IN SHORT: SCIENCE BOOKS
IN SHORT: SCIENCE BOOKS; TEST YOUR TECHNOLOGICAL LITERACY
By BILL SHARP
Published: April 8, 1990
LEVITATING TRAINS AND KAMIKAZE GENES: Technological Literacy for the 1990s. By Richard P. Brennan. (John Wiley & Sons, $18.95.) A layman's survival guide to our high-technology world is one of those things you don't know you're missing until you hold it in your hands. In fact, it is long overdue. More than one-third of the college students across three states polled by the University of Texas in 1988 said they believed in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, unidentified flying objects and the lost city of Atlantis. Richard P. Brennan, a long-time science writer, writes in ''Levitating Trains and Kamikaze Genes'' that people misinformed about science have little hope of coping with the increasingly rapid changes our future appears to hold. Mr. Brennan offers his book to provide ''what an otherwise educated person should know [about technology] and no more.'' As promised, the author distills basic information about the current state of research on space, biology, computers, the environment, energy, superconductivity, medicine, transportation and weaponry down to 262 pages of usually easy-to-read text. The book begins with a 50-question test of technological literacy. It then steps systematically through technologies, carefully explaining such facts as ''a light year is a measure of distance, not time,'' and ''it is a mistake to think of a computer as a thinking machine; it is not.'' Computers, Mr. Brennan assures us, do not think: they merely do what we tell them to do with incredible speed. From such simple facts, the author progresses to explaining more complex ideas, from how and why installing superinsulated windows in buildings throughout the United States could save tens of billions of dollars each year to a discussion of why advancing nuclear weapons technology is giving defense analysts fits. There are places where Mr. Brennan's simplified explanations are still not simple enough for the average reader, and one can think of some topics that just didn't make it into this book, but Mr. Brennan answers a lot of the questions you felt too foolish to ask. Knowing the answers is important to your future.