{"id":1107,"date":"2018-02-02T09:07:58","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T17:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thezachproject.us\/?p=1107"},"modified":"2020-04-24T10:01:41","modified_gmt":"2020-04-24T17:01:41","slug":"writing-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/2018\/02\/02\/writing-2\/","title":{"rendered":"writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing is mysterious and beautiful. Good writing is hard. From somewhere I remember a quote from a 18th Century writer of a letter. At the end of a 20+ page letter to a friend he apologized for going on so long. He said he didn’t have time to write a brief letter.<\/p>\n

Or something like that. The point is that it takes a lot of time to arrange the chaotic ideas running through one’s head into organized sentences that someone else has a chance of understanding. In this blog, I try to think before writing, thus most of my entries are relatively brief. 20 page letters will not be read by 21st Century readers. Now in the forums sometimes I see ‘tl;dr’. Too long, didn’t read.<\/p>\n

I found one previous reference<\/a> in this blog to the American writer James Gleick. His book Chaos<\/em> has been a long time favorite of mine. At Mom and Dad’s the other day, I spotted another Gleick book: Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman<\/em>, and filched it. I had read it before, some years ago, but I thought it was worth another reading.<\/p>\n

This morning I opened it and almost immediately I was struck by the quality of the writing. In the Prologue, Gleick tells of a meeting in 1948 of the world’s best physicists:<\/p>\n

\n

In the annals of science it was the last time but one that these men would meet in such circumstances, without ceremony or publicity. They were indulging a fantasy, that their work could remain a small, personal, academic exercise, invisible to most of the public, as it had been a decade before, when a modest building in Copenhagen served as the hub of their science. They were not yet conscious of how effectively they had persuaded the public and the military to make physics a mission of high technology and expense.\u00a0 . . . Next year most of these men would meet once more . . . but by then the modern era of physics had begun in earnest, science conducted on a scale the world had not seen, and never again would its chiefs come together privately, just to work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing is mysterious and beautiful. Good writing is hard. From somewhere I remember a quote from a 18th Century writer of a letter. At the end of a 20+ page […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[612,2],"tags":[387,506,388,18,507,77],"class_list":["post-1107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-nuts-and-bolts","tag-chaos","tag-genius","tag-gleick","tag-mom-and-dad","tag-richard-feynman","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1109,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions\/1109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}