About

About the Blogger:

In the photo above your blogger, Thomas Levenson, enjoys an oxygen break at 17,000 feet up in the Atacama Desert, where I and my crew were filming Caltech’s CBI instrument as it measured the Cosmic Microwave Background. My day job has me professing science writing at MIT, mostly teaching in the Institute’s Graduate Program on Science Writing. (The program is a great way to start in the profession – think of it as a year-long science writing bootcamp).

I am a recent immigrant to the professoriat, and continue to do what I did before: write books (and the occasional article), and make documentary films about science, its history, and its interaction with the broader culture in which scientific lives and discoveries unfold.

I’m working on my fourth book, a great story from a little-known corner of Isaac Newton’s life, to be published by Harcourt (US) and Faber (UK) in 2008 or early 2009. My previous books include: Einstein in Berlin; Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science; and Ice Time: Climate Science and Life on Earth (now out of print). My documentaries have mostly appeared on PBS, and most of those on the NOVA series. Recent work includes the Origins series, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson and broadcast on NOVA — (my favorite is program four, the cosmology show, “Back to the Beginning”); the “Domes” program in David Macaulay’s delightful PBS series Building Big, and NOVA’s two hour Einstein Revealed, now a little long in the tooth, but featuring a nice turn by Andrew Sacks as Albert Einstein. (You may have seen Sacks in one of the great television comedy roles: Manuel the Spanish Waiter in Fawlty Towers.)

Besides writing, film making and generally being dour about the daily news, I lead an almost entirely conventional life in one of Boston’s inner suburbs with a family that gives me great joy. The new cat has to stop waking me up at five a.m., however.

About the Blog:

Inverse Square takes as its beat the intersection of science with public life. Put that another way — just about anything is fair game, given that it’s hard to find something that people do onto which a scientific approach can’t shed some light.

(The blog’s name, a nod to my long prose affair with gravity, comes to me courtesy of my student, Andrew Moseman. If I blog too far, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants).

The other emphasis here will be on the craft, art and practice of science writing (where “writing” is conceived broadly to include much more than just the printed page). Science hits the public square through somebody telling some kind of a story, so the good, bad and ugly of popular writing about science is also grist for this mill.