Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

“woke” is the new caravan.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

The lights are all blinking red.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Medium Cool with BGinCHI – She Blinded Me With Science

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – She Blinded Me With Science

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In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

In this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about the intersection between art & science.

I’m just finishing a fabulous book called Now: The Physics of Time, by Richard A. Muller (Norton, 2016). As the title suggests, it’s about how physics describes the functioning of the universe, by offering clear explanations of relativity, entropy, entanglement, the Big Bang, and on and on. It often digresses to take up subjects explored in films and novels (time travel, in particular).

This got me wondering what notable intersections of art & science you’ve found most fascinating and enduring.

Reader Interactions

132Comments

  2. 2.

    BGinCHI

    The physics book I mention in the post is fabulous on physics and math, and especially astrophysics.

    But it’s terrible on other ways of perceiving and explaining (philosophical, psychoanalytic, linguistic). Surprised at how myopic the guy is even though he’s incredibly smart and relatively aware, culturally.

  5. 5.

    NotMax

    A few books:
    Black Holes and Warped Spacetime, William J. Kaufmann
    Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
    The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes
    The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
    .

  6. 6.

    Mousebumples

    @Scout211: both of those are awesome.

    Geekily, i love how there used to be (and maybe still is?) a college class on the philosophy behind The Matrix.

    Link – https://www.matrixfans.net/matrix-101-keanus-spectacular-blockbuster-is-now-being-taught-as-a-philosophy-course/

    Apparently it was at the University of Washington, in Seattle. And there are now various books out that tie the themes together.

    I also love the Good Place, again for philosophical reasons… Among others. ?

  8. 8.

    BGinCHI

    @NotMax: I love Sacks’s books. Such a great writer (and human being).

    Reminds me I need to read Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelics.

  9. 9.

    Haydnseek

    Book:  The Tao Of Physics

    If this guy can explain what quantum entanglement actually is and how it works, and by that I mean with peer reviewed research and not just spitballing, I’ll buy it in a heartbeat.  If he can do that to the satisfaction of an informed layman as well as the physics community he deserves every Nobel Prize in physics for the rest of his life.

  10. 10.

    oatler.

    In Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon goes off on long stoned riffs about every branch of science known.

  11. 11.

    Kent

    My daughter had to write an essay about the intersection of arts and science as part of her application to the UW Honors College.

    She wrote about our imagery of the Covid-19 virus and how nearly every single visual portrayal of the virus shows it as red.  Or with red coronas.  While in point of fact, the virus is actually smaller than the wavelength of visible light meaning that it, by definition, has no color, and cannot have a color.

    So why do we color the virus red?  No scientific reason, it’s actually unscientific to do so.  But in the arts we have lots of popular imagery of red as the color of danger going all the way back to the Odyssey.

    She will find out if she got in this coming March 12 so we shall see.

  13. 13.

    TomatoQueen

    The Astronomer, Vermeer, 1668, safely in the Louvre since 1983
    The Parthenon, sitting on the Acropolis since 447 BC, and all its imitations later, still solving the column problem
    The Elements, Euclid, in which the language of measurement uses terms from the carpenter’s art

  14. 14.

    RSA

    @NotMax: Great choices; I loved the Diamond and Sacks books.

    I’ll mention Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter, though I run hot and cold on the ideas. I really enjoyed my first read of it, though.

  15. 15.

    MomSense

    I’m going with Baking.  Like everyone else, I got caught up in the sourdough craze.  I’m still a beginner baker scientist, but my son’s GF is advanced.  She’s making amazing things now and is keeping detailed notes about ingredients, hydration, etc.

    The book I’m following is Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilie Raffa.

    We’re having waffles for dinner.

  17. 17.

    Ken

    I love the illustrations in Stephen Jay Gould’s essay collections and books such as Wonderful Life, especially where he reproduces sketches from the 19th century and earlier. It’s hard to improve on da Vinci.

    I also like Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, though it’s more “science porn” – lots of pretty computer-generated images of seventeen-dimensional string theory structures, but that may have nothing to do with reality.

  18. 18.

    trollhattan

    “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid” is a slog, but a worthwhile one.

    I see I am not Frist with this.

  19. 19.

    laura

    @NotMax: Yes, Yes, YES to the Julian Jaynes book. It left a deeply lasting impression on me all these many years. I’d add Connections and The Day the Universe Changed, the entirety of Ray Bradbury and the wish I knew of her sooner Octavia Butler. It’d be a crime to ignore Queen Guitarist and Sir Isaac Newton look alike Brian May who wrote his PhD thesis on the velocity of intersteller particles – proving that we are in fact star dust.

  21. 21.

    BGinCHI

    @MomSense: ​
      I’ve been thinking about sourdough, and have been close to taking the plunge. It’s weird that I do all the cooking in our house, and am very adventuresome, but have no desire to bake.

    I think it’s because I don’t like to follow recipes, and with baking you have to (at least at first).

  23. 23.

    trollhattan

    @Kent: ​
    UW women beat Colorado in soccer today. Might be helpful in case there’s a surprise sportsball quiz for applicants. :-)
    Pac 12 is really upended this season (technically the 2020 season) and defending all-galaxy champion Stanford has already lost while Cal has two wins. Bizarre.

  24. 24.

    trollhattan

    @Baud:

    Ah, Kelly LeBrock. Had a hard time forgiving her for the Steven Seagal error, but she eventually corrected that.

  25. 25.

    There are those who call me...tim... (Still posh)

    A Beginners Guide to Constructing the Universe by Michael Schneider. From the Fibonacci sequence in leaves and seashells, to the Golden Mean, to the Triangle, I saw math from nature to art in a seamless progression. My eyes opened wide.

  26. 26.

    laura

    @BGinCHI: May and Roadie Brother the Younger have been tight since the Freddie Mercury tribute concert and thinks the world of him. His dad built his first guitar out of a metal bike rack, a still treasured possession. You’ve got to love a life long learner.

  28. 28.

    dmsilev

    @Kent:

    While in point of fact, the virus is actually smaller than the wavelength of visible light meaning that it, by definition, has no color, and cannot have a color.

    A correction, or perhaps a nitpick. Your ‘by definition’ isn’t actually true. It’s the whole wave-particle duality thing. Light of a certain color (and hence wavelength) can equally well be regarded as a stream of photons of a particular energy, and there’s no special reason why ‘thing that emits photons of a desired energy’ can’t  be smaller than the wavelength. If you’ve seen new TVs advertised as using ‘quantum dot color’ or similar, that’s what’s going on there, virus-sized or smaller particles grown to a specific size shape and composition to emit light of a certain color when you kick them in the right way. Cadmium selenide nanoparticles, for instance, emit in the visual despite being 10 or so nm  in size (an order of magnitude smaller than a typical virus).

  32. 32.

    MattF

    I’ll own up to mixed feelings about Art + Science. I thnk aesthetic experiences are about pleasure, and scientific experiences are about knowledge. It’s fundamental that one has to have both pleasure and knowledge for a full life and full understanding, but they are different.

  36. 36.

    zhena gogolia

    Nabokov has a lot of great formulations about this: “the precision of poetry and the intuition of science” for example.

  37. 37.

    Another Scott

    @Kent: You (and she) are right that the ends of the spikes aren’t really “red”, but color is a complex thing and the physics can get much richer than we commonly realize. E.g. OpticalEngineering:

    Abstract

    Gratings with periods smaller than visible wavelengths in ambient white light will exhibit enhanced colors if the profile is designed so that resonant light interaction occurs in the visible range. Resonances have a frequency-selective influence to the grating diffraction inducing colors in transmittance and reflectance, respectively. Apart from the well-known surface-plasmon polariton excitations and cavity resonances, newly discovered resonances in TE-polarization can be exploited for colorizing wire-gratings, when simply illuminated by unpolarized white light. Colors can be laterally tuned by varying the grating profile. The capability of generating images by sub-wavelength gratings is exemplified by a metallic wire grating embedded in a plastic foil with a lateral variable modulation depth. This method for producing colored images is predestined for industrial mass production and will have ever more practical applications such as for security features.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  39. 39.

    NotMax

    Visual media:

    Not precisely science heavy but James Burke’s Connections was a helluva lot of fun to watch.
    Also not really entirely science-y, found The Real African Queen fascinating.
    Last Call for Titan!
    Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet takes some Hollywood liberties but is nonetheless worthwhile. Edward G. Robinson never disappoints.
    For something more offbeat, Nuts!
    .

  40. 40.

    dmsilev

    @Another Scott:

    Apart from the well-known surface-plasmon polariton excitations and cavity resonances,

    I suspect that I’m one of the few here for whom the bolded text is accurate.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    @Another Scott:

    Apart from the well-known surface-plasmon polariton excitations and cavity resonances, newly discovered resonances in TE-polarization can be exploited for colorizing wire-gratings, when simply illuminated by unpolarized white light.

    QFT.

  42. 42.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach

    Thomas Levenson: Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science

    Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace: The Documents in the Case

  43. 43.

    MattF

    @dmsilev: I suppose I’m the other one– I once gave a seminar in grad school entitled ‘The Truth about Surface Plasmons’

    ETA: Which was a very long time ago.

  46. 46.

    BGinCHI

    I wish more films had science in them, like “The Martian” does. One of the cool things about “For All Mankind” is that it lingers on the how-to of being in space, solving problems, etc.

    I always wish for more technical stuff rather than when a team goes off to solve a problem and just comes back with the solution.

  47. 47.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Three good science articles this week:

    Is ‘Avalanche’ the Answer to a 62-Year-Old Russian Mystery Over 9 Deaths?

    Nine hikers in remote Russian mountains were found dead in strange circumstances. It’s been a mystery on the order of UFOs in the US. The explanation of an avalanche seems persuasive to me.

    The Secret Life of a Coronavirus

    Are viruses alive? What does it mean to be alive?

    Mars Is a Hellhole

    This echoes my thinking, to a point where she uses the exact words I’ve thought. No plagiarism, I’ve never written them. Needless to say, she is being attacked online by the Elon Musk fanbois.

  58. 58.

    Ken

    @dmsilev: I suspect that I’m one of the few here for whom the bolded text is accurate.

    The joy of the internet is anyone can instantly learn about any subject.

    (Googles “surface-plasmon polariton excitations and cavity resonances”. Scrolls looking for the Wikipedia article, doesn’t find it on the first page. Checks the second page despite well-known advice about that. Tries reading first article. Checks search was restricted to English.)

    So, how about AOC’s latest anti-Cruz tweet?  Sick burn, huh?

  59. 59.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @BGinCHI:

    I always wish for more technical stuff rather than when a team goes off to solve a problem and just comes back with the solution.

    You could give a little credit to the Underpants Gnomes.

  60. 60.

    StevEagle

    There’s a book called “The Science of Interstellar” by Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist who was the science advisor for the film. It’s a lot of fun and really interesting because he divides everything in the movie into categories like “real science”, “plausible theory behind this idea”, “really stretching it but technically possible”; and “ok, this is fun but probably impossible”. He goes on to explain things like what the actual properties of the giant black hole would have to be for what happens in the movie to happen. It’s a lot of fun if you’re into that kind of thing! He also writes about how the CGI of the black hole and the wormhole were, at the time, the most detailed and realistic images based on theoretical ideas of those things! He also was the guy on set who wrote all the equations and whatnot on the chalkboard to make it as realistic as possible :)

  61. 61.

    Geminid

    Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was one of the most influential science books ever written. I loved reading The Sea Around Us (1951) and its precurser, Under the Sea Wind (1941). Carson was an effective, evocative writer as well as a well grounded scientist, and The Sea Around Us was on best seller lists for 86 weeks. It’s success freed Carson to research and write full time. This freedom allowed Carson to produce Silent Spring, which has been credited with the rise of the modern environmental movement.

  62. 62.

    Central Planning

    I liked the book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
    I also recently saw a video of a Timelapse of the Future that doubles the speed through time every 5 seconds. If seeing the end of the universe trillions of trillions of trillions of years from now wigs you out, this might not be for you.​​

    ETA: I also liked Asimov’s Foundation books and I’m looking forward to the series on AppleTV.​​​

    ETA ETA: the Text editor has hosed the breaks in my comment. Latest Firefox, Mac M1.

  65. 65.

    JanieM

    @MattF:

    I thnk aesthetic experiences are about pleasure, and scientific experiences are about knowledge. It’s fundamental that one has to have both pleasure and knowledge for a full life and full understanding, but they are different.

    Your psyche must be much tidier than mine (which wouldn’t be hard, given how messy mine is). I’m sometimes under the impression that I’m taking pleasure in knowledge, for example. Then there’s stuff like the beauty of fractals, and the pleasure I take in the beauty that’s obvious whether you know the math behind them or not, and the overlapping pleasure in understanding a bit about the math.

    *****

    There are some great books mentioned in this thread — makes me especially want to go back and reread Wonderful Life, which I remember loving, but it was a long time ago.

  66. 66.

    Central Planning

    Just one more comment on my last one – I had to delete all the MCE fragments and add in some <p> to fix the formatting.

  67. 67.

    RSA

    @BGinCHI:

    I always wish for more technical stuff rather than when a team goes off to solve a problem and just comes back with the solution.

    Me too! One of the challenges, though, is that a great deal of modern science doesn’t lend itself very well to drama. What’s the most important scientific result of 2021? I’d say it has to do with vaccines. I might be wrong, but I think zeroing in on a single small team of scientists to show their work wouldn’t really be accurate–there were thousands of critical contributions going back years.

    Also, I suspect most advances in science aren’t accompanied by some tough guy saying, “Forget the rules. Let’s do it.” :-)

  68. 68.

    patrick II

    Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy which I read in the early 60’s. I grew up in a medium size town in Indiana. Small town in ideas. The trilogy introduced the ebb and flow of civilizations (and systems generally). The Mule was the black swan event, before people talked of black swan events, that almost thwarted Seldon’s plan to shorten the downward cycle. I think in terms of those cycles even now as I look at our country’s system creaking with age as it attempts to apply a 250 year old constitution to a changed world.​

  70. 70.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @MattF: Last night I was reading a recent Science magazine in the dead-tree version, which I like because I can page through all sorts of thing I might not otherwise see. For some reason, that issue (Feb 18 or close) had several articles about enzymes and RNA and protein synthesis and breakup.

    I was overcome with pleasure at the mystery of these hundreds (thousands?) of tiny molecular factories that are so essential to the functioning of our bodies. How did they evolve? Why do they work so well that one amino acid replacement in one gene can seriously bollix things up? So many of them, each with its own evolutionary story.

  71. 71.

    JanieM

    @MomSense:

    @BGinCHI:

    My prospective son-in-law got me going on bread-making again about three years ago, after a long gap during which I had quit eating wheat entirely. Like MomSense’s son’s GF, he measures everything carefully (he’s a scientist….) and likes to keep track of things. I just throw stuff together in more or less the right proportions and it turns out fine for everyday use.

    You’re right that you’d probably have to start by following a recipe, but bread is pretty forgiving in my experience. Once you got the hang of it, you could be more casual, and even experiment!

    I love making bread, both the discipline it imposes on my days, and the tactile experience. Also the smell of it baking. But I’m sliding away from the topic of the thread, so I’ll stop now. (Even though bread is surely both art and science….. ;-)

  72. 72.

    Yutsano

    Cosmos. Whatever flaws Carl Sagan might have had he definitively felt the music of the universe.

    Also: no love for our Artist in Residence? Y’all gonna feel the mighty paw of Tikka for this. Then Champ will finish thee off knaves.

  74. 74.

    RSA

    For what it’s worth, when I tried to think of work that connected science with art, what may be a more common combination came to mind: work that combines philosophy with art. You have all the philosophers who expressed some of their ideas in fiction (Sartre, Camus, et al.) and the fiction writers of a philosophical bent (Gide, Dostoevsky, Kafka, et al.)

    Not to mention more modern work, like Christopher Falzon’s Philosophy Goes to the Movies, which is fun. Maybe a future post? Assuming I haven’t missed one such already.

  75. 75.

    Robert Sneddon

    One of the things I’ve been privileged to see with my own eyes is Cherenkov radiation. There’s no representation in film or on screen that can match that alien glow around an underwater nuclear reactor core.

  76. 76.

    Brachiator

    @laura: 

    I’d add Connections and The Day the Universe Changed

    Yes! Yes! Yes!

    I enjoyed the book that the TV show was based on, but the series was a fantastic set of engaging and exciting stories about the often transformative role of science and technology in human society.

  77. 77.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @NotMax:

    The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

    That reminds me, the Robin Williams movie Awakenings where he played a fictionalized version of Sacks, was excellent. In the movie, victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic were “awakened” by the then new drug, L-DOPA, and then sadly grew tolerant of it until the effective dose was so high it would’ve been lethal, falling back into catatonia.

    In real life, Sacks wrote in 1982:

    I have become much more optimistic than I was when I […] wrote Awakenings, for there has been a significant number of patients who, following the vicissitudes of their first years on L-DOPA, came to do – and still do – extremely well. Such patients have undergone an enduring awakening, and enjoy possibilities of life which had been impossible, unthinkable, before the coming of L-DOPA.

    Robin Williams and Oliver Sacks became friends during filming and remained fairly close until Williams’ death in 2013.

  78. 78.

    Central Planning

    @Yutsano: Cosmos also makes me think of Connections. I loved the different… connections… things (generally scientific) had through time. That kind of stuff fascinated me.

    ETA: FYWP. Arghhh!!

  79. 79.

    billcinsd

    I think I had previously mentioned

    The Toaster Project — an artist sets out to make a toaster by making all the materials himself

    Debunking Economics — a demonstration of what’s wrong with modern neo-classical economics

    Gobekli Tepe: An introduction to the world’s oldest temple

    Also, I was a co-author on a paper in the journal “Leonardo” the world’s leading international peer-reviewed journal on the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts and music and, increasingly, the application and influence of the arts and humanities on science and technology. This paper was on a new metal clay that could be fired in your home stove.

    I am also writing a paper on a summer students work utilizing upconverting nanoparticles in a variety of ways in paintings. This is an outgrowth of a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates site called “Back to the Future” where we try and tie historical metallurgy/materials techniques to current metallurgy/materials research that I help run. One thing we have been doing lately has been working with the National Park Services Submerged Resources unit to help figure out when sunken metal ships (like the USS Arizona) will fall apart enough to start leaking large amounts of oil. Luckily that seems to be a couple of hundred years in the future.

  80. 80.

    Sure Lurkalot

    The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski. Also a PBS series.  Aged but excellent.

    A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson. Wonderful writer.

    The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder. Brings the golden age of physics, and beyond, to life.

  84. 84.

    gwangung

    A friend of mine, Madhuri Shekhar, wrote Queen, about catastrophic bee colony collapse and it all revolved around the research-level methodology that so many folks will fine familiar.

    Photograph 51 is a speculation about Rosalind Franklin, and the situation about her and the discovery of the shape of the DNA molecule.

  86. 86.

    billcinsd

    @billcinsd: I also should add “The man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth”

    and of course “Time Team”

  87. 87.

    Sloane Ranger

    83 posts and no mention of Sir Terry Pratchett’s Science of Discworld series? Massive oversight. Typical Discworld story mixed with expositions on science. What’s not to love?

  91. 91.

    sab

    Very old, but CP Snow Strangers and Brothers series. Snow himself was a physicist turned successful novelist writing about life and government in mid-20th century England.

  92. 92.

    ChasM

    “Arcadia”,  Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece. Chaos theory, scientific method and English garden aesthetics in one witty play.

  94. 94.

    Zelma

    I’ll second the mention of Bill Bryson’s, The Short History of Nearly Everything.  I still have nightmares about the Yellowstone caldera.   I’ll put in a plug for his more recent, The Body: A User’s Guide.  He has a remarkable ability to make relatively complex scientific material both interesting and comprehensible.

  95. 95.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @NotMax:

    In that vein would add A Canticle for Leibowitz as a tale of rediscovering science.

    Oh, yes. One of the 20th century’s genuine classics.

    I believe it was also you who mentioned Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It’s been probably 40 years since I read it. Should dig it out and reread one of these days.

  97. 97.

    Cermet

    @Cheryl Rofer: I’ve written a white paper on going to, living on (for 14 months only), and returning from Mars. Shielding is absoultely everything – period. While it is possible to do, and protect a small crew, living on Mars (and yes, it would need to be well underground) would be hellish. Only very short and extremely rare times would anyone be able to visit the surface due to the cosmic radiation and heavy neutron flux it kicks up.

    The cost would be, well, very expensive and even with shielding, cancer risks and servere vision loss would be a fact of (later) life; no exscaping those effects.

  100. 100.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Kent:

    I am wildly impressed by this! Kids today are way smarter than my friends and I were at the same age.

    She’s going to be outstanding as a student and in whatever career paths beckon.

  106. 106.

    joel hanes

    @Kelly:

    Annals Of The Former World

    I usually recommend Rising From The Plains as a starting point for the general reader, although it’s not the first in the series.

    Also great: The Control Of Nature and Encounters With The Archdruid. Honorable mention to Oranges
    Oh, and Coming Into The Country, though I’m told that Eagle is nothing like that any more.

  110. 110.

    StringOnAStick

    @BGinCHI: I’m reading Pollan’s book right now. I love his writing style and I enjoy reading the background history about just about anything, so his writings work for me.  I also live in a state where voters approved psilocybin for supervised therapeutic use last election, so I am intrigued. I know from personal experience that it does help with depression.

  111. 111.

    joel hanes

    Aldo Leopold’s <em>A Sand County Almanac</em> is intended as serious literature and as a seduction into Leopold’s ideas about land use.  Senior to and belongs on the same shelf as the Rachel Carson.

  113. 113.

    Ken

    @BGinCHI: apart from living underground

    The soil has toxic levels of perchlorates and gives off chlorine gas, so the underground tunnels better be carefully sealed.  All in all, the Moon is both less dangerous and easier to reach.

  115. 115.

    dm

    Benoit Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which brought fractals to the masses, and raised a million CGI mountains.

    And there is a marvelous little novella about teenage Benoit Mandelbrot protecting his Jewish neighborhood from the Nazis in Vichy France by moving it to a fractal dimension: Mandelbrot the Magnificent, by Liz Ziemska. I apologize that my clumsy summary does not do the book justice.

    Since I’m talking about Mandelbrot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDU40eUcTj0

  116. 116.

    caring and sensitive

    @BGinCHI: As my daughter the science teacher keeps reminding me, cooking is art, baking is science. Follow the recipe every time

  117. 117.

    Kent

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    @Kent:

    I am wildly impressed by this! Kids today are way smarter than my friends and I were at the same age.

    She’s going to be outstanding as a student and in whatever career paths beckon.

    I agree.  The kids I teach today in HS are far more motivated and talented than my peer group of HS students were in the early 1980s.  We were unmotivated fuckups who partied way too much.  They mostly have their shit together.

  118. 118.

    joel hanes

    @Ken:

    [Mars is a toxic environment]

    This blog does not have upvotes.

    This is one.

    Also, to the best of my knowledge some of the malfunctions of the human body under extended null gravity/low gravity are still intractable.

  121. 121.

    Falling Diphthong

    @RSA: Re philosophy and art in fiction:

    I just reread Neil Stephenson’s Anathem, which takes the idea of Plato’s cave and runs with it for more than 800 pages. Usually I wish Stephenson had an editor reining him in, but this is the rare case where all those words are needed to tell the story. (Of a world in which the academy is rather like a medieval hermitage, laboring in isolation mostly locked away from the secular world.)

  122. 122.

    eclare

    The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett is an excellent book.  I read it years ago when I lived close to the CDC.

  123. 123.

    PJ

    Obviously, a lot of (most?) science fiction takes scientific concepts and tweaks something about them to make new stories, and reflect contemporary life through funhouse mirrors, so I won’t get into them.

    Of non-sf storytellers, two of my favorites are Italians, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi.

    Calvino was not a scientist, but he would typically organize his stories around some kind of organizing principle and explore it in a methodical way. Two books of his that approach science in this way are Mr. Palomar, about how specific perspectives shape our experiences, and the Cosmicomics series, where physics particles and substances are characters that interact over eons. His writing is really delightful.

    Levi is perhaps a less enjoyable writer than Calvino, and also more serious, due to his subject matter, but he is also very precise and delights in exploring concepts and occupations. His most famous books are about his experiences in Auschwitz and after, and the Holocaust as a whole, but maybe my favorite book by him is The Periodic Table. Levi worked the bulk of his life as a chemist (it was probably what saves him from being exterminated) and in each chapter of his book, he relate an aspect of his life to a specific element. The most powerful story tells how, while working for a paint manufacturer in the 1960’s, he opened a complaint with a German supplier about their defective chemicals, and he realizes that the guy he is corresponding with was one of his Nazi bosses at Auschwitz when they had him trying to make artificial rubber.

  125. 125.

    dm

    @Falling Diphthong:  Anathem is a pretty good recommendation for this thread (especially as a follow-on to Canticle for Lebowitz, given its monastic setting). While the book may seem philosophical, it’s the philosophy for which science was “natural philosophy”. Moreover, it’s a young scientist looking through a telescope that is the key to the plot.

    I never thought of the “Plato’s cave” interpretation of the book before. What a wonderful interpretation!

  127. 127.

    mrmoshpotato

    The explosions created by and captured in slow motion by Mythbusters. :)

    Wake up! Time for science!
    -Adam Savage

  128. 128.

    Another Scott

    @PJ: Every time I see Italo Calvino mentioned I always think of Italo Svevo and his Confessions of Zeno / Zeno’s Conscience.  A very interesting little book, quite funny at times, with a rather horrifying (but prescient) ending.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  130. 130.

    J R in WV

    @Kelly:

    Was going to “Annals of the Former World” by McPhee, but you beat me to it!

    He wrote it in multiple volumes, so he could have an income stream for the years it took to complete…. Wonderful history of how today’s Earth came to be!

    I also love Neil’s work, never too many words!

  131. 131.

    cope

    LAST!

    I tried hard to come up with a way in which science drove a particular piece of art or art determined the direction of a scientific inquiry.  Yes, books and movies are art but I wanted to think of something beyond those examples.  For the former, what I came up with was The Golden Record and record cover carried by each of the Voyager spacecraft.  For the later, my weak example would be the development of different colored dyes for textiles which was a purely chemical endeavor.

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