Dearest readers,
This is my first post on The Virtuosi, so I thought I’d take a moment to introduce myself. I’m a first year physics graduate student at Cornell, recently joined after 2 years working as an engineer first at a private firm and then at a national lab. I myself have had lots of fun following the exploits of my estimable colleagues here on The Virtuosi, and I thought I could bring a new angle to the content here. I would like to use this space to discuss how science interacts with everyday life in a cultural sense. How does science appear in popular culture? How do political or social issues relate back to science? Those sorts of questions. (I understand that there are plenty of other resources elsewhere that offer far more intelligent insight into these matters than I can, but in the very least this will give people a chance point them out to me as they yell at me in the forum below.)
Enough intro, here begins my very first blog post:
Being interested in how science is communicated to the public, I am an avid reader of popular science. While academic types sometimes dismiss this kind of writing as shallow or otherwise uninteresting, I think science writers perform a very important function serving as a way to convey information about conceptually challenging topics to a general audience. At their best, I find that these books serve as examples for how I can communicate my own ideas better, and in addition challenge my understanding of how science relates back to society in general.
