Article: Most physicists hate writing. With...

Most physicists hate writing. With few exceptions they find it a necessary time-consuming chore that keeps them away from their equations. I am a bit of an exception in that I have always enjoyed the final phase of a piece of research-the process of writing it up. But still, the idea of writing a whole book for a non-physics audience seemed beyond me.

Being a voracious reader, it's not that I didn't value the ability to write. There are a few great physicists who do it extremely well-Steven Weinberg and Freeman Dyson immediately come to mind. For many years I have admired their ability to express ideas in the written word, but I could not imagine doing it myself.

What provoked me to try my hand at writing for a general public was my experience teaching physics, not to undergraduates or graduate students, but to "grownups." Stanford has a Continuing Studies Program that offers all sorts of courses from Jazz Dance to Bioethics. The program is for ordinary people from the local community around Palo Alto-usually "old codgers." A few years ago I decided to find out if there was a market for a course on the most exciting topics in modern physics: The response was amazing. Once a week, for several years now, a large lecture hall fills up with folks varying in age from their early forties to their nineties, to hear me expound on the new modern developments in physics: everything from string theory to the Big Bang, and black holes. They come for a semester, but then they come back and back. By now they have organized themselves into an organization-"The Stanford Quantum Groupies." The whole thing went to my head and I began to think that I might just have some unusual talent at explaining things to laymen. The audience evidently agreed. And of course they said, "You must write a book."

That experience together with the fact that physics and cosmology were undergoing an incredible revolution encouraged me. With more than a little trepidation, I took the plunge-writing for the public. But once I started I became completely hooked. Having experienced the pleasures of writing I don't think I will stop.

Copyright © 2005 Leonard Susskind