What's Science Ever Done For Us: What the Simpsons Can Teach Us About Physics, Robots, Life, and the Universe
Just in time for the release of the big-screen Simpsons movie, and in the tradition of numerous others in the Science of . . . series, comes this entertaining, educational look at the world's most famous yellow-skinned cartoon characters and what they can teach us—believe it or not—about genetics, artificial intelligence, time travel, space travel, extraterrestrials, quantum physics, the Coriolis effect, and other mind-expanding matters. Like William Irwin's The Simpsons and Philosophy (2001), the book extracts wisdom and real-world lessons from the long-running animated show: Halpern uses an episode in which Homer sells a tobacco-tomato crossbreed called tomacco, for example, to explore the subject of genetic mutation; the famous episode "The Springfield Files," in which a green-glowing alien is revealed to be Mr. Burns, leads the author into a discussion of the dangers of overexposure to radium. Halpern, a physics and mathematics professor, is clearly a big Simpsons fan, and, in addition to being informative and accessible to the lay reader, his book is a lot of fun. It's not often you laugh while you read a science book; like The Simpsons itself, the book is funny and smart. Pitt, David