technically incorrect descriptions. For example, on page 198 Burke says:

"There was only one thing that would reflect radio waves besides metal reflectors like the ones Hertz had used: ionized atoms, which had lost one or more of their electrons. These atoms became positively charged and would reflect electronic signals (which were negative)."

While it is true that ions are positively charged, radio waves are not negative. In another place, he describes voltage as charge (see page 186). He also mentions, off handedly, that collimated laser beams spread by only "a few feet" over the distance between the earth and moon (see page 75). [A collimated beam, with a wavelength of 600 nm, will have a half-beam divergence of about 48 feet over the distance between the earth and moon when collimated with a telescope having a 10-meter-diameter primary mirror. See, for example, Saleh, Teich, "Fundamentals of Photonics," Wiley Series in Pure and applied optics, equation 3.1-20.]

These examples left me with a sometimes uneasy feeling about the book's technical accuracy, yet I cannot discount the possibility that Burke was simply explaining these phenomena in the context of the way they were understood when first discovered.

The book has an excellent index. The figures, however, are of generally poor quality and hard to see. Another irritant was the frequent and often-detailed descriptions Burke gives of ingenious and complex machinery and gadgets. These descriptions are often very hard to follow, and would benefit greatly from drawings that support the textual descriptions.

Aside from these few criticisms, however, I found Burke's book most enjoyable. It will broaden your horizons and make you appreciate history from a new perspective. An ideal book for just before bedtime, I highly recommend it.

Duwayne Anderson

The reason I rate this book so low, however, is that often Burke sums up a series of connections by implying -- or sometimes directly stating -- that the first event in the chain caused, by means of the intermediate steps, the last. This is often not at all the case; the connections between steps may have had no causal relationship, but simply meant that a person was working in the same city, or some other such interesting but not causally relevant connection.

So in short, the chains of connections themselves make for fun reading, but don't trust the summaries. "Correlation does not equal causation," to quote an old statistics maxim; in the case of The Pinball Effect, connection doesn't always equal causation, either.