The thing is, science is fascinating. (Hence, my love for RadioLab on WYNC.) Physics is especially fascinating, because it’s also a little crazy. I never got to take a physics class in high school or college, though I would’ve liked to, but what very, very, very basic knowledge of it I have seems to say that it’s largely based on the question “What if?” Which is the question that leads to the most interesting answers, and stories.

One article, “Setting Sail into Space, Propelled by Sunshine,” is about an organization that’s planning to launch satellites that will sail on sunlight once it is in orbit. Like boats sail with wind. Because “light carries not just energy but also momentum–a story told by every comet tail, which consists of dust blown by sunlight from a comet’s core.” Tell me that is not super cool.

The other is an essay about the Large Hadron Collider, “The Collider, the Particle and a Theory about Fate.” This is the one that I kind of can’t get over. It talks about how the hadron collider–an experiment in Switzerland that is trying to cause protons to crash and show how the Big Bang may have occurred–is basically sabotaging itself. Through time travel. Which is a legitimate vein of research. For reals. There are scientists who say that these particles colliding “might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.” So because what results from the particles colliding might be so bad, that result is somehow traveling through time to stop itself.

I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, and yet I also can’t get it out of my mind–and so I guess it makes sense that A Wrinkle in Time and The Time Traveler’s Wife have had the same effect.

In school science classes, the general take on science always seemed to be that it’s the opposite of magic. It’s orderly. It’s explainable, and classifiable, and cut and dry. But I never really bought that. Sure, we can go smaller and smaller from organism to cell to parts of a cell to atoms to protons and neutrons and electrons. We can give everything a name. But does that really explain anything? We can ask “Where did the protons come from?” And maybe we’ll even have an answer to that eventually, if the hadron collider stops sabotaging itself. Still…will we ever truly know why one thing happens instead of another? Why one molecule forms instead of another? It’s all still magic, even if we put a name on it.

Even time is fluid. That article quotes Einstein: “For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

I think maybe I like physics because there’s a sense of wonder, and a sense that a crazy theory just might be the right one. It reminds me of a quote by Roald Dahl that I’ve always liked:

Above all, watch with glittering eyes the great world around you, because dreams are always hidden in the most unlikely of places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

A sort of alarmist and gloom-and-doomy article about The End of publishing from New York Magazine.

And another look toward the future of media, but this time in roundtable fashion.

Obviously, I think that reading books is vital. But that belief doesn’t mean that I think online reading is detrimental. It’s different. I found myself a little irked by one quote in the article:

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

That seems an extremely elitist position to take. After all, I read this article online. (Okay, yes, I’ll be printing it out to save, too.) Lots of learning is acquired from books. But much of the learning I did in college was from xeroxed articles or printouts from online journals. And I’m sure that current students are relying on those means even more than I did. We can read thought-provoking arguments, debates, ideas, stories in any form. We learn if we take the time to digest and mull over them. And if we can talk them over with other people. What the internet hinders is the time to digest and absorb what we read online. It’s so easy to click onto the next thing, or to become distracted: it’s your turn in Scrabulous! there’s another interesting article! ooooh, there’s a new post on your favorite blog! a friend is im-ing you! But what the internet helps is finding more people to discuss and debate the ideas with. Ultimately, isn’t the internet a tool, and we can use it how we want to? We can’t really blame it for kids reading or not reading books. It may not be the problem, but how we think of it could be.

It did worry me, though, that the teenage girl in the article said she wanted to major in English and be published someday, but didn’t see the point of reading books. The best advice that can be given to aspiring writers is to read, read, read, so they can see how other people are doing it and what works or doesn’t work.

This article, too, talked about what kids read during their leisure time, but in the same breath about testing scores. So are they really concerned with the leisure time reading? I mean, I’m a grown-up, avid reader, former English major, and editor, and when I read in my leisure time, it’s to be swept away by a story.

Also, I was caught by the line about the internet having no beginning or end. Does that make the internet God?

My favorite detail, though, might be the “Not recommended for purchase by the expert” stamp. Such power!

I hope people keep talking away about how offended/not offended they are by the cover, so that more and more pick it up and stumble across this article.

He talks about books being markers of social identity for young adults, which is a thought I don’t think I’d ever put into the right words before, but this is totally it. He says:

That’s one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences — it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works. They pay keen attention, they argue back. There’s a consequentiality to writing for young people that makes it immensely satisfying.

YES!

He also points out that literature may be one of the few escapes left for young people today, with how much fear there is about getting hurt making it hard to live. Which is, too, a major theme of Little Brother.

Since I think one of the most obvious differences between adult and YA literature is that YA lit has HOPE, I’m glad that Cory Doctorow–and many others–are there for teens.