Words

Twenty-First Century Science Writers

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I was very flattered to find myself on someone’s list of Top Ten 21st Century Science Non-Fiction Writers. (Unless they meant my evil twin. Grrr.)

However, as flattered as I am — and as much as I want to celebrate rather than stomp on someone’s enthusiasm for reading about science — the list is on the wrong track. One way of seeing this is that there are no women on the list at all. That would be one thing if it were a list of Top Ten 19th Century Physicists or something — back in the day, the barriers of sexism were (even) higher than they are now, and women were systematically excluded from endeavors such as science with a ruthless efficiency. And such barriers are still around. But in science writing, here in the 21st century, the ladies are totally taking over, and creating an all-dudes list of this form is pretty blatantly wrong.

I would love to propose a counter-list, but there’s something inherently subjective and unsatisfying about ranking people. So instead, I hereby offer this:

List of Ten or More Twenty-First Century Science Communicators of Various Forms Who Are Really Good, All of Whom Happen to be Women, Pulled Randomly From My Twitter Feed and Presented in No Particular Order.

I’m sure it wouldn’t take someone else very long to come up with a list of female science communicators that was equally long and equally distinguished. Heck, I’m sure I could if I put a bit of thought into it. Heartfelt apologies for the many great people I left out.

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Reality, Pushed From Behind

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“Teleology” is a naughty word in certain circles — largely the circles that I often move in myself, namely physicists or other scientists who know what the word “teleology” means. To wit, it’s the concept of “being directed toward a goal.” In the good old days of Aristotle, our best understanding of the world was teleological from start to finish: acorns existed in order to grow into mighty oak trees; heavy objects wanted to fall and light objects to rise; human beings strove to fulfill their capacity as rational beings. Not everyone agreed, including my buddy Lucretius, but at the time it was a perfectly sensible view of the world.

These days we know better, though the knowledge has been hard-won. The early glimmerings of the notion of conservation of momentum supported the idea that things just kept happening, rather than being directed toward a cause, and this view seemed to find its ultimate embodiment in the clockwork universe of Newtonian mechanics. (In technical terms, time evolution is described by differential equations fixed by initial data, not by future goals.) Darwin showed how the splendid variety of biological life could arise without being in any sense goal-directed or guided — although this obviously remains a bone of contention among religious people, even respectable philosophers. But the dominant paradigm among scientists and philosophers is dysteleological physicalism.

However. Aristotle was a smart cookie, and dismissing him as an outdated relic is always a bad idea. Sure, maybe the underlying laws of nature are dysteleological, but surely there’s some useful sense in which macroscopic real-world systems can be usefully described using teleological language, even if it’s only approximate or limited in scope. (Here’s where I like to paraphrase Scott Derrickson: The universe has purposes. I know this because I am part of the universe, and I have purposes.) It’s okay, I think, to say things like “predators tend to have sharp teeth because it helps them kill and eat prey,” even if we understand that those causes are merely local and contingent, not transcendent. Stephen Asma defends this kind of view in an interesting recent article, although I would like to see more acknowledgement made of the effort required to connect the purposeless, mechanical underpinnings of the world to the purposeful, macroscopic biosphere. Such a connection can be made, but it requires some effort.

Of course loyal readers all know where such a connection comes from: it’s the arrow of time. The underlying laws of physics don’t work in terms of any particular “pull” toward future goals, but the specific trajectory of our actual universe looks very different in the past than in the future. In particular, the past had a low entropy: we can reconcile the directedness of macroscopic time evolution with the indifference of microscopic dynamics by positing some sort of Past Hypothesis (see also). All of the ways in which physical objects behave differently toward the future than toward the past can ultimately be traced to the thermodynamic arrow of time.

Which raises an interesting point that I don’t think is sufficiently appreciated: we now know enough about the real behavior of the physical world to understand that what looks to us like teleological behavior is actually, deep down, not determined by any goals in the future, but fixed by a boundary condition in the past. So while “teleological” might be acceptable as a rough macroscopic descriptor, a more precise characterization would say that we are being pushed from behind, not pulled from ahead.

The question is, what do we call such a way of thinking? Apparently “teleology” is a word never actually used by Aristotle, but invented in the eighteenth century based on the Greek télos, meaning “end.” So perhaps what we want is an equivalent term, with “end” replaced by “beginning.” I know exactly zero ancient Greek, but from what I can glean from the internet there is an obvious choice: arche is the Greek word for beginning or origin. Sadly, “archeology” is already taken to mean something completely different, so we can’t use it.

I therefore tentatively propose the word aphormeology to mean “originating from a condition in the past,” in contrast with teleology, “driven toward a goal in the future.” (Amazingly, a Google search for this word on 3 February 2014 returns precisely zero hits.) Remember — no knowledge of ancient Greek, but apparently aphorme means “a base of operations, a place from which a campaign is launched.” Which is not a terribly bad way of describing the cosmological Past Hypothesis when you think about it. (Better suggestions would be welcome, especially from anyone who actually knows Greek.)

We live in a world where the dynamical laws are fundamentally dysteleological, but our cosmic history is aphormeological, which through the magic of statistical mechanics gives rise to the appearance of teleology in our macroscopic environment. A shame Aristotle and Lucretius aren’t around to appreciate the progress we’ve made.

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The Branch We Were Sitting On

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barnes_julian-19911205025R.2_png_380x600_crop_q85In the latest issue of the New York Review, Cathleen Schine reviews Levels of Life, a new book by Julian Barnes. It’s described as a three-part meditation on grief, following the death of Barnes’s wife Pat Kavanagh.

One of the things that is of no solace to Barnes (and there are many) is religion. He writes:

When we killed–or exiled–God, we also killed ourselves…. No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren’t going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height–even if it was only an illusion of a view–wasn’t so bad.

I can’t disagree. Atheists often proclaim the death of God in positively gleeful terms, but it’s important to recognize what was lost–a purpose in living, a natural place in the universe. The loss is not irretrievable; there is nothing that stops us from creating our own meaning even if there’s no supernatural overseer to hand one to us. But it’s a daunting task, one to which we haven’t really faced up.

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Don’t Start None, Won’t Be None

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[Final update: DNLee’s blog post has been reinstated at Scientific American. I’m therefore removing it from here; traffic should go to her.]

[Update: The original offender, “Ofek” at Biology Online, has now been fired, and the organization has apologized. Scientific American editor Mariette DiChristina has also offered a fuller explanation.]

Something that happens every day, to me and many other people who write things: you get asked to do something for free. There’s an idea that mere “writing” isn’t actually “work,” and besides which “exposure” should be more than enough recompense. (Can I eat exposure? Can I smoke it?)

You know, that’s okay. I’m constantly asking people to do things for less recompense than their time is worth; it’s worth a shot. For a young writer who is trying to build a career, exposure might actually be valuable. But most of the time the writer will politely say no and everyone will move on.

For example, just recently an editor named “Ofek” at Biology-Online.org asked DNLee to provide some free content for him. She responded with:

Thank you very much for your reply.
But I will have to decline your offer.
Have a great day.

Here’s what happens less often: the person asking for free content, rather than moving on, responds by saying

Because we don’t pay for blog entries?
Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore?

Where I grew up, when people politely turn down your request for free stuff, it’s impolite to call them a “whore.” It’s especially bad when you take into account the fact that we live in a world where women are being pushed away from science, one where how often your papers get cited correlates strongly with your gender, and so on.

DNLee was a bit taken aback, with good reason. So she took to her blog to respond. It was a colorful, fun, finely-crafted retort — and also very important, because this is the kind of stuff that shouldn’t happen in this day and age. Especially because the offender isn’t just some kid with a website; Biology Online is a purportedly respectable site, part of the Scientific American “Partners Network.” One would hope that SciAm would demand an apology from Ofek, or consider cutting their ties with the organization.

Sadly that’s not what happened. If you click on the link in the previous paragraph, you’ll get an error. That’s because Scientific American, where DNLee’s blog is hosted, decided it wasn’t appropriate and took it down.

It’s true that this particular post was not primarily concerned with conveying substantive scientific content. Like, you know, countless other posts on the SciAm network, or most other blogs. But it wasn’t about gossip or what someone had for lunch, either; interactions between actual human beings engaged in the communication of scientific results actually is a crucial part of the science/culture/community ecosystem. DNLee’s post was written in a jocular style, but it wasn’t only on-topic, it was extremely important. Taking it down was exactly the wrong decision.

I have enormous respect for Scientific American as an institution, so I’m going to hope that this is a temporary mistake, and after contemplating a bit they decide to do the right thing, restoring DNLee’s post and censuring the guy who called her a whore. But meanwhile, I’m joining others by copying the original post here. Ultimately it’s going to get way more publicity than it would have otherwise. Maybe someday people will learn how the internet works.

Here is DNLee. (Words cannot express how much I love the final picture.)

——————————————————–

(This is where I used to mirror the original blog post, which has now been restored.)

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Bleeding Edge

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I think we can all agree that what the world needs is more book reviews of famous novelists by theoretical physicists. The clamor has been, admittedly, somewhat muted, but I can see through the coy silence. (Can one see through silence? A famous novelist would never write like that.)

Thomas-Pynchon_Bleeding-Edge-Cover_smSo I was very pleased when Nature, that well-known literary publication, asked me to review Thomas Pynchon’s new book, Bleeding Edge. Longtime readers of me will know that I’ve been fascinated by Pynchon’s work for a long time now; longtime readers of Pynchon will know that it’s not always easy going (even when it’s consistently rewarding). Fortunately, Bleeding Edge was a delightful page-turner, with the usual colorful characters and many laughs along the way. It’s a detective story set in Manhattan, 2001, as things were falling down: the tech bubble, not to mention the World Trade Center. Because Pynchon seems to enjoy confounding expectations, this is a book with a single definite point-of-view character, as well as an identifiable plot. Because he is nevertheless still Thomas Pynchon, there are multiple strands of interlocking schemes and conspiracies, most of which don’t really get “resolved” in the conventional sense. But some do! It’s a great book, easily recommended either to the committed Pynchon fan or to their skeptical friend would would appreciate a user-friendly introduction.

Sadly my own wordsmithing wasn’t at its highest peak while writing my review; it’s not easy to squeeze all the basic facts that would actually be useful to the reader into a 1000-word limit while also keeping things amusing and poetical. But it can be done; you might want to check out Jonathan Lethem’s review in the NYT to see how a real writer would have done it.

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Atoms With Consciousness, Matter With Curiosity

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Probably I’m the last scientfically-oriented person in the world to discover this, but Richard Feynman wrote a poem that he read as part of an address to the National Academy of Sciences. I stumbled across it because I was actually looking for scientists who were familiar with work of the poet Muriel Rukeyser — anyone have any suggestions? Anyway, here’s Feynman:

There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison

Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the Sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the Universe.

Nobody is surprised, of course, that Feynman was a card-carrying dysteleological physicalist. More interesting is that he chose to highlight this kind of question — the emergence of complexity and consciousness from the blind play of atoms, stupidly minding their own business — rather than something about particle physics, for example. As much as reductionists get a bad name in some circles, the good ones do appreciate the bigger picture.

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Ze Is Zir Own Person

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With the increasing acceptance of gay marriage, there’s a temptation to think that we as a society have basically done away with all relevant forms of discrimination. “Hey, we abolished slavery, gave women the vote, and let gay people get married! Perfect equality has finally been achieved.”

Then you read something depressing like this opinion piece in The American Conservative, and are jolted back to reality. It spins off an NPR piece on, naturally, those crazy college youths and their mixed-up ideas. Margot Adler reported on the trend among students to identify themselves not only by their name, but also by what pronouns they like to be called by.

Depending on what street corners you hang out on, you might not be aware that pronouns are an issue. Guys are he/him, and gals are she/her, right?

Of course that only makes sense if you buy into the idea that there are guys, and there are gals, and that’s just about all there is. But the reality is much more richly complex — and that’s a reality to which our society has not yet caught up.

My lovely wife Jennifer has a new book coming out next year — Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. One of her chapters is on gender and sexuality — what it is, how it comes about, and how it gets expressed. Once you actually look at the science behind it all, rather than assuming that the categories bequeathed to you as a child represent universal truths, you quickly realize that this stuff is as complicated as all get-out. (That’s how the youths these days talk, right?)

tesseract Talking with Jennifer as she wrote her chapter (which, as usual for her, involved reading a pile of technical papers as well as interviewing many experts) led me to propose the Gender Tesseract. (I’m hoping this becomes a symbol of inclusiveness and understanding, and we sell bushels of T-shirts and bumper stickers.) A tesseract, as readers well know, is the four-dimensional equivalent of a cube. And roughly — very roughly, because these ideas arise from the human desire to stick things into categorical boxes, not from any fixed nature of reality — there are four important dimensions of gender/sexuality to be considered:

  • Gender Identity: how you think of yourself.
  • Gender Expression: how you dress/act/present yourself to the world.
  • Sexual Orientation: to whom you are attracted.
  • Biological Sex: what body parts you have. (Forgot about that one, didn’t you?)

Eddie-Izzard-Dress-to-Kill-8x62 In principle, all of these can be completely different for an individual person. Comedian Eddie Izzard, although he tends to perform in “boy mode” these days, has frequently appeared in women’s clothing — his gender expression (at least as far as clothes were concerned) was female. But he isn’t gay; his sexual orientation is toward (biological/self-identified) women. There shouldn’t be any problem imagining a person (for example) who is biologically female and wears what we think of as women’s clothing, but who thinks of themselves as male and is attracted to women people who are biologically female. All the vertices of the tesseract are open for business.

And of course the reality is infinitely more complicated than that. There’s no reason to locate one’s self at a vertex of the tesseract, rather than somewhere in the interior; yes, Virginia, there are bisexuals. And indeed there are asexuals and pansexuals and countless other variations. Even before I open my T-shirt store, the Gender Tesseract is hopelessly out of date. (Perhaps we should think of functions defined on the tesseract, rather than simply points within it.) As a member of the most boring, socially normative category, I try to keep in mind that I’m not an expert on other people’s sexuality and identity, and listen to what they have to say rather than telling them how to behave.

Which is tricky, because society loves telling you how to behave. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes indirectly. The most powerful indirect tool society has is language.

The idea of a unique gender binary — men, women, no other categories — is built into English and many other languages. Women are “she,” men are “he,” and there aren’t any other possibilities. Perhaps you don’t know whether a person you are talking about is male or female, in which case society has a rule for you: assume they are male, and refer to them as “he.”

That last one is actually pretty easy to fix. For a long time now, many people have used “they” as a singular pronoun in cases where the person being referred to is of unknown gender. I started using it years ago, and it works fine. (Following in the footsteps here of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, so I’m not exactly a trailblazer.) But what about when you know exactly who you are talking about, and that person doesn’t want to accept a simplistic gender binary?

Thus the quest for gender-neutral pronouns. This is a very tricky subject, as language always is — especially for something so anarchic as English, where there isn’t any central governing body that lays down the law. In English, anyone is allowed to just make up words, so people certainly have. One choice that is popular in the transgender community is to substitute ze for he/she and zir (pronounced “zeer”) for him/his/her. These neologisms can seem strained at first use, but there’s a chance they will catch on and eventually seem perfectly natural. I was intrigued (and pleased) to learn that some college kids are pushing the idea forward. We’ll see how it goes.

Rod Dreher, author of the American Conservative piece, was less pleased. It is in the nature of conservatism to resist change, so that shouldn’t come as much of surprise. What’s depressing is the sheer lazy stupidity of the “critique.” Actually there’s not much critique at all — Dreher merely points at something he doesn’t understand, and kind of giggles uncomfortably. He labels the students “deeply confused people,” and the sum of his counterargument is one word: “Honestly?”

Yes, honestly. Language matters, and matching how we speak about people to how they think about themselves is an important part of human dignity. I don’t know what the best linguistic solution is for the knotty realities of human gender and sexuality, but I welcome the attempts to do better. Perfect equality has not yet been achieved, but I like to think we’re moving in a good direction.

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Time, Born Again

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Lee Smolin has a new book out, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. His previous subtitle lamented “the fall of a science,” while this one warns of a crisis in physics, so you know things must be pretty dire out there.

I’m not going to do a full-fledged review of the book, which gives Lee’s argument for why “time” needs to be something more than just a label on spacetime or a parameter in an evolution equation, but a distinct fundamental piece of reality with respect to which the laws of physics and space of states can change. (Sabine Hossenfelder does offer a review.) There are also suggestions as to how this paradigm-changing viewpoint gives us new ways to talk about economics and social problems.

Over at Edge, John Brockman has posted an interview with Lee, and is accumulating responses from various interested parties. I did contribute a few words to that, which I’m reproducing here.

Time and the Universe

Cosmology and fundamental physics find themselves in an unusual position. There are, as in any area of science, some looming issues of unquestioned importance: how to reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy, to name two obvious ones. But the reality is that particle physicists, gravitational physicists, and cosmologists all have basic theories that work extraordinarily well in the regimes to which we have direct access. As a result, it is very hard to make progress; we know our theories are not absolutely final, but without direct experimental contradictions to them it’s hard to know how to do better.

What we have, instead, are problems of naturalness and fine-tuning. Dark energy is no mystery at all, if we are simply willing to accept a cosmological constant that is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than its natural value. We take fine-tunings to be clues that something deeper is going on, and try to make progress on that basis. Sadly, these are subtle clues indeed.

“Time” is something that physicists understand quite well. Quantum gravity remains mysterious, of course, so it’s possible that the true status of time in the fundamental ontology of the world is something that remains to be discovered. But as far as how time works at the level of observable reality, we’re in good shape. Relativity has taught us how to deal with time that is non-universal, and it turns out that’s not such a big deal. The arrow of time—the manifold differences between the past and future – is also well-understood, as long as one swallows one giant fine-tuning: the extreme low entropy of the early universe. Given that posit, we know of nothing in physics or cosmology or biology or psychology that doesn’t fit into our basic understanding of time.

But the early universe is a real puzzle. Is it puzzling enough, as Smolin suggests, to demand a radical re-thinking of how we conceive of time? He summarizes his view by saying “time is real,” but by “time” he really means “the arrow of time” or “an intrinsic directedness of physical evolution,” and by “real” he really means “fundamental rather than emergent.” (Opposing “real” to “emergent” is an extremely unfortunate vocabulary choice, but so be it.)

This is contrary to everything we think we understand about physics, everything we think we have learned about the operation of the universe, and every experiment and observation we have ever performed. But it could be true! It’s always a good idea to push against the boundaries, try something different, and see what happens.

I have two worries. One is that Smolin seems to be pushing hard against a door that is standing wide open. With the (undeniably important) exceptions of the initial-conditions problem and quantum gravity, our understanding of time is quite good. But he doesn’t cast his work as an attempt to (merely) understand the early universe, but as a dramatic response to a crisis in physics. It comes across as a bit of overkill.

The other worry is the frequent appearance of statements like “it seems to me a necessary hypothesis.” Smolin seems quite content to draw sweeping conclusions from essentially philosophical arguments, which is not how science traditionally works. There are no necessary hypotheses; there are only those that work, and those that fail. Maybe laws change with time, maybe they don’t. Maybe time is fundamental, maybe it’s emergent. Maybe the universe is eternal, maybe it had a beginning. We’ll make progress by considering all the hypotheses, and working hard to bring them into confrontation with the data. Use philosophical considerations all you want to inspire you to come up with new and better ideas; but it’s reality that ultimately judges them.

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The Realm of the Nebulae

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41CF7V31PmL._SY300_ Edwin Hubble never really liked the word “galaxy.” He was the one, of course, who was most responsible for making the word an important one, by showing that (at least some of) the fuzzy patches in the sky called “nebulae” were actually collections of billions of stars in their own right, far outside our Milky Way. (That was his second-most important discovery, after the distance-redshift relationship that reveals the expansion of the universe.) It’s possible that Hubble didn’t want to do any favors for Harlow Shapley, his rival, who coined the term “galaxy.” But for whatever reason, when in the 1930’s he gave a series of prestigious lectures at Yale which he later turned into a book, Hubble’s chosen title was The Realm of the Nebulae. Near the end of his introductory chapter, he sniffs, “The term nebulae offers the values of tradition; the term galaxies, the glamour of romance.”

In the court of popular opinion, romance will usually be a heavy favorite over tradition, and these days we use “galaxies” to refer to large collections of stars, gas, dust, and dark matter. But Hubble’s book became a classic, and is a great treat to read these many decades later. Cosmology has marched on quite a bit, of course, but the insights Hubble offers into the practice of doing science are timeless. The guy was a smart cookie, and a better-than-decent writer, to boot.

So it’s great to have a new edition of the book recently published by Yale University Press. Precisely because science has been advancing in the intervening years, publishers have found it useful to commission new prefaces to keep the reader updated on cosmological progress, and these prefaces (or Forewords, I can never tell the difference) have been accumulating over time, all of them contained in the new version. There’s one by Allan Sandage, from 1958; another by James Gunn, from 1981; and now our Golden Age of Cosmology requires not one but two new contributions, one by Robert Kirshner and one by me. Given the extraordinarily high quality of my companion contributors to the front of the volume, I tried hard to make my offering both interesting and useful. Readers can judge that for themselves, but it’s certainly an honor to be in such esteemed company.

Hubble was an unforgiving empiricist; he didn’t worry too much about the theoretical implications of his discoveries, preferring to leave that to others. But he knew about them, and his last chapter discusses the different world models to emerge from Einstein’s general relativity, and the implication that we will only ever be able to observe a small part of the much larger universe.

Thus the explorations of space end on a note of uncertainty. And necessarily so. We are, by definition, at the very center of the observable region. We know our immediate neighborhood rather intimately. With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary — the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.

The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass onto the dreamy realms of speculation.

Fortunately, and contrary to the metaphorical implication, the dreamy realms of speculation aren’t a location where we have to remain once we arrive. Progress in science requires cooperation between speculation and observation. The dreamy realms are an important place to visit, even if Hubble wouldn’t have wanted to live there.

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Volumes of Science

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This weekend featured the latest edition of the LA Times Festival of Books, the largest book festival in the U.S., and a great celebration of the written word. The Saturday and Sunday festivities feature a bounty of author events, especially conversations between different writers, and it’s always a treat to see huge numbers of people (with lots of kids included) come out to hear about words and ideas. Good to be reminded that there really is a community of readers out there.

booksbooksbooks The festival kicked off on Friday night with the annual Book Prizes, which cover categories from history to mystery. For the last couple of years, Jennifer has been on the jury for the Science and Technology prize, which is a lot of work but a good way to become familiar with the science books written during the year. I bet you wouldn’t think it would be possible to become dismayed when more free books were mailed to your door, did you? But when over a hundred come your way over the course of a couple of months, it can get overwhelming pretty fast.

The bad news about being married to a judge is that your own book doesn’t have a chance to get considered. But that meant I was an easy choice to be the presenter of this year’s prize, which was a lot of fun. Got to meet both Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem, so that was a treat. And I got to announce the finalists and winner, which were some great popular science books. Here’s what I said about each of the finalists:

  • QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING, by Susan Cain, conveys one of those ideas that is simple and obvious, but only after someone else has figured it out: it’s okay to be an introvert. Cain explains how a dynamic public speaker might have a strong need to recharge in private after a talk, and how a quiet woman like Rosa Parks can change the world.
  • TURING’S CATHEDRAL: THE ORIGINS OF THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE, by George Dyson, tells a story overflowing with brilliant scientists and world-changing ideas. In the 1930’s Alan Turing explicated the idea behind a universal digital computer; in the 1940’s, John von Neumann led a team that made it a reality. Things, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, were never going to be the same.
  • THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: HOW STORIES MAKE US HUMAN, by Jonathan Gottschall, links the familiar act of storytelling to the mysteries of biology, psychology, neuroscience, and virtual reality. Our penchant for telling stories is part of our evolved tendency to perceive patterns in the world. Stories aren’t just a way to pass the time, they are a tool for making sense of everything around us.
  • THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL — BUT SOME DON’T, by Nate Silver — who in the 2012 Presidential elections garnered a lot of attention for making predictions that didn’t fail. No magic or deals with the Devil were involved; just a lot of careful and clear-eyed examination of data. The modern world is awash with data, and separating the signal from the noise has never been more important.
  • BREASTS: A NATURAL AND UNNATURAL HISTORY, by Florence Williams, tackles a subject whose cultural or personal interest tends to obscure questions of science and health. Mammals use breasts to feed their young, but only humans have breasts continuously from puberty onwards — and nobody is quite sure why. Science and history mix in a tale of bodies, feminism, and modern life.

And the winner was … Florence Williams, for Breasts. A subject that our culture kind of obsesses about, obviously, but not always in a level-headed and healthy way. A very worthy winner, amidst an intimidating collection of great competitors.

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