15 июня 2024 года
I seriously can’t write fiction. I suspect it's not lack of imagination, but some odd form of writer’s block. Or perhaps it is too many years devoted to sifting defensible reality from experimental and computational data. Or is it that I’m unwilling to ask a reader to be confused about the real, the possibly real and the entirely imagined? Or maybe it is because the one and only piece of published fiction I wrote, came (almost) true within the year? Would any other fiction I wrote become real? That’s clearly a flight of fancy... Читать дальше...
Only five books? And the five best books? Last month I did an interview via email with Caspar Henderson (who wrote a marvelous bestiary for the new century: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings) on the best five books I would put on a reading list titled "Chemistry." It's now up on the site — Five Books. But the hardest part was not answering the great questions Caspar posed, but figuring out what five books to list. What did I want this list to do? Teach you chemistry? Maybe. Or give you a sense... Читать дальше...
| My ungrounded feet in rubber boots. |
This post originally appeared at the UNESCO International Year of Light's blog, in October 2015. The site is no longer available.
| Interior of an antique spectroscope. |
Sikhote-Alin meteorite from Vatican Observatory's collection |
A five -place table of logarithms from my dad's CRC Handbook of Mathematics (why is that set of values circled?) and a circa 1958 Hemmi 257 slide rule designed for chemical calculations. |
| See note 3 for source. |
| That Mars habitat? |
Diagram of a thermometer similar to the one describe by Leurechon, c. 1638. Note that hotter temperatures have smaller magnitudes degrees associated with them. Image from Wellcome collection, used under CC license. |
| Topi Barr's Antithiotimoline is in this vintage Analog |
