Slashdot Mirror
Entertainment Weekly Bemoans Lack of Great Science Books
Bryan writes "A recent headline at Entertainment Weekly suggests that the '100 Best Reads' of the last 25 years do not include a single science book (not even a popular science book). In response, cosmologist Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has given an interesting analysis of EW's disappointing list, and Soul Physics is calling for suggestions on the Greatest Physics Books of the Last 25 Years. For all the great literature that science has produced in the last 25 years, EW's list seems to represent a major shortcoming in the field: it still isn't diffusing into popular culture." I'm not sure what Entertainment Weekly's standing to complain would come from. That aside, have science books ever in modern times been a driving force greater than ones intended as (mere) entertainment, religious instruction, etc? I'd put anything by Richard Feynman on this list, though.
any and ALL books by Carl Sagan, A.C. Clark (non-fiction), A.Asimov (non-fiction) and a MUST READ Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
I haven't read any of the books on their list, and I've only heard of about a quarter of them. They need to travel in wider circles.
Uh. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the twits and twats that read Entertainment Weekly simply aren't the same people that would read anything by Kaku or Sagan or Dawkins or anything else that would make them use that three pound enigma in their skulls.
I, for example, don't know any of the current videos on MTV or BET. I'm just not in that demographic.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Everyone was interested in it. The Space Race was still ongoing, magazines like Popular Science proliferated, and we Cub Scout and Boy Scout kids worked hard on our radio and electricity or bridge-building experiments. We all wanted to be scientists when we grew up.
Now, everyone wants to be "in entertainment." Even the most well-known "scientists" are really CELEBRITIES more than anything else; they're famous for being famous. Instead of the staid, sober "Mr. Wizard," you have "Bill Nye the Science Guy" from about a decade ago, or the new Sid The Science Kid. It's all about fun and flash and, well, "celebrity," entertainment.
We used to be "entertained" by the IDEAS behind what we were learning. We had imagination enough to extrapolate ideas like "hey, if I can make this model rocket fly up to 500 feet, maybe one day I can make one that goes the the Moon or Mars!"
Now, it's all about what someone else is doing, for our entertainment, on TV. Don't need "hands-on," we can just watch someone else do "Science" that really just looks like an entertaining video game.
Perhaps if we could get the kids back to doing REAL science - after all, when you're eight years old the same experiments that the scientists of three hundred years ago were performing for the first time are certainly NEWS to you! - instead of just seeking to entertain them, they might start to take it seriously.
And that would be reflected in what we are reading and talking about as well.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
First I'd have to possibly put Stephen Hawking's A Brief History Of Time on there. It was pretty popular, and really good at explaining the comments to a mass audience.
Second, I just don't think popular culture is fertile ground for intellectual inquiry along the lines of hard science. Some popular mass-circulation magazines and newspapers used to have math and science sections of interest to general readership. You'll find nothing like that in People, Us, or USA Today.
Third, I think scientists have gone somewhat at odds with the general population in the past few decades as well. This is still largely a religious nation, but many books by the most prominent scientists now spend most of their time not only questioning things like religious belief and cherished cultural traditions, but mocking them outright as well. Richard Dawkins all but calls religious people idiots in his books. That's kind of a hard sell when nearly 90 percent of your population believes in a God of some kind.
What was that line from that movie... Contact? Palmer Joss's line?
Just possibly, making the argument to most of the population that their beliefs are nothing but twaddle probably doesn't do wonders for book sales.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"Entertainment Weekly too shallow to pay attention to science, blames scientific community"
If their demographic is twenty- and thirty-something people who want to read about movie stars and their lives, which is what Entertainment Weekly publishes (they gave me a free subscription, which now clogs my recycle bin, unread) they're pretty unlikely to enjoy books that aren't about movie stars.
Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" is a fabulous read. One or two chapters each on astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, you name it. There's a reason it was a bestseller: it is accessible to people who don't know an integral from an interval.
There are scads of excelent science books out there: Sagan, Asimov, Zukav, Hofstatder. But if you want to read about Mel B's nose job, you're probably not going to rate them highly.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
What about "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark" By Carl Sagan,"The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins, "The fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene etc. EW is a bunch of idiots.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
In my mind, a lot of these are questionable at best, but any organization that places a poorly-written piece of garbage like "The DaVinci Code" on a list of the top 100 books in the past 25 years immediately loses my respect.
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
He's written a bunch of books that should be on the list: "Selfish Gene", "The Blind Watchmaker", "Ancestor's Tale" and last but not least "The God Delusion".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
IIRC, that was the book of which it was said, "bought by millions of people, read by thousands, understood by hundreds".
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
EW's list is almost entirely light fiction. Except for a few memoirs, there aren't any non-fiction books, let alone science books. I've enjoyed several of the books on the list, but it might be better titled "100 classic beach books".
I'm not sure if the EW article changed since the Slashdot article was posted, but it doesn't look like EW made any remark about the lack o f science books. I think that was just the submitter's editorial comment.
If we took 10% of our defense budget and put it into education I believe we would solve a lot of our problems.
The general population wouldn't be as xenophobic, thus less willing to go after the "evil doers" as our current leader labels them.
George Bush has actually increased federal educational spending by more than any US President since Lyndon Johnson.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-02-federal-spending-inside_x.htm
And I wouldn't call Americans Xenophobic when the overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of legal immigration. It's really only the unions and the cultural right wing that are against even illegal immigration.
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