Cranks, quarks, and the cosmos : writings on science

Author / Creator

Bernstein, Jeremy, 1929-

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Summary

"Jeremy Bernstein's work has become an eagerly awaited resource for all who want a window on the arcane world of twentieth-century science. His "Annals of Science" pieces in The New Yorker - scient...

"Jeremy Bernstein's work has become an eagerly awaited resource for all who want a window on the arcane world of twentieth-century science. His "Annals of Science" pieces in The New Yorker - scientific profiles of great scientists - have been much admired and much imitated as a means of conveying deep science or technology through the experience of recognizable human beings. "I act as a channel between these subjects and an audience of readers whom I do not assume to be scientists, but whom I do assume to have intellectual curiosity," Bernstein writes. "The personality serves the message - the science - and not the other way around...Marital infidelity is marital infidelity whether it is practiced by Erwin Schrodinger or your neighborhood grocer. What makes Schrodinger special is that he invented wave mechanics and thus transformed twentieth-century science."" "Here now are some of Bernstein's most wonderful pieces of the past decade, including two never-before published and several published only in obscure journals. The book includes a charming autobiographical account of how he came to be the science writer for The New Yorker...a fascinating discussion of how to spot a crank science paper, entitled "How Can We Be Sure That Albert Einstein Was Not a Crank?"...a profile of Sophia Kovalevsky, who is universally regarded as the greatest female mathematician prior to the twentieth century...and much more." "Whether he's discussing the entrepreneur and photographic genius Edwin Land or songwriter/mathematician Tom Lehrer, or writing about science for non-scientists, Bernstein manages to inform as well as entertain."--BOOK JACKET.

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