Apologies and science books
First off, I’ve got to make two connected apologies. The first one is for this week’s blog being a bit late. My excuse is that I’ve been ill with a chest infection. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but suffice to say that there’s been lots of coughing and hacking.
The infection hasn’t made me feel too ill, but it has made me feel quite tired and prevented me from doing as much work as I wanted. So I simply haven’t had time to write the blog. Because of that, this week’s blog is also going to be quite short, and that’s my second apology.
One of the many annoyances of this chest infection is that it’s made me too tired to read. As I haven’t been feeling that ill, I’ve still carried on working but then tend to fall asleep as soon as I stop. This means that I haven’t been able to make any more headway on the science book that I’ve been reading for the past four years.
I like to have both a novel and a non-fiction book, usually popular science, on the go at the same time, so that I can choose between them depending on my mood. That’s the idea anyway, but it hasn’t quite worked out like that. The problem is that I only tend to read in short snatches of at most a couple of hours and, what with the magazines and newspapers that I also read every week, that doesn’t leave much time for reading books.
Now, this isn’t too much of a problem for novels, which you can read in short bursts, but tends to be more of a problem for popular science books. This is especially the case for the book I’m reading at the moment – It must be beautiful: great equations of modern science. This consists of 11 short essays on various groundbreaking equations, from Einstein’s famous E = mc2 to the Molina-Rowland chemical equation that revealed the mechanism by which the ozone layer was being destroyed.
Although all the essays I’ve read have been fascinating, you really need to read them in one sitting. As they comprise 30 pages of detailed scientific explanation, that can be quite difficult. But it’s also difficult to try to read them in a number of sittings, because you tend to lose the thread of the argument. That’s why I’ve tended to put this book on the back-burner and focus more on the easier-to-read novels, although I have read other work-related science books over the past four years.
But I’ve just finished a fairly long novel, which also took me quite a time to read, and so I’m now determined to finish reading It must be beautiful. I’ve got just four essays left to go; let’s hope I can stay awake for long enough.
