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[seekingferret]

48. The Secret Life of Quanta by M.Y. Han

Wow, this is a singularly unique pop science book, to my eyes. Most science writers these days write under the banner of this Brian Greene op-ed, believing that the right approach to accessible science writing is to steer clear of the math and focus on the "Wow moments", especially those provoked by the

Comments

[sanguinity]

:: It's a total contempt for important, workmanlike science that actually advances our understanding of the world but isn't attractive mathematically. ::

I'm from a theoretical math background. I've spent loads of time around departments full of people who feel that contempt, and yet science is still proceeding somehow. That a nominal physicist is showing that contempt is new and amusing to me, but I have faith that someone, somewhere, will be taking up the important, workmanlike, practical advances, because humans tend to be like that. Part of the experience I'm drawing on, mind you, is the way that mathematics has splintered and resplintered because someones felt the need to do something unrespectably practical and workmanlike. So even though physics has been dinking around with string theory for a good long while now, I am confident still that the breakthrough will happen -- it just may not be the physics department that gets credit this go around.

(Well, unless we've gotten to the "chimpanzee" threshold that De Grasse Tyson worries about -- that we've just hit our hard-wired cognitive limit to conceptualize the universe. But if that's the case...)

:: I think you'll probably find the math in the Han book a bit boring and simple... ::

I like boring and simple math. It makes me feel smart. ;-)

Also, one of my interests is how to effectively get math across to lay people, so even if the math itself isn't interesting, I will be interested in how he handles it for a popsci audience.

[seekingferret]

it just may not be the physics department that gets credit this go around.

I know my science history. It will be the physics department that gets credit. Remember, a meteorologist discovered chaos theory, but people forget that and think of it as a physics breakthrough because the physicists, when they finally clued in, piled on.

And part of my experience is the number of my agemates who grew up with popular science writing/communication built around string theory and the "ooh, pretty" mindset I spoke about in my original post, and I've seen these people become disillusioned in grad school when they realized that research was actually hard work with little immediate reward and little in the way of "ooh pretty". And I've seen people who would have made important contributions to science driven away because it wasn't what they were promised when they were growing up.