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science essays
hey DiSers
do you think there is a place in the world for a shitty blog of literary scientific essays? in my mind here I've got something like your standard literary review, but instead of people talking about the latest George Saunders or William Gass collections there is stuff about maths and science. there is a bit of this stuff about (mostly written by Steven Weinberg tbf) but it seems a bit thin on the ground. the science blogs i read seem to be mostly be written by people are really badly read or just bizarre, switching between explaining what a complex number is to explanations of the Aharanov-Bohm effect.
been writing this essay on chaos theory and fractals and i see something like the bifurcation diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram which has to be one of the achievements of 20th century human thought... only about 0.0001% of the general populace even understand what it is, yet get the aesthetic beauty tied up in it. i feel like there should be something where people can convey why something like that is good, on a level that both every day readers can understand it and for it still to be engaging to the experts. guess it just goes back to C.P. Snow about a 100 years ago now, how people in the sciences and people in the humanities both miss out by having this divide between the two and it has got worse if anything.
also in this thread: post stuff that fits the bill for good, artistic writing about Science. my favourite stuff is:
Italo Calvino 'Cosmicomics'
Steven Weinberg 'Dreams of a Final Theory'
David Foster Wallace 'Everything and More'
guess Asimov is the king of this stuff but.... I haven't read any of it.