"Crash sites keep me up at night"

Interesting profile in the current Bookforum on Thomas McMahon, "a former biophysics professor at Harvard University and the author of four strikingly original novels...in addition to two books of nonfiction and numerous scientific articles and papers". The article discusses the seeming divide between the sciences and the literary world, and the ways author-scientists like McMahon bridged that divide. Spoiler: no, science and literature don't turn out to be the same thing.

A few quotes, first one from McMahon himself:

In McMahon's posthumous novel, Ira Foxglove, which reads as an unassuming, literary-scientific manifesto, a middle-aged inventor says:

As far as I can tell, ideas always show up like that, absolutely free. And very often in a nearly final form. . . . What you do have to do is test them, with your education or with your experience, to see whether they're any good. You can go to school or grow old learning how to test ideas. That takes hard work. But no one can teach you how to get them. They come for nothing.

...which, I mean, yeah. He's talking about science, sure, but that more than applies to writing. Substitute "draft" for "test" and you've got the idea of it. Which pretty much feeds right into the other quote from the article that caught my eye:

McMahon had a particular gift for finding the mathematical kernel of a complex phenomenon. Some of his work was done within traditional laboratory settings, but his most interesting results seem to have emerged from creative, even idiosyncratic, experimentation. While working on the Harvard track project, for instance, he photographed students running on enormous pillows (a model of an exaggeratedly pliant surface). When studying the mechanical properties of trees, he and his wife went out into the woods with a stopwatch, shook tree trunks, and measured the resulting oscillations. As Howe told me recently, McMahon "wasn't afraid to do goofy experiments if they led to good science." In fact, his career serves as a reminder of the sometimes-fine line between brilliance and childlike indulgence.

...which, again, basically: yeah. All told, I'm looking forward to reading some of McMahon's novels; I think I'd like to start with Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry--seems most in line with my long-held and randomly-held fascination with the atom bomb.

Cue the closing personal parenthetical: (See, it's interesting stuff, at least to me. I grew up a math and science nerd who also happened to read a lot of books, rather than a literary dork with a side interest in geek stuff, though I guess it was only barely tipped in the one direction. Up until college I was planning on going into engineering, not writing. But somewhere along the line I flipped out, melted down, cracked, and made the switch; I escaped with naught but a minor in math, downgraded from a planned dual english/math major once I realized the hot girls generally signed up for "Intro to Writing Beret-ridden Poetry 301", not "Pound You in the Face Symbolic Logic 301". Still, I'm plenty interested in the sciences; The Making of the Atomic Bomb has been on the TBR pile for too long, and my long-dusty yet-unpublished first novel features as a main character a scientist who references movies like Heat to demonstrate basic principles of game theory. Yeah, sure, sometimes I look back on the life I could be leading today, but I don't miss it much. Okay, I miss the huge stacks of cash I'd be lining my apartment with, sure. But I wouldn't have written all those crappy poems during college. It balances out. Right?)