Discord is that sort of genial, Whiggish, Anglocentric account that science lecturers once dashed off for Victorian weeklies. And dashed off this book was. Author of thirty-plus books of popular science since 1999, Goldsmith, a physicist, commits error after error as he skips through the millennia, shunting the writing of the Babylonian-Epic of Gilgamesh to India, playwright Ben Jonson (1572-1637) to the eighteenth century, and novelist Robert Musil from Austria to Germany. Goldsmith's thesis is that the number, loudness, and kinds of noises have increased over the ages due to the growth of population, cities, and industry. Annoyance with noise increased proportionately, as the sole effective recourse was zoning that restricted noise-producers by time or place. Only since 1895 and the Harvard investigations of Wallace (not William) Clement Sabine has science furnished mathematical principles for viable acoustic design and noise attenuation. Amplified during the 1920s by better microphones and audiometric scaling, "after thousands of years of slow progress, the science of sound leapt forward" (p. 164). That progress, with that leap, appears to have been primarily British-even the baptism, if not the conception, of the decibel-although Goldsmith does pause to assess the works of Galileo, Athanasius Kircher, Pierre Laplace, Daniel Colladon, Ernst Weber, Hermann Helmholtz, and Harvey Fletcher (not Harold or, as indexed, Harry).
展开▼
