(Almost) everything he learned about science he learned from Isaac Asimov, Jamie Todd Rubin says:
I never learned about the Germinid meteor shower in any of my schooling. Instead, I learned about it and about meteor showers in general through Isaac Asimov’s science essays that appeared monthly in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The first of Asimov’s science essays appeared in the November 1958 issue (of which I happen to posses a copy).
Those monthly science columns continued unabated for 399 consecutive months. (And eventually, Isaac’s wife, Janet, put together a 400th column after his death.) The essays were collected in more than two dozen books. The columns themselves ranged through all realms of science, and occasionally into philosophy and humanities. They were written in Asimov’s familiar colloquial style, making it easy for anyone to approach even arcane subjects. I devoured every one of those essays and it is from those essays that I truly believe that I learned nearly everything I know about science today.
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Asimov’s essays taught me not only the hows and whys of science, they taught me the history of science. Taken together, anyone who reads all 399 F&SF science essays can’t miss certain patterns in logic and reasoning, can’t miss the evolution of thought and experiment. The essays taught me that scientists were real men and women.
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Today, only a few of these essays are truly dated. Some facts have changed because science evolves, but the core is still valid and the history that these essays provides is an invaluable tool for understanding the cumulative nature of science. Seven of these early essays were never put into any collections, and there were six or seven that Asimov wrote before his death that have not, to my knowledge, been collected either. Perhaps I am a lone voice in the wilderness here, but I think it’s high time that a newly reissued compendium of all of Isaac Asimov’s F&SF science essays be put together and re-released.
I was shocked to find that Amazon’s Isaac Asimov page doesn’t list any nonfiction, at least not until the second page, where Understanding Physics shows up. It’s out of print.
Asimov’s New Guide To Science is the book that came to mind when Rubin mentioned the history of science. I had that same experience of finding historical context really, really illuminating.
Historical context is centrally, radically relevant to a clear understanding of the genesis, trajectory, and importance of the creation of ideas and discovery of phenomena in mathematics and science.
Given its orienting value, I’ve always been mystified why there’s not more of it in science and especially math education.
Asimov had a Ph. D. in biochemistry and was a tenured Associate Professor at Boston University. But he found his calling and moved on, and moved back to NYC.
Isaac, when he knew he was sick and dying, sat down and wrote a book of two hundred pages, with all the ideas he had in his head at one time or another but had never acted on.
My favorite science book by Asimov is Far As Human Eye Could See. It is about the discovery of discovery as humans began to examine and understand the universe from the atomic to astronomy. Quite an excellent read.
When I was a kid I found my dad’s ancient copy of Fact and Fancy. Reading “My Built In Doubter” was a life-changing experience.
Thank you for the reminder that these exist.
This site lists all books that contain those essays and the site owner’s personal rating and review. But it doesn’t list the individual essays in each book.
This site lists each individual essay and all the books that contain it.
I’d like to know the minimal set of books that collectively contain all the essays. It is derivable from the second link, but I haven’t done the drudgery to extract it, nor have I found such a list elsewhere.