The likelihood of waking up dead

Tiffany O?Callaghan, CultureLab editor

A DECADE ago science writer Dick Teresi was working on a story about pinpointing the moment of death. "I thought I had chosen a simple topic. Who is alive? Who is dead? I thought science held the answers," he writes. Instead he found that modern medicine had transformed death into a philosophical question. In The Undead he shows that today death is not simply defined by when your heart stops or you stop breathing, but when whatever makes you you is gone.

Teresi tours through the ways humanity has identified death throughout history, and includes several alarming anecdotes about when death has been misdiagnosed. But his primary focus is on brain death, and he grows increasingly aggravated as he points out that the criteria used to determine "irreversible coma" were established by a group of 13 Harvard physicians and academics nearly half a century ago, based on no data and with a stated goal of reducing controversy when it came to procuring donor organs. What's more, he stresses, even those criteria are no longer fully adhered to. For example, electroencephalography (EEG) to look for activity in the cortex is not mandated.

Also alarming, he says, is that the list of conditions that can mimic the traits of brain death has grown over the years, and now includes hypothermia and drug intoxication.

Modern medicine has made it possible to restart stopped hearts, reverse the course of a stroke hours after it has started, and to enable people whose minds are trapped within non-functioning bodies to communicate through thought patterns or eye movements. Yet Teresi concludes that as we continue to chase death into the shadows, distinguishing its boundaries may become more of an art than a science.

Book information:
The Undead by Dick Teresi
Pantheon
$26.95

Four billion years of Earth's shifting seasons

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

FOR around 4 billion years, Earth has been just right for life. It's not too hot, not too cold, not too windy nor too wet. But it is also changeable, and sometimes distinctly uncomfortable.

In The Goldilocks Planet, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams of the University of Leicester, UK, set out to tell the story of Earth's changing climate, from the planet's early days when it was bombarded by meteorites to today. It is a project of vast scope, and the authors do an admirable job of pulling together an enormous amount of information into something approaching a coherent story. But their book has two major problems.

Reconstructing past climates is a huge technical challenge. There were no weather stations to tell us what was happening, so palaeoclimatologists have to rely on a host of subtle indicators, from the chemical make-up of fossilised algae to layers of dust trapped in Antarctic ice. Zalasiewicz and Williams expertly explain these arcane techniques, but they do so at the expense of the story. Too many pages detail how climatologists find things out, instead of describing the results and painting vivid pictures of the different stages Earth went through.

As a result, a subject that is already rather abstract becomes even more esoteric. It is a shame, because the authors missed the opportunity to show how the Earth's changing climate is intimately tied to the evolution of life. Different climates favoured different organisms, and dramatic climate change often wiped out vast swathes of the ecosystem and unleashed new waves of evolution.

The second problem with the book is nobody's fault: for the first three-quarters of Earth's history, there is hardly any information. Even the last 500 million years, when complex plants and animals spread over the globe, is sketchy. The slow workings of plate tectonics have destroyed most of the rock record, effectively writing over the evidence.

As a result Zalasiewicz and Williams devote as many chapters to the last 3 million years as they do to Earth's first 3 billion. They describe in great detail the most recent glacial maximum, and the 10,000 years of stable climate that saw the rise of human civilisation, but lavish far less attention on periods of Earth's history that are arguably more interesting, such as the dinosaurs' hothouse climate.

The book does perk up in the final chapter, which tackles human-made climate change. Zalasiewicz has long argued that humanity's impact on the planet is now so great that we should declare a new geological period, the Anthropocene. Yes, the climate changes on its own - but we have lived with a fairly stable one throughout the course of human civilisation. Changing it, the authors say, is not a good idea.

Book information:
The Goldilocks Planet by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams
Oxford University Press
?16.99/$29.95

Lifting the lid on Schr?dinger's world

Andrew Purcell, online producer

IN HIS latest book, Erwin Schr?dinger and the Quantum Revolution, prolific science writer John Gribbin tells a fascinating tale of scientific endeavour starring Schr?dinger - a man as complex and unpredictable as the phenomena he studied. As the major players in the book show, the German-speaking world dominated science in the first half of the 20th century, and nowhere more so than in quantum physics.

From Max Born to Ludwig Boltzmann, Friedrich Hasen?hrl to Werner Heisenberg, Gribbin expertly elucidates the relationships and discoveries that shaped Schr?dinger's thoughts, including his lengthy correspondence with Albert Einstein, which led to the famous cat-in-the-box thought experiment in 1935.

Yet what sets Gribbin's book apart is the elegance with which it delivers a simple but neglected truth: that each of us is a product of our times. Gribbin addresses the myriad forces which shape both the process of scientific discovery and those making the discoveries. From the fortunes of nations to the work of peers, political ideologies to romantic affairs and religious convictions, he deftly identifies the influences that sculpted Schr?dinger and his pivotal role in the quantum revolution.

Anyone wishing to dip their feet in the muddy waters of quantum physics will enjoy this scientific soap opera. But it should be required reading for those eager to understand how the process of scientific discovery really works.

Book information:
Erwin Schr?dinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin
Bantam Press
?25

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