The sum of our fears
“THE CARBON OF a mother’s milk becomes the carbon of her child’s beating heart.”
We hear a lot about carbon these days, and none of it is good. That’s the stuff warming the Earth, right?
A new book (Symphony in C, Harper Collins) gives us a deeper understanding of the effects of carbon on earth, comparing it, unexpectedly, to music. The author, American professor of earth sciences Robert M. Hazen, is a mineralogist and astrobiologist who has a mineral (hazenite) named after him. If anyone can make the music/carbon thing work, it should be him: until 2016, he was a trumpeter in his spare time.
A “distinguished” scientist (Hazen has enough national awards to qualify as one) is often, let’s be honest, a bit of a prose killer. But Hazen has written a writerly and even,
