Modern Day Yankee - Softcover

Lightman, Alan

3.94

18 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140094768 ISBN 13: 9780140094763

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1988

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The author offers a collection of essays that addresses questions ranging from why scientists do their most original work in their youth, and how progress has handicapped society to the physiology of a smile to the mysteries of the night sky

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From Library Journal:

The clever, well-written essays in this collection originally appeared in such diverse publications as Science, the New Yorker, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In an informal, engagingly episodic narrative style, Lightman, a Harvard physicist and the author of Time Travel, relays a considerable number of facts to the general reader, explaining in nontechnical terms several of the mysteries of astronomy, as well as the workings and a few of the paradoxes of modern science in general. Subjects include cosmology, Halley's Comet, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, applied versus theoretical science, and the nature of scientific ability. Not only does Lightman succeed in spanning the chasm between the public and his technical colleagues, but he proves himself a skilled storyteller. Recommended. Robert Paustian, Wilkes Coll. Lib., Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

Lightman, a physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a teacher at Harvard, has a flair for explaining the issues and difficult problems of modern astrophyics today. PW was particularly pleased by his "personal sidelights."
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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