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Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science
In this amusing and informative collection of seventeen essays, Dr. Asimov takes the reader on a rousing mental trip into the world of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy.
205 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1964
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391 people want to read
About the author
Isaac Asimov
4,666 books27.2k followersWorks of prolific Russian-American writer Isaac Asimov include popular explanations of scientific principles,
The Foundation Trilogy
(1951-1953), and other volumes of fiction.
Isaac Asimov, a professor of biochemistry, wrote as a highly successful author, best known for his books.
Asimov, professor, generally considered of all time, edited more than five hundred books and ninety thousand letters and postcards. He published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey decimal classification but lacked only an entry in the category of philosophy (100).
People widely considered Asimov, a master of the genre alongside Robert Anson Heinlein and Arthur Charles Clarke as the "big three" during his lifetime. He later tied Galactic Empire and the Robot into the same universe as his most famous series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those that Heinlein pioneered and Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson previously produced. He penned "Nightfall," voted in 1964 as the best short story of all time; many persons still honor this title. He also produced well mysteries, fantasy, and a great quantity of nonfiction. Asimov used Paul French, the pen name, for the Lucky Starr, series of juvenile novels.
Most books of Asimov in a historical way go as far back to a time with possible question or concept at its simplest stage. He often provides and mentions well nationalities, birth, and death dates for persons and etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Guide to Science, the tripartite set Understanding Physics, and Chronology of Science and Discovery exemplify these books.
Asimov, a long-time member, reluctantly served as vice president of Mensa international and described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs." He took more pleasure as president of the humanist association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, an elementary school in Brooklyn in New York, and two different awards honor his name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_As...
Isaac Asimov, a professor of biochemistry, wrote as a highly successful author, best known for his books.
Asimov, professor, generally considered of all time, edited more than five hundred books and ninety thousand letters and postcards. He published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey decimal classification but lacked only an entry in the category of philosophy (100).
People widely considered Asimov, a master of the genre alongside Robert Anson Heinlein and Arthur Charles Clarke as the "big three" during his lifetime. He later tied Galactic Empire and the Robot into the same universe as his most famous series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those that Heinlein pioneered and Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson previously produced. He penned "Nightfall," voted in 1964 as the best short story of all time; many persons still honor this title. He also produced well mysteries, fantasy, and a great quantity of nonfiction. Asimov used Paul French, the pen name, for the Lucky Starr, series of juvenile novels.
Most books of Asimov in a historical way go as far back to a time with possible question or concept at its simplest stage. He often provides and mentions well nationalities, birth, and death dates for persons and etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Guide to Science, the tripartite set Understanding Physics, and Chronology of Science and Discovery exemplify these books.
Asimov, a long-time member, reluctantly served as vice president of Mensa international and described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs." He took more pleasure as president of the humanist association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, an elementary school in Brooklyn in New York, and two different awards honor his name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_As...
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 11, 2011
I was given a copy of this collection when I was nine or ten, and it permanently changed my attitude to science and mathematics. Nearly all the individual entries are excellent, though I think I'd have to give top billing to the ones on the Michelson-Morley experiment (a negative result can change the whole history of science!) and Cantor's diagonalization argument (there are different kinds of infinities!!)
If you know a bright kid who's run out of interesting things to read, you might want to see if he likes it. I'm guessing most of the book is still just as topical.
If you know a bright kid who's run out of interesting things to read, you might want to see if he likes it. I'm guessing most of the book is still just as topical.
July 23, 2009
(See my review of
The Solar System and Back
for my overall impressions of Asimov's essays for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.)
The best of Asimov's F&SF essay collections I have yet read, this title serves up one outstanding article after another. Perhaps surprisingly, this work features only two essays on astronomy, and a plurality (seven of the seventeen) are on mathematical subjects.
Part I--Mathematics
Chapter 1: "T-Formation" (August 1963): large numbers; the googol, the googolplex, the relative magnitudes of countable particles in the universe vs. the number of possible permutations of a shuffled 52-card deck; Leonardo Fibonacci and the number named for him; prime numbers; Marin Mersenne; abundant, deficient, and perfect numbers; Skewes's number.
Chapter 2: "One, Ten, Buckle My Shoe" (December 1962): the binary number system; digital computers (a fresher concept 47 years ago than today); other number bases generally.
Chapter 3: "Varieties of the Infinite" (September 1959): the infinity symbol and its behavior over various arithmetic operations; one-to-one correspondence (bijective mappings); the comparative infiniteness of even integers, odd integers, all integers, and all rationals; the infiniteness of the reals; Georg Cantor; aleph-notation.
(review to be continued)
Chapter 4: "A Piece of Pi" (May 1960)
Chapter 5: "Tools of the Trade" (September 1960)
Chapter 6: "The Imaginary That Isn't" (March 1961)
Chapter 7: "Pre-fixing It Up" (November 1962)
Part II--Physics
Chapter 8: "The Rigid Vacuum" (April 1963)
Chapter 9: "The Light that Failed" (June 1963)
Chapter 10: "The Light Fantastic" (August 1962)
Part III--Chemistry
Chapter 11: "Slow Burn" (October 1962)
Chapter 12: "You, Too, Can Speak Gaelic" (March 1963)
Part IV--Biology
Chapter 13: "The Lost Generation" (February 1963)
Chapter 14: "He's Not My Type" (January 1963)
Part V--Astronomy
Chapter 15: "The Shape of Things" (September 1962)
Chapter 16: "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" (October 1963)
Part VI--General
Chapter 17: "The Isaac Winners" (July 1963)
My favorite quotes from the book:
The best of Asimov's F&SF essay collections I have yet read, this title serves up one outstanding article after another. Perhaps surprisingly, this work features only two essays on astronomy, and a plurality (seven of the seventeen) are on mathematical subjects.
Part I--Mathematics
Chapter 1: "T-Formation" (August 1963): large numbers; the googol, the googolplex, the relative magnitudes of countable particles in the universe vs. the number of possible permutations of a shuffled 52-card deck; Leonardo Fibonacci and the number named for him; prime numbers; Marin Mersenne; abundant, deficient, and perfect numbers; Skewes's number.
Chapter 2: "One, Ten, Buckle My Shoe" (December 1962): the binary number system; digital computers (a fresher concept 47 years ago than today); other number bases generally.
Chapter 3: "Varieties of the Infinite" (September 1959): the infinity symbol and its behavior over various arithmetic operations; one-to-one correspondence (bijective mappings); the comparative infiniteness of even integers, odd integers, all integers, and all rationals; the infiniteness of the reals; Georg Cantor; aleph-notation.
(review to be continued)
Chapter 4: "A Piece of Pi" (May 1960)
Chapter 5: "Tools of the Trade" (September 1960)
Chapter 6: "The Imaginary That Isn't" (March 1961)
Chapter 7: "Pre-fixing It Up" (November 1962)
Part II--Physics
Chapter 8: "The Rigid Vacuum" (April 1963)
Chapter 9: "The Light that Failed" (June 1963)
Chapter 10: "The Light Fantastic" (August 1962)
Part III--Chemistry
Chapter 11: "Slow Burn" (October 1962)
Chapter 12: "You, Too, Can Speak Gaelic" (March 1963)
Part IV--Biology
Chapter 13: "The Lost Generation" (February 1963)
Chapter 14: "He's Not My Type" (January 1963)
Part V--Astronomy
Chapter 15: "The Shape of Things" (September 1962)
Chapter 16: "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" (October 1963)
Part VI--General
Chapter 17: "The Isaac Winners" (July 1963)
My favorite quotes from the book:
[A:] Swiss botanist named Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli, a professor at the University of Munich[, ...:] was heir to a nineteeth-century school of German biologists who called themselves "nature philosophers".
The nature philosophers were a group who believed in the mystic importance of the individual and in the existence of misty and undefined forces particularly associated with life. The German language is particularly well adapted to a kind of learned professorial prose that resembles a cryptogram to which no key exists, and the nature philosophers could use this sort of language perfectly. If obscurity is mistaken for profundity, then they were profound indeed. (p. 155)
The notion of the stationary earth was accepted by Ptolemy and therefore by the medieval scholars and by the Church. It was not until 1543, a generation after Magellan's voyage, that a major onslaught was made against the view.
In that year, Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, published his views of the universe and died at once, ducking all controversy. (p. 178)
December 2, 2017
I would have given it five stars if I had read it in my childhood - that would have been more exciting. But even now, although I knew most of the technical parts, it was still interesting to see scraps of the history of science tied together with juicy little things about the scientists themselves and also to brush up on some dusty concepts from chemistry, physics, biology. My favourite part was (really unexpectedly) the chemistry one - the chapter on how substances in organic chemistry are named was pure delight. Had I known those in high school...
I also enjoyed the writing style, especially since it's the first thing I'm reading from Asimov. I might give his other novels a try, too, although science fiction is not really my thing.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone, more so to persons not from "sciencey" fields and especially (!!!) to children to spark their interest in science.
I also enjoyed the writing style, especially since it's the first thing I'm reading from Asimov. I might give his other novels a try, too, although science fiction is not really my thing.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone, more so to persons not from "sciencey" fields and especially (!!!) to children to spark their interest in science.
July 11, 2015
chapter 13 ; Evolution and genetic laws of Mendel are the complementary relationship.
it is intriguing about Unit conversion and treat very huge number and local minimum .
it is intriguing about Unit conversion and treat very huge number and local minimum .
April 19, 2025
One of my little projects is to re-read all of Asimov’s collections of F&SF essays in a hard cover edition. I am very sure that I have read this one before although it is missing here on Goodreads as well as my own Books-DB. Strange.
Anyway. This is the forth book in the series and one of the best. For one thing he started to include personal anecdotes at the beginning of an essay. And my all-time favourite anecdote is in the essay The Imaginary that isn’t. At one time he was meeting a friend who happened to attend a lecture in sociology (one wonders what kind of friends he had). The professor was still holding court when Asimov arrived and was just telling his students that mathematicians were mystics because they believed in numbers that had no reality like the square root of -1. Asimov, of course, objected and the Prof challenged him to give him a square root of minus one piece of chalk. After some hesitation Asimov excepted the challenge. “I’ll do it if you hand me a half piece of chalk first.” The professor broke a fresh piece of chalk. And then Asimov hold the piece up and said: “This is one piece of chalk it certainly isn’t two or three.” Then the prof mumbled something about standard-legnth to which replied that even granted was he sure it was not 0.48 piece of chalk. And then: “Can you really consider yourself qualified to discuss the square root of minus one, when you are a little hazy on the meaning of one half?” - I love it.
Nearly every essay is absolutely brilliant. Although I freely admit that as a fan of Asimov, my judgement may be clouded. Maybe the best one in this collection is Slow burn about the decicive experiment that established modern chemistry. Or maybe it is The Light that failed about the Michelson-Morley experiment. When I was young I used to write SF stories and in one story I had the experiment repeated on the moon with a positive result - proving that Earth was in the center of the universe. I was very proud of it and thought it was an original idea of mine. But maybe it was not. Because in this essay Asimov suggests to repeat the experiment on the Moon. Well.
In A Piece of Pi he talks about the Leibniz-series that can create the value of π. He said he tried to calculate the number but soon gave up. But he said people should drop him a line telling him how many terms you need to improve on 355/113. And so I stopped reading and did the calculation. (I had a modern computer and he did not even have a calculator in 1963.) I came up with 3,748,629 by in case you are interested.
Finally a word about the last essay The Isaac Winners where he prepared a short list of 72 scientists out of which he picked his Top 10. Very interesting. There is definitely Leibniz missing but I found it a bit frustrating that there are a couple of scientists I did not know (or have forgotten about which comes to the same thing). Here they are: Stanislao Cannizaro, Josiah Gibbs, Henry Moseley, William Perkin, Theodor Schwann, and Frederick Soddy.
Anyway. This is the forth book in the series and one of the best. For one thing he started to include personal anecdotes at the beginning of an essay. And my all-time favourite anecdote is in the essay The Imaginary that isn’t. At one time he was meeting a friend who happened to attend a lecture in sociology (one wonders what kind of friends he had). The professor was still holding court when Asimov arrived and was just telling his students that mathematicians were mystics because they believed in numbers that had no reality like the square root of -1. Asimov, of course, objected and the Prof challenged him to give him a square root of minus one piece of chalk. After some hesitation Asimov excepted the challenge. “I’ll do it if you hand me a half piece of chalk first.” The professor broke a fresh piece of chalk. And then Asimov hold the piece up and said: “This is one piece of chalk it certainly isn’t two or three.” Then the prof mumbled something about standard-legnth to which replied that even granted was he sure it was not 0.48 piece of chalk. And then: “Can you really consider yourself qualified to discuss the square root of minus one, when you are a little hazy on the meaning of one half?” - I love it.
Nearly every essay is absolutely brilliant. Although I freely admit that as a fan of Asimov, my judgement may be clouded. Maybe the best one in this collection is Slow burn about the decicive experiment that established modern chemistry. Or maybe it is The Light that failed about the Michelson-Morley experiment. When I was young I used to write SF stories and in one story I had the experiment repeated on the moon with a positive result - proving that Earth was in the center of the universe. I was very proud of it and thought it was an original idea of mine. But maybe it was not. Because in this essay Asimov suggests to repeat the experiment on the Moon. Well.
In A Piece of Pi he talks about the Leibniz-series that can create the value of π. He said he tried to calculate the number but soon gave up. But he said people should drop him a line telling him how many terms you need to improve on 355/113. And so I stopped reading and did the calculation. (I had a modern computer and he did not even have a calculator in 1963.) I came up with 3,748,629 by in case you are interested.
Finally a word about the last essay The Isaac Winners where he prepared a short list of 72 scientists out of which he picked his Top 10. Very interesting. There is definitely Leibniz missing but I found it a bit frustrating that there are a couple of scientists I did not know (or have forgotten about which comes to the same thing). Here they are: Stanislao Cannizaro, Josiah Gibbs, Henry Moseley, William Perkin, Theodor Schwann, and Frederick Soddy.
October 20, 2014
call it 4.5. This one is a barely themed collection of essays Asimov wrote for magazines, about half of them are about numbers. This one has essays on infinity, very large numbers, measurement systems, the michaelson-morley experiment that disproved the existence of the ether, and a great story about the eventual discovery of Mendel's work on genetics (he was a monk by trade) by other scientists, blood types, and the true story of Columbus' journey's relationship to the earth being round. (Yes, the Earth has been known to be round for 1000s of years, the question was how big is it)
September 30, 2017
Interesting quote: “The key step toward the true value was taken by François Vieta, a French mathematician of the sixteenth century. He is considered the father of algebra because, among other things, he introduced the use of letter symbols for unknowns, the famous x’s and y’s, which most of us have had to, at one time or another in our lives, face with trepidation and uncertainty. Vieta performed the algebraic equivalent of Archimedes’ geometic method of exhaustion. That is, instead of setting up an infinite series of polygons that came closer and closer to a circle, he deduced an infinite series of fractions which could be evaluated to give a figure for π. The greater the number of terms used in the evaluation, the closer you were to the true value of π.” (pg. 43) This book gives a intro all the different fields: mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics. Plus it is at times very humorous I highly recommend this book.
July 30, 2020
This essay collection is typical Asimov, which is of course why I love it. He delights in discussing everything from his new counting system based on trillions to a breakdown of his opinions on the greatest scientists of all time. As usual, I found his most compelling essays to be those in which he described the history of science. "A Piece of Pi," "Slow Burn," and "The Lost Generation" come to mind. His worst bits (though still entertaining and fascinating, of course) were those that either attempted to propose some complicated new idea with too many examples, like "T-Formation," or were overly obtuse in his attempts to explain to the layman, like "He's Not My Type." Overall, again a very informative and fun essay collection from Asimov.
May 24, 2020
Very good history on various subjects from math to astronomy!
August 30, 2023
The section on mathematics is pretty basic, but this is a great first step into scientific literature.
July 8, 2024
Always, enlightening - Asimov!
October 1, 2016
Interesting collection of popular essays on the history of science, covering multiple disciplines. I feel like I've read all the mathematical stuff in other of Asimov's books before so that was a little dull, but as always (for me, anyway) things improved once we got to the biology, which is my own particular scientific preference. My favourite essay was "The Lost Generation", on Mendel's pea experiments - no surprise, botany improves everything.
July 31, 2019
One of the best parts of this book, which was published in 1964, is from the first page, regarding a number christened "googol" in 1940: "Personally, I think it is an awful name, but the young child of one of the authors invented it, and what could a proud father do? Thus, we are afflicted forever with that baby-talk number." Isaac Asimov died in 1991, too soon to witness the proliferation of the baby-talk number into one of the most popular words in the English language, or one of the most popular words in the world. ("Googlelealo," as my mom says.)
This book is a collection of pop-sci essays. It is divided into six parts, on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, and a General section where he awards the Isaac Awards to the 72 greatest scientists (in the author's estimation). I especially enjoyed the essays on large numbers, varieties of infinity, the electromagnetic spectrum, and blood types. The book focuses on basic science, so the content hasn't expired, but where the content is a bit stale (lasers), it provides a good history of science.
I started this book because I thought it might help me fall asleep, but like Albert Abraham Michelson, the American physicist whose experiment failed so thunderously "as to win its perpetrator a Nobel Prize," (from Ch. 9, The Light That Failed), "What a happy fairy tale for scientists it would be if all experiments failed like that!"
This book is a collection of pop-sci essays. It is divided into six parts, on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, and a General section where he awards the Isaac Awards to the 72 greatest scientists (in the author's estimation). I especially enjoyed the essays on large numbers, varieties of infinity, the electromagnetic spectrum, and blood types. The book focuses on basic science, so the content hasn't expired, but where the content is a bit stale (lasers), it provides a good history of science.
I started this book because I thought it might help me fall asleep, but like Albert Abraham Michelson, the American physicist whose experiment failed so thunderously "as to win its perpetrator a Nobel Prize," (from Ch. 9, The Light That Failed), "What a happy fairy tale for scientists it would be if all experiments failed like that!"
February 12, 2011
Not exactly the usual Asimov, but just as well written as the rest of his work. His essays here provide a novel viewpoint wrt science and math. I wish I had read this in high school so I could see if/how my opinion changed after undergrad/grad school.
September 25, 2021
Interesting collection of essays on a wide variety of science topics. The major exception (which prevented a four star rating) was the essay "The Lost Generation", which pretended that Gregor Mendel's findings in genetics "proved" that Darwin's evolutionary fantasy was correct.
August 14, 2009
Another of the Good Doctor's collections from his science/mathematics column in the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews