I Dream of Wrigley

Thoughts and Musings

Tonight the 2015 Major League Baseball season opens at Chicago’s Wrigley Field with a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the host Chicago Cubs. This essay originally appeared a year ago on The Last Word on Nothing, a science writers’ collective, in...

Total Immersion: Museum as Narrative

Thoughts and Musings

By Richard Panek How could it happen? Was it the wrath of God or the malice of Poland? Was the crew drunk or was the Vasa wrongly built? The town was alive with rumours. I’ll bet it was. On August 10, 1628, the warship Vasa—the pride of Sweden, the talk of...

I Saw Them Standing There

Thoughts and Musings

(This essay was the author’s faculty reading at a recent MFAW-VT residency. It commemorates an event that happened 51 years ago this week.)  By Richard Panek I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” recently when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and...

Of Heisenbergs and Beethovens

Thoughts and Musings

By Richard Panek The 16-year-old student has an idea, but she doesn’t have the maths to support it. She does, however, have a drawing. She submits it to her tutor. He examines it, then delivers his verdict. “This is not science,” he says. “This is...