Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 39

[cahn]

Last post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)

Comments

Re: Challenger

[mildred_of_midgard]

I probably would have read it back in my "I'm going to be a physicist when I grow up" days if my high school library had had it, but I can only imagine we didn't, because I think I'd only even *heard* of it in my thirties.

One thing to keep in mind is just how isolated a tech geek I was. It was me in a small town, at an unacademic high school, in an unintellectual family. I had to find everything on my own. And shortly after starting college, for reasons with which you are familiar, I developed a physics aversion and avoided all mention of physics (and more or less science, too) for a good decade.

I only got back into science in the early 2010s thanks to picking up a book on genetic algorithms that was on the shelves in the office at my first tech job, reading the first few pages, and realizing I needed to learn how *genetics* worked, and then somewhat later, picking up the popular science book T-Rex and the Crater of Doom, which was a great book that I still reread and recommend to people. At that point, it had been long enough since my signal failure to become a physicist that I could emotionally stand to be reminded of science again.

Re: Challenger

[cahn]

Huh! I think this might be a generational thing -- which makes sense since it came out mid-80's. Because when I read it (maybe a couple of years after it came out?) I had no idea he was a famous physicist or anything (and had only a somewhat tenuous grasp on what a physicist was at all) -- it was only in college that he switched in my head from "Feynman, the guy who wrote that great book" to "Feynman, the brilliant physicist."

I actually read it because my piano teacher liked books a lot, and had a copy (and I always read her books while my sister was taking her lesson). (She wasn't particularly into science, though it may have been for her oldest son, who was a few years older than I was and had more geeky interests than she did -- I remember at one point he tried to get me to read Roger Zelazny, which I was really too young for at the time.) And I feel like in my generation I've heard this story from several other people, who also just happened to pick it up because it was a best-seller at the time, and were captivated by it even at a young age because he's so appealing to the geek mindset. But I can see how it would have been much harder to find on one's own or by serendipity a few years later, once the buzz had died down.

Re: Challenger

[mildred_of_midgard]

Huh! I think this might be a generational thing -- which makes sense since it came out mid-80's.

Maybe! Because I certainly knew who Feynman *was*, but I had never heard of this book! When I was in middle school and high school, the book that would have been easy to pick by osmosis was A Brief History of Time.

I finished it today, and...I liked it. I didn't love it. It was a little too episodic for my tastes, I would have preferred more of a connected narrative. I will check out his other book that you said you might like better these days.