In India

Just a note to say that I'm on writing hiatus (or at least the kind of writing that I sell) since I am in India for 4 weeks. But I'm writing about THAT here.

Blocked

I am sitting in a coffee shop in Woods Hole, STARING at the screen, trying to throw myself back into Kepler and Brahe with a vengeance, and mostly I am . . . staring at my computer screen. It doesn't help that my favorite coffee shop in Woods Hole got wireless access and so e-mailing becomes a far too accessible procrastination tool. But really. This shouldn't be so hard.

I've been stumped on this book for a solid month now I think -- partly 'cause I've focused elsewhere, getting ready for my trip. But also because I am finding myself having to write about characters I just don't know as well. And so I stare at the keyboard, take a sip of coffee, stare some more, turn on my e-mail -- hit send/receive a few times, turn off my e-mail, sip some coffee, write a sentence, turn back on my e-mail, realize no one has written me in the last two minutes, turn it off, stare at the screen, watch the people go by, wish I had a copy of Writing Down the Bones to help me out with some fun writing exercise to get me started, finally say Screw it! and just write something here instead.

Why doesn't this ever get easier?

People's Interpretations

One of the most interesting things about putting a book out there is the ways in which people react from their own biases. I have a lot to say about different audiences for anything one writes that I won't go into a lot of detail here. Suffice it to say there is always a group of people who know far more about the subject than the rest of the populus and unless you say exactly the same thing as what they believe they know, then they will raise a hue and a cry about how you are incorrect.

It's important to realize both as a writer -- and if you're a huer and a crier -- that the experts are not your audience. The experts have a knowledge base, and they are often frustrated by things that are factually correct, but just rub them the wrong way. Or alternatively, they are committed to a certain theory when you propound another one. This kind of bias is not easy to spot and can be disconcerting when you encounter it.

I'm here today to discuss a whole different kind of "the wrong" audience. By "wrong" I simply mean people who are not going to get out of a book what you were aiming to give them. One of my favorite cases is from The Big Bang Theory.

It is an interesting device of those who are anti-science to point fingers at a theory's weaknesses and then say "See! It's clearly wrong, even scientists have to agree there are problems, and so the entire scientific approach is wrong and we should return to a simpler life/believe the bible literally/jettison technology that is destroying the world."

As it happens, the whole point of my Big Bang book was to analyze how robust a theory it is, where there are holes that still need to be patched up, what seems proven completely, what isn't, etc. Therefore, I naturally went into detailed discussions about the weaknesses (weaknesses that, mind you, have already changed in the two years since the book was published -- cosmology is a fast-moving field. . . ) I wrote in the introduction that it would be foolish to think that because there was room for discussion about the theory, one should embrace, say, Creationism instead. One can, and should, accept change in science, without feeling that science as a way to analyze the world is fundamentally untenable.

Ok, that was the background to the fact that in the article THE BIG BANG THEORY—A SCIENTIFIC CRITIQUE [PART II] by Bert Thompson, Ph.D., Brad Harrub, Ph.D., and Branyon May on a website dedicated to defending fundamentalist Christian beliefs in the face of scientific data, I am described as "admitting" the problems with the Big Bang Theory.

Karen Fox admitted:

The fact is that the dark matter problem is reaching something of a crisis, although few astronomers have been willing to admit this yet. Forget not finding any ideal dark matter candidates. The problem isn’t that no one can find the missing matter (although they can’t) but that even if theorists stomp their feet and shake their heads, observations haven’t even shown that the universe is at the critical density (2002, pp. 122-123, parenthetical item in orig.).
But if “observations haven’t even shown that the universe is at the critical density,” then that plays havoc with the idea of inflation producing a Big-Bang-type of Universe that is flat, and that will expand indefinitely.

As Fox casually remarked: “The dark matter problem affects the basics of the big bang model” (p. 124). It certainly does!)

It also describes me as "confessing":

Evolutionist Karen Fox confessed: “This radiation in and of itself doesn’t require the big bang theory per se be correct” (2002, p. 134).

Never mind the fact that they call me an "evolutionist" -- which, yeah, I am, but which has nothing to do with the big bang -- I just love this. I love the fact that I write a section entitled "How Good a Theory Is It?" with a chapter called "Glitches", in which the whole point is to describe what the problems about the theory are . . . and it's interpreted as this dirty secret, where I have to "admit" that everything is not smack-dab perfect within the world of cosmology. The words echoed throughout the web. . . On a Christian Message board arguing the Big Bang theory versus a 6-day creation describes says my "admission speaks volumes."

I have not, of course, attempted any discourse with the authors in question -- it wouldn't get any of us anywhere. But as I gear up for the next round of reactions on this current book, some of which I'm sure WILL be negative and WILL affect me more deeply than the above examples, it's great to be reminded how often feedback is rooted in biases I can never hope to affect.

Feedback

Thanks to all of you who dropped me notes after the Politics and Prose reading aired on BookTV this morning. It's great to know that there were actual people awake at that hour, who enjoyed, agreed with, disagreed with, wanted to comment on, or simply watched, the show!

(And thanks also to those of you who bought the book due to the show -- our Amazon ranking went from 50,000 yesterday to 9,000 today.)

More Media

Is it thoroughly jejeune of me to be excited any and every time the slightest thing gets put in print about Einstein A to Z? Probably. . . but hey it's still fun!

My friend Hilary Liftin, who is not only a fantastic writer, but who shares the wealth, sent my Shameless Boasting e-mail to a colleague at the NYC edition of Metro -- a free newspaper distributed globally. And so we're in there today! Aries and I are their book pic of the day. (Hit the link and scroll down to page 12 to read it in print. . . But here's what it said, next to a picture of the book: "Sure Einstein was brilliant, smart, witty , adn the greatest mind of our time. But, man, do you reall GET him? It's just too much information for us to handle Thankfully, science writers Karen Fox and Aries Keck have written a handy entertaining breakdown of the great thinker: from A to Z -- with a little E=MC2 thrown in.")

ALSO! If you'd like to see how Aries and I did at our Politics and Prose gig two weeks ago -- or alternatively if you're an insomniac and will be awake at 6:15 AM this Sunday, you can see us on Book TV on C-Span2.

Woods Hole

Exactly NO writing is getting done while I'm in Woods Hole, as the salt air is pickling my brain and making me focus on really important things like napping, reading science fiction books, and drinking wine. This is a problem, because I actually have quite a few things that I told myself I would get done while here. . . but tomorrow! I really will start writing tomorrow!

'Nother Review

I think Publisher's Weekly is pretty much REQUIRED to write a review on every book that is ever published, but I am still pleased they take the time to write about my books. Their reviews are always really nicely written as well (Hey, this one had Latin in it!) and I kinda like that too. . .

From Publisher's Weekly: A is for absentmindedness, and yes, the greatest scientist of the 20th century was a stereotypically absentminded professor. E is for his famous equation on the relation between energy and mass, which is nicely explained here in a clear, comprehensible way. M is for McCarthyism, which Einstein openly decried, and also for Marilyn Monroe, whose link to Einstein is wholly fictional. Fox (The Big Bang Theory) and Keck, a science reporter for public radio station WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, say their alphabetic omnium gatherum "is designed to be as casual or as specific as the reader wishes," and that's a fair description. Details about Einstein's life, not just his science, are found in these alphabetical fragments, which cover the physicist's feelings on Israel and Judaism, on pacifism (which he espoused) and on quantum mechanics (which he famously rejected), as well as his relations with other scientists and with his own family. Novice students of physics and casual browsers can learn a fair amount from these entries, though, of course, it's no substitute for reading one of the many comprehensive books on Einstein's life and work. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.