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.

Comments

Science Superheroes

[Colonel Korn]

"EW's list seems to represent a major shortcoming in the field: it still isn't diffusing into popular culture."

A professor once gave me a book called The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Pleasures-Engineering-Thomas-Dunne/dp/0312141041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214425954&sr=8-1), which began with a discussion of engineers as romantic, heroic figures to the people of the late 19th century. This is still true to some extent in some places like France. Right now in the US we're in an anti-intellectual upswing, but that doesn't mean we won't have another golden age of cultural interest in science.