Pity the grad students in a seminar with Vaclav Smil. Or perhaps, envy them. If they survive his intellectual blast furnace, they will emerge much stronger. In Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years, Smil dismisses the faulty analysis of other senior academics, many named, with phrases such as “this is nonsense” and “entirely missing the fact.” Perhaps students receive more gentle…
Peter Calamai
Peter Calamai has been a foreign correspondent, national reporter and editorial page editor for Southam newspapers and, most recently, science reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star. He is now freelancing to avoid the catastrophe of retirement.
Articles by
Peter Calamai
A Loss of Beauty
Sounding the alarm for some of nature’s most interesting creatures January–February 2008Half-Full or Half-Empty?
An Australian and a Canadian take opposite views on dealing with climate change May 2006
Just days before writing this review, at the end of the first week of March, I flew with a group of Canadian atmospheric scientists from Eureka on Ellesmere Island—the northern-most permanent research station in the world—to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. The Summit Air charter was aloft for about seven hours and, for that entire…
The Theory of Everything
Three books examine our insatiable need to explain the nature of the universe October 2004
In almost any used bookstore you can find nearly mint copies of A Brief History of Time, a supposedly “popular” science book by Stephen Hawking that was on British bestseller lists for four years. Usually, these volumes will fall open somewhere in the first 50 pages, showing where the original owners admitted…