Category «PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY»

When We Cease to Understand the World

A review of Benjamin Labatut’s award-nominated collection. They are well-worn clichés: the scientist as tortured genius; the idiot savant who peers unblinkingly into the secrets of the universe while forgetting to eat or bathe; or, at the most superficial, scientists as hopeless nerds, whip-smart but clueless when it comes to “regular” people and their quotidian …

Book Review: Einstein: His Life and Universe

[Originally posted on March 19, 2008 at AmericanFreethought.com.] Walter Isaacson’s celebrated biography Einstein: His Life and Universe proves one thing: while Albert Einstein was not the greatest scientist who ever lived, he’s one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived. He wasn’t a scientist in the sense we might think, overseeing experiments and poring meticulously over data; rather, Einstein was a …