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Richard Dawkins On Science Writing
otee writes "Richard Dawkins asks the question: Why hasn't a Nobel Prize been awarded to a scientist for literary work? He suspects that it simply hasn't occurred to the judges. Read the well written article at The Edge Website for information about good (science) writing."
No scientist has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Why not? I suspect that it simply hasn't occurred to the judges. "Literature" automatically conjures "novelist", or "poet".
On the other hand: Winston Churchill got the Nobel prize for literature for his memoires, not really proze or poetry.
This isn't about scientific publications of the kind you'd find on arxiv.org; it's about scientific publications of the kind people buy to look impressive on their coffee-table. Popularisations.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Ok, so Hawkins "A Brief History of Time" would qualify as a popular scientific publications, as it's simplyfied in a way, yet not too much. The target audience is the average reader without a PhD.
Still, I wouldn't rate it as literature, since Hawkins intended to inform the reader, and not necessarily to "emotionalize" (the latter - in my opinion - being the prime motive for literature).
IMHO it really boils down to the emotions (other than the occasional joke) conveyed in a text. This aspects sets scientific and literature texts apart. And this aspect is (again, IMHO) what makes a text worthy to receive a nobel prize.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
IIRC,
Bertrand Russel got the Nobel prize for literature. But I guess he counts as a mathematician.
Dawkins has gone for whole books without mentioning "godbotherers". It really is a rather small aspect of his writing and one which he seems to have left alone for the moment.
Why is anything anything?
Stephen Hawking wrote "A Brief History of Time". Richard Dawkins, the subject of this article, wrote "The Blind Watchmaker" and lots of other books on evolutionary biology. Two different authors.