Category Archives: Book Notes

Steven Weinberg, TO EXPLAIN THE WORLD

Posted on Monday 13 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Steven Weinberg is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is best known (I gather) as a leading proponent of the idea that progress in physics will ultimately lead to a small set of fundamental principles that explain everything — i.e. the … Continue reading →

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Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

Posted on Thursday 2 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This was the third collection, published in 1983, of Lewis Thomas’s elegant, mostly short, essays, following The Lives of a Cell (which I blogged about last week) and The Medusa and the Snail. I read (or reread, I’m not sure) … Continue reading →

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Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

Posted on Tuesday 30 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction (and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). I finally got around to it on my plane flight back east a month ago. The title refers to five prominent … Continue reading →

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Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Lewis Thomas was a pediatrician and doctor, who became president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and who wrote a series of short essays which were first published in New England Journal of Medicine in the early … Continue reading →

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Revisiting Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

The Cosmic Connection, published in 1973, was the first popular book by Carl Sagan, after some academic tomes and an anthology of essays about UFOs, who later gained much fame as the author and host of the 1980 book and … Continue reading →

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Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe

Posted on Wednesday 24 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Alan Lightman’s THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE (2014) is a short book of seven essays, most previously published, on various ways the universe is not obviously what it appears to be, or is at odds with what humans might prefer. (Lightman is … Continue reading →

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Narrativium and Lies-to-children

Posted on Thursday 18 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I was looking at the third volume in this series, published in the US last week (the publisher, Penguin Random House/Anchor, has kindly been sending me copies), and realized the book wasn’t at all what I’d thought at first glance … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Jerry Coyne; Max Planck; Creationism and Education; Human history and progress; and others

Posted on Thursday 11 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Finished reading Jerry Coyne’s new book Faith Vs. Fact, subtitled “Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible”, which I took extensive notes on that at some point I will summarize here on my blog. Meanwhile, Coyne did a Q&A with National … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Flip-Flopping Politicians; Jerry Coyne’s new book; Six Basic Storylines; Trigger Events

Posted on Wednesday 20 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: Our Best Presidents Are Flip-Floppers Politicians are attacked for changing their positions due to political expediency — as Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a one-time biology major, has done about the teaching of creationism in schools, to appeal to his … Continue reading →

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Bad Astronomy, 1

Posted on Tuesday 12 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m currently reading through the eponymous book by the popular ‘Bad Astronomy’ blogger Phil Plait, now posting regularly at Slate.com, where he celebrates scientific breakthroughs and criticizes anti-science movements (anti-vaxxers, state-sanctioned teaching of creationism, etc.). His first book, which I’ll … Continue reading →

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