Science Writing

A love of math, science and technology has led to many of the magazine, newspaper and online stories that Peter Mucha has written.

Mucha believes he solved the mystery about how Joan Ginther, a Texas woman with a Ph.D. from Stanford, won four multimillion-dollar lottery prizes. ABC’s 20/20 interviewed him about it for a lottery special.

He shot down a theory that a Secret Service agent accidentally fired the shot that killed JFK in Dallas.

He debunked the myth that sports parades, such as the 2008 Phillies World Series parade, draw crowds with a couple of million people.

Nanotechnology, the search for extraterrestrial life, advances in robotics, evolution, dinosaurs, the demotion of Pluto, the world’s leading cell bank, and how to save the world from asteroids are just some of the scientific subjects he tackled while a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

After seeing a total solar eclipse north of Paris in 1999, he found an early Internet cafe and emailed a report back for publication in the Inquirer.

He also answered hundreds of science questions from children while serving as the Inquirer’s Kids’ Talk columnist for five years.

Other Philly.com subjects included dark matter, auroras, UFOs, a Mars hoax, the world’s largest radio-telescope array, a Tesla test-drive, physics prizes, and many, many weather stories, plus galleries about such subjects as historic Philadelphia-area tornados and snowfalls.

Peter Mucha’s websites, ThinkableOrNot.com and StealMyIdeasPlease.com, often dabble with and delve into science and technology.

Early explorations while freelancing after college including writing about solar energy for the New York Times, and genetic engineering and inhalant abuse/huffing for the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J.  The Meaning of Meltdown, a long explanatory piece about the dangers of nuclear power, graced the cover of Delaware Today and won an award while he was editor there back in the early 1980s.