This week, we’re highlighting five of our favorite science stories from The New Yorker’s archive—stories that capture, in different ways, the thrills, challenges, sacrifices, and satisfactions of the scientific life.
“Scientist and Mob Idol” (1933): Alva Johnston’s two-part Profile of Albert Einstein shows a physicist adjusting to sudden fame.
“Out of the Ego Chamber” (1969): Jeremy Bernstein’s Profile of Arthur C. Clarke, written a year after “2001: A Space Odyssey,” searches for the sources of Clarke’s “profoundly poetic feeling for the strange and only partly understood objects—stars, moons, planets, asteroids—that populate our universe.”
“Her Deepness” (1989): Wallace White’s Profile of the underwater explorer Sylvia Earle finders her fearless, determined, and permanently curious.
“Brilliant Light” (1999): In this memoir, Oliver Sacks remembers his scientific childhood. “Many of my childhood memories are of metals: these seemed to exert a power on me from the start.”
“Dream Machine” (2011): Rivka Galchen explores the world of David Deutsch, a physicist “who believes in multiple universes and has conceived of an as yet unbuildable computer to test their existence.”
We hope you enjoy these stories, as well as the pieces we’ve already shared in earlier archive collections, and that you’ll follow The New Yorker on Facebook and Twitter to discover more archive stories in the coming weeks.
