Tag: George Wald

Grandpa, tell us the story about the time you sank your dad’s speedboat

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books

When we were kids we heard the same stories many times. Some were family yarns and some were the storybooks we were being read to just before falling asleep. We found delight in re-hearing the stories we already knew. Perhaps there was a comfort in knowing how they turned out. Perhaps it was the way grandparents and other relatives told (re-enacted) the family stories every time Thanksgiving or Christmas rolled around.

As adults, some of us still do that. We watch movies multiple times. We re-read books multiple times. Each time that happens, we learn or notice something new. Right now, I’m re-reading Jeff Shaara’s A Chain of Thunder about Grant’s siege of Vicksburg and George Wald’s Therefore Choose Life (first mentioned in my blog here.) Some say that the fall of Vicksburg was more instrumental in the Union victory than the fall of Gettysburg and that Gettysburg got more press and public attention because it was closer to Washington, D.C., and other major cities. I have no idea whether or not that notion is true, though historians will probably always be debating the issue.

Nobel laureate George Wald gave an elegant lecture in 1970 as part of the Canadian Broadcasting  Corporation’s Massey Lectures series. The resulting book is a short course on how life arose on our planet. I love it because it’s clear and meant for general readers rather than scientists, and that means it goes a long way in explaining the unbroken chain of life that’s responsible for all of us on the planet.

One interesting point in the book is that man has no specifications and continues to evolve. Technological creations always have specifications and–not counting where AI might take us– technology is engraved in stone once it’s become a product. That is, it cannot evolve. Wald was well-known outside of scientific circles during the 60s and 70s because he was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.

He tells the story of life on earth the way grandpa might tell how and why the family’s speedboat sank near Alligator Point, Florida. It’s accessible. It’s interesting. And perhaps it explains why we’re here. As Wald would say, atoms, molecules, and the universe itself know themselves because man has seen them, thought about them, and written about them. What a magnificent story.

As for Jeff Sharra, I’ve read all of his books because he took his father’s book, The Killer Angels, about the battle of Gettysburg, and wrote novels about what happened before and after that battle. Then he began writing about other wars and other battles. These books tell me stories I did not hear in history class. Like the stories I heard as a child, I know how these stories will end, but the telling has a lot of spirit and spunk and draws me back to them. Wald’s story is more open-ended, in many ways dependent on what we do not about climate change and other issues of the day.

–Malcolm

P.S. We did sink the speedboat.

‘Therefore Choose Life’ by George Wald

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books, eternity

“I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.” — George Wald

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist George Wald gave the 1970 Massey Lecture on CBC radio called “Therefore Choose Life,” focused on life, the universe, and our relationship to it.

Long considered one of the best lectures from a series of broadcasts that began in 1961 to provide a podium–as CBC has said–for writers, thinkers, and scholars who explore important ideas and issues of contemporary interest, the lectures are generally produced as published books after the broadcasts. Except Wald’s. He was working on the typescript when he died in 1997 and subsequently the manuscript was lost for years.

I heard a tape recording of Wald’s lecture just after it was given. It profoundly impacted my life and my view of the cosmos.  Wald’s ideas, presented in nearly poetic words, in terms non-scientists could easily understand, placed the workings of the universe before my eyes. His words haunted me since then, and it would be forty-seven years before I found them again in 2017, when they were finally published and just as relevant then (and now) as they were in the aftermath of the turbulent 1960s.

From the Publisher

“All men, everywhere, have asked the same questions: Whence we come, what kind of thing we are, and at least some intimation of what may become of us . . .”

So begins Nobel Prize–winning scientist George Wald’s 1970 Massey Lectures, now in print for the first time ever. Where did we come from, who are we, and what is to become of us — these questions have never been more urgent. Then, as now, the world is facing major political and social upheaval, from overpopulation to nuclear warfare to environmental degradation and the uses and abuses of technology. Using scientific fact as metaphor, Wald meditates on our place, and role, on Earth and in the universe. He urges us to therefore choose life — to invest in our capabilities as human beings, to heed the warnings of our own self-destruction, and above all to honour our humanity.

I hope thousands of people will find this book and, for a mere $9.99 on Kindle, see the “big picture” and their part in it.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell’s novel “The Sun Singer” is available free on Kindle September 14 through September 18. But for goodness’ sakes, read “Therefore Choose Life” first.