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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.
But Carl Sagan documentaires were *a must* when I was a kid.
Oh, and Isaac Asimov's non-SF books are great too (the book about Physics and the one about Maths are great).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
In related news, Cosmo whines about the lack of great intellectual thinkers.
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What many people don't know is that in addition to being a great bongo player, Richard Feynman was also quite an accomplished physicist.
It's true!
Isn't this subjective with the term "best read". I can tell you right now that I'm not even moderatly interested in the majority of those books. I could name a few fantasy books I'd say would say most certainly beats many of those on that list but because of my own tastes.
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking I actually found to be a great read if they need suggestions on science literature. Again, who considers science a "good read"? Not most people I would say.
"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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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
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
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Class-You-Wish-Had/dp/0399523138
"The Science Class You Wish You Had"
It covers a LOT of ground in very short time, and makes everything accessible. This is definitely for people who think that Harry Potter is the #2 best book of the last 25 years.
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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"
What about the compilations of Gould's essays for "Natural History" magazine? My two favorites are "The Panda's Thumb" and "Bully for Brontosaurus".
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
GÃdel, Escher, Bach has enough science in it (particularly cognition and neurology) to qualify as a "science book" (whatever that's supposed to mean).
Definitely a must-read for anyone interested in metacognition.
I loved A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It is more of a history of science book. If you want to know something like how it is that we know the age of the earth and all the prior theories and how they were concocted then this is the kind of book for you. It is a very entertaining read as he often takes side tracks into the personalities behind the discoveries.
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.
Who needs books? Most scientists read wikipedia.
REAL scientists know wikipedia is unreliable. That's why they use the Uncyclopedia.
Another place scientists go is Bob the Angry Flower. Here's another. And another. Oh look, here's one for you!mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Excuse me? Penrose's "The emperor's new mind" was published in 1989 and is one wonderful book on AI - so great that I've read it a few times (I was 14-15 the first time I read it, it took pretty long to come to my country). Maybe EW should concentrate on the mindless entertainment?
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.
Science Weekly's list of "The 100 Best Reads" includes not one single piece of popular culture fluff. Nor does it only go back 25 years, which is about how long people with no other useful purpose have been making money by turning information about entertainment (as opposed to entertainment itself) into a money making venture.
When EW's history goes back far enough and has enough quality material listed that they can claim to have their equivalent to Principia Mathematia, then they'll have something significant to say about their own field. And they will probably still have no background from which to judge science literature.
I read an entertaining and educational science book once a week whether I need to or not. Anyone wanting some suggestions along these lines, go read Alan Boyle's "Cosmic Log" on MSNBC and look up the archives of his Used Book Of The Month Club. Those who already read such things should keep an eye out for his next request for suggestions, and submit one. If it gets used, you get a prize -- usually another good science book he'd recently reviewed or otherwise acquired.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
And what about good old Stevie H.? Brief History of time anyone? Great book, widely read... and a damn good read at that...
The God Particle by Leon Ledderman is one of my favourite Physics books. It offers an incredibly accessible introduction to particle physics for the non science oriented while at the same time provides a fascinating look (for the science oriented) into the history of particle physics by someone involved in several of the key discoveries of the last 50 years.
The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, and Basin and Range by John McPhee. All three were popular enough to make it onto the NYT best seller lists and were widely discussed as pop lit.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
As do you...
QED came out in 1985, making it only 23 years old. It'd definitely go on my favorite science book list. It explained virtual photons and summing of probability amplitudes quite well, I though, without calling in the heavy math.
I'm also a fan of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.
--sabre86
Chaos: Making a new science, by James Gleick is an excellent book. It covers the history of fractals/chaos and reads a bit like a novel. The mini biographies of many cutting edge scientists that are discussed along the way are very interesting too. I highly recommend it. http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0140092501
How could they leave this off the list of most entertaining books of the last 25 years. Not only does it teach a lot about gravity but you can use it experimentally as a central mass.
Squirrel!
James Burke - Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, etc. Simon Singh - The Code Book Schneier - Beyond Fear
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.
Gravity, George Gamow
Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory, George Gamow
Birth of a New Physics, I Bernard Cohen
The nice thing about these is that they don't pander or sensationalize the way much of what passes for current science writing does.
As far as more recent work goes, I found "Subtle is the Lord", an Einstein biography by Abraham Pais to be quite good.
The two Richard Rhodes bomb books are genius.
The first one tells the story of 20th century physics and the rise of the Nazis. The second one ends with the Cuban Missle Crisis. Both are white knuckle history with the physics moving from ceiling wax to Mike.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
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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