I've been reading Scientific American articles for years -- Savannah can tell you if you don't believe me. I carried them (rather pretentiously, yes, I know) around in my backpack in middle and high school, and I really was reading the articles... but yeah, of course, it was also kind of my thing, the nerd thing that I got a rep for, and I liked that. I talked about being a quantum physicist when I was eleven. I was that kid. (Though I think I did understand to a degree what I was talking about.) (More or less.) (More than the kids who picked on me for it, anyway. Hah.)
In college I dropped it for a while but picked up the habit again after my parents purchased me a subscription (all my own!) for Christmas one year. I try to read them cover to cover, and in my pagecounting book list I estimate I read about 70 or so pages per issue. I highly recommend them for light reading -- seriously! Because they're not issues of Science or Nature, or any other genuine peer-reviewed journals. They're science for laypeople.
The information is mostly accurate but should be taken with a grain of salt. SciAm's popularity resides in its ability to stimulate creativity. It's daydream fodder. It's sci-fi, with just enough of reality to be worth talking about at the water cooler of an office building. It's meant to educate the American people! Lift our standards of general knowledge! It's supposed to change our culture and make us all more critical and analytical about everything in our lives, and also allow us to live a little, vicariously through the scientists who are doing these neat experiments.
But it's not entirely factual, as I mentioned. If you read it, don't tell your friends about what you read as though it's all true. This magazine doesn't give you the numbers, or the statistical analyses, or accurate predictions about how and when the results of these experiments are going to change our lives. It's just fun.
And everyone should read at least one article a year.
*two pennies clinking*
I used to love Scientific American! You should check out the editions from the turn of the last century; they predict flying cars by 1975, complete with diagrams. Much like the current editions predict....flying cars by 2075.
ReplyDeletePopular Mechanics is another great magazine with similarly interesting sciencey stuff that's pretty easy to understand.