{"id":2016,"date":"2007-11-29T09:03:31","date_gmt":"2007-11-29T09:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/29\/notable-science-of-the-recent\/"},"modified":"2007-11-29T09:03:31","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T09:03:31","slug":"notable-science-of-the-recent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/29\/notable-science-of-the-recent\/","title":{"rendered":"Notable Science of the Recent Past"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In comments to my earlier <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/science_is_not_notable.php\">cranky post about the <cite>New York Times<\/cite><\/a>, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn&#8217;t released their &#8220;Ten Best Books&#8221; list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/12\/09\/books\/review\/10-best-2007.html?_r=1&#038;oref=slogin\">posted the list today<\/a>, and there&#8217;s nothing on it that wasn&#8217;t also on the Notable Books list, so no dice.<\/p>\n<p>Another common response to my complaint was along the lines of &#8220;Do they <strong>ever<\/strong> list science books?&#8221; I was looking for a way to kill a little time at one point yesterday, so I went back through the last few lists and counted science books. The tallies for 2003-2006 (using a fairly broad definition of &#8220;science book&#8221;&#8211; I&#8217;ll list titles below the fold):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>2006<\/b>: 3<\/li>\n<li><b>2005<\/b>: 5<\/li>\n<li><b>2004<\/b>: 6<\/li>\n<li><b>2003<\/b>:10<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The huge drop from 2003 to 2004 is deceptive, because the whole list was longer in 2003. I didn&#8217;t count, but if I had to guess, I&#8217;d say they went from 100 fiction and 100 non-fiction in 2003 to 100 total in 2004. This is another data point in the &#8220;watch the slow death of American intellectual life&#8221; series&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>On a more upbeat note, if you&#8217;d like some positive recommendations (other than what&#8217;s in the comments to my earlier post, and the non-Jane Austen parts of the <a href=\"http:\/\/nielsenhayden.com\/makinglight\/archives\/009646.html#009646\">Making Light post<\/a>, Carl Zimmer also notes the existence of the &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.stevens.edu\/csw\/stevens70\/Part_I_A-G.html\">Stevens Seventy<\/a>,&#8221; John Horgan&#8217;s list of the seventy &#8220;greatest science books&#8221; in his estimation.<\/p>\n<p>The list of science books deemed &#8220;Notable&#8221; by the <cite>Times<\/cite> in recent years:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>2006<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><cite>Field Notes from a Catastrophe<\/cite>, by Elizabeth Kolbert<\/li>\n<li><cite>The Ghost Map<\/cite>, by Steven Johnson<\/li>\n<li><cite>Programming the Universe<\/cite>, by Seth Lloyd<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>2005<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><cite>American Prometheus<\/cite>, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin<\/li>\n<li><cite>Collapse<\/cite>, by Jared Diamond<\/li>\n<li><cite>1491<\/cite>, by Charles Mann<\/li>\n<li><cite>Spook<\/cite>, by Mary Roach<\/li>\n<li><cite>Warped Passages<\/cite>, by Lisa Randall<\/li<\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Notes: <cite>American Prometheus<\/cite> is a biography of Robert Oppenheimer. I&#8217;m not entirely sure about whether <cite>1491<\/cite> should count&#8211; it might be more history than archaeology, based on some of what I&#8217;ve heard about it, but I haven&#8217;t read it.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>2004<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><cite>The Ancestor&#8217;s Tale<\/cite>, by Richard Dawkins<\/li>\n<li><cite>Beasts of Eden<\/cite>, by David Wallace<\/li>\n<li><cite>The Fabric of the Cosmos<\/cite>, by Brian Greene<\/li>\n<li><cite>On the Wing<\/cite>, by Alan Tennant<\/li>\n<li><cite>Out of Gas<\/cite>, by David Goodstein<\/li>\n<li><cite>Soul Made Flesh<\/cite>, by Carl Zimmer<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Notes: Again, I&#8217;m not entirely sure about <cite>Out of Gas<\/cite>, which is a &#8220;Peak Oil&#8221; argument, and could easily be more of a politics\/ economics book than a science book. The blurb notes that the author is a physicist, though, so I put it on.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>2003<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><cite>Einstein&#8217;s Clocks, Poincare&#8217;s Maps<\/cite>, by Peter Galison<\/li>\n<li><cite>The Empty Ocean<\/cite>, by Richard Ellis<\/li>\n<li><cite>The Founding Fish<\/cite>, by John McPhee<\/li>\n<li><cite>Isaac Newton<\/cite>, by James Gleick<\/li>\n<li><cite>Merchants of Immortality<\/cite>, by Stephen Hall<\/li>\n<li><cite>Monster of God<\/cite>, by David Quammen<\/li>\n<li><cite>Our Own Devices<\/cite>, by Edward Tanner<\/li>\n<li><cite>Shortcut Through Time<\/cite>, by George Johnson<\/li>\n<li><cite>A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/cite>, by Bill Bryson<\/li>\n<li><cite>The White Rock<\/cite>, by Hugh Thomson<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, the inclusion of some of the books on that list might be a little dodgy, and some of them might not be all that great as science, but there&#8217;s no doubt that the <cite>Times<\/cite> has considered science books &#8220;Notable&#8221; in the recent past. You can also see a hint of a decline in the number of science books included, even without the precipitous 2003-2004 drop. It&#8217;s not due to a decrease in the number of science books <strong>published<\/strong>, either, as 2005-6 was loaded up with String Theory Wars books&#8211; Krauss, Susskind, Smolin, Woit, not to mention Oerter&#8217;s <cite> The Theory of Almost Everything<\/cite> which was outstanding. And, of course, there&#8217;s no shortage of books about the life sciences&#8211; I just tend to remember the physics books.<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve said in several of the other threads discussing this, I also don&#8217;t believe that there weren&#8217;t any worthy science books published this year&#8211; again, I would point to David Lindley&#8217;s <cite>Uncertainty<\/cite> and Natalie Angier&#8217;s <cite>The Canon<\/cite>, both of which I thought were excellent. I also hear good things about Walter Isaacson&#8217;s Einstein biography, and a number of people have suggested <cite>The World Without Us<\/cite> as a worthy candidate.<\/p>\n<p>There might not have been as many outstanding science books as in some other years, but I have a hard time believing that there were <strong>no<\/strong> science books more deserving than Tina Brown&#8217;s book about Princess Diana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In comments to my earlier cranky post about the New York Times, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn&#8217;t released their &#8220;Ten Best Books&#8221; list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They posted the list today, and there&#8217;s nothing on it that wasn&#8217;t also on the Notable Books&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/29\/notable-science-of-the-recent\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Notable Science of the Recent Past<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,11,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-science_books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}