Monday, October 27, 2008

Hitting the (virtual) road: Stop 1 on my "Walking the White Road" Virtual Book Tour


My virtual book tour, Walk the White Road: flash, fiction and science, has now officially begun, and the first stop is at Clare Dudman's excellent Keeper of the Snails blog. She asked me questions about, among other things, my love for science, so I thought I would make a little confession here. Every now and then I pop into a blog called Cosmic Variance. It contains sentences such as this one:
The week before last, I spent several delightful days at the Causality, Analyticity, and Superluminal Propagation Workshop at the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics in Ann Arbor.
And I noticed that when I read the above sentence, I got a thrill. The kind of thrill I imagine some people may get from porn, or from gourmet chocolate, or from finding a great bargain, or buying a pair of really expensive shoes.

The words "Causality", "Superluminal!, "Theoretical Physics" do something to me, they excite my molecules. Why?? I have no idea. I continue reading and there is more: "Lorentz invariance", "dark energy", "Einstein"...oooooooooooh, stop!

Why should physics be so seductive for me? It's not as if I have much of an idea of what most of these terms mean. But to me, they are part of something bigger, "science", that I just love. Visit Keeper of the Snails where I discuss this in more details, and tell me what you think.

2 comments:

Matt Bell said...

You were in Ann Arbor two weeks ago? I wish I'd known-- I would have taken you out for a cup of coffee or something!

I think this virtual book tour is a really cool idea. Keep up the good work!

Matt Bell said...

Nevermind, it's too early in the morning. That's a quote from the blog, not from you. Sorry!