I hope this is the right forum for this question/comment.
With the passing of Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, writers who can make scientific advances somewhat easier to relate to are becoming harder to find. And some of them, Stephen Hawking among them, aren’t as clear to laypeople as they might hope.
I’ve enjoyed the James Glieck books but his output is limited. That can be said about most of the authors I’ve seen.
Do you have a favorite writer in the fields of “pop science” and/or “pop math” who manages to stay pretty much up to date on discoveries and ongoing investigations?
If there are some websites that treat these matters, I have yet to find a good one.
Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki and Adam Spencer both deal in “pop science”. Dr. K regularly appears on at least two radio stations here in Australia. A year ago I went to what was called the “Sleek Geek Tour”, where they just got up on stage and talked about all sorts of cool science facts. They don’t usually deal with the newest of the new, mostly it’s just the really entertaining science.
For math, Keith Devlin and Ian Stewart are good for “discoveries and ongoing investigations,” though there are a number of other good “pop math” writers I could mention. (E.g. Martin Gardner has long been the big name in recreational mathematics.)
A couple of names from my own library: Stewart Brand (technology), Duncan Steel (astronomy), James Burke (history of technology), Dava Sobel (history, science-based), John D. Barrow (cosmology).
Ivars Peterson wrote a book called The Mathematical Tourist which attempts to explain some of the recent discoveries in computational math in “layman’s term”. It has pretty pictures too. James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science is also highly recommended.
Thudlow Boink mentioned Martin Gardner above, so I’ll point out that Gardner was the first to popularize John Horton Conway’s Game of Life, the first cellular automaton. The linked article mentions a couple of Conway’s books on games and math. Gardner’s books collecting his Mathematical Games columns from Scientific American are also great.
There’s also The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
For more fractals (and an amazing amount of other stuff) see Cliff Pickover’s site. He has a list of his books there, some sci/tech and some not.
Stephen Jay Gould was a giant of evolutionary history for the layman (though I understand there’s some contention about his ideas among Those Who Know).
John Allen Paulos wrote a fabulous book called Innumeracy, plus a couple of followups, on mathematics.
By the way, I think it was Buckminster Fuller who said that any scientist who can’t explain his work to a layman is a quack.
Now I have three versions of that quote. I’ve heard “You don’t really understand something until you can explain it to a seven-year-old” or “…explain it to your grandfather”; attributed to either Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman.
I actually heard that this wasn’t all that great of a choice afterall. I was reading the God Particle, and the author had some pretty negative things to say about that book.
Henry Petroski does engineering for the layman. Check out To Engineer is Human*, where he explores major design failures.
Another good engineering one is Why Buildings Stand Up by Mario Salvadori, where he explains how buildings work–static loads, dynamic loads, etc. Sadly, I finished reading this book on September 10, 2001. Well, at least I fully understood exactly why they fell.
Most laypeople are uninformed of the in-fighting in any scientific field. Scientists can be quite passionate and fierce when discussing minute details of a particular theory.
SJG’s great claim to fame was Punctuated Equilibrium. Many of his opponents are not disputing the possibility that the theory is plausible but rather feel that he overapplied the concept.
There is also a continuing hostility towards scientists who write science for laymen among some of the intellectual crowd. Snob issues.
Well, at least I fully understood exactly why they fell.