Physics is fun!
http://tinyurl.com/69mh4w
A whirligig tour of scientific fundamentals makes an appeal to intellectual
enjoyment
The genre of popular-science writing has something of the paradoxical about
it, owing its very existence to science’s lack of popularity at school and
its peripheral role in our cultural life. In a world where an American
President can claim that the “verdict is still out” on evolution, where
half of the population of the European Union has no idea that an electron is
smaller than an atom, and where only 7 per cent of English teenagers between
the ages of thirteen and seventeen think science is “cool”, science’s
unpopularity is matched only by its importance in shaping our lives.
It is a situation of which Natalie Angier, the author of this popular-science
primer, The Canon, is keenly aware. After a quarter of a century working as a
science writer, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for a series of features
in the New York Times, when people call science “bo-o-oring” she takes it
personally. But how to interest a society as indifferent to scientific ideas
as it is hungry for their technological results? Dispensing rapidly with the
usual arguments for greater public understanding of science, Angier makes a
direct appeal to intellectual enjoyment, which sets the tone for the whole of
her whirligig tour.
“Of course you should know about science, for the same reason that Dr Seuss
counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things
are fun, and fun is good.” With fun as her watchword, armed with interviews
of “hundreds” of scientists, Angier sets off in pursuit of everything “
nonspecialist nonchildren” should know about science, what she calls the “
beautiful basics”. Very basic they are too, with no time in 264 pages for
anything much on fundamentals such as quantum mechanics, general relativity,
Avogadro’s number, or kin selection.
She begins with a straightforward account of “scientific thinking” which
describes science as “a way of viewing the world” and warns of the dangers
of presenting science as “a body of facts” – an admonition largely ignored
for the rest of The Canon, which chooses to follow a sightseeing trip round
current scientific knowledge rather than trace the historical development of
scientific theories. Science is a “dynamic process of discovery”, which
studies “objective reality” by breaking problems up into “tractable pieces
”. Scientists “thrive” on uncertainty and “demand evidence” to “rule
out competing hypotheses” as a way of “approximating the truth”, an
account which offers little to explain either science’s striking
effectiveness, or its bewildering alternation between sweeping consensus and
all-out dispute.
Angier pushes aside the notion that mathematical ability is required for
scientific sophistication, quoting Brian Greene’s assertion that “In
principle, every equation can be expressed in English as a sentence”, but
admits the need for what she calls “quantitative thinking”, devoting the
next two chapters first to probability and then to an exploration of the
proportions of the universe from the nano-tiny to the giga-large.
The stage is now set for the compendium of basic facts Angier was keen to
avoid, with chapters giving the bare bones of physics, chemistry,
evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology and astronomy. Apart from a
chapter-long defence of evolution, the politics of science is left mostly to
one side, with only a glancing treatment of debates about GM food, global
warming and stem cells, making plenty of room for exploring the scientific
consensus on everything from atoms to dark energy. Here there are arresting
nuggets and breathtaking concepts galore – the fact that a cell cut from
your kidney will start crawling around independently if given the chance, the
insight that geological change is driven by the transfer of heat from the
Earth to space – but they are presented in an excitable prose style which is
often too showy to be straightforwardly comprehensible, and once or twice
even veers off towards nonsense. Angier seems to have decided that the way to
have “fun” with science is to spice up her prose style, offering generous
helpings of slang, bombast and anecdote, seasoned with puns, rhymes and a big
dollop of alliteration.
Open the book at random and we find chlorine’s “outer shell” of electrons
“shy of satiety . . . so chlorine leans towards mean, toward stealing
electrons when it can”, or a “cadence of swishing . . . [which] can
instigate a smooth, sinuous, motivated wave, which would surely buoy a rubber
duckie outward through all of space, time, and divinity if not for the walls
of the tub”. When the “slowing down” of “Earth’s dervish dancing” is
attributed largely to the “tidal tugging of our tagalong moon”, or when
atoms are described as cohering “covalently as molecules, ionically as salts
or ironically as metals”, the writing has begun to get in the way. Angier’s
enthusiasm is at such a pitch that it can sometimes seem that she is turning
stylistic cartwheels out of an underlying lack of confidence in the material,
but eventually she wearies even herself:
"Life is the anti-accident, the most thermodynamically profligate heave-ho
ever instigated and subsequently amplified, annotated, explicated,
expurgated, renovated . . . well, you get the idea."
One of the reasons Angier’s prose has to do so much of the heavy lifting is
that this is a book free not only from mathematics, but also from
illustrations. The orthogonal relationship between the electric and magnetic
fields that make up a beam of light is only as “hard to envision”, as she
declares, for readers deprived of a simple line-drawing. This is a
general-science primer with no picture of the phylogenetic tree of life, the
covalent bond, the DNA molecule, the convection currents in the Earth’s
mantle, or the Gaussian distribution of probability, to name but a few. The
invitation to “compare the following foursome of forelimbs” would be a much
more convincing plank in building a case for evolution next to a diagram of a
bat wing, a penguin flipper, a lizard leg and a human arm.
Angier’s aversion to images shows more than a predilection for making things
harder than they need to be, it also reveals something of her attitude to
scientific models, arguably the missing piece in her account of the
scientific method. It is the repeated abstraction of complicated reality into
simple models which gives science its power. Electrons don’t really orbit
atomic nuclei at all, but if you think of them as being a bit like planets
you can apply similar mathematics to make useful predictions, explain what is
going on in the street lamp outside your door, or build a laser. Science is
successful and unified because scientists’ simple pictures have captured
something of how the world we live in actually works. At the same time it is
uncertain and riven with dispute because complex problems can be modelled in
many different ways, and the simplifications which are appropriate in some
circumstances may not hold in others. For all Natalie Angier’s thorough
research and prodigious effort, The Canon is not a book that will make
science truly popular.
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