A Page of Science

In late 2016 I started what I called an “audio art project” titled A Page of Science. As part of my job I’d been reading a lot of textbooks and began to appreciate how a good textbook could convey a large amount of important information in a very limited amount of words. One of the things a scientist has to learn is how to interpret the dense writing style of textbooks, and it occurred to me that it might be informative to read a single page of a textbook aloud and then interpret in laymen’s terms what one implication of that knowledge is.

I don’t know if this project was a success or not, but if I’m calling it art then maybe there isn’t even a success metric. Collected below are the three episodes (plus the introductory episode) of the series, comprising about 25 minutes all together. Perhaps one day I’ll revisit it, but for now it stands on its own.

Full Episode List at SoundCloud

Episode 0 – Introduction

Episode 1 – Ashcroft and Mermin

Episode 2 – Griffith’s Quantum Mechanics

Episode 3 – An Introduction to Combustion