SciManDan is a YouTube creator from England. He uses his channel to debunk science misinformation he finds on the internet. A lot of the time that is coming from Flat Earth believers or people who believe that all space exploration has been faked. (Those are often the same people.)

He recently started a book club so I decided to give it a try. I knew that this would be challenging for me. Obviously, I have a strong science background, but my interest is all in biology. I had to do a lot of math and some physics in college as prerequisites to apply to veterinary school but I hated every minute of it. I’ve never needed any of it above algebra for my job. I use the geometry for quilting! The rest has been useless. It was just used to see who was willing to jump through the hoops to apply to school.

The books for the club weren’t announced in advance but I figured that they would be more geared toward the aspects of science that I don’t find as interesting. I wanted to try to push myself to see what I could learn.

There are two options to join – physical and digital. For physical you get the book and a gift box every two months. For digital you just get access to the Discord server where the book is being discussed and you need to find your own copy of the book. I went with digital because this is a UK-based club and I thought the shipping of the book would be expensive. What I didn’t count on was that the obscurity of the books would make finding my own copies hard. Of the two books so far, I had to find one on a used book site I’d never heard of before and the other I was able to find on Amazon as an ebook but it was expensive.

The first book was Eight Improbable Possibilities by John Gribbin.

This book started strong for me. I learned a lot about the formation of the moon and how it is a stabilizing effect on the Earth. Without it life may not have been able to evolve. I really liked that chapter.

After that it got more into astrophysics and my brain just slid off it. That’s what I learned from those sections. My brain just does not care about physics. I can force myself to read the words. I can’t force myself to care or retain the information. (That was my issue with physics in college too.) As a champion DNFer of books, this was hard for me. I went into this not allowing myself to quit a book. I powered through but it took me almost the whole two months allotted for this book and it is a short book. Other people in the discussion were bemoaning how basic this book was and my brain was whining, “Why are there numbers??? This is so boring.”

It did move back to biology at the end and it was pretty basic. So I get what the physics-brained people were saying in the discussion.

The second book is Proof by Adam Kucharski. This is about how we know what is true and what isn’t. Again, it starts strong. My brain was much happier by discussions of logic. But then it got into a discussion of mathematical proofs and it came up to one that was a problem in the development of calculus.

It shows a complicated equation on the page. It says that obviously that was going to be an issue. It doesn’t say why. It just assumes that you can look at this equation and see the issue. Now, I’m all for calculus being proved wrong. One of my happiest memories is still walking out of the final exam of my very last calculus class I was ever going to have to take in my entire life and knowing that I never had to do that ever again. But apparently I’m a dumb-dumb reading this book and you should explain to the class why this equation was an issue.

I gave up eventually. I just could not get into this book. I want to. My brain just is not interested and that is the kiss of death for a mood reader.

The third book was A Brief History of Earth by Andrew H. Knoll. I tried this on audio to see if that would help. It did but I think my brain had totally given up by that time. I only got through the first chapter or two.

I ended up canceling the subscription because:

  • I proved to myself that I am just a biology person through and through
  • I’m not interested in using Discord enough to remember to go there and have discussions. I find it way too clunky to use enjoyably.

It’s too bad because I really liked the idea of the club but it just didn’t work out for me.