Scientists Have No Defense Against Awe

Eileen Pollack, author of The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, hinted at the complexity of the relationship between science and the soul in a recent essay: “We need scientists who recognize the reality of this illusion we still call the soul and artists who know how intimately the reality of that soul will remain connected to the physical world—to science.”

In many ways, her fiction follows this suggestion. It draws on her scientific background—she graduated from Yale University in 1978 with a BS in Physics—and her later pursuits in literature, philosophy, and creative writing as a graduate student.

In her latest novel, , for example, published last month, a woman researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is obsessed with finding theback in the 1990s, still thinking and seeing the world as a person trained in physics would. “It just took me a long time to find an audience. It was very hard to convince publishers that women readers would want to read anything that had science in it.”