A popular impression about science is that scientists do not know how to write well; that is, they only write in highly technical jargon that’s, well, boring. Scientists spend so much of their training, the story goes, learning about facts that they do not master the art and craft of communication. Montgomery, in this work, seeks to counter that argument by teaching scientists how to communicate well. In so doing, he harkens to a centuries-long…
John Polkinghorne is a Cambridge physicist who decided, mid-career, to become an Anglican priest. Like a good scientist working out a theory, he worked out how his orthodox Christian beliefs were essentially compatible with modern physics. He has won international acclaim and awards for his insights about religion and science. Especially central to his contributions is the idea that both disciplines require a certain amount of belief and faith. This book, compiled with his collaborator…
John Polkinghorne is a respected professor of physics at Cambridge University who became an Anglican priest. The President Emeritus of Queen’s College, he is well-known for his understanding of common terrain between science and religion. This book contains the text of the 1993-94 Gifford Lectures and describes his theological belief system. This belief system roughly aligns with Christian orthodoxy. This text explains how he studiously came to these beliefs as he explains why he eschewed…
Religious belief and science are often put at odds with each other in contemporary society and popular culture. One needs only to listen to fundamentalist preachers or read newspapers about anti-vaccine protestors to think that these groups are forever at odds. Further, the histories of religious wars and persecutions turn many educated, reality-based citizens off of the religious path. To this situation, Polkinghorne offers a detente by suggesting that the two fields are cousins in…
Technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be as much of a problem as a help. As an instrument, it can make mass killing much easier. Indeed, nuclear bombs enable the world to potentially destroy itself in less than an hour. Yet technology can enable human flourishing as well. For instance, I develop software professionally that I hope will help my domain (medical research) advance. How are we to understand technology, a concept as…
Confession: I work in the field of biomedical computing as a software developer. After journeying through a BS in computer science and medical school, I desire to devote much of my life towards advancing this field along with other bookish pursuits. So this book, by its title, caught my interest. November does an excellent job of chronicling the advance of applying computing towards biomedical pursuits. Much of the early advances in computing came at the…
While alive, Zinsser was our era’s guru on writing. Besides bestselling On Writing Well, he left us with a cadre of lesser-known works on how to communicate effectively. This work chronicles how to write educational pieces and is replete with examples from a variety of fields, ranging from music to geology and from physics to art. Zinsser’s authority is relatively unquestioned in the popular sphere. I do question whether his writing principles are indeed universal,…
My research work is moving from writing code to explaining the software that I’ve written. In general, I enjoy learning about language, and I picked up this book to extend my knowledge as well as to refresh myself on good practices for scientific writing. Scientific writing is often dry and difficult to understand – but as Greene points out, it doesn’t have to be. By following good writing practices (in the tradition of the famed…