SCIENTIST IN THE CITY

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Summary: Well-written summary of how technology makes cities work
Review: Book Report: A Scientist in the City, by James Trefil I picked up this book because the title intrigued me. I found it a well written and layperson-friendly explanation of the technology that makes cities possible and what that technology is likely to enable in the future. Trefil is an author that one feels a connection with quickly-he is a very beguiling storyteller. This book is not about social issues. It is about the materials and building blocks of cities. Trefil discusses materials, such as wood, brick, concrete, steel and glass. He investigates what holds buildings up and what conspires to tear them down. (The real challenge for a modern skyscraper, for example, is not collapse, but wind.) Moving people, energy and information around are city factors he visits at length. Sound boring? Its not. For example, he discusses how most of the glass manufactured in the U.S. today is made by a process called floating. "Glass is melted, then poured onto a pool of molten tin. The glass floats on the metal, hence the name of the process. Near the furnace, the glass is heated from above to keep it fluid, and as a result it flows into a uniform thin sheet. . . This process has the advantage of never having the glass come into contact with rollers, so that it doesn't have to be ground or polished after it comes out of the furnace." I have no earthly idea what I will ever need that information for, but I find it absolutely fascinating. Cool as that part is, Trefil goes on to discuss the future he believes most likely. He foresees that the Edge City pollution problems can be solved by electric cars and better recycling, but the congestion issues will need the information economy to remove the need to commute at all. New suburbs will stretch farther into the country, enabled by high-speed magnetic levitation trains. (Most people, it develops, adhere to the 'Rule of 45'-not commuting longer than 45 minutes.) I find this book thought-provoking, informative, and readable-in-an-airplane. Here are some of excerpts I found interesting: *"The kind of cities we build depend on our understanding of the natural world-what we call science-and on our ability to turn that understanding to our own ends-what we call technology." *"A city is a natural system, and we can study it in the same way we study other natural systems and how they got to be the way they are." He notes that an ecosystem is a place that supports the existence of niches, where energy flows through, where materials tend to move in cycles, and is not static. *"[With respect to plastics] we seem to be filling 10 percent of our dumps with carbon chains taken from deep reservoirs of oil and coal around the world, used briefly, and then reburied." * "I know of no better way to illustrate the essential unity of nature than to note that the amount of traffic the Golden Gate bridge supports and the height reached by the tree outside your window are governed by the same law." * "What good is this device? Mr. Prime Minister, someday you will be able to tax it. (Physicist Michael Faraday, on the first electrical generator)" * "Improving efficiency doesn't produce radical changes in the structure of a society. It just allows people to go on doing what they've been doing all along. It is in . . . the development of new ways of producing energy-that the real potential for change lies." * "In a sense, then, the bedroom suburb filled with people who worked in the central city was a transitory phase in the automobile-driven expansion of American cities. Within a few decades of the time that workers began moving to the suburbs, the jobs moved to be near them. City planners and intellectuals still haven't grasped this fact, nor has the reality of what's going on the outskirts of American cities penetrated the national consciousness. The central feature of what Joel Garreau calls Edge Cities is that a combination of personal mobility (supplied by the automobile) and a new kind of industry (based on information technology and the microchip) has spawned a metropolis characterized by a network of work centers, or nodes, of which the centralized city is only one. In such a system, people live in the development between the nodes and commute to work in them, not necessarily into the central city." * "No sooner had telegraph lines been spread around the world in the late 1800s than what analysts call a killer technology came on the scene. A killer technology is one that completely replaces (kills) an old way of doing things, as cars replaced horse-drawn carriages and transistors replaced vacuum tubes. In this case, the killer technology was the telephone." * "The history of our ability to control matter, energy, and information leads, it seems to me, to an interesting hypothesis: There are no longer any technological limits on the kinds of cities we can build." * "There are two great hurdles to an urban future dominated by the construction of edge cities. One is the pollution associated with the widespread use of automobiles; the other is the congestion resulting from the need for constant traffic between nodes. Both these problems must be dealt with to make this sort of future possible." * "Astronomer Robert Wood and I once calculated that the market value of materials in a single asteroid 10 miles across exceeds the total national debt of the United States. If the asteroids turn out to be an exploitable resource, then the first permanent residents in space may be miners, as were the first Europeans in the American West." Chip Saltsman ([e-mail])

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Summary: I think it was an interesting book about scientist
Review: This book was very interlectial and extreamly facinating. I throughly enjoyed readin this book about a scientist that gets lost in the city. My mum,dad,brothers,uncles,aunts also liked this book because I lent it to them all.