I've always been fascinated by science, but it still scares me a bit. My lack of knowledge on the subject - chemistry & physics in particular - makes me feel woefully inept. I don't read science books on a regular basis, I don't subscribe to any science-y periodicals. I don't even read science blogs (although I suspect there are some excellent ones out there.) Yet, when I hear a certain segment on NPR, somehow manage to latch on to an interesting fact about bees, or ice, or how molecules move as we move - I am fascinated by how fascinating science is and doubly fascinated by how much of it I don't know. I also scribble down all interesting science bits to use in a story, a novel. To attribute to a character's thoughts, musings. Yet, I never feel comfortable using these science-y bits in my writing, so afraid I am of getting it embarrassingly wrong. So it was with double, possibly triple, pleasure that I happened upon Natalie Angier's new book The Canon: A Whirlgig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Her goal with this canon, a canon so unlike the one I spent my college years attempting to master, is to make science accessible for those that are, like me, intimidated by the prospect but fascinated with what I'm quite sure I'll find. Here's an excerpt in which she suspects the other canon might be to blame for this lack of interest in science:
"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!"
More goodness (which reminds me, specifically, of the reluctance to study poetry I've seen):
"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 myth 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."
Ah, yes, the F in Chemistry. In college no less. It's lovely to know I'm not the only one. (What? I studied literature! French literature! Molecules were not my bag, baby!) Angier's prose seems as accessible and interesting as any science book I'm ever likely to read and I love that she has setup her own struggle with why science - and her profession - has become "a public allergy." Her book aims to cover all things science in an engaging way that helps us to finally, finally understand the world we live in down to the molecule. Or is it cell? Or atom? Is there something smaller?
It's also nice to see that writers aren't the only ones who get nervous when the research is over and the writing must begin:
"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."
A long excerpt from the book can be found at NPR. Since I've had an unusual hankering for all things science lately (control issues?), I'm eager to settle down with it and get my science on.
