Joy Hakim: Page Turner

Credit: Brian Cairns

Journalist and textbook author Joy Hakim is still writing, adding to her textbook catalog with continued brilliance. Her latest opus is a contemporary science book for secondary school students called Einstein Adds a New Dimension, due in print this September. It's the third in a series she has written that approaches science through its history and stories, rather than focusing exclusively on its theorems and formulas.

"This is the greatest scientific era ever," she says, "and yet we don't teach kids much about it. No wonder school science often seems irrelevant." Though Hakim admits this is the toughest book she has ever written, it's also the most exciting. Thanks to help from Edwin F. Taylor, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she's keeping things on target when it comes to quantum theory, relativity, cosmology, and many other realms of cutting-edge science. Most of all, though, she's achieving her real purpose: "To get readers to grapple with ideas, do critical thinking, and get an intellectual life."

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