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Malcolm Gladwell and Wendy Kaminer

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The New New York Times

By Malcolm Gladwell
Posted Tuesday, June 9, 1998, at 2:36 PM ET

Yes, that is the striking thing about physics. Sometimes it seems like physicists and mathematicians are really the last intellectuals who get to use beauty as a criteria for assessing the value of knowledge. (I once wrote a story about the discovery of the largest known prime--or some such breakthrough--and I phoned a prominent mathematician and told him the number and he paused--the way you would pause before a really beautiful painting--and said "yes, that IS a large number!") By contrast, a lot of other scientific knowledge is awfully messy. I've always found one of the great frustrating things about writing about medicine is that the net effect of breakthroughs is always to complicate. Why can't there only be one kind of cholesterol, for example? Why are there are seven (or is it eight now?) different kinds of herpes viruses? Every now and again, when I was growing up, I would listen to my father, who is a mathematician, talk to someone in a different profession and he would ask question after question after question, fruitlessly trying to boil it all down to something elegant. The point, I suppose, is that elegant science and messy science don't really have a lot in common, which is why it's a bit strange sometimes that both of them get lumped together in places like "Science Times". I'm waiting for the Times to completely reorganize itself along more logical lines, and put politics and Hollywood stuff together, music and math together, sports and foreign news together, and put Frank Rich in one of those little agate type advertisements on the bottom of the front page.

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