As part of LWON’s unintended series on science and art, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan. He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe. As such, he was involved in […]
Ann
I’m generally anxious though I doubt that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or at least when I went to trustable-looking websites and read their lists of symptoms and took their little tests, I didn’t quite fit or pass. But sometimes I get scared and jumpy and fretful and hyper-alert and shaky; I stop thinking clearly; […]
17 -21 September The forbidden crystal sounds like an Indiana Jones sequel, but it’s real. Ann tells you about an expedition “to find something nature made that we didn’t know it could make.” Heather explains honey guides, honey badgers, and why honey was likely the fuel that gave us our big brains. Three-time guest posting […]
Paul Steinhardt looks like a tidy and successful lawyer, though a touch geeky. He’s a physicist whose fields include the gritty physics of matter, the first instants of the universe, and the possibility that the universe won’t end, it’ll just cycle. He’s a theorist, that is, he uses computers, math, and his brains to make […]
September 3 – 7 Sometimes new technology gives you a person who can only compare the moon to a tart. And sometimes it gives you Galileo, or the Beatles. This week, Richard pondered the connection. For labor day, Ann brought back her famous account of scientists being withering. Tom got irritated about the science lies […]
My nephew-the-biology-graduate-student sacrificed several days and a certain amount of money to come to a family reunion and seemed honestly interested in talking to the relatives, so I thought, ok, maybe this is a little vacation from the lab, maybe he’s relaxing. Except I’d look over at him sprawled on the couch and say, “What […]
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. […]
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 […]
