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; […]
History/Philosophy
I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” the other night when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles!” cried Ed, in his imitable style, and the camera cut to curtains flying apart with an abandon that matched the song’s first notes, already slamming away. Then Paul stepped to […]
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 […]
One evening during a recent visit to Santiago, Chile, I went to dinner with two colleagues. Afterward, as I descended the stairs of the Metro to cross Providencia Avenue, I saw a young girl, no more than five years old, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on the ground. She was holding out a shoe […]
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 […]
Science, so useful to our lives in so many ways, also usefully supplies metaphors from which we may find comfort or edification. An astronomer told me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, was surrounded by a tenuous halo of hot gas. “How can gas stay hot, out there in space?” I asked. […]
This is the third installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read the first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here, and the second, about eerie mounds of black coral, here. If you go to the Galápagos, and even if you go, as I did, in a herd of clumsy American tourists, […]
Science is known to be fatal; it kills people — this is all but a cliché. World War I was the chemists’ war: chemists developed chlorine as a bleach and a disinfectant, then turned it into chlorine gas, which flooded (along with other gases) into enemy trenches. World War II was the physicists’ war: physicists […]