Improv

Some science writers have a historical sensibility that focuses on earlier writers, usually 19C writers but sometimes 18C Enlightenment-era people, and connects those writers’ thoughts with contemporary science. I’m thinking of the way Philip Ball uses Walter Bagehot in Critical Mass or of how Ian Hacking’s statistics books use Leibniz and Peirce.

I’m also thinking of Warren Ellis’s “secret history” in the Planetary comics but that’s a different thing. I really gotta get a handle on things, huh?