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Entertainment Weekly Bemoans Lack of Great Science Books
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jun 25, 2008 03:26 PM
from the that's-entertainment-weekly dept.
from the that's-entertainment-weekly dept.
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.
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I don't know about books... (Score:5, Informative)
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).
non-SF Asimov (Score:2, Offtopic)
Don't forget Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare
Re:I don't know about books... (Score:5, Informative)
Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" was, I think, a bestseller and was very good too.
Parent
Re:I don't know about books... (Score:5, Insightful)
IIRC, that was the book of which it was said, "bought by millions of people, read by thousands, understood by hundreds".
Parent
Re:I don't know about books... (Score:5, Funny)
Tough read past that point but you can make it if you mind your P's and Q's.
Parent
Re:I don't know about books... (Score:4, Funny)
Agreed. Watching his specials and NOVA were a large part of what inspired me to become a scientist. I predict that the current generation is going to grow up watching things like Mythbusters and Brainiac and lead to an massive increase in the number of people entering fields science that involve "blowing shit up".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My four year old is bored silly by most of the stuff on The Science Channel. But he loves Mythbusters and Master Blasters, as do I. I had Mr. Wizard growing up, he has Mythbusters, and anyone who thinks that Mr. Wizard's audience was just kids needs to check themselves.
There is a time for everything under the sun, and sometimes you want to watch someone explain the mysteries of the billy-uns and billy-uns of stars out there, and sometimes you want to see someone blow s*** up (for a purpose).
As for books, Je
Re:I don't know about books... (Score:4, Interesting)
My daughter (7 years old) got sucked into Mythbusters last year (picking up basic scientific method). Recently (last 2 months), she's started watching other shows on Discovery channel. She even woke me up early because she found one called Universe. Was really excited, seeing how Earth could have formed. So yeah, blowing shit up is very cool, she is picking up some ideas on critical thinking and also getting interested in mechanical engineering. Poor thing, tried to make a robot out of card board and tape. Got upset when it kept falling apart. Looks like a Mechano set is on the list for birthday.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Recommend "Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West" instead. That book was DAMN creepy, though beautifully written. No Country For Old Men was also good, as was "The Crossing", which also was haunting, but dark.
Not science books though. I like the "Einstein File", "The Mismeasure of Man" (can't go wrong with Gould), and the book on eugenics by the guy who wrote "IBM and the Holocaust". Good cautionary, or eye opening, tales of when science gets mixed with politics, for good or ill (ill for ma
Re:I don't know about books... (Score:5, Informative)
If you enjoyed Cosmos, you really should read:
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark" (1996)
Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" (1994)
Biographies on famous scientists are always interesting too. There are plenty to choose from. I've read about the lives of Sagan, Feynman, Newton and Einstein. Very entertaining and a wonderful insight into their work as well as their characters (and their character flaws! Did you know the rumour is that Einstein would try to seduce women by letting his robe fall open....oops)
Parent
Re:I don't know about books... (Score:4, Informative)
Also it's hard to go past Brownowski's "The Acsent of Man" for a general history of science.
Parent
In related news (Score:5, Funny)
In related news, Cosmo whines about the lack of great intellectual thinkers.
Re:In related news (Score:4, Funny)
TMZ bemoans the loss of basic human decency.
Paris Hilton sheds tears over a decline in moral values.
Justice Department employees stage uproar over personal privacy invasions.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The quote the great George Carlin, "What do I care? I have a cell phone that makes pancakes!"
Re:In related news (Score:4, Funny)
Not quite fair to Entertainment Weekly. Despite being a magazine that specializes in pop culture, it's nothing like Cosmo or People. In fact, it's actually quite literate and assumes it's readers actually have a brain.
Parent
Ah, Feynman (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:Ah, Feynman (Score:5, Funny)
Feynman was a character, wasn't he? "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" doesn't really fall into the category of a science book per se, but it was a great read. Safecracking at Los Alamos as a practical joke? Priceless.
Parent
Re:Ah, Feynman (Score:4, Interesting)
Feynman is, pound for pound ($for$) the biggest seller in the whole section. That includes urban studies. And, to be serious, Fossey, Hawking, Lovelock and Sagan. My bit doesn't include the popular science stuff (the line we draw is equations - more than two and it's my section, less and it's the equally popular Popular Science section)
The public will be drawn in by popular science books, hell, I love reading them myself, and there will always (I hope and ironically pray) be guys at the top of the field who can write non-popular but entertaining books for those who either have a bit of background in "science" in general, or want a bit more depth to their pop-sci introduction. Science writing is alive and well. It's never going to compete with "everything else", the fiction section at work takes up a third of the shop, and rightly so. We're talking a niche product, but as a niche the quality and passion behind it is very very high. And I'm referring to both the writers and the customers.
And the booksellers....obviously
Parent
Barking up the wrong tree (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Science Superheroes (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Re:Science Superheroes (Score:4, Funny)
*crosses his fingers*
Parent
We are spending even more! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [usatoday.com]
And I wouldn't call Americans Xenophobic when the overwhelming majority of
re (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:re (Score:5, Informative)
I'd add anything and everything from Feynman. Even his biographical writings are full of information.
Also, I'm surprised to be the first to point out "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose. There's nothing new in the book really, but he's the first to put real mathematics in a book targeted towards a general audience. If want a deeper understanding than you can get from A Brief History of Time, but you're not prepared to read a graduate physics text, The Road to Reality is for you.
Parent
A Brief History of Time? (Score:2)
Sure, it was 20 years ago, but it was a pretty good book for the unwashed masses.
One might say the same about most technical subjects. Given the overwhelming list bias towards fiction, it isn't that surprising. How may of your parents or children took A New Kind of Science to the beach this summer?
Re:A Brief History of Time? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Check the demo. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
For Me... (Score:4, Informative)
"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.
THE CULPRIT: Science as Entertainment (Score:5, Insightful)
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," [mrwizardstudios.com] you have "Bill Nye the Science Guy" [billnye.com] from about a decade ago, or the new Sid The Science Kid [muppetnewsflash.com]. 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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a new show on PBS no
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you need both. Science needs to be entertaining to keep people's interest. What I can't stand is when the science is sacrificed FOR the sake of entertainment.
For example look at how unscientifically the Myth Buster's do their experiments. Their show would be a brilliant platform to drum in what the scientific method means and how to go about actually disproving or verifying a hypothesis. Instead they just blow shit up, and generally piss on the scientific method then come up with a conclusion that i
Possible Reasons? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Possible Reasons? (Score:4, Interesting)
I dunno, The God Delusion by Dawkins make precisely that argument and it was in NYT bestsellers for 51 weeks, reaching #4, as well as #2 on Amazon. There are more atheists out there than you think, especially among the more educated and intelligent, and therefore among those who tend to read more.
Parent
Headline needs re-stating: (Score:5, Insightful)
"Entertainment Weekly too shallow to pay attention to science, blames scientific community"
Any of Stephen Jay Gould's essay collections... (Score:3, Informative)
What about the compilations of Gould's essays for "Natural History" magazine? My two favorites are "The Panda's Thumb" and "Bully for Brontosaurus".
GÃdel, Escher, Bach (Score:5, Informative)
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.
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Score:5, Informative)
I loved A Short History of Nearly Everything [wikipedia.org] by Bill Bryson [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My favorite one that wasn't in the audio book is about an 18th or 19th century astronomer that traveled to India to make accurate measurements of the transit of Venus. His voyage was delayed and was at sea during the transit but decided to stick around (12 years) until the next transit. The big day came
Well, what qualifies as 'great read'? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not that I had a lot of respect for EW to start... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
What abolut Richard Dawkins? (Score:5, Insightful)
In Other News (Score:3, Funny)
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.
The God Particle (Score:3, Interesting)
The God Particle [amazon.com] 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.
Speaking of Feynman (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm also a fan of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.
--sabre86
Misner Wheeler Thorne (Score:3, Funny)
No science? Heck, there's almost no non-fiction (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Books that I was captivated by as a teenager (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Good books? (Score:5, Funny)
Who needs books? Most scientists read wikipedia.
REAL scientists know wikipedia is unreliable. That's why they use the Uncyclopedia [uncyclopedia.org].
Another place scientists go is Bob the Angry Flower [angryflower.com]. Here's [angryflower.com] another. And another [angryflower.com]. Oh look, here's [angryflower.com] one for you!Parent
Re: (Score:3)
As do you...