Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SHELDON Glashow, Professor of Physics at Harvard and Nobel Laureate, is the latest in a long line of contemporary scientists to try to popularize his trade with a book aimed at the general public.Interactions is intended to be scientific autobiography which will allow the reader to share in "the search for the ultimate portrait of the universe, as seen through the eyes of one of its searchers...
Questions such as these challenged much of the physics community until Glashow's so-called "standard theory" was accepted in the 1970s. Glashow takes the reader through the questions which increasingly precise empirical data posed, the theories constructed to explained these observations (which were often the results of faulty experiments), the shortcomings of these theories in the face of general scientific principles or new data, and so on, in an endless cycle...
...this process lies the key to the scientific method: the interplay of fact and theory. Yet Interactions is poorly organized, and what should be an exciting progression of thought instead often confronts the reader as a muddle...
GLASHOW never provides a real sense of what people, ideas or occurences shaped his thought, and hence the reader is left with no insight into the intellectual stimulants found in a scientific community. Interactions would have been a valuable book if it had begun to describe how a high-powered academic community functions, how competition and co-operation blend to produce great advances in knowledge. Instead, Glashow describes a puzzle of particle physics on one page, goes skiing with a colleague or his latest girlfriend on the next page and presents a possible solution on the next...
...death there from tuberculosis, her mother returned to the U.S. and remarried. (Sontag uses her stepfather's last name.) In time, the new family ended up living in Canoga Park, near Los Angeles, though it would be truer to say that Sontag lived in books. The most ardent reader at North Hollywood High School, alma mater of Alan Ladd and Farley Granger, she graduated at 15 and made for the University of Chicago. (She would later do graduate work at Harvard and Oxford.) At 17 she married sociologist Philip Rieff, then a 28-year-old instructor, just ten days after...