(This post is the first in a two-part series. I adapted it from a keynote address I delivered in the summer of 2010 at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont, where I teach in the MFA Writing program. The essay is part of a collection of talks by Goddard writing faculty that have been collected in […]
Physics
AG’s little mouseover says, “. . .except algebraic geometry. Algebraic geometry pretty much sucks.” I’m going to have to take his word for it, I’m profoundly innumerate. Moreover, if AG hadn’t added the caption, I would have said this cartoon was about physics. Physics is the science, the knowledge; math is just the language — […]
In 1992 I wrote an article for the New York Times on body doubles—the performers in movies who substitute for stars who aren’t quite buff enough for close-ups or brave enough for nudity. I cited several examples of stars who have used body doubles, including Kim Basinger in My Stepmother Is An Alien and Julia […]
Socrates (according to Plato) is explaining to a follower, Glaucon, an overly-complex but famous metaphor. Prisoners who have been raised in a cave sit chained facing a wall, which is lit only by the fire behind them. For the prisoners, says Socrates, reality is “only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another.” And […]
On April 4, the physics department at Columbia University held an unblinding party. For 100.9 days between January 13 and June 8, 2010, a detector 4,500 feet underground at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, in central Italy, had been collecting data. Following the protocol of a “blind” analysis, the data had instantly disappeared into […]
My grandfather was interested in the Faust legend and I inherited the interest, though for the life of me I don’t know why it’s interesting and he died before I could ask him. Whatever it is, it has to do with trading your soul for certain bad kinds of knowledge, or with excessive curiosity leading […]
I’ve kept an eye on neutrinos ever since I heard, back in the mid-1980’s, that not enough of them were coming out of the sun; this sounded serious. It turned out that the sun was behaving itself but the neutrinos weren’t. On its way out of the sun, any given neutrino was changing into three […]
Some scientists make great discoveries. Some scientists provide the opportunity for other scientists to make great discoveries. Let us now praise one not-so-famous man. Victor Blanco assumed the directorship of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in June 1967, just five months before the observatory opened. CTIO, a collaboration between U.S. and Chile, was an […]