T. Pratchett, I. Stewart & J. Cohen - The Globe

The Science of Discworld II: The Globe is another book that shows us evolution of the human race on planet Earth. The book is divided in two parts - the Discworld Pratchett's one and hard science one written by Stewart and Cohen. We can take Pratchett's wizards meddling as introduction to what is coming and also we can use it as analogy.

I've read this book twice and I have to admit that when I read it in 2002 I wasn't really much concerned by it. When I read it now it was much more appealing to me. Especially the part about "lies". In Physics we have models that simplify things. The models can be used under some circumstances. They can be used to better understand much more complex things etc. But this does not only work in Physics. Actually this is something that we use in everyday life. Everything that we start to learn are simplified untruths. I was often wondering how come that there are certain phonemes that we can here and produce and some that we just can't grasp. How come though that an adult person can still learn them? Where is the line that learning or teaching our brain something new becomes rather impossible?
Am I still capable of learning rhythm? To be able to reproduce and hear a certain rhythm? I should be able to get this ability if I'm capable of recognizing and reproducing phonemes that don't exist in our language or not?

And yes, how come we started to "imagine" things? Because all we could see around us was...well reality. How a human being/ape came to the idea that there can be something like a faerie? Or that human could cast spells etc? Was it the need to explain something that we couldn't understand? So we created something/someone that could make this happen? But how human actually started to visualize something like that?

Whatever I will probably think of this for some time. There are interesting facts and theories in this and the previous book. Now I'll probably try to find the Darwin's Watch and read it too (it seems that all the Pratchett's books displace on their own)

Personal Rating: 3/5

Conclusion: If you are not from scientific background or not used to be reading scientific texts it might be difficult to read the "scientific chapters". Even though the theories are explained in comprehensible way it still requires concentration. I also can't really imagine people who have never heard of this or that person read such a book (but other literature is your friend, just go and look it up). The wizard meddling story is nice and funny as usual^^ but it's not really about it... at least for me.
Also the style of the authors stays in the same lines which is good. (I remember books written by several authors were you can clearly distinguish who wrote which part - not that it would matter in this book though)