In Measure for Measure, Thomas Levenson offers a compelling account of how scientific thinking development from the day 2,500 years ago when Pythagoras discovered the musical scale to the present day. The story unfolds through the tales of instruments scientific and musical: the organ, the microscope, the still, the scales, Stradivari's miraculous violins and cellos, computers, and synthesizers. What emerges is a unique portrait of science itself as an instrument, our single most powerful way of understanding the world. Yet perhaps the most important invention of modern science has been the power to countenance its own limitations, to find the point beyond which science can explain no more, to rediscover that science, like music, is an art.
My day job has me professing science writing at MIT, where I also run the Institute's Graduate Program in Science Writing.
I'm not yet wholly ivy-covered yet (and anyway -- the place up the street holds the franchise for that pernicious weed). In fact, I am a recent immigrant to the professoriat, and I continue to do what I did before: write books (and the occasional article), and make documentary films about science, its history, and its interaction with the broader culture in which scientific lives and discoveries unfold.
I'm just finished my fourth book, "Newton and the Counterfeiter" -- which is a great story from a little-known corner of Isaac Newton's life. My previous books include "Einstein in Berlin;" "Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science;" and "Ice Time: Climate Science and Life on Earth" (now, sadly, out of print). My documentaries have mostly appeared on PBS, and most of those on the NOVA series. Recent work includes the Origins series, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson and broadcast on NOVA -- (my favorite is program four, the cosmology show, "Back to the Beginning"); the "Domes" program in David Macaulay's delightful PBS series Building Big, and NOVA's two hour Einstein Revealed, now a little long in the tooth, but featuring a nice turn by Andrew Sacks as Albert Einstein. (You may have seen Sacks in one of the great television comedy roles: Manuel the Spanish Waiter in Fawlty Towers.)
Besides writing, film making and generally being dour about the daily news, I lead an almost entirely conventional life in one of Boston's inner suburbs with a family that gives me great joy. The cat has to stop waking me up at five a.m., however.
