367
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #61,220 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★☆
Less depth, but still good
Scientific American was once a great magazine, but now it is just a good magazine. I read Scientific American as a teenager in the 80's, I read it as a student and as an engineer in the 90's and I am still reading Scientific American and subscribing to it. Even today I enjoy reading Scientific American very much, but I am not pleased with the fact that the depth of the articles has decreased.
In the olden days the writers for Scientific American were not afraid of putting mathematical formulas, algorithms, in depth analysis, and statistics as well as references to research articles in their articles. Today's Scientific American is not written by scientists, but by journalists and free lancers.
It used to be that scientists and engineers interested in fields outside their own areas of expertise were the magazine's target audience. Now, however, Scientific American is aimed at general readers who are interested in science. Scientific American is now looking more like Discover magazine. In my opinion Discover magazine and Scientific American should complement each other (in depth reading vs. light reading) and not be so similar. I understand that these changes were made for business reasons.
For a while I also thought that Scientific American had taken on a political slant. However, I’ve come to realize that my misconceptions and biases caused me to jump to conclusions regarding accurately written articles on topics that had become politically controversial. Today I trust Scientific American to be mostly apolitical and to be mostly about the science. However, I still think the attack on Björn Lomborg a few years ago was unbecoming of Scientific American even though I know Björn Lomborg has an agenda.
The illustrations are great, the topics are varied and include, for example, medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology, artificial intelligence, economics, geology, archeology, and social science. I am interested in all of these subjects, but I enjoy reading about physics, cosmology and artificial intelligence the most. I always find something interesting to read in Scientific American. I highly recommend Scientific American even though I would like them to take one step back with regards to the depth of the content.
