Articles

Essays, Reviews, and Features:

  • Aftermath: An invited essay about mathematics and my personal relationships. The inaugural piece for the column Parallel Practice at The Rumpus.
  • The Damned: A short personal essay about my first *ahem* experiment and religion, while growing up in Ohio. For Belt.
  • Science, Viruses, and Stories: An interview with author and biologist Joe Osmundson on the publication of his book, Virology. For the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • Physics and Other Profanities: An essay review about God, death, the laws of physics and how to deconsecrate science writing. Published at Lit Hub.
  • To the Grave: Secrets, Insecurity, and Sins: An essay about secrecy and national security, and a review of the book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. Published at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • A Cosmologist Reveals the Majesty that Bigotry Obscures: My short review of The Disordered Cosmos, the brilliant new book by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Published at Undark. Republished at Salon.
  • The Gospel According to Frank: An essay and review of the book Fundamentals, by the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. Published at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • The Life Ironic: A personal essay about the romance of nature, growing up, fatherhood, and the pricks of art and science, through the films of Wes Anderson. Published at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • The Fiction of Individual Genius: An editorial about racism, misogyny, the Nobel Prize, the fiction of individual genius, and how science is truly done. Even James Watson, in his bigoted memoir, knew that scientists were a chorus, not soloists. Published at Undark.
  • The Standard Model: A personal essay about physics, family, race, and misogyny. It is the story of my two trips to Ohio, in the summer of 2018, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Standard Model with Nobel laureates and to celebrate my great-grandmother’s 103rd birthday. Published in Joyland Magazine.
  • Einstein and the Eclipse: The story of the hidden labor of pure science, and the experiment that made Einstein famous. Published in Massive. Reprinted at Salon.
  • A Brilliant Failure: Cover story about Ernest Lawrence and the company of physicists who helped develop color television during the Cold War. Television sets used to particle accelerators, and they displayed more than sitcoms and evening news; they highlighted incoming missiles and foreign bombers. Published in Physics Today. And here is the nicer PDF.
  • Critical Phenomena: A personal essay about the punk band Operation Ivy, the series of atomic bomb tests that inspired their name, the writer Leonard Michaels (whose son was the band’s lead singer), missile defense systems, the physics of critical phenomena, growing up in Michigan, living in New York, leaving the Bay Area, the patterns of history, and the wars in Iraq. Published in Joyland Magazine. Reappeared at ➰➰➰.
  • An Experiment of Her Own: An interview with the high-energy physicist, Sau Lan Wu, for Quanta Magazine. Reprinted at Wired.
  • Nil Communication: A feature article that explains quantum mechanics and counterfactual communication, in other words communication without any medium, published at Scientific American.
  • Science and the Humanities Should be Allies: An invited editorial in the Daily Texan.
  • On Writing About Science: A contribution to the Kenyon Review‘s discussion of science and writing.
  • The Reality Tests (pdf): A narrative feature about the physicists in Vienna who began to test whether quantum mechanics allows for a fundamental physical reality. Reprinted in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. The essay was also reprinted by the Austrian Science Ministry, by the magazine Pour La Science in France, and by Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany.
  • Intimate with Einstein (pdf): The lead review of Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein.

Other, Older Pieces:

  • Truth and Science (pdf): A much-too-short and overly simplistic and almost certainly wrong introduction to the philosophical notion of truth in science.
  • Quantum Pulp (pdf): A somewhat glib take on the similarities between quantum mechanics and crime fiction.
  • Not Feeling the Fields (pdf): When Grisha Perelman turned down the Fields Medal.
  • A Second (Scientific) Opinion (pdf): A group of physicists speak out about the detentions and abuses at Guantánamo.
  • Mr. Feynman goes to Washington (pdf): Richard Feynman and the Challenger Investigation.
  • Putting his Money Where his Math is (pdf): A profile of the billionaire hedge fund founder and former mathematician, Jim Simons.
  • String Theory Cribsheet (pdf): An introduction to the basic principles of string theory.
  • Big Science (pdf): About the concurrent rise of Big Science and the United Nations after WWII, and how the one might help the other in its endeavor toward peace.
  • Time to Mess With Your Head (pdf): A few changes to the way we think about time.
  • Big in Japan (pdf): Scientists who are treated like celebrities in Asia.
  • Surveying the Landscape: A survey of nearly two dozen high-energy physicists about the possibility of a multiverse.
  • Lisa Randall: A short profile of the most-cited theoretical physicist.
  • A New Force in Physics?: The first article to talk about how blogs changed physics.

Shorter Book and Film Reviews:

  • The Periodic Table (pdf): A brief review of Primo Levi’s magisterial book.
  • Insignificance (pdf): A review of Nicolas Roeg’s film about Einstein, Monroe, McCarthy, and DiMaggio.
  • Arrowsmith (pdf): Review of Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about medical research.
  • Cyberiad (pdf): Stanislaw Lem’s work of combined Lewis Carroll-like frivolity and Borgesian profundity.

Interviews:

  • James Simons (pdf): The somewhat reticent billionaire mathematician who runs one of the most consistent and best-performing hedge funds in the world, and who has used his money to improve math education in America.
  • Al Jean and David X. Cohen (pdf): Two writers from The Simpsons and Futurama with backgrounds in, and a love for, science.
  • Limits of Observation (pdf): An interview with Dr. Keith Schwab, a physicist whose research was shown as art at the MoMA in New York.