Customer Reviews

Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos: Writings on Science

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Bernstein is one of that small set of people who are both scientists and have written for the New Yorker. This books is a collection of essays on scientists. In addition to to more 'regular' ones about Bohr, Einstein, Mach and Turing, there are stories about Edwin Land and Sonya Kowalewsky. The tale of how Tom Lehrer, Harvard math graduate student, actually got his songs to market caught me by surprise. And I had no idea Primo Levi had been in a concentration camp.

This book's focus is more on the people who make science than the actual science itself. It is not a flippant biography or collection of anecdotes by any means, but a solid (well --- as solid as you can be in twenty pages per person) well balanced description of various scientists. The author's science/writing experience allows him to avoid being condescending, bloated or abstruse. More than mere journalism, this book gives a real flavor of the lives of scientists.

Bernstein is the author of a good many books and a good many scientific profiles for the New Yorker, a literary form that he claims to have invented. I'm not sure that I'd completely accept that- Berton Rouche's "Annals of Medicine" series for that magazine seem to have predated him- but that aside, Bernstein is still one of the best popular science writers around. He is a master of the New Yorker style, having been trained by that magazine's great editor William Shawn.

Bernstein also has a deep understanding of modern science missing from some of the modern writers of popular accounts, and he lets the story tell itself, rather than taking the lazy route of adding stylistic affectations to add interest to a poorly told story. His profiles of some of the greatest physicists of the modern era, like Mach, Bohr and Schroedinger, really clarify for the lay reader what it was about the accomplishments of these men that gave them their place in history.