Part travelogue, part guide book, part history book and part textbook, this is an incredibly entertaining collection of write-ups that'll be of interest to just about any geek.

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Product Description

The history of science is all around us, if you know where to look. With this unique traveler's guide, you'll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or is happening now. Travel to Munich to see the world's largest science museum, watch Foucault's pendulum swinging in Paris, ponder a descendant of Newton's apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and more. Each site in The Geek Atlas focuses on discoveries or inventions, and includes information about the people and the science behind them. Full of interesting photos and illustrations, the book is organized geographically by country (by state within the U.S.), complete with latitudes and longitudes for GPS devices. Destinations include:

• Bletchley Park in the UK, where the Enigma code was broken
  
• The Alan Turing Memorial in Manchester, England
  
• The Horn Antenna in New Jersey, where the Big Bang theory was confirmed
  
• The National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland
  
• The Trinity Test Site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was exploded
  
• The Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California

You won't find tedious, third-rate museums, or a tacky plaque stuck to a wall stating that "Professor X slept here." Every site in this book has real scientific, mathematical, or technological interest--places guaranteed to make every geek's heart pound a little faster. Plan a trip with The Geek Atlas and make your own discoveries along the way.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86215 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780596523206
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Amazon.com Review
The Geek Atlas is a list of sites to visit where science, mathematics, or technology happened or is happening. The book can be used as a true travel guide or as inspiration for the armchair traveler. Each place has its own chapter that includes a general introduction to the place's significance, a related technical subject covered in more detail, and practical visiting information.

From Kiev to Jaipur with The Geek Atlas in hand

“This is the Captain speaking. Welcome aboard flight NB1729, the Nerd Bird, stopping in Kiev, Munich, Paris, London, Dublin, New York, San Francisco and Jaipur. Seat belts fastened please: we’re about to apply Newton’s laws of motion and take off.” Pripyat First stop is Kiev, Ukraine and it’s straight from the airport to the National Museum of Chernobyl that explains the events of April 26, 1986 when reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power station blew open and released a cloud of radioactivity that covered Europe. The following morning your tour bus leaves Kiev and makes the drive out to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Inside the zone you see the entombed reactor and the abandoned town of Pripyat, which is forever stuck in the mid-1980s. During the trip you’ve got plenty of time to read The Geek Atlas’ explanation of the dangers of radioactive iodine and its effect on the thyroid gland. Next, it’s back aboard the plane for the ride down to the gleaming airport in Munich, Germany. From there it’s a short train ride to the Deutsches Museum--probably the greatest science museum in the world. You’ll be staying all day in the museum because of its sheer size (there are 28,000 objects on display) and the highlight will be the Electric Power demonstration where 300 kV of AC are generated and then an 800 kV lightning strike is set off. On the train ride into Munich there’s time to read The Geek Atlas’ explanation of the operation of the Diesel engine and find out what a planimeter is. Paris is up next. Your walking tour of the City of Lights starts at the Paris Observatory at the feet of François Arago, director of the observatory in the 19th century. You are looking for a small brass disk set into the sidewalk. Written on the disk is the word ARAGO and the letters N and S. You follow the northerly direction towards the observatory staying on the old Paris meridian (the French 0 degrees of longitude). Along the way you’ll search for more of these Arago medallions marking the meridian and end up seeing the sights of Paris. The meridian passes through the city center and without straying far you’ll see The Pantheon (with Foucault’s Pendulum inside), the Jardin de Luxembourg, the Eiffel Tower and le Musée du Louvre. The Brunel Museum Stop for a coffee near the river Seine halfway through the trip and read The Geek Atlas’ description of how to find your local meridian at home using a stick and some string. The next day, you leave the airplane behind and hurtle under the English Channel on a train to arrive in London in just over two hours. In London your tour avoids the major tourist attractions and takes you by underground train to The Brunel Museum. You arrive by passing through the first tunnel built under a body of water. If you are lucky you can take the museum tour back through the floodlit tunnel in an underground train that creeps through at walking pace. While in London the tour stops for lunch at Bunhill Fields Cemetery, a quiet spot in the City of London, where you can hunt down the grave of Reverend, and pioneer of probability theory, Thomas Bayes. The Geek Atlas contains a probability brainteaser to ponder while thinking about the famous Bayes Theorem (which is explained). Before leaving Europe the airplane makes a stop in Dublin for a bit more mathematics. Crossing Broom Bridge across the Royal Canal you come to a plaque on the bridge itself. This is the spot where Sir William Rowan Hamilton, out on a walk with his wife in 1843, scratched the fundamental equation of the theory of quaternions into the stonework using a knife. The equation had just come to him and he needed to write it down. Opening The Geek Atlas to page 91, you’ll find a description of the quaternions and the complex numbers. Deep Space Communications Complex After the long flight to New York’s JFK and a bumpy cab ride into the city you avoid the crowds around Times Square and head straight for the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York City. Inside is the small and wonderful John M. Mossman collection of locks. Since New York is an important banking center locks are very important and the collection is filled with beautiful examples of complex, mechanical time locks used to secure vaults. Many of the locks were built by the Yale Company, and The Geek Atlas explains how the familiar home ‘tumbler’ (or Yale) lock works. Flying over the US towards California there’s plenty of time to read up on the The Geek Atlas’ highlights of Silicon Valley, but after leaving San Francisco airport your tour heads south and out towards Fort Irwin, CA where NASA has the headquarters of the Deep Space Communications Complex with its multiple parabolic dishes that point skyward and chat with man-made probes that are exploring the solar system. Some of the probes have been phoning home to Fort Irwin for over 30 years. Since it’s a long ride to Fort Irwin you’ll have time to get your head around The Geek Atlas section on error-detecting and correcting codes used to transmit information across the reaches of space (and ensure your credit card number is accurate). To complete the tour it’s a change of scene and continent: you leave high-tech California and dial back time to visit one of the oldest stone observatories in the world at the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, India. In Jaipur you’ll be seeing the largest sundial in the world and a host of beautiful and massive instruments used for astronomical observations since the 18th century. “This is the Captain speaking once again. Thank you for taking The Geek Atlas world tour. Your trip is free if you can tell the chief flight attendant the significance of our flight number while deplaning.”

About the Author
John Graham-Cumming is a wandering programmer who's lived in the UK, California, New York and France. Along the way he's worked for a succession of technology start-ups, written the award-winning open source POPFile email program and churned out articles for publications such as The Guardian newspaper, Dr Dobbs, and Linux Magazine. His previous effort writing a book was the obscure and self-published computer manual GNU Make Unleashed which saturated its target market of 100 readers. Because he has a doctorate in computer security he's deeply suspicious of people who insist on being called Dr., but doesn't mind if you refer to him as a geek.

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Customer Reviews

Written BY a Geek, but for Geeks and Non-Geeks Alike!
This terrific book first came to my attention when its author politely asked whether it would be okay for him to mention it in the technical newsgroup forums my company hosts. I had known of John through his many years as an occasional contributor in our forums, though I knew nothing of his being an author. Little did I know.

Now I have a copy, and I love it. When I take it with me to coffee, other regulars who have seen it before, grab it if I'm reading something else. We all love it because it is SO accessible (and these are people who are not nearly as geeky as me). Opening the book to literally any page pulls you in immediately. Even if you're not a traveller (I'm definitely not) the book is a compendium of bite-size world-wide technical history of innovation and invention -- in gratifying detail. No single topic is more than four pages long, so you can read many before your coffee gets cold. And you may be ordering a second cup, because this book is difficult to put down. You can read by region, or scan the table of contents for anything that looks interesting; The Escher Museum in the Netherlands, the Experimental Breeder Reactor #1 in Idaho, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Mendel Museum of Genetics in the Czech Republic, and 124 other notable places and times where something geeky and technologically important happened. I used to wonder how and where the speed of light was first measured. Now I know.

John has filled the pages not only with a discussion of interesting brief historical notes, but also with his own diagrams and explanations of every principle and discovery. He has a direct, straightforward, and clear writing style. And best of all for geeky readers like myself, he clearly knows what he's talking about. Unlike some authors who are disconcerting because you sense that they're not sure of their facts, you won't find any of that here. The technical content is precise and will satisfy the geekiest among us.

This book would be a bargain at twice Amazon's price of only $20. So think about getting two. Even if you are not a geek, you'll love this -- really. And I'll bet you know a geek who would value this just as much!

So much more than a travel guide!
The Geek Atlas is a travel guide for locating the sites of significant math, technology, and science breakthroughs complete with little icons for each location indicating the availability of food, weather-suitability, and kid-friendliness. But "travel guide" barely begins to describe the wonder contained in the Geek Atlas. I prefer to think of this book as a geography-based survey of awesomely fascinating stuff no one ever told you, but that you'd love to know. Imagine having a smart uncle around to feed your brain tasty tidbits of knowledge. If you'd like to be that uncle, here's your guide. Open the book to any page and I guarantee you'll find a cool story or a neat technical explanation: the molecular structure of penicillin plus an explanation for how it works, the story of the first battery and the chemistry behind it, a thorough and detailed description of the structure and function of the lymphatic system, the temperature of space. Gobs of information about technology and science. I could live without this knowledge, but being a geek myself, I wouldn't want to!

Take, for example, the entry on the Eiffel Tower. From the Geek Atlas we learn that the Eiffel Tower was built with puddle iron "which has a higher carbon content than wrought iron and therefore more tensile strength. Puddle iron is made by mixing the pig iron from a blast furnace with iron oxide (rust) and puddling it (stirring the molten mixture)." The Eiffel Tower section continues with a description of Eiffel's engineering approach to the tower's wind resistance: "In 1885, Eiffel wrote a paper for the French Society of Civil Engineers in which he described the most significant part of the tower's design -- he had eliminated any diagonal bars by ensuring that stress from the wind was transmitted exclusively down the exterior of the tower. This design dictated a specific curving shape." As familiar as the Eiffel Tower seems, I knew none of this!

I love this book. Give it to a curious kid, a dad or mom with kids, or devour its pages on your own. If you're a geek, or a lover of science and tech, this book's for you.

A fascinating and enjoyable book
A recent search on Amazon for travel guides returned over 30,000 results. Most of these are standard travel guides to popular tourist destinations which advise the reader to go to the typical tourist sites. The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive is a radically different travel guide. Rather than recommending the usual trite destinations, which are often glorified souvenir stores, the book takes the reader to places that make science real and exciting, and hopefully those who exit such places are more knowledgeable than when they went in.

Irrespective of its travel content, The Geek Atlas is a unique and fascinating read for the information and overview of its wide range of topics. If there is a fault in the book, it is with its title. When people see Geek Atlas, they might think that this is a book that takes the reader to boring and obscure places, which is the exact opposite of its intent.

Author John Graham-Cumming writes that you won't find tedious, third-rate museums, or a tacky plaque stuck to a wall stating that "Professor X slept here". Every place he recommends is meant to have real scientific, mathematical, or technological interest.

Each of the books 128 chapters is separated into 3 parts: a general introduction to the place with an emphasis on its scientific, mathematical or technological significance; a related technical subject covered in greater detail, and practical visiting information. So while you may not be able to make it to the Escher Museum (chapter 29) in The Hague, Netherlands; the information on how M.C. Escher used impossible shapes in which the chapter describes is a fascinating read on its own.

Graham-Cumming notes that a disappointing trend with science museums today is a tendency to emphasize the wow factor without really explaining the underlying science. He notes the following 3 attributes of such museums: a short name ending with an exclamation mark, a logo featuring pastel colors or a cuddle cartoon mascot, or an IMAX theater.

Why does the book specifically have 128 places listed? See chapter 58, for the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, UK. Graham-Cumming notes that your average travel guide would have listed perhaps 100 or 125 places. 128 is a round binary number (10000000). Of course, those who are binary obsessed might wonder why this book is not titled 10000000 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.

The 128 places listed are for the most part divided equally between sites in Europe and the USA, with a few in the Far East and Russia. A complete listing of the sites is mapped on the books web site. Africa for some reason seems to be left out and perhaps a follow-up volume will fill that void. Of course, one could argue that Africa has had a minimal contribution to the world of science, mathematics and technology. Nigeria for example is famous for its 419 advance-fee fraud, but not its overabundance of contributors to physics.

For the US locations, there are locations for 25 states, with California being the biggest with 7 suggested places to visit. With that, it is surprising that the book lists the HP Garage, given that it is not open to the public and only serves as a shack to be photographed. Other places such as the US Navy Submarine Force Museum and MIT Museum are indeed more visit worthy.

The tours of some of the sites, like the HP Garage will take less than an hour or so (chapter 42 -- Bunhill Fields Cemetery, London, UK), while others one can spend a half or full-day at the site.

While The Geek Atlas is touted as a travel guide, it is much more than that. Its 128 chapters are a wide-ranging overview of science and mathematics. Topics run the gamut from physics and pharmacology to transistors and optics. In fact, the book would make a superb syllabus for an introduction to science course. The plethora of subject covered, combined with its easy to read and absorbing style makes it a fantastic book for both those that are scientifically challenged, yet curious, and those that have a keen interest in the sciences.

The Geek Atlas is a fascinating and enjoyable read; in fact, it I found it hard to put down. Lets hope the author is working on a sequel with the next 256 additional places where science and technology come alive.