For ten years, I wrote regular columns about science for women's magazines, and to my knowledge I'm the only person in the world who can say that. This has no kudos in either the science-writing world or the academic world, but it's one of the most challenging things I've ever done. It's much harder to write about cosmology for a magazine like Vogue than for the New York Times, which I've also written for, because you have to imagine that on the page opposite there'll be an advertisement for eyeliner, or an article about the latest trends in skirt length.
Margaret WertheimWave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. But what is critical to note here is that, however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalizing wholeness and the thing itself that drives physicists onward like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near. It is always out of reach.
Margaret WertheimFemale physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.
Margaret WertheimI don't know of any science writing going on in women's magazines, unless you count medical stories about things like breast cancer. I still think there's a huge problem about how we can actively engage a wider range of women. I'm not saying women must be a separate audience - I'm just responding to the reality that the majority of people who do read science magazines are male. That's not a value judgment; it's a statistical fact.
Margaret WertheimSimple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.
Margaret Wertheim