Skip to content

Margaret Wertheim

Author, Physics on the Fringe

Margaret Wertheim is a science writer with degrees in physics and mathematics. She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian, and is the author of Pythagoras' Trousers, a history of physics and religion, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, and most recently, Physics on the Fringe. In her pioneering work in new methods of science communication, she founded the nonprofit Institute For Figuring, through which she organized the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, a touring exhibition at the intersection of science and art. The IFF's Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef project is perhaps the biggest art/science community project in the world. More than 5000 people from New York and London, to Riga and Cape Town, have actively contributed pieces to Crochet Reef exhibitions. As of mid-2011, more than 3 million people had seen these shows.

 
A Brief History of Outsider Science
Some of his biographers have claimed that Michael Faraday died of a broken heart because his idea of an invisible field of influence was rejected as idiocy by his scientific peers. 
We Are Overworked and Going Mad
The most important task we have as any generation does is to raise the next generation, and to pass on the tools for living as sane people to the next generation. 
Outsider Science is a New Kind of Folk Art
The purpose of physics is to tell us the story about our world and where we as human beings fit in a wider cosmological scheme. That is why outsider physics, like folk art, works as good imaginative brain teasing.