What the cover to James Burke's book The Knowledge Web doesn't tell you is that it is essentially his Connections 3 TV series in book form. There's nothing wrong with this but, if you've watched the series already and then come to the book, you will surely, like me, be thinking that it all sounds very familiar.
Burke is a historian of science who, as the title of his TV series above indicates, likes to make connections between events and people in history to show how they produce scientific and technological advances. But it isn't all a dry lecture consisting purely of names and dates as Burke has a dry sense of humor and so linking, say an Englishman's development of DNA profiling to American spying balloons has all kinds of twists and turns. Tales general also involve a lot of conflict, both interpersonal and inter-territorial, love affairs, death, experiments gone seriously wrong, etc.
As an example, take Chapter 3 which is entitled "Drop the Apple". We begin with James Smithson (after whom The Smithsonian was named) and his description of calamine crystals. Rene-Just Hauy discovered that calamine crystals were piezo-electric. Pierre and Jacque Curie's work regarding piezoelectricity led Pierre and his wife Marie to the secrets of radium and radioactivity. Their physicist friend Paul Langevin would follow up their work and invent sonar which proved very handy in destroying German U-Boats and also as a plot device in movies such as Das Boot. Shipbuilding provides the stage for a discussion about welding and arclights, the latter of which would be introduced to theatres after much refinement. And some of that refinement was done by Leon Foucault. For his part, Foucault would create a big pendulum which proved Copernicus was right in addition to taking daguerreotypes of an eclipse.
The story continues with ash from kelp and opera but I'll stop here because I think you get the picture. If you're unfamiliar with Burke's work, The Knowledge Web certainly isn't a bad place to start. The trips through time are fascinating and funny.
For those already familiar with Burke's style, the book may be something of a departure for you. I've not read all of his stuff but the links here are often a bit more tenuous than in some of his earlier work. Previously links were made between people and events that, well, were directly or almost directly linked. Two people knew each other or one person read another's work and took the baton, taking research off on a tangent. Here just a common topic often provides the link. For example, take my description of chapter 3 above. The discussions about sonar and welding are linked because of the topic of ships but not because of two people who knew one another or because one person directly knew the work of another. Take this as good or bad at your pleasure.
Another element which The Knowledge Web is largely missing which at least some of his earlier works had is a sense of a larger, grander picture. Certain bits of his The Day the Universe Changed come to mind. In that program Burke talked about rationalism as a gift of the Greeks to Western civilization and how it underpins our views and expectations today. There is some of that here in the book's introduction but it's largely confined to a novel stylistic choice I'll note below. My problem is that the book has a lot of history in it but very little interpretation, very little assessment of what all of the stories mean or could mean to us. The Knowledge Web is still a great read but there were times when I found myself hoping that he'd talk about some of the broader impacts the discoveries he chronicled had made.
One thing we did get here was the printed equivalent of hyperlinks. The Knowledge Web was released in 2000 and it was clearly influenced by the Web. Certain subjects in the text will have a series of numbers in margin next to it. These numbers refer to other pages where this same subject is brought up. (I see that his previous book, The Pinball Effect has these "links" as well.) One can jump pages to follow the trajectory of a subject and discover all of its connections - something akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure book - or you can simply read straight through. This porting of HTML to the print realm works but I chose to mostly read straight through. While reading the first half of the book I would jump only occasionally and then only read the relevant bit about the subject and then go back from whence I came. For the second half I would jump back for a brief refresher when a topic reappeared.
The Knowledge Web then is an experiment. It mimics the hyperlinking capability of HTML in the print medium to demonstrate how computers are changing/have changed how knowledge is disseminated. Now, perhaps I'm just a meta kind of guy, but I think this already interesting book would have been more so had Burke actually discussed and made connections between events and people that have influenced how information was disseminated in the past. In the introduction written in 1999, Burke forecasts various problems that will arise as activities become virtualized and more and more things become available on the Internet. He describes his book as being an approach to knowledge for the 21st century and defends it against anyone thinking that such an approach is "dumbing down" by pointing to all the naysayers of ages past who said the same of the "first printing press, newspapers, calculators, and the removal of mandatory Latin from the curriculum". I wish that these stories and others were told in the book to illustrate the past in anticipation of the hyperlinked future Burke predicted.
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