Nature Fast and Nature Slow

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Various studies are showing how this pandemic, so disruptive of our usual lives and leaving so many of us locked down, languishing and anxious, has had some peculiar impacts on our perceptions of time. And so with time on our minds it was with pricked-up ears that one listened to ABC Radio National Science Friction interview with brilliant and lyrical biologist Nicholas Money. His new book is Nature Fast Nature Slow: How life works from Fractions of a Second to Billions of Years and this week's column is written under the influence of Money's meditations on the expansiveness and weirdness of time. Strikingly, unforgettably, Money invites us to measure our lifespans in seconds. * Ian Warden, Canberra Times * Money manages to squeeze millions of years into a single book. Using time as a metaphorical video camera and powers of ten to characterize various "quantum processes" of life as captured at different speeds, Money proceeds from "Ballistics: Fractions of Seconds (10-6 Seconds)" (chapter 1) and concludes with "Beginnings: Billions of Years (1016 Seconds)" (chapter 10). Each chapter illustrates typical behaviors or processes of a variety of living organisms, from the nematocysts (poison darts, or "ballistics") of the Cnidaria (jellyfish), passing through "Bears: Decades" and "Bristlecones: Millennia" to the full span of life's history starting from primordial cyanobacteria, the first living things. Previous author of The Selfish Ape Money here draws on philosophy, poetry, and some of the history of biology, addressing the "imaginative challenge" of placing Homo sapiens within the overall time scale of life . . . This book will be enjoyed across the spectrum, from high school seniors to retired science professors . . . Recommended. * Choice * To the one in four Americans who think the sun revolves around the earth, this lyrical, factpacked meditation on time and nature "that whirs and boings" will hold no interest. But for the rest of us heliocentrists . . . Money offers a vision of the booming, buzzing creation that delights and intrigues, "a vision of biology set within the timescale of the universe." . . . I was impressed by Money's magisterial command of his material and also by his commendable
restraint when it comes to science's epistemological claims. -- Bruce Wollenberg * Theology and Science * Nature Fast and Nature Slow seems more like a reflection on a lifespan than an argument; it is learned, wistful, and literate, assembling everything the author has learned in long research in mycology and voluminous reading in everything else, including John Milton. It reads almost like a valedictory to a career, though one hopes this impression is wrong, and there will be many more books ahead from Nik Money. * Lection * This is a lovely concept, a cosmic zoom of biology, where the zoom is not in space but in time. Each chapter looks at biological actions that occur in a particular timeframe, starting with those that occur in a fraction of a second and running up to billions of years. * popularscience.co.uk * I thought that this was a really clever way of looking at life on this planet. Taking each chapter as a step up in time gave me a great insight into the way that the natural world works and highlights the fact that we may feel we live a long time, but we are a mere snapshot compared to other lifeforms . . . a very readable science book on life and its rich and varied time . . . Well worth reading. * Halfman, Halfbook * After reading Nicholas P. Money's deeply fascinating book, I realised I was looking at the world around me in a completely different way. It takes the reader on a journey that starts with a fraction of a second and ends with a billion years, in a book about the passage of time that is different from any other I have ever read. * Torbjorn Ekelund, author of 'In Praise of Paths: Walking Through Time and Nature' (2020) *