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Nothing Personal
Another one cites the bust
"Love my breasts" disease strikes Zeta-Jones; Hef's a uniter, not a divider; and Beck on why he was bullied ... but in a fair way.
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People Poll
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[03/21/00]

People Feature
No gays or abortions allowed in my papers!
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[03/20/00]

Nothing Personal
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[03/20/00]

People Feature
Victoria's penitentiary
Lingerie or weapon? Off with the underwire bra if you want to go behind bars.
By Linda Robertson
[03/20/00]

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Science is fast.

It is also frighteningly accurate: Using equations provided by 16th century astronomer Johannes Kepler, we sent a tiny hunk of metal called Voyager on a billion-mile journey to the outer planets and beyond. Our aim in sending Voyager is as accurate as that of a sharpshooter firing a bullet from Earth and hitting a 1-foot target on the moon. It's not easy to get one's mind around science's achievements, and most of us -- who left science behind when we lost our high school textbooks -- regard science with a mixture of suspicion and the cold fear that it's generally over our heads.

Watch a segment of "Life Beyond Earth" 56 | 100 RealMedia(Don't have the RealPlayer 7? Click here to download it free.)

Timothy Ferris has written eight books on science, three of them enduring bestsellers: "Coming of Age in the Milky Way," "The Mind's Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context" and, his most recent, "The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report." Under Ferris' pen, science is never frigid or remote -- even for the science-wary reader. Packed with the colorful human beings that scientists actually are, his work gives us the real juice: Science is a process, a crazy, dynamic struggle of quirky turns, blind alleys, sleepless nights, absurdities and breakthroughs.

Here's how he introduces Tycho Brahe, a contemporary of Kepler's, in "Coming of Age in the Milky Way":

Tycho was an expansive giant of a man who sported a belly of Jovian proportions and a gleaming metal alloy nose -- the bridge of his original nose had been cut off in a youthful duel. Heroically passionate and wildly eccentric, he dressed like a prince and ruled his domain like a king, tossing scraps to a dwarf named Jep who huddled beneath the dinner table.

Ferris' own nose sits on a handsome and rugged face beneath a wavy frame of brown hair. Sixteenth century lordly airs are hard to come by in these times, and it would be wrong to call the 56-year-old Ferris haughty. But the man has a solid and confident look to him -- the writer at the top of his game. He is given to tweed jackets and khakis that always smell of cigar smoke (he says he has never written a worthwhile sentence without a lighted cigar in hand), and he works from a grand, book-lined office on the bottom floor of his house in San Francisco. It's a remarkable setting: His house is the highest-set private property under Coit Tower, which crowns San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. His view of the Bay Bridge is stunning, and the four floors he shares with his wife, Carolyn Zecca, and son, Patrick, are tastefully rich -- with colors chosen by design guru Don Kaufmann and paintings by his talented wife. He is king of a castle in a sense, and his fellow royalty are such grand-vizier writers as Annie Dillard, Joyce Carol Oates, Hunter S. Thompson and Jim Harrison -- all of whom he considers friends.

Like each of them, Ferris has carved out his own literary niche. But while reading a Ferris book may be as easy and entertaining as reading a Dillard book, it's important to remember that the underlying subject matter is very different.

Next page | "I try not to speak more clearly than I think"