I don’t know what it is with these young people thinking the violent obliteration of a planet and all its civilizations is cool. Maybe they grew up with reality being virtual and not the other kind. Never mind. Supernova 1987A — the “A” because it was 1987’s first supernova — used to be a blue […]
This post is a re-run from 7/15/2010. The situation hasn’t improved. I grew up noticing what a writer notices — stories and how things are said — and educated myself accordingly. So I never learned much science and now, after I’ve unexpectedly turned into a science writer, my questions to scientists are generally English-major questions. […]
As you undoubtedly know, quantum theory — the most precisely accurate most fundamental theory about the universe’s most basic particles and forces — comes down to the uncertainty principle. That is, if you know where and how forcefully and how fast a particle is going (its momentum), you can’t at the same time know where […]
Take up where the last review left off: “. . . and if nonfiction writers are so entranced by the techniques and effects of fiction, why don’t they for chrissakes just write it?” Well, they do, they just do it cheesily. Fiction about reality – about history or, say, science — often follows the cupcake […]
We here at LWON have been all over this and we (ok, I) agree completely with AG: astrobiologists out-compete evolutionary psychologists for getting the most publicity out of the least evidence. Also I just ran across an interesting but illogical argument: if the principles of physics, chemistry, and geology “work beyond our planet,” why not […]
Some of the characters of Thomas McMahon’s novel, Loving Little Egypt: Mourly Vold, a nearly-blind, off-scale intelligent young man at the School for the Blind who figures out how to take a telephone’s receiver and transmitter, make an induction coil from a pencil, adapt a Ford’s magneto, turn a hairpin into a hookswitch, and make […]
__________ This reminds me of that idiot, Walt Whitman, who thought his appreciation of the stars was so superior to the learn’d astronomer’s. The guy needed a pie in the face. But here’s the question: is good poetry (not AG’s) as enlightening, meaningful, or interesting as a walk on Mars — or any kind of […]
July 16 – 21 So what do we do about invasive species? Exterminate ’em, right? and feel holy about it. And when the invasives are goats on the Galapagos, we still exterminate ’em, right? Only it doesn’t feel so holy, says Virginia. Ann, in her obsessive search for the metaphors of science, finds another one: […]
