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Science And Story: Physicist and Author Sean Carroll Talks Metaphors, “Thor,” And The Higgs Boson
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Science And Story: Physicist and Author Sean Carroll Talks Metaphors, “Thor,” And The Higgs Boson
Sean Carroll wears two hats. He’s a Caltech physicist who tries to unravel higher scientific mysteries like dark energy. But as an author of popular science books, he also works to bring those higher mysteries down to Earth and introduce them to the public. Carroll will be joining fellow authors Jo Marchant (“Decoding the Heavens”) and Steven Pinker (“The Better Angels Of Our Nature”) at the 2014 World Science Festival program Science And Story: The Write Angle. We chatted with him recently about the fine art of science storytelling: (Note: this interview has been lightly edited and condensed) WSF: When you’re writing about science, how do you make abstract concepts easy for a general audience to grasp? SC: This is something you face all the time when you’re doing the kinds of topics I write about: particle physics, gravity, cosmology. You have try to remember what it was like to not understand these things, to remember what jargon you didn’t know. With schooling, certain things become ingrained. What can be helpful is analogies or metaphors. However, you have to be careful, because you can give people ideas that come along with the analogy that you didn’t mean. A classic example …
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