Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. He writes often about science, technology, and global public health. Since joining the magazine, he has written several articles about the global AIDS epidemic, as well as about avian influenza, malaria, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, synthetic biology, the attempt to create edible meat in a lab, and the debate over the meaning of our carbon footprint. He has also published many profiles of people, including Lance Armstrong, the ethicist Peter Singer, Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, Manolo Blahnik, and Miuccia Prada. Specter came to The New Yorker from the New York Times, where he had been a roving foreign correspondent based in Rome. From 1995 to 1998 he served as the New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief. He came to the Times from the Washington Post, where from 1985 to 1991 he covered local news, before becoming the national science reporter and later the newspaper’s New York bureau chief. Specter has twice received the Global Health Council’s annual Excellence in Media Award, first for his 2001 article about AIDS, “India’s Plague,” and second for his 2004 article “The Devastation,” about the ethics of testing HIV vaccines in Africa. He received the 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Award for his 2001 article “Rethinking the Brain,” on the scientific basis of how we learn. His most recent book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, received the 2009 Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking, presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. In 2011 Specter won the World Health Organization’s Stop TB Partnership Annual Award for Excellence in Reporting for his New Yorker article “A Deadly Misdiagnosis,” about the dangers of inaccurate TB tests in India, which has the highest rate of tuberculosis in the world. Specter splits his time between Brooklyn and upstate New York.
Steven Weinberg is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas. His honors include the Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, election to numerous academies, and sixteen honorary doctoral degrees. He has written more than 300 articles on elementary-particle theory, cosmology, and related topics, and twelve books; the latest, Lake Views: This World and the Universe, is a collection of his essays in the New York Review of Books and other periodicals. Educated at Cornell, Copenhagen, and Princeton, he taught at Columbia, Berkeley, MIT, and Harvard, where he was the Higgins Professor of Physics, before coming to Texas in 1982.
Tim Zimmermann is a correspondent at Outside magazine and the author of The Race. He writes often about marine mammals and the oceans and recently was an associate producer and cowriter of Blackfish, a documentary about killer whales in captivity. Zimmermann’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Men’s Journal and Sports Illustrated. Prior to his work at Outside, he was a diplomatic correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. More on his work can be found at timzimmermann.com and on Twitter (@Earth_ist). He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children.
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2012
SELECTED BY TIM FOLGER
JILL U. ADAMS
Chasing Dragons. Audubon. July/August.
ISAAC ANDERSON
The Lord God Bird. Image. Issue 72.
YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
A Week in Stockholm. Science. April 6.
ROY BLOUNT JR.
Go, Higgs! Block That Boson! Sports Illustrated. July 30.
BELLE BOGGS
The Art of Waiting. Orion. March/April.
ROB DUNN
The Glory of Leaves. National Geographic. October.
BETH ANN FENNELLY
Observations from the Jewel Rooms. Ecotone. Fall.
TIMOTHY FERRIS
Sun Struck. National Geographic. June.
WILLIAM FINNEGAN
Slow and Steady. The New Yorker. January 23.
DOUGLAS FOX
Witness to an Antarctic Meltdown. Scientific American. July.
The Clouds Are Alive. Discover. April.
SUSAN FREINKEL
In Each Shell a Story. On Earth. Summer.
JUSTIN GILLIS
A Climate Scientist Battles Time and Mortality. The New York Times. July 2.
EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN
The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality. The Chronicle of Higher Education. July.
ANDREW GRANT
William Borucki: Planet Hunter. Discover. December.
JEROME GROOPMAN
Sex and the Superbug. The New Yorker. October 1.
ROWAN JACOBSEN
The Gumbo Chronicles. Outside. April.
Boilover. Outside. October.
MARK JENKINS
Last of the Cave People. National Geographic. February.
JEFFREY KLUGER
Fabiola Gianotti, the Discoverer. Time. December 19.
MARIANNE LAVELLE
Good Gas, Bad Gas. National Geographic. December.
CHARLES C. MANN
State of the Species. Orion. November/December.
KATHLEEN MCAULIFFE
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy. The Atlantic. March.
BILL MCKIBBEN
A Matter of Degrees. Orion. July/August.
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. Rolling Stone. July 19.
Scary Monsters. Orion. March/April.
ZEEYA MERALI
Gravity off the Grid. Discover. March.
GREGORY MONE
Frozen. Irradiated. Desolate. Alive? Discover. November.
KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE
Concrete Footing. Orion. July/August.
GEORGE MUSSER
A New Enlightenment. Scientific American. November.
BRADFORD PLUMMER
The Big Crackup. Audubon. September/October.
MARY ROACH
Say Hello to My Little Friend. Outside. January.
RON ROSENBAUM
Richard Clarke on Who Was Behind the Stuxnet Attack. Smithsonian. April.
DAVID SAMUELS
Wild Things. Harper’s Magazine. June.
CALEB SCHARF
The Benevolence of Black Holes. Scientific American. August.
MICHAEL SPECTER
The Climate Fixers. The New Yorker. May 14.
SANDRA STEINGRABER
The Fracking of Rachel Carson. Orion. September/October.
DICK TERESI
The Beating Heart Donors. Discover. May.
MICHAEL TRIMBLE
I Cry, Therefore I Am. The New York Times. November 10.
JEFF TURRENTINE
True Believer. On Earth. Fall.
JAMES VLAHOS
The Case of the Sleeping Slayer. Scientific American. September.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
What Love Looks Like. Orion. January/February.
E. O. WILSON
Is War Inevitable? Discover. June.
CARL ZIMMER
A Show of Hands. National Geographic. May.
About the Editor
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, cancer physician and researcher, is the author of The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner for general nonfiction.
Footnotes
1. In his recent book The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I cited 1964 work by Peter Higgs and two other sets of theorists. This was because they had all explored the mathematics of symmetry-breaking in general theories with force-carrying particles, though they did not apply it to weak and electromagnetic forces. As known since 1961, a typical consequence of theories of symmetry-breaking is the appearance of new particles, as a sort of debris. A specific particle of this general class was predicted in my 1967 paper; this is the Higgs boson now being sought at the LHC.
As to my responsibility for the name “Higgs boson,” because of a mistake in reading the dates on these three earlier papers, I thought that the earliest was the one by Higgs, so in my 1967 paper I c
ited Higgs first and have done so since then. Other physicists apparently have followed my lead. But as Close points out, the earliest paper of the three I cited was actually the one by Robert Brout and François Englert. In extenuation of my mistake, I should note that Higgs and Brout and Englert did their work independently and at about the same time, as also did the third group (Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble). But the name “Higgs boson” seems to have stuck.
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2. I have written more about this in “The Missions of Astronomy,” The New York Review of Books, October 22, 2009.
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3. This article is based on the inaugural lecture in the series On the Shoulders of Giants, of the World Science Festival in New York on June 4, 2011, and on a plenary lecture at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin on January 9, 2012.
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The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013 Page 42