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The problem with popular science books is that they are written by journalists untrained in science. It should be scientists who write popular works. There are
by sn41 13y ago
The problem with popular science books is that they are written by journalists untrained in science. It should be scientists who write popular works. There are several scientists who have written great works which are neither difficult, nor dumbed down - for example, Steinhaus' "Mathematical Snapshots", Einstein and Infeld's "The Evolution of Physics", Schrodinger's "What is life?" and even delightful works such as Faraday's "Chemical history of a candle".
With the hypercompetitiveness of modern scientific careers, scientists who take time off to write popular expositions are looked down upon. The problem is not Malcolm Gladwell, the problem is the insularity of modern scientists.
- tempestn 13y agoI've heard good things about Hawking's books as well, although haven't read any yet.
- nzp 13y agoDon't waste your time. His books are just horribly misleading. After reading them you won't come out with any better knowledge about what is actually going on, in fact you might even be worse off. He throws around lots of technical jargon without any attempt to actually explain (relying instead on layman reader's wrong intuitions) what those words mean in the context of theoretical physics and you can really see just how hard he tries to make it all mysterious to impress the "common man" and give him enough illusion of understanding so he doesn't stop reading. But hey, that sells books! Although he's not the only scientist who does this, he's become in my mind a prototype for such deceitful behavior. Feynman's approach was as good as it gets when it comes to popularizing physics, so your best bet are his popular books. And if you have some working calculus knowledge you should just read his Lectures on Physics to get to understand pretty much all of physics up to and not including QFT and General Relativity.
- mpclark 13y agoAlmost nobody has. Oh yes, we've all got them, but we haven't read them.
- debacle 13y agoA Brief History of Time was good, and informative if you don't really know very much about physics, but a light read.
- lutusp 13y ago> The problem with popular science books is that they are written by journalists untrained in science. It should be scientists who write popular works. Yes, perhaps, but you need to realize something -- scientists who write popular books often pay a very high price. Not always, there are exceptions, but Carl Sagan is a perfect example of someone who did a lot of public good by popularizing science and scientific topics, but it ruined his scientific career. Most scientists understand this -- to write a popular science book or article may send the signal to other scientists that you don't have anything more serious to write about. As a reward for such important projects as Cosmos, Sagan was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences, something extraordinary given his actual scientific accomplishments. For balance, we can look at Leon Lederman ("The God Particle") and Stephen Hawking (several well-received books) who seem not to have suffered unduly for their popularizations of science. But the risk is real.
- lazyant 13y agodoes Asimov count?