The Big Spin

Overview

The Big Spin is what California's lottery TV show is called. And lottery being a game of chance, from here Burke takes us through Alexander Fleming's chance discovery of penicillin, to Rudolf Virchow's observation that contaminated water is related to health, to Schliemann's search for the City of Troy, the theft of a discovered treasure, and to Virchow's criminology. From there we proceed to anthropology, the classification of life forms, Francis Bacon, the statistics of mortality, life expectancy, statistical math, Priestley's carbonated water, the soda fountain, petroleum oil, some French fossil hunters, seismology, and impossible-to-predict earthquakes.