Those of us who have written off science as too dull, geeky, or difficult are about to have our minds changed by National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Natalie Angier. A passionate polemic against the scientific illiteracy permeating American society, The Canon offers a refresher course in the fundamentals of five "hard" sciences, presenting them in an exuberant, accessible style that is neither didactic nor dumbed down. Angier wins us over, not with an appeal to our better nature (science, like broccoli, is good for us) but with the promise of a fun-filled excursion -- a promise she fulfills in spades! Enlivened with humor and colorful real-world examples, here -- at last -- is a playful reminder that science is not so much a "bunch of facts" as a way of seeing the world.
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
Narrated by Nike Doukas
Natalie AngierUnabridged — 13 hours, 15 minutes
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
Narrated by Nike Doukas
Natalie AngierUnabridged — 13 hours, 15 minutes
Overview
From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Woman, a playful, passionate guide to the science all around us. The Canon is an ebullient celebration of science that stands to become a classic.
Drawing on conversations with hundreds of the world's top scientists and on her own work as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the New York Times, Natalie Angier creates a thoroughly entertaining guide to scientific literacy.
The Canon is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the great issues of our time-from stem cells and bird flu to evolution and global warming. And it's for every parent who has ever panicked when a child asked how the earth was formed or what electricity is.
Angier's sparkling prose and memorable metaphors bring the science to life, reigniting our own childhood delight in discovering how the world works. The Canon is a joyride through the major scientific disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Along the way, we learn what is actually happening when our ice cream melts or our coffee gets cold, what our liver cells do when we eat a caramel, why the horse is an example of evolution at work, and how we're all really made of stardust. It's Lewis Carroll meets Lewis Thomas-a book that will enrapture, inspire, and enlighten. The Canon is an ebullient celebration of science that stands to become a classic.
Editorial Reviews
The Canon is never dull or obscure, and despite the distracting wordplay, most of Angier’s explanations are anything but superficial. She conveys the real substance of field after field, without distortion or dumbing down, and often her sensual descriptions (of the interior of a cell, a star or the Earth, for instance) leave the reader with images both vivid and useful. The Canon is an excellent introduction (or refresher) to the beautiful basics of science, and I hope it is widely read. It could make the country smarter.
— The New York Times
… the book is worth reading not only as a science lesson, but also as a rhapsodic personal essay from one of the great science writers of our time -- an eminence whose love of snotty cells and crazy creatures may be second only to her love of language.
— The Washington Post
Science is underappreciated and undervalued in a world that thrives on it. Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Angier sets out to bring the basics of hard science (biology, chemistry, physics, etc.) into listeners' everyday lives. Rather than returning to the doldrums of a high school science class, she shows listeners where and how science is happening in everything we do. Through her discussions with scientists and her use of analogies, she makes the complex accessible. Doukas delivers her performance in an energetic, soft and welcoming voice. She emphasizes and paces so as not to overload her listeners as well as to bring home Angier's points. Doukas's tone hints of excitement but also sympathy for those listeners who may appreciate science but who have a bit of angst for learning about it. With over 13 hours of listening, though, this audiobook is best processed in small chunks. Angier covers a lot in each chapter, but trying to grasp it all may take repeated listening. Simultaneous release with the Houghton Mifflin hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 8). (May)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationIn the introductory essay of this exuberant book, Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Angier corrects two common misapprehensions about science. First, forget the "nerdy" image—science is fun, born of a child's innate curiosity. Second, it's not just for the intellectual elite—everybody doesscience, whether solving problems or just making observations. Thus, Angier sets out to depict the joys of science and to present them as something in which we all can participate. Chapters explore essential principles in the fields of statistics and probabilities, measurements and calibration, evolutionary and molecular biology, physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy. She writes with such verve, humor, and warmth that even readers who may have flunked any of those subjects in high school will still be willing to give them a second chance. Also, she quotes frequently from interviews that she conducted with dozens of scientists, humanizing the work that they do. The style is so lively that the more serious goal of fostering public science literacy is easily reached. A similar book is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Both are well worth reading. For all libraries.
—Gregg Sapp Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Decrying smug scientific illiteracy, New York Times science writer Angier (Woman, 1999, etc.) deftly sets forth the universally accepted principles underlying basic science that everyone should understand. This bestselling author's love of words is writ large here. Hardly a page goes by without an internal rhyme ("sirs and madams we're all made of atoms"), or an unexpected adjective (a gecko with a nose of "Necco pink"), or a blunt descriptor (the living cell is squishy like snot) that sets up a what-will-she-say-next? tease. A snappy style is simply her way of making sure we pay attention as Angier presents chapters on thinking scientifically, probability, scales of measurement, physics, chemistry, evolution, molecular biology, geology and astronomy, all of them liberally laced with juicy quotes from the powerhouses she's interviewed. The chapter on evolution alone is worth it, providing ample evidence to confront creationists and their intelligent-design offspring. Against the intelligent-designers' argument of "irreducible complexity"-the idea that, for example, the intricate blood-clotting mechanism found in vertebrates is just too complex to have evolved through "clunky" natural selection-she places biologist Kenneth Miller's analysis of the far cruder and simpler clotting process in invertebrates: "exactly the kind of ‘imperfect and simple' system that Darwin regarded as a starting point for evolution." Dentists will love the chapter on molecular biology, which begins with a description of the scrupulous dental hygiene Angier practices as part of her never-ending battle against the oral bacteria assaulting tooth enamel. Such graphic, homely examples serve as springboards for thedeeper stuff, whether it's the genetic code or the ever-expanding universe. She even makes it clear why it's hard to get your arms around the idea that galaxies are not exploding outward into space, but that space itself is stretched. Not everything is as easy as pie (or pi) to grasp, and therein lies the excitement and challenge of science, masterfully conveyed here.
"Every sentence sparkles with wit and charm. . . it all adds up to an intoxicating cocktail of fine science writing." —Richard Dawkins
"Natalie Angier provides a masterful, authoritative synthesis of the state of knowledge across the entire scientific landscape." —Howard Gardner, Harvard University, author of Five Minds for the Future and Frames of Mind
"An essential experience . . . How dare she write so artfully, explain so brilliantly, rendering us scientists simultaneously proud and inarticulate!" —Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate
"Every single sentence . . . sparkles with enough intelligence and wit to delight science-phobes and science-philes alike. I loved it!" —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bait and Switch and Nickel and Dimed
"Natalie Angier makes planets and particles sexy. . .She turns guys with lab coats and pocket protectors into Daniel Craig." —Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind
"Exuberant . . . She writes with such verve, humor, and warmth." Library Journal Starred
"This bestselling author's love of words is writ large here . . . the excitement and challenge of science [is] masterfully conveyed." Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"Angier is a nimble stylist with a playful sense of alliteration and consonance." —Ben Dickinson Elle
"An excellent introduction (or refresher) to the beautiful basics of science, and I hope it is widely read." —Steven Pinker The New York Times Book Review —
An excellent introduction (or refresher) to the beautiful basics of science, and I hope it is widely read.”
Every sentence sparkles with wit and charm…it all adds up to an intoxicating cocktail of fine science writing.”
The title tells it all. Starting with the basics of scientific thinking, probability, and statistical measurement, Angier sets us up for a wild joyride through the central scientific discoveries of the last two centuries in physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and astronomy. It is a lively, enjoyable tour meant especially for science phobes but is also a useful refresher course. Narrator Nike Doukas dances with obvious delight over some of Angier’s more playful analogies. Her voice sparkles with precision and youthful vitality. She immediately takes charge of the text and seems to understand intuitively the more difficult concepts, as well as the author’s offbeat, anything-but-didactic tone. If you’re struggling with the transition from James Bond to the ionic bond, this is the book for you. P.E.F. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940175876131 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2023 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Sisyphus Sings with a Ying When the second of her two children turned thirteen, my sister decided that it finally was time to let their membership lapse in two familiar family haunts: the science museum and the zoo. These were kiddie places, she told me. Her children now had more mature tastes. They liked refined forms of entertainment — art museums, the theater, ballet. Isn't that something? My sister's children's bodies were lengthening, and so were their attention spans. They could sit for hours at a performance of Macbeth without so much as checking the seat bottom for fossilized wads of gum. No more of this mad pinball pinging from one hands-on science exhibit to the next, pounding on knobs to make artificial earthquakes, or cranking gears to see Newton's laws in motion, or something like that; who bothers to read the explanatory placards anyway? And, oops, hmm, hey, Mom, this thing seems to have stopped working! No more aping the gorillas or arguing over the structural basis of a polar bear's white coat or wondering about the weird goatee of drool gathering on the dromedary's chin. Sigh. How winged are the slippers of time, how immutably forward point their dainty steel-tipped toe boxes. And how common is this middle-class rite of passage into adulthood: from mangabeys to Modigliani, T. rex to Oedipus Rex.
The differential acoustics tell the story. Zoos and museums of science and natural history are loud and bouncy and notably enriched with the upper registers of the audio scale. Theaters and art museums murmur in a courteous baritone, and if your cell phone should bleat out a little Beethovenchime during a performance, and especially should you be so barbaric as to answer it, other members of the audience have been instructed to garrote you with a rolled-up Playbill. Science appreciation is for the young, the restless, the Ritalined. It's the holding-pattern fun you have while your gonads are busy ripening, and the day that an exhibit of Matisse vs. Picasso in Paris exerts greater pull than an Omnimax movie about spiders is the debutante's ball for your brain. Here I am! Come and get me! And don't forget your Proust!
Naturally enough, I used the occasion of my sister's revelation about lapsing memberships to scold her. Whaddya talking about, giving up on science just because your kids have pubesced? Are you saying that's it for learning about nature? They know everything they need to know about the universe, the cell, the atom, electromagnetism, geodes, trilobites, chromosomes, and Foucault pendulums, which even Stephen Jay Gould once told me he had trouble understanding? How about those shrewdly coquettish optical illusions that will let you see either a vase or two faces in profile, but never, ever two faces and a vase, no matter how hard you concentrate or relax or dart your eyes or squint like Humphrey Bogart or command your perceptual field to stop being so archaically serial and instead learn to multitask? Are your kids really ready to leave these great cosmic challenges and mysteries behind? I demanded. Are you?
My voice hit a shrill note, as it does when I'm being self-righteous, and my sister is used to this and replied with her usual shrug of common sense. The membership is expensive, she said, her kids study plenty of science in school, and one of them has talked of becoming a marine biologist. As for her own needs, my sister said, there's always PBS. Why was I taking this so personally?
Because I'm awake, I muttered. Give me a chance, and I'll take the jet stream personally.
My bristletail notwithstanding, I couldn't fault my sister for deciding to sever one of the few connections she had to the domain of human affairs designated Science. Good though the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry may be, it is undeniably geared toward visitors young enough to appreciate such offerings as the wildly popular "Grossology" show, a tour through the wacky world of bodily fluids and functions.
Childhood, then, is the one time of life when all members of an age cohort are expected to appreciate science. Once junior high school begins, so too does the great winnowing, the relentless tweezing away of feather, fur, fun, the hilarity of the digestive tract, until science becomes the forbidding province of a small priesthood — and a poorly dressed one at that. A delight in "Grossology" gives way to a dread of grossness. In this country, adolescent science lovers tend to be fewer in number than they are in tedious nicknames: they are geeks, nerds, eggheads, pointy-heads, brainiacs, lab rats, the recently coined aspies (for Asperger's syndrome); and, hell, why not "peeps" (pocket protectors) or "dogs" (duct tape on glasses) or "losers" (last ones selected for every sport)? Nonscience teenagers, on the other hand, are known as "teenagers," except among themselves, in which case, regardless of gender, they go by an elaboration on "guys" — as in "you guys," "hey, guys" or "hey, you guys." The you-guys generally have no trouble distinguishing themselves from geeks bearing beakers; but should any questions arise, a teenager will hasten to assert his or her unequivocal guyness, as I learned while walking behind two girls recently who looked to be about sixteen years old.
Girl A asked Girl B what her mother did for a living.
"Oh, she works in Bethesda, at the NIH," said Girl B, referring to the National Institutes of Health. "She's a scientist."
"Huh," said Girl A. I waited for her to add something like "Wow, that's awesome!" or "Sweet!" or "Kewl!" or "Schnitzel with noodles!" and maybe ask what sort of science this extraordinary mother studied. Instead, after a moment or two, Girl A said, "I hate science."
"Yeah, well, you can't, like, pick your parents," said Girl B, giving her beige hair a quick, contemptuous flip. "Anyway, what are you guys doing this weekend?"
As youth flowers into maturity, the barrier between nerd and herd grows taller and thicker and begins to sprout thorns. Soon it seems nearly unbreachable. When my hairstylist told me he was planning to visit Puerto Rico, where I'd been the previous summer, and I recommended that he visit the Arecibo radio telescope on the northwestern side of the island, he looked at me as though I'd suggested he stop by a manufacturer of laundry detergent. "Why on earth would I want to do that?" he asked.
"Because it's one of the biggest telescopes in the world, it's open to the public, and it's beautiful and fascinating and looks like a giant mirrored candy dish from the 1960s lodged in the side of a cliff?" I said.
"Huh," he said, taking a rather large snip of hair from my bangs.
"Because it has a great science museum to go with it, and you'll learn a lot about the cosmos?"
"I'm not one of those techie types, you know," he said. Snip snip snip snip snip.
"Because it was featured in the movie Contact, with Jodie Foster?" I groped frantically.
The steel piranhas could not be stilled. "I've never been a big Jodie Foster fan," he said. "But I'll take it under advisement."
"Hi, honey!" my husband said when I got home. "Where did you put your hair?"
In truth, I pull it out myself just fine, all the time. How could it be otherwise? I am a science writer. I've been one for decades, for my entire career, and I admit it: I love science. I started loving it in childhood, during trips to the American Museum of Natural History, and then I temporarily misplaced that love when I went to a tiny high school in New Buffalo, Michigan, where the faculty was so strapped for money that one person was expected to teach biology, chemistry, and history before dashing off for his real job as the football coach. The overstretched fellow never lost his sense of humor, though. One morning, as I approached his desk to present him with my biology project, a collection of some two dozen insects pinned to cardboard, I noticed that the praying mantis, the scarab beetle, and the hawk moth were not quite dead, were in fact wriggling around desperately on their stakes. I screamed a girlish stream of obscenities and dropped the whole thing on the floor. My teacher grinned at me, his eyes merrily bug-eyed, and said he couldn't wait until it was time for me to dissect the baby pig.
In college I rediscovered my old flame, science, and it was still blazing Bunsen burner blue. I took many science courses, even as I continued to think of myself primarily as a writer, and even as my fellow writers wondered why I bothered with all the physics, calculus, computers, astronomy, and paleontology. I wondered myself, for I was hardly a natural in the laboratory. I studied, I hammered, I nattered, I plucked out my hairs, but I kept at it.
"Well, aren't you a little C. P. Snow White and the Two Cultures," said a friend. "What's your point with these intellectual hybridization experiments, anyway?"
"I don't know," I said. "I like science. I trust it. It makes me feel optimistic. It adds rigor to my life."
He asked why I didn't just become a scientist. I told him I didn't want to ruin a beautiful affair by getting married. Besides, I wouldn't be a very good scientist, and I knew it.
So you'll be a professional dilettante, he said.
Close enough. I became a science writer.
So now, at last, I come to the muscle of the matter, or is it the gristle, or the wishbone, the skin and pope's nose? I have been a science writer for a quarter of a century, and I love science, but I have also learned and learned and not forgotten but have nevertheless been forced to relearn just how unintegrated science is into the rest of human affairs, how stubbornly apart from the world it remains, and how persistent is the image of the rare nerd, the idea that an appreciation of science is something to be outgrown by all but those with, oddly enough, overgrown brains. Here is a line I have heard many times through the years, whenever I've mentioned to somebody what I do for a living: "Science writing? I haven't followed science since I flunked high school chemistry." (Or, a close second, ". . . since I flunked high school physics.") Jacqueline Barton, a chemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology, has also heard these lines, and she has expressed her wry amusement at the staggering numbers of people who, by their own account, were not merely mediocre chemistry students, but undiluted failures. Even years of grade inflation cannot dislodge the F as the modal grade in the nation's chemistry consciousness.
Science writing, too, has remained a kind of literary and journalistic ghetto, set apart either physically, as it is in the weekly science section of the New York Times, or situationally, as it is by being ignored in most places, most of the time, no matter how high the brow. Ignored by Harper's, ignored by the Atlantic, ignored by, yes, The New Yorker, ignored by the upscale cyberzines like Salon despite the presumably parageek nature of their audience. I've seen reader surveys showing that, of all the weekly pull-out sections in the New York Times, the most popular is "Science Times, "which runs on Tuesdays. Yet I also know, because I have been told by kindhearted friends and relations, that many people discard the whole section up front and unthumbed. Some of those preemptive ejectors even work for the New York Times. Several years ago, when the woman who was then the science editor of the New York Times asked the man who was then the chief editor of the entire paper to please, please, give the science staff some words of appreciation for all their good work, the chief editor sent a memo assuring the staff how much he looked forward to "Science Times" . . . every Wednesday. When I first started writing for the newspaper, and I introduced myself as a science reporter to the columnist William Safire, he said, "So I would be likely to read you on Thursdays, right? " Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate, told me I should have replied, "Sure, Bill, if you read the paper forty-eight hours late."
Oy, it hurts! How could it not? Nobody wants to feel irrelevant or marginal. Nobody wants to feel that she's failed, unless she's in a high school chemistry class, in which case everybody does. Yet I'll admit it. I feel that I've failed any time I hear somebody say, Who cares, or Who knows, or I just don't get it. When a character on the otherwise richly drawn HBO series Six Feet Under announces that she's planning to take a course in "biogenetics" and her boyfriend replies, Bo-o-ring. Why on earth are you doing that? I take it personally. Wait a minute! Hasn't the guy heard that we're living in the Golden Age of Biology? Would he have found Periclean Athens bo-o-ring too? When my father-in-law finishes reading something I've written about genes and cancer cells and says he found it fascinating but then asks me, "Which is bigger, a gene or a cell?" I think, Uh-oh, I really blew it. If I didn't make clear the basic biofact that while cells are certainly very small, each one is big enough to hold the entire complement of our 25,000 or so genes — as well as abundant bundles of tagalong genetic sequences, the function of which remains unknown — then what good am I? And when a copy editor, in the course of going over a story I've written about whale genetics, asks me to confirm the suggestions in my text that (a) whales are mammals and (b) mammals are animals, I think, Uh-oh, but this time in bold, twenty-six-point, panic-stricken type. Woe, woe, nobody knows anything about science. Woe, woe, nobody cares.
Am I sounding self-pitying, a sour-grapes-turned-defensive whine? Of course: a good offense begins with a nasal defensiveness. If I was going to write a book about the scientific basics, I had to believe that there was a need for such a book, and I do. If I believed there is a need for a primer, a guided whirligig through the scientific canon, then obviously I must believe there to be a large block of unprimed real estate in the world, vast prairies and deep arroyos of scientific ignorance and scientific illiteracy and technophobia and eyes glazing over and whales having their nursing privileges rescinded. In the civic imagination, science is still considered dull, geeky, hard, abstract, and, conveniently, peripheral, now, perhaps, more than ever. In a 2005 survey of 950 British students ages thirteen through sixteen, for example, 51 percent said they thought science classes were "boring," "confusing," or "difficult" — feelings that intensified with each year of high school. Only 7 percent thought that people working in science were "cool," and when asked to pick out the most famous scientist from a list of names that included Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, many respondents instead chose Christopher Columbus.
Scientists are quick to claim mea culpas, to acknowledge that they bear some responsibility for the public allergy toward their profession.
We've failed, they say. We've been terrible at communicating our work to the masses, and we're pathetic when it comes to educating our nation's youth. We've been too busy with our own work. We have to publish papers. We have to write grant proposals. We're punished by "the system," the implacable academic track that rewards scientists for focusing on research to the exclusion of everything else, including teaching or public outreach or writing popular books that get made into Nova specials. Besides, very few of us are as tele-elegant as Brian "String King" Greene, are we? All of which amounts to: guilty as charged. We haven't done our part to enlighten the laity.
A fair question to interject here is: Need we do anything at all? Does it matter if the great majority of people know little or nothing about science or the scientific mindset? If the average Joe or Sophie doesn't know the name of the closest star (the sun), or whether tomatoes have genes (they do), or why your hand can't go through a tabletop (because the electrons in each repel each other), what difference does it make? Let the specialists specialize. A heart surgeon knows how to repair an artery, a biologist knows how to run a gel, a jet pilot knows how to illuminate the fasten seat belt sign at the exact moment you've decided to get up and go to the bathroom. Why can't the rest of us clip our coupons and calories in peace?
The arguments for greater scientific awareness and a more comfortable relationship with scientific reasoning are legion, and many have been flogged so often they're beginning to wheeze. A favorite thesis has it that people should know more about science because many of the vital issues of the day have a scientific component: think global warming, alternative energy, embryonic stem cell research, missile defense, the tragic limitations of the dry cleaning industry. Hence, a more scientifically sophisticated citizenry would be expected to cast comparatively wiser votes for Socratically wise politicians. They would demand that their elected representatives know the differences between a blastocyst, a fetus, and an orthodontist, and that one is a five-day-old, hollow ball of cells from which coveted stem cells can be extracted and theoretically inveigled to grow into the body tissue or organ of choice; the next is a developing prenate that has implanted in the mother's uterus; and the third is never covered by your company's dental plan.
Others propose that a scientifically astute public would be relatively shielded against superstitious, wishful thinking, flimflammery, and fraud. They would realize that the premise behind astrology was ludicrous, and that the doctor or midwife or taxi driver who helped deliver you exerted a greater gravitational pull on you at your moment of birth than did the sun, moon, or any of the planets. They would accept that the fortune in their cookie at the Chinese restaurant was written either by a computer or a new hire at the Wonton Food factory in Queens. They would calculate their odds of winning the lottery, see how ridiculously tiny they were, and decide to stop buying lottery tickets, at which point the education budgets of at least thirty of our fifty states would collapse. This last figure, alas, is not a joke, suggesting that if a pandemic of rational thinking should suddenly grip our nation, politicians might have to resort to dire measures to replace the income from state lotteries and state-owned slot machines, including — bwah-ha-ha! — raising taxes.
Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, knows too well how resistant people can be to reason, and how readily they dive down a rabbit hole in search of axioms, conspiracy theories, the rabbit's fabled foot. A hearty, fiftyish woman with short, peach-colored hair and a rat-a-tat cadence, Jones serves as the United States Geological Survey's "scientist-in-charge" for all of Southern California, in which capacity she promotes the cause of earthquake preparedness. She has also been a designated USGS punching bag, officiating at media squalls and confronting public panic whenever the continental plate on which Southern California is perched gives a nasty shake. Like seismologists everywhere, she is trying to improve geologists' ability to predict major earthquakes, to spot the early warning signs in time to evacuate cities or otherwise take steps to protect people, their domiciles, that treasured set of highball glasses from the 1964 World's Fair. Jones has heard enough earthquake myths to shake a trident at: that fish in China can sense when a temblor is coming, for instance, or that earthquakes strike only early in the morning. "People tend to remember the early morning earthquakes because those are the ones that woke them up and scared them the most," Jones said. "When you show them the data indicating that, in fact, an earthquake is as likely to happen at six p.m. as six a.m., they still insist there must be some truth to the story because their mothers and grandmothers and great-uncle Milton always said it was true. Or they will redefine 'early morning' to mean anything from midnight until lunchtime. And, by gosh, it's true: many earthquakes that occur, occur between twelve a.m. and twelve p.m. Uncle Milton was right!"
The public also believes that seismologists are much better at predicting earthquakes than they claim, but that they perversely keep their prognostications to themselves because they don't want to "stir a panic."
"I got a letter from a woman saying, 'I know you can't tell me when the next earthquake is going to be,'" Jones said, "'but will you tell me when your children go to visit out-of-town relatives?' She assumed I'd quietly use my insider's knowledge on behalf of my own family, while denying it to everybody else. People would rather believe the authorities were lying to them than to accept the uncertainty of the science. "With a minimum of scientific training, Jones said, people would realize that the words "science" and "uncertainty" deserve linkage in a dictionary and that the only reason she would send her children to visit out-of-town relatives would be to visit out-of- town relatives.
Many scientists also argue that members of the laity should have a better understanding of science so they appreciate how important the scientific enterprise is to our nation's economic, cultural, medical, and military future. Our world is fast becoming a technical Amazonia, they say, a pitiless panhemispheric habitat in which being on a first-name basis with scientific and technical principles may soon prove essential to one's socioeconomic survival. "Soon after the Industrial Revolution, we in the West reached a point where reading was a fundamental process of human communication," Lucy Jones said. "If you couldn't read, you couldn't participate in ordinary human discourse, let alone get a decent job.
"We're going through another transformation in expectations right now," she continued, "where reasoning skills and a grasp of the scientific process are becoming things that everybody needs."
Scientists are hardly alone in their conviction that America's scientific eminence is one of our greatest sources of strength. Science and engineering have given us the integrated circuit, the Internet, protease inhibitors, statins, spray-on Pam (it works for squeaky hinges, too!), Velcro, Viagra, glow-in-the-dark slime, a childhood vaccine syllabus that has left slacker students with no better excuse for not coming to class than a "persistent Harry Potter headache," computer devices named after fruits or fruit parts, and advanced weapons systems named after stinging arthropods or Native American tribes.
Yet the future of our scientific eminence depends not so much on any cleverness in applied science as on a willingness to support basic research, the pi-in-the-sky investigations that may take decades to yield publishable results, marketable goodies, employable graduate students. Scientists and their boosters propose that if the public were more versed in the subtleties of science, it would gladly support generous annual increases in the federal science budget; long-term, open-ended research grants; and sufficient investment in infrastructure, especially better laboratory snack machines. They would recognize that the basic researchers of today help generate the prosperity of tomorrow, not to mention elucidating the mysteries of life and the universe, and that you can't put a price tag on genius and serendipity, except to say it's much bigger than Congress's science allotment for the current fiscal year.
Yes, let's cosset the scientists of today and let's home-grow the dreamers of tomorrow, the next generation of scientists. For by fostering a more science-friendly atmosphere, surely we would encourage more young people to pursue science careers, and keep us in fighting trim against the ambitious and far more populous upstarts India and China. We need more scientists! We need more engineers! Yet with each passing year, fewer and fewer American students opt to study science. As a National Science Board advisory panel warned Congress in 2004, "We have observed a troubling decline in the number of U.S. citizens who are training to become scientists and engineers, "while the number of jobs requiring such training has soared. At this point, a third or more of the advanced science and engineering degrees earned each year in the United States are awarded to foreign students, as are more than half of the postdoctoral slots. And while there is nothing wrong with the international complexion that prevails in any scientific institution, foreign students often opt to take their expertise and credentials back to their grateful nation of origin. "These trends," the Science Board said, "threaten the economic welfare and security of our country."
Who can blame Americans for shunning science when, for all the supposed market demand, research jobs remain so poorly paid? After their decade or more of higher education, postdoctoral fellows can expect to earn maybe $40,000; and even later in their careers, scientists often remain stubbornly in the stratum of the five-figure salary. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and the former president of Caltech, who spent much of his early career at MIT, observed that the classic bakery for an upper-crust life, Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, where his daughter was a student, has an excellent science program, one of the best. "But you never see Andover graduates at MIT," he said. "Academy alumni with quantitative skills go on to become stockbrokers. There are damned few patrician scientists."
Beyond better pay, science needs more cachet. Science advocates insist that if science were seen as more glamorous, racier, and more avant-garde than it is today, it might attract more participants, more brilliant young minds and nimble young fingers willing to click pipettes for twenty hours at a stretch. "Things were different while I was growing up," said Andy Feinberg, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University. "It was the time of Sputnik, the race into space, and everybody was caught up in science. They thought it was important. They thought it was exciting. They thought it was cool. Somehow we must reinvigorate that spirit. The culture of discovery drives our country forward, and we can't afford to lose it."
These are all important, exciting, spirited arguments for promoting greater scientific awareness. I'd love to see more young Americans become scientists, especially the girl who serves as the vessel of my DNA and as a deduction on my tax return. I'd also be happy to see voters make smarter and more educated choices in Novembers to come than they have in the past.
And yet. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor of physics at the University of Texas, points out, many issues of a supposedly scientific slant cannot be decided by science at all. "When it comes to something like the debate over an antiballistic missile defense system," he said, "I've been more bothered by the fact that our leaders seem to be the sort of people who don't read history rather than by the fact that they don't understand X-ray lasers." Can science really decide an issue like whether we should extract stem cells from a human blastocyst? All science can tell you about that blastocyst is, yep, it's human. It has human DNA in it. Science cannot tell you how much gravitas that blastocyst should be accorded. Science cannot settle the debate over the relative "right" of a blastocyst to its cellular integrity and uncertain future — deep freeze for possible implantation in a willing womb at some later date? or a swift bon voyage down the fertility clinic drainpipe? — versus the "right" of a patient with a harrowing condition like multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease to know that scientists have unfettered, federally financed access to stem cells and may someday spin that access into new therapies against the disease. This is a matter of conscience, politics, religious conviction, and, when all else fails, name- calling.
In sum, I'm not sure that knowing about science will turn you into a better citizen, or win you a more challenging job, or prevent the occasional loss of mental faculties culminating in the unfortunate purchase of a pair of white leather pants. I'm not a pragmatist, and I can't make practical arguments of the broccoli and flossing kind. If you're an adult nonscientist, even the most profound midlife crisis is unlikely to turn you into a practicing scientist; and unless you're a scientist, you don't need to know about science. You also don't need to go to museums or listen to Bach or read a single slyly honied Shakespeare sonnet. You don't need to visit a foreign country or hike a desert canyon or go out on a cloudless, moonless night and get drunk on star champagne. How many friends do you need?
In place of civic need, why not neural greed? Of course you should know about science, as much as you've got the synaptic space to fit. Science is not just one thing, one line of reasoning or a boxable body of scholarship, like, say, the history of the Ottoman Empire. Science is huge, a great ocean of human experience; it's the product and point of having the most deeply corrugated brain of any species this planet has spawned. If you never learn to swim, you'll surely regret it; and the sea is so big, it won't let you forget it.
Of course you should know about science, for the same reason Dr. Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things are fun, and fun is good.
There's a reason why science museums are fun, and why kids like science. Science is fun. Not just gee-whizbang "watch me dip this rose into liquid nitrogen and then shatter it on the floor" fun, although it's that, too. It's fun the way rich ideas are fun, the way seeing beneath the skin of something is fun. Understanding how things work feels good. Look no further — there's your should.
"I was in college and in a debate with my father," said David Botstein, a geneticist at Princeton University. "He wanted me to be a doctor. I wanted to be a scientist. I had made it pretty clear to him that I wasn't going to medical school, and in fact I was already engaged in some really interesting research on DNA. One evening, a buddy of my father's, a general surgeon, cross-examined me about what it was I planned to do. How could anything be more interesting than human physiology and putting together broken bones? We were both having a little drink, and I explained to him what the structure of DNA meant, and its implications. This was back around 1960, when the field of molecular biology was just getting started. At the end of our conversation, my father's friend looks up, and says, 'You are the luckiest guy in the world. You are going to get paid to have fun.'"
Peter Galison, a professor of the history of physics at Harvard University, marvels cheekily at the thoroughness with which the public image of science has been drained of all joy. "We had to work really hard to accomplish this spectacular feat, because I've never met a little kid who didn't think science was really fun and really interesting," he said. "But after years of writing tedious textbooks with terrible graphics, and of presenting science as a code you can't crack, of divorcing science from ordinary human processes that use it daily, guess what: We did it. We persuaded a large number of people that what they once thought was fascinating, fun, the most natural thing in the world, is alien to their existence."
Granted, all the scientists I interviewed who attested to the fun of science are safely and amply granted, are flourishing in their fields and have personal cause to think the universe is a magical place. Yet I know plenty of very successful writers who think of themselves, not as the luckiest hey-you- guys in the world, but as cursed, as miserable, as being in their trade because they have no choice, no other marketable skills. "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," the novelist and essayist Thomas Mann complained. "When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral," said Carl Hiaasen — and he writes comic novels. David Salle, the artist, moaned to Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker about the miseries of painting. "I find it extremely difficult. I feel like I'm beating my head against a brick wall," he said. "I feel that everyone else has figured out a way to do it that allows him an effortless, charmed ride through life, while I have to stay in this horrible pit of a room, suffering." For their part, scientists are extremely bright and driven and — don't let their shorts and T-shirts fool you — carnivorously competitive; yet through it all they gush about the good fortune and great fun of being scientists, and they're not selfish and they're willing to share their glee.
"So, yes, we did it, we pushed the boulder to the top of the hill, and we made people think science is boring," Galison continued. But there's something to be said for a boulder in that position: it holds a lot of potential energy, and it's practically begging to be dislodged. A few well-placed shoves, a joining of shoulders for a hearty oomph, and the boulder may well be released from its unnatural bondage, to tumble earthward with a Newtonian roar.
This book is my small attempt to lend a deltoid to the cause, of nudging the boulder and unleashing the kinetic beauty of science to wow as it will.
Maybe you're one of those people who hasn't clicked with science since that dreadful year of high school when you flunked physics because you showed up for the final exam an hour late, in your pajamas, and carrying an insect collection. Or maybe you fulfilled your college science requirements by taking courses like the Evolutionary Psychology of Internet Dating, and you regret that you still can't tell the difference between a proton, a photon, and a moron. Or maybe you're just curiouser and curiouser and you don't know where to start. You think that the beginning might be a reasonable place, but whose beginning? Not the kiddie beginning, not the contemptuous or embarrassing or didactic digit-wagging beginning, but the beginning as an adult. The beginning as a relationship between equals, you and science. And before you raise your hands defensively, and cry, Whoa, that's not a fair competition, me versus science, let me say, It's not you against science, but you with science, you the taxpayer who supports science whether you realize it or not, you the person who does science more often than you'd suspect. Every time you try to isolate a problem with the vacuum cleaner, for example — machine heats up; machine stops running; holy hairball, when was the last time you changed the bag in this thing, anyway? Or when you know that if you don't stir the hollandaise sauce constantly at a hot but not boiling temperature you'll end up with a mass too lumpy to pour over your asparagus. You do science, you support science, you're baking the cake, you may as well lick the spoon.
This beginning is the beginning as scientists see it, or at least as they've agreed to see it because some reporter has shown up at their office door, plunked herself down in a chair, and asked them to consider a few very basic questions. Scientists have long whinnied about rampant scientific illiteracy and the rareness of critical thinking and the need for a more scientifically sophisticated citizenry. Fair enough. But what would it take to rid people of this dread condition, this pox populi ignoramus, and replace it with the healthy glow of erudition? What would a nonscientist need to know about science to qualify as scientifically seasoned? If you, Dr. Know, had to name a half-dozen things that you wish everybody understood about your field, the six big, bold, canonical concepts that even today still bowl you over with their beauty, what would they be? Or if you're the type of professor who still on occasion teaches undergraduate courses for those soft-shelled specimens known as "nonmajors," what are the essential ideas that you hope your students distill from the introductory class, and even retain for more than a few femtoseconds after finals? What does it mean to think scientifically? What would it take for a nonscientist to impress you at a cocktail party, to awaken in you the sensation that hmm, this person is not a buffoon?
When confronted with the query "What do you wish people knew about science?" many scientists felt compelled to talk about the urgent need to improve science education in primary and secondary school, which is a noble and necessary goal and worth urging at all relevant opportunities, but few adults have the luxury of a K-through-12 encore. To the well-intentioned curriculum revisionists, I gave my emphatic agreement, then pleaded that they take pity on the post-pedagogued. Surely not even the most feebly educated adult is beyond hope? Let's focus on them: What should nonspecialist nonchildren know about science, and how should they know it, and what is this thing called fun?
Realizing that the term "science" is a bit of a bounder, which can be induced via modifiers like "social" or "soft" to embrace anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, politics, geography, or feng shui, I decided to focus on those sciences generally awarded the preamble "hard." These are the physical and life sciences, which in their broadest categories include physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. These are the subjects that people tend to find the most daunting and abstruse, and that have the worst customer service desks. At the same time, they are the fields in which the greatest progress has been made, where the discoveries of the last century have been the grandest and most buoyant, and where a shopworn term like "revolutionary" still rightly applies. Scientists have probed the Joycean chambers of the atom, read the memoirs of the cosmos virtually back to the moment of crowning, detangled the snarls of our DNA, and mapped the twitchy globe of Silly Putty we call our castle and our home. These are the fairy tales of science, tales, as one scientist put it, "that happen to be true." They are hard the way diamonds and rubies are hard: they're built to last, and they sure look swell in the light.
In the course of my research, I interviewed and gathered insights from hundreds of scientists, often in person, sometimes by phone and email, at many of the nation's premier universities and institutions. I spoke with Nobel laureates, members of the National Academy of Sciences, university presidents, institute directors, MacArthur geniuses. I also sought out researchers who were known as brilliant teachers, who had won their university's version of the "most adored professor of the year" award, or who were cited on student Web sites for being exceptionally clear, inspirational, entertaining, or, that old reliable, "awesome." Even the most difficult, desultory conversations, the ones that had me feeling like a Victorian dentist — all pliers and no nitrous — almost invariably yielded a gem or two. Scientists talked about the need to embrace the world as you find it, not as you wish it to be. They described their favorite molecules. They told jokes, like the one about physicist Werner Heisenberg, whose famed uncertainty principle says that you can know the position of an electron as it orbits the nuclear heart of an atom, or you can know its velocity, but that you can't know both at once. To wit: Heisenberg is scheduled to give a lecture at MIT, but he's running late and speeding through Cambridge in his rental car. A cop pulls him over, and says, "Do you have any idea how fast you were going?"
"No,"Heisenberg replies brightly, "but I know where I am!"
"Now, you tell that at a cocktail party, and people will walk away from you," said Michael Rubner, a materials scientist at MIT. "Tell it in front of five hundred eighteen-year-olds at MIT, and they just roar."
I also pushed scientists to get beyond the knee-jerk tutorials, to explain, as much as was possible, what exactly they mean by some of the terms so often used as introductory definitions. You've likely heard, for example, the purportedly kindergarten description of the atom, that it is composed of three different classes of particles: protons and neutrons sitting sunlike at the center, electrons whizzing in orbits around them. You might also have heard that protons have a "positive charge," electrons a "negative charge," and neutrons "no charge. "Well, that sounds breezy enough: a plus sign, a minus sign, and free with purchase. But what in the name of Mr. Rogers's last cardigan are we really talking about? What does it mean to say that a particle has "charge," and how does this subatomic "charge" of the light brigade relate to more familiar, real-world displays of electric "charge"? When your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, for example, and you realize, on taking out your cell phone to call for help, that you forgot to re- "charge" the battery, and suddenly it's not a beautiful day in the neighborhood after all?
I also sought, as much as possible, to make the invisible visible, the distant neighborly, the ineffable affable. If a human cell were blown up to the size of something you could display on your coffee table, would you want to? What would it look like? You say that the average cell is a very busy place. Is that busy like Manhattan, or busy like Toronto?
It's not that I wanted to take dumbing-down to new heights. In peppering sources with the most pre-basic of questions and tapping away at the Plexiglas shield of "everybody knows" until I was about as welcome as a yellow jacket at a nudist colony, I had several truly honorable aims. For one thing, I wanted to understand the material myself, in the sort of visceral way that allows one to feel comfortable explaining it to somebody else. For another, I believe that first-pass presumptions and nonexplanatory explanations are a big reason why people shy away from science. If even the Shlemiel's Guide to the atom begins with a boilerplate trot through concepts that are pitched as elementary and self-evident but that don't, when you think about them, really mean anything, what hope is there for mastering the text in cartoon balloon number two?
Moreover, in choosing to ask many little questions about a few big items, I was adopting a philosophy that lately has won fans among science educators — that the best way to teach science to nonscientists is to go for depth over breadth.
After countless interviews and many months of labor, I began to experience the wonderful, terrible sensation of "déjà-knew": scientists were telling me the same things I'd heard before. Wonderful, because it meant I could be fairly confident I had a defensible corpus of scientific fundamentals that weren't entirely arbitrary or idiosyncratic. Terrible, because it meant the time for reporting was over, and the time had arrived for writing, the painful process, as the neuroscientist Susan Hockfield so pointedly put it, of transforming three-dimensional, parallel- processed experience into two- dimensional, linear narrative. "It's worse than squaring a circle," she said. "It's squaring a sphere." And to think I was brought to tears in an art class because I couldn't draw a straight line.
Copyright © 2007 by Natalie Angier. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.
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