The View From a Height

Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992) had a degree in biochemistry, and was a well-known Golden Age science fiction writer with his Positronic Robot series and his Foundation series to name only a few. But for most of his writing years he saw himself as a science popularizer. From 1957 until his death, he wrote a series of articles, on a wide variety of scientific subjects, for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. All but a handful of the 399 essays he wrote were then collected into anthologies and published in hardback and subsequently in paperback.

All of those books are out of print now, and you'll be lucky to find them in a library, too. (I assembled my collection of these essays by purchasing used books through Amazon.com's service - more than half of the books I recieved were de-accessioned library books.)

And this is a pity, because more than half of the essays Asimov wrote still have applications today. He explained his topics simply and clearly, so that even if a layperson couldn't quite grasp the intricacies involved, they still understood the general concept. These books really should be read by everyone aspiring to a scientific education. (And that should be all of us!)

Asimov explains it in his introduction to the anthology Adding A Dimension. I reproduce a few of the relevant paragraphs below.

[There is a fallacy called] the "growing edge," the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded an dead.

But is that true? ...

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. "If I have seen further than other men," said Isaac Newton, "it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

... In fact, an overly exclusive concern with the growing edge can kill the best of science, for it is not on the growing edge that growth can best be seen. If a growing edge only is studied, science begins to seem a revelation without a history of development.

... Science gains reality when it is viewed not as an abstraction, but as the concrete sum of work of scientists, past and present, living and dead. Not a statement in science, not an observation, not a thought exists in itself. Each was ground out of the harsh effort of some man [or woman] and unless you know the man and the world in which he worked; the assumptions he accepted as truths, the concepts he considered untenable; you cannot fully understand the statement or observation or thought."

All of this is my explanation for why, even though this blog is devoted to Rocket Science, I will occasionally recommend books on other subjects - such as chemistry, classical physics, astronomy, and so on. All these disciplines come together to make someone an informed scientific layperson - and that is the goal of this blog.

(Asimov continues in this vein and has some interesting things to say on the scientific method, and I'll share that in my next post.)

If you'd like to collect all of Asimov's collected essays from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, here are the titles:

Fact and Fancy (1962)
View from a Height (1963)
Adding a Dimension (1964)
Of Time, Space, & Other Things (1965)
From Earth to Heaven (1966)
Science, Numbers and I (1968)
The Solar System and Back (1970)
The Stars in Their Courses (1971)
The Left Hand of the Electron (1972)
The Tragedy of the Moon (1973)
Of Matters Great & Small (1975)
The Planet that Wasn't (1976)
Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1977)
Road to Infinity (1979)
The Sun Shines Bright (1981)
Counting the Eons (1983)
X Stands for Unknown (1984)
The Subatomic Monster (1985)
Far as Human Eye Could See (1987)
The Relativity of Wrong (1988)
Out of the Everywhere (1990)
The Secret of the Universe (1990)

Most of these can be bought from Amazon for a penny...and $3.99 postage. Others are more expensive. All of them are worth the cost, as you will discover as this blog progresses.