Sokal again. Drat!

[Andrew Dinn]

grip at netcom.com replies to Paul M:

> I wonder how many of the types of articles that send you screaming up the 
> wall are written by first rate scientists and how many are written by 
> scientific acolytes who can't hack it as a practicing scientist but 
> can produce lots of material for the layman to read.

> Do you find the writings of say, Roger Penrose or Steven Weinberg to be 
> of this type? (I mean the writings meant for a moderately educated 
> public, not particularly technical.) I'm curious because there are a lot of 
> hack "science" writers out there and some of them make particularly dumb 
> claims.

I don't think knowledge of scientific practice is the determining
factor. I have read great science writing and crap from both camps.
It does nto appear that the ability to do science or maths and the
ability to give an account of teh activity or its fruits go hand in
hand. In fact, my experience is that for all but a few, rare
occurences the greater a person's fluency with a subject the worse
they are at explaining it.

For example, Penrose perpetrates the usual trick of the bad science
writer which is to take terms with familiar, everyday significations
and use them in a context in which such significance can only be a
hindrance to grasping the underlying mathematical, physical or
chemical model - a model usually far less charged and mysterious than
its description. And Penrose also manages the other trick which is to
use such terms where there is no underlying model, merely an analogy
or metaphor stretched well beyond its elastic limit. Hawking is even
worse than Penrose. He cannot even manage to stretch his weak
analogies and metaphors far enough to cover the vast framework of
mathematics he hopes thereby to silhouette. By contrast, Bert
Holldobbler and Edward O Wilson's book `Journey to the Ants' is a
superb example of scientific storytelling.

It's not just popular science, either. Some science and maths
textbooks are much, much better than others at explaining their
subject e.g. Pauling and Bright-Wilson's introduction to Quantum
Mechanics is wonderfully motivated, making it clear how the theory
grew out of experiments and exactly what it was intended to address. I
tried several other text books and floundered badly with them before
this one rescued me. Herstein's `Topics in Algebra' is a great survey
of the basics of the field, far wider ranging, more coherent and
better integrated than most other books at the same level. Abelson and
Sussman's `The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' is a
superb introduction to program and data abstraction techniques which
set the tone for 1980s computing in the same way as the classic texts
of Knuth, Aho, Ullman, Sethi et al did for the 70s. Bad textbooks are
too numerous to even attempt listing.

And of course from the other camp, non-scientists writing about
science, our boy is the shining example, with Don D in close pursuit.
On the strength of Neuromancer I would probably include William Gibson
amongst those who write well about science, although I would also
consign him to the pile of skiffy writers who are so eager to explain
their story that their revelatory zeal continually gets in the way of
the telling.


Andrew Dinn
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And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.