Originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines
By Richard A. Muller
W.W. Norton; 380 pages; $26.95
The late William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. No one, to my knowledge, ever asked him to choose between the Berkeley phone book and the UC Berkeley faculty. I suspect the conservative Buckley would have held his nose and opted for the faculty – if only in hopes that a few right-wing economists might compensate for the liberal yahoos that he imagined made up the rest of the professoriat, to say nothing of the population at large.
Graeme Wood 