Word: physicists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Nobody has ever figured out precisely why Stephen Hawking's first popular book, A Brief History of Time, has been such a gigantic success, selling an astonishing 10 million copies since it was published in 1988. One possibility is that readers thought they were hearing from the greatest physicist since Einstein, and maybe the greatest of all time (Hawking himself declared that comparison "rubbish" in a TIME interview several years ago, and most of his colleagues agree with him). Another, more plausible reason is the public's fascination with a man who is utterly immobilized by the degenerative disease amyotrophic...
...prospect of another difficult read might make readers wary of taking on the University of Cambridge physicist's latest work, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam; 216 pages; $35). That would be a loss. Hawking takes on plenty of intimidating topics in Nutshell, including space-time geometry, quantum mechanics and the ominously titled M-theory. But he does it in a much more accessible way this time, using plenty of comprehensible analogies and no small amount of humor, often self-deprecating. Example: "Newton occupied the Lucasian chair at Cambridge that I now hold, though it wasn't electrically operated...
...illustrations by Philip Dunn that explain the thornier concepts better than words ever could. There are plenty of photos too, of everything from Einstein on a bicycle to Hawking's grandson. And every few pages, the author throws in an informative block of text--a miniprofile of an important physicist, a digression on the idea of linking our brains directly to computers, a minitutorial on taking the temperature of a black hole...
...were coming from somewhere else, or were the opposite sex, then those basic laws of physics, math and life might be completely different, as many scholars, including Stanley Fish and the late Thomas Kuhn, argue. In his new book, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former Harvard professor Steven Weinberg takes on these critics, if not skillfully, at least thoroughly...
Those looking for a discussion of these issues in medicine or economics, where cultural bias sounds more plausible, will be disappointed by Facing Up. Weinberg freely admits that he is a physicist and cannot discuss fields outside his realm of knowledge. We’re going to have to wait for a different treatise to answer that one, but Weinberg manages to give a pretty good, if muddled, one for physics...