
A Novelist Teaches Herself Physics - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/75/story/a-novelist-teaches-herself-physics
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m31415
From the article:

> I also loved Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement and Kip Thorne’s Black
> Holes and Time Warps. That one was slow for me, but it was like being in the
> kind of physics class I always dreamed of taking. At Harvard I had taken a
> class, Physics for Poets. The professor said in an impatient way, “If you
> can’t follow the math, then you don’t have to, but I can’t really explain it
> without the math, so just do the best you can.”

And this is true. You can't learn physics by listening to a physicist talk or
by reading popular science books. The title of the article gave me the
impression that the author picked up a university-level book in physics and
worked through it. As far as reading popular science goes, I think a lot of SF
authors do that. And there are also SF authors who dig deeply into the science
they write about (e.g., Greg Egan, Peter Watts, etc.).

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darawk
Is Nautilus seriously reporting uncritically on a novelist "teaching herself
physics" by reading pop science books? Is this a joke?

