Kate Greene - Four Way Interview

Image copyright Dia Feli

Kate Greene is an essayist, poet, journalist, and former laser physicist whose work has appeared in Aeon, Harvard Review, the New Yorker, The Economist, and WIRED, among others. She was second-in-command on the first simulated Mars mission for NASA’s HI-SEAS project. She holds a BS in chemistry, an MS in physics and an MFA in poetry, and has taught writing at Columbia University, San Francisco State University, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. She lives in NYC. Her latest book is Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.

Why science?

The mystery! And discovery, but mostly the mystery—the questions, the transmutation of a question into something approaching an answer that often leads to more questions. It’s good if you’re curious. A renewable resource.

Why this book?

I had to write it so it’d stop taking up so much space in the brain. There were too many strange and satisfying connections between my HI-SEAS experience and the rest of life to ignore.

What’s next?

Writing-wise, it’s a poetry chapbook that’s finally come together. I’m also poking at a beast of a larger project that deals with artificial intelligence and 'algorithms of the self.' I hope to queer the usual questions and frameworks around AI.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

In poetry it’s Larry Eigner, a Bay Area poet who wrote from the 50s to the 90s in a fragmentary style that is utterly compelling to me right now. I’m also making my way through Ursula Le Guin’s essays and other nonfiction and short stories by Robert Walser. I’m excited about policy changes forthcoming from the Biden administration and the efforts toward racial equity that seem rooted in practical, useful measures. And finally, I’m very excited about the vaccine for COVID-19. Less excited about the slow roll-out, but still grateful that lives are being saved and hopeful that distribution will improve.

Comments

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of The Universal Machine and featured in a recent Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single Universal Machine that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then, computers were peop...

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...

Search This Blog