The Merely Personal [antikvár]

ON SCIENCE As I was reading over the essays that I wanted to include in this collection, I made a curious discovery. I have been writing about science for the general public for some four decades, but, as far as I can remember, I have never written a "popular science" article. By a popular science article I mean an article that attempts to explain some scientific subject in its own terms, without reference to the people and circumstances that produced it. All my articles on science involve people and places. I have been interested in this human side of science ever since I got involved with it. No one ever said to me that my articles should have people and places in them. It was just the way I thought about things. That is probably why my way of writing about these matters fitted so well with the New Yorker—at least until the balance shifted from science to people and places. Thus I do not see a very clear division between the articles I include in this section and the next except that in this section the weight is more on the science and in the next it is more on the people and places. But it is really a continuum. The first article in the section is divided into two parts. The first deals with the chess match played in Iceland in the summer