science books blog

attention elsewhere

2007-12-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

As anyone who has stopped by here recently (has anyone? no idea...) knows, this blog is in suspended animation. I'd love to keep it up - the books still engage me. But for me a blog has to relate to a current project to get a piece of my time. And until I get that commission for the complete treatment of popular science,
and the research chair to go with it, my attention is elsewhere. For now,
I recommend Elizabeth Leane's Reading Popular Physics,
which I just reviewed for THES but can't link because they aren't geared up for that.

So I hope you might visit a new blog, for a new project - the Rough Guide to the Future. On advice from the net savvy folk on the UK science writers' e-list, it is on a platform I probably shouldn't name here - don't really know if it's better but it's certainly easy. Find it at unreliable futures

All comments welcome - this project, even more than most, needs distributed intelligence to overcome the limits of the author's education and imagination - which I guess is one thing which will feature in all our futures if they are going to be viable at all...

Rough Guide to Genes and Cloning

2007-05-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

2 posts in a day? Well, while I'm at it let me advertise publication of The Rough Guide to Genes and Cloning, out a couple of weeks ago - because if I don't, who else will?

The co-author of this fine work is Dr Jess Buxton, who actually knows all about contemporary genetics so it is up to date and (we think) reasonably accurate. And there are some cultural and historical bits which suit the Rough Guides format.

And all for only £9.99, or even less on Amazon of course.

do you remember your first time?

2007-05-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

In mid email interview for an Italian paper, prior to a visit to the science fair in Trieste next week, they asked "what was the first science book you read?". My first thought was, damned if I remember. There was a thing called the "Pye Book of Science" my dad procured, full of Tomorrow's World stuff (they were a modern electronics company at the time). Very futuristic.

But then it came back to me. I remember being given a copy of an old book called, I thought, Rockets and Space Travel by the astronomer Willy Ley, though searching now makes it seem more likely it was The Conquest of Space, first published in 1949. I do know it was adorned with full page colour plates of Chesley Bonestell's wonderful paintings of what he thought the moon and planets would look like – this would be around 1960, or a little later, when every kid wanted to be an astronaut. I know I did. The text was a bit old for me, but I was captivated by the pictures. I no longer have the book, but I have found others with some of Bonestell's images in, and they are still very striking. Nowadays, of course, you can find them on the web.
try here.

I'm especially fond of this one - the outer reaches of the Solar System as a sublime landscape. Aren't those tiny figures intrepid?

It all goes against my adult prejudice that words matter more than images, which I admit is based largely on the fact that I figured out how to get paid for producing them, at least some of the time. But Bonestell's pictures certainly feel like the future I grew up with.

Any other books make an impression as strong as this? (hint, it helps if you were eight or so at the time).

Would you take Michael Crichton's word for anything?

2007-04-14T02:36:00.000-07:00

Got involved in an extended discussion of Michael Crichton this week, courtesy of Jon Adams of the “How do facts travel?” project at LSE.

Not a popular science author (though I dare say he could have been) but lots of people uneasy about his use of fiction to support arguments about science issues. The most troubling example seems to be State of Fear, which I don’t know. But his latest, Next, comes across as less objectionable in some ways. I think it feels that way to me because it just seems part of a tradition of mixing fact and fiction in discussing biotech. OK, it is an uncomfortable genre violation to have a novel which has an addendum in which the author suddenly appears to tell you his “conclusions” from his “research”. But one’s unease is somehow quieted by the fact that it is a hilariously bad novel – clunky, unoriginal, badly written: an unthrilling techno-thriller. F. Paul Wilson’s Sims, from 2003, has many of the same ingredients and does a far better job with them. Also, Crichton’s “conclusions” this time are commonplace. Lets not patent DNA. You can’t stop biotechnology but we really ought to think about it.

Crichton’s procedure isn’t new, either, of course. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake makes much of contemporary biotech news, and you can still look up the headlines which she wove into her story on the book’s website – though there wasn’t actually one about a scientist who decides to destroy humanity using a genetically engineered virus because, well, he can, as featured in the book. Further back, the great British SF writer John Brunner showed Atwood how it could be done more than 30 years earlier in Stand on Zanzibar. His arresting picture of a possible future, inspired in part by the John Dos Passos’ 1930s vision of the USA, mixes real and made-up news reports, letters, diaries, and conventional narrative.

On the other (that is, "non-fiction"!)side, there was David Rorvik’s largely forgotten book In His Image, a novel presented and published as non-fiction in the late ‘70s, in which science reporter Rorvik portrayed the first human clone. And Lee Silver used fictional vignettes of people grappling with future genetic technologies all through Remaking Eden in 1998. Like Rorvik, Silver is a poor fiction writer (though an interesting writer), so his little fictions, though clearly framed as stories to think with, fell a bit flat.

Conclusion? Mixed. You need to be a really good novelist to bring off this kind of thing. Atwood is one, but Oryx and Crake isn’t her best work, as seems to happen when literary novelists wander into SF territory. (Everyone seems to think more highly of The Handmaid's Tale than I do, too.) Crichton’s current fiction is hobbled, even by his techno-thriller standards, by his new-found addiction to preaching. Biotech is everywhere – and tends to be more interesting when it is just, as is increasingly often the case, a taken for granted feature of the landscape (White Teeth, Cloud Atlas) rather than the main thing driving the narrative.

And mixing up fact and fiction, without making it clear which is which? I’m not in favour. But it is, at least, a reminder that when it comes to writing about the future everyone, scientists included, is making up stories.

prize books?

2007-04-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

The Royal Society's judges (no longer Aventis sponsored) are casting their net pretty wide for the adult prize this year. The longlist of 12 ranges from old hands like Paul Davies and the thrice shortlisted Matt Ridley to first-time author Henry Nicholls - whose Lonesome George has been talked about here already. There's a Rough Guide in there too, which I like as I'm about to publish one myself. And, ahem, The Science of Doctor Who. How do they compare them, I wonder?

Full list here.

There's also a link there to various science and literary celebs' nominations for favourite reading, which throw up some good old titles - Hardy's Mathematician's Apology, Freeman Dyson, Sagan, Bronowski and J. B. S Haldane, as well as a few contemporaries. OUP are getting ready to publish a new (i.e. old!) collection of Haldane's classic essays, incidentally.

Off to a workshop at LSE on "how facts travel" next week, so may actually have some new things to say then

Appleyard on science and certainty

2007-02-06T09:01:00.000-08:00

was going to put together a post about writing about scientific process, but not got round to it...

meanwhile, as we like to be up to date round here, just caught up with Brian Appleyard's commentary on the meaning of popular science books in November - but still readable here.

It's an entertainingly argumentative piece, which is what they pay him for, though full of fairly gaping holes (as Appleyard's essays tend to be). f'rinstance, as the man fancies himself as not without philosophical acumen - he tells us how he chided Stephen Hawking for oversimplifying Witttgenstein, as you do - it is pretty daft to build his case by assuming there is some abstraction "science", which he identifies with popular science books by just three authors. He concludes on the basis of their books that science was "certain". Just because the Reverend Dawkins is sure of himself does not mean that "science" is, or was, I reckon. But then spotting spurious trends by being ridiculously selective from a complex universe of cases is what cultural commentary in what passes for the quality press is all about these days, I fear. The upside is that means it's a game everyone can play.

icons of conservation

2007-01-24T08:53:00.000-08:00

er, end of hibernation. Been talking about science books with students again, and especially Henry Nicholls' Lonesome George - out last year from Macmillan.

It's been fairly widely and well reviewed and is a perfectly respectable first book, but not as arresting as the title - partly because nothing much happens or ever is going to happpen to the creature, a Galapagos giant tortoise who is the last male of his sub-species surviving. He's a leading exhibit at the Charles Darwin Research Station, and likely to remain so for a long time (tortoises do that).

Nicholls wants his hefty shell to carry a lot of weight, as a way into lots of other stories about conservation in general, ecology, reproductive biology, politics of protecting/exploiting the Galapagos, and so on. Maybe it is too much for poor George to bear.

There's also one thoughtful academic review, by historian Joe Cain in the last but one issue of Public Understanding of Science, which rather lays into the author for inviting us to feel good about scientists looking after one creature/species while the rest of us get on with destroying the planet.

He has a point, though it's also true that the books which don't do that already exist - notably Jonathan Weiner's wonderful The Beak of the Finch, (already mentioned here) about Malcolm and Linda Grant's work on the Galapagos' bird life and Edward Larson's Evolution’s Workshop, a fine history of discovery on the Galapagos, which also covers the Grants and Lonesome George (in a few pages…)

I also wonder what a book could do which would really get people's attention about the loss of biodiversity, especially now climate change is so firmly lodged on the public agenda. Sure, the two are related, but I'm thinking of E. O. Wilson's efforts in this direction, which seem now to involve writing the same book repeatedly. His plea is invariably urgent and eloquent, but who is listening?

Anyhow, it looks like there's a neat PhD for someone who'd like to review the construction of the Galapagos as a cockpit for discovery/conservation/struggle over resources. It would have to take in film and DVD treatments, too, as well as The Voyage of the Beagle, and maybe even Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos...

I'm going to try to post more regularly here, so if anyone happens to read, do post a comment so I know I'm not (just) talking to myself.

Nature essay and other printed things

2006-12-14T13:22:00.000-08:00

Been distracted from blogging lately, but there's a brief essay of mine on the topic of these online ramblings in this week's Nature. You'll need a sub, but if you or your institutions have one, you can see it here.

And while I'm drawing attention to myself, you can also check the Xmas science books roundup in the Independent, and the review of Janna Levin's book about Godel and Turing in Physics World. Again, you can't get at the review without a sub, but you can read their books editor Martin Griffiths' nice feature on the Best Science Books event back in October

More, better best books...

2006-11-28T06:40:00.000-08:00

Now Discover magazine has a list of the 25 best ever science books, in the December Issue - with Darwin in the top two spots.

Like the RI event, this has the flaw that science books from all periods are treated as if they are the same kind of thing, so Newton, Galileo, Vesalius are equated with Weinberg and Dawkins... But some interesting entries on the full list.

There's an online vote for the best ever, too, open until mid-December.

Let them read books...

2006-11-24T11:16:00.000-08:00

After noticing Tony Blair's recommendation of popular science books as an aid to science education the other week, I find the latest (2006) edition of the excellent annual Best American Science and Nature Writing takes a similar tack.

Guest editor Brian Greene (regular editor Tim Folger finds the pieces, the guest then chooses which ones go in the book) says he's been promoting this idea in the US for some time.

People ask him, he says, how to turn school students on to science. The problem, he reckons, is more how to offer a curriculum which does not turn them off. "I've been advocating that schools introduce a new course, one in which students spend the entire term reading and discussing a wide selection of compelling popular science books and articles".

He doesn't say what to choose, beyond materials "that cut a wide swath through the sciences, from their established underpinnings up to cutting edge research".

A whole term would never fit in with the National Curriculum, but I've wondered for a while why schools in Britain don't make more use of popular science books, so much more appealing than the average GCSE or A-level text.

But which ones?

on accuracy

2006-11-17T13:24:00.000-08:00

Someone with a sharper scientific eye than me pointed out today that Primo Levi makes some rather obvious mistakes about photosynthesis in Carbon, probably the most celebrated chapter of The Periodic Table.

This doesn't detract from his poetic style. But does it weaken the claim that it deserves to be regarded as the best science book ever? I think so.

Teamwork

2006-11-06T01:06:00.000-08:00

Thouhgtful piece in the New York Times, which argues that the traditional "great man" science biography needs rethinking because modern research is all about collaboration and orchestrated effort. (Thanks to Tom Miller for pointing this out).

I don't believe it myself (the death of biography, not the teamwork). Publishers and readers like biographies, however historiographically teeth-grinding they turn out to be. Even better if the media can create a personal opposition to portray an issue - as with Venter and Sulston over ownership of the human genome. And both now have books devoted to them.

But Peter Dizikes' piece says a lot of other interesting things, too. He also lists some scientists ripe for biographical treatment including (according to Dan Kevles) Carl Sagan. That's odd: I've read two biographies of Sagan already.

Anyway, you can read Dizikes' piece here.

a leader speaks

2006-11-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

"We need to make science popular again - to bring it back to people. We have seen recently some excellent popular books - Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins, Steven Hawking, Bill Bryson, whose A Short History Of Nearly Everything sold over two million copies and which was sent to every secondary school".

Thus Tony Blair, in his speech today about how Britain's path to the future is "lit by the brilliant light of science". Shades of the white heat...

Wonder how Richard Dawkins feels about being singled out by the great statesman/war criminal (delete which is ever is inapplicable)?

Mailer unbound

2006-10-31T00:53:00.000-08:00

Blimey, Norman Mailer is annoying. At least he was in 1970. For all I know he is now a sweet old man (though I somehow doubt it). But his writing in A Fire on the Moon is wonderfully frustrating. Such a collection of reportorial virtues; such interesting things to say; such an odd result.

It begins weirdly enough, with a first chapter hilariously entitled A Loss of Ego (let us assume he intended the joke to be on him) which presents the author in the third person, in two different guises. That said, there is some terrific reporting, and a beautifully clear impression - unusual at the time - of the Apollo programme as a great adventure which is marred by being in the hands of people who can only communicate in NASAspeak.

But whatever "Norman", or "Aquarius" (!) says is quickly drained of interest by being so consistently overwritten.

Favourite example so far. On p146 he is trying to pin down the difference between physics and engineering. He fires off a whole string of attempts, of which one is:
"Phyics was the quiet remark, 'Give an object an escape velocityof 36,000 feet per second and it will be able to leave the gravitational field of the earth'. Engineering was the fifty years of rockets digging furrows in cornfields and catching fire on the pad from leaky valves".

That's great. But then there is a needless elaboration of the same point. Then there's a further lengthy contemplation of physics and chemistry as partners in a marriage arranged by a computer, with an amazingly drawn out meditation, with dialogue, on how to arrange for the two partners to have sex in spite of a mutual lack of attraction... All this takes a whole page more, by which time the force of the remark where he actually nailed what he needed to say is not so much lost as dissipated forever. Overwritten, in fact, falls far short of the effect.

This, alas, is not a moment's abberation but typical of what I suppose we have to call Mailer's style. The result is a book full of readable things but which for me is ultimately unreadable, in spite of its advocates' urging.

Now if one could put these things into a database and run through a do-it-yourself edit, who knows what great books might be hewn from the sedimentary layers of Mailer's prose here? But life is too short...

Memorable

2006-10-23T04:13:00.000-07:00

Someone said poetry is memorable speech. Prof. Carey, in What Good are the Arts? defines literature as "writing that I want to remember - not for its content alone, as one might want to remember a computer manual, but for itself: those particular words in that particular order."

Which nicely subjective line explains why there is a literature of science...

Some good writing

2006-10-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

Now for some unalloyed subjectivity. Sara Abdulla reckons most pop science badly written. I tend to agree. Maybe it is fairer to say that most science writers rarely do better than functional, workmanlike (non-sexist alternative?) prose - me included. I wonder how much this matters (certainly to the readers of popular science), and will say why one day. But there are some mainstream popular science books which are memorable because of the quality of the writing - because the author can occasionally make words work on the page in a way which gives pleasure to a reader who likes that sort of thing. Now there's an evasive definition for you.

Ten of the above (in no particular order):

Jonathan Weiner - The Beak of the Finch
E. O. Wilson - The Diversity of Life
George Johnson - Strange Beauty
Timothy Ferris - Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Marek Kohn - A Reason for Everything
Oliver Morton - Mapping Mars
Rachel Carson - The Sea Around Us
Loren Eiseley - The Firmament of Time
John McPhee - Basin and Range
Diane Ackerman - A Natural History of the Senses

It would be quite easy to double this list, and not just by adding another book from each of these authors. After that, I think it would get harder.

Norman Mailer is annnoying me, and is relevant because I want to note why his book is NOT well-written. It is partly because he was clearly way too grand by 1969 to be edited. But no time now to go into that...

And the winner is...

2006-10-20T02:23:00.000-07:00

Just for the record, Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table took the vote for best science book at the RI event last night.

It was a nice conversation, and further thoughts will keep this blog going for a while – this kind of thinking aloud being mildly addictive.

For now, consider: three panelists who knew a lot about science writing, and about other kinds of writing – Tim Radford, Armand Leroi, Sara Abdulla. (Sara runs Macmillan’s popular science list and stepped in at the last minute – thanks!). They chose great books. But all, for one reason or another, shied away from the mainstream of recent popular science writing. They mostly said this was because good books transcend this kind of categorization. True in a way. But I think it also means we still find it hard to say why one book in the mainstream is better than another. Is Fortey vs Dawkins, Pinker vs. Ridley, Weinberg vs Hawking, Davies vs Barrow, just a matter of taste? Or can we say such books are good of their kind, with reasons? I still want to try it…

Still, the books up for discussion this time (first choices first) were:
Primo Levi – The Periodic Table
Norman Mailer – A Fire on the Moon
James Watson – The Double Helix (Tim)

Konrad Lorenz – King Solomon’s Ring
Ernst Haeckel – Kunstformen der Natur
Peter Medawar – Pluto’s Republic (Armand)

Tom Stoppard – Arcadia
Bertolt Brecht – The Life of Galileo
Jonathan Lethem – As She Climbed Across the Table (Sara)

We threw in The Selfish Gene – mentioned several times as a standout title - as a fourth contender for the vote. There were quite a few votes for Medawar and Dawkins, but Primo Levi came out ahead.

Why? Various criteria came up.
A great science book should:
Have a Big Idea
Tell something of the doing of science
Have high literary quality – obviously a big consideration for these judges
Be one you can love (even if some hate it)
And, as Tim put it, it should have passages which “pinion my awareness to the solidity of the world around me”.

Not sure about the first, although maybe Levi’s much anthologized final chapter Carbon qualifies. That seems to be top of many people’s list of best bits of “science writing” (though I have come across people who find it too stylized for their taste) Anyhow, his book seemed to come closest to ticking every one of these boxes.

It’s a hard choice to argue with, but of course the book is inimitable, and quite unlike the general run of popular science. All the better for that, perhaps. Someone who obviously cared a lot about science books mentioned Sacks’ Uncle Tungsten as another worthy title which is kind of about chemistry – though I found it by some distance his worst book. But that still leaves the question of how to sift through the current mass of pop-science books. Asked to recommend just one for a beginning reader, the panel weren’t at all keen on naming names.

Will these criteria help? We’ll see. I feel a few lists coming on… starting with literary quality, partly because Sara reckons most run of the mill popular science books are appallingly written. So next post will be some that aren’t, just to remind myself they do exist.

Meantime, like the Origin of Species, the final paragraph of The Periodic Table, (and of Carbon) is one of the most poetic: "It" is a single atom of carbon, making its way in the world, and into Levi's brain...

It is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one that concerns us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream: it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the carbon which was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two level of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.

Dunno about the copyright, but if you can't lay hands on the Penguin classic the whole chapter can be found here.

Time for the verdict

2006-10-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

... on the best science book ever. Or at any rate the best one on Thursday evening, Oct 19th.

Our (that is the RI and the science communication lot at Imperial College) event is almost upon us. If you come along, you can vote for the top science book. The core list is:

Primo Levi - The Periodic Table
Norman Mailer - A Fire on the Moon
Jim Watson - The Double Helix
Ernst Haeckel - Kunstformen der Natur
Konrad Lorenz - King Solomon's Ring
Peter Medawar - Pluto's Republic

There will be three more titles from the panel, but you won't find out what these are until the night. And we'll try and find a way of letting the audience vote in at least one more for the final run-off.

It is in the Alexander Fleming Lecture Theatre at IC, starting at 6.30, finishing at 8.00. I shall be in the chair (only a minor disincentive I hope), so shall remain strictly neutral - though some further opinions may appear here afterwards.

Oh, and you can hear some discussion on Material World (with Sue Nelson this week) on Radio 4 that afternoon, also (at around the same time) on the book panel on Radio 5 Live, broadcasting from the science museum. And I'm told there's a Guardian science podcast too, though I haven't checked it out. So we already have the most attention to science books there's been for a while, I'd say.

Mulling over Medawar

2006-10-15T12:55:00.000-07:00

Speaking of essayists, Peter Medawar was as elegant a scientific essayist as you could find from the 1950s through to 1970s. Patrician, never less than confident in his own judgment, he made the reader feel that intellectual standards mattered, and you had better be pretty alert to match up to his.

His Pluto’s Republic, first published in 1982, is a collection of these essays, some major, some minor – and Armand Leroi’s third selection as a candidate for best science book ever. It ranges widely, from cancer and psychoanalysis to Teilhard de Chardin and IQ. The recurring theme, as Medawar describes it, is the question: “what is science, what kind of person is a scientist, and what kind of act of reasoning leads to scientific discovery and the enlargement of the understanding?”

The core of the answer lies in the piece reprinted from the 1960s, on Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought. Here he declares his allegiance to Karl Popper, the scientist’s favourite philosopher of science. Interesting, I think, that he points out a couple of times that there had been no real studies of what scientists actually do – as opposed to what they are supposed to do. Well, there have now…

The book also contains Medawar’s sympathetic review of another on our list, The Double Helix. How’s this for a provocation?

“It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English Schools of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of outstanding ability – much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Jim Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something to be clever about.”

Remembering Lewis Thomas (long post)

2006-10-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

Some of us do. Talking to Anil Ananthaswamy of New Scientist last week, we agreed that it's not right no-one has mentioned the Lewis Thomas yet in the lists for top science book. One of the great humane essayists of the last decades of the 20thC, he's been one my my heroes since I discovered him in the late 1970s (slightly earlier than Anil...). I think of him now as one of the heirs of Loren Eiseley. Both are now fading into that posthumous literary limbo which awaits most of us.

To remind others what Thomas was about, here's a piece Anil composed when he was a science writing student at UC, Santa Cruz, which he says is amateurish. I think we should all have such students...

I've omitted some words at the beginning. Thomas, who died in 1993, was a bright boy who became a prominent doctor. Then... over to Anil:

Somewhere in the midst of this illustrious career, Thomas turned into an essayist. In 1970, he gave the keynote address for a symposium on "Inflammation." Since such conferences were usually heavy going, his talk "was designed to lighten proceedings at the outset by presenting a rather skewed view of inflammation." Several months after the conference, a pamphlet-sized reproduction of his talk was circulated to the participants. Soon, Franz Ingelfinger, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, called Thomas. Ingelfinger had liked the piece, and wanted Thomas to write essays for the Journal. He was to write one essay each month, due on Thursday of the third week, no longer than one Journal page in length, on any topic of his liking. He would not be paid, but in return, Ingelfinger promised Thomas that no one would edit his piece.
Ingelfinger had been Thomas’ senior at the City Hospital internship, and Thomas had been accustomed to taking orders from him. "Our relationship began, and continued, with him giving orders and me carrying them out," wrote Thomas. So, when Ingelfinger asked for the essays, "I could not say no," said Thomas.
But Thomas, his "Good bad verse" aside, had only written scientific papers — about two hundred of them, in the "relentlessly flat style required for absolute unambiguity in every word." The essay gave him a chance to flex his prose mus¬cles. He started in earnest: outlining ideas, listing items to cover in each piece, organizing thoughts in orderly sequences, and writing "several dreadful essays which I could not bring myself to reread."
He gave up organization, eschewed method, and held fast till the deadline passed. Then, on the weekend, two days after the deadline, late at night, he wrote without outline or planning, as fast as he could. His first essay was called "Lives of a Cell."
This seminal essay, and others, appeared monthly in the Journal. Soon, Thomas received a letter from Joyce Carol Oates, whom he had never met, advis¬ing him to collect the essays for a book. Book publishers and agents followed with similar advice, but all wanted him to rewrite and add pieces to make a coherent book. Thomas declined: he had no time. Then, Elisabeth Sifton, an editor at The Viking Press, offered to publish the essays — no rewrites, no new pieces. Thomas said yes over the phone, and the book was published. Titled "The Lives of a Cell — Notes of a Biology Watcher," it became a best-seller, and won the National Book Award.
Thomas went on to write other highly acclaimed books: "The Medusa and the Snail — More Notes of a Biology Watcher," "The Youngest Science — Notes of a Medicine Watcher," "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony," "Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher," and "The Fragile Species."
Thomas wrote his books in longhand. "I had a word processor once," said Thomas in an interview with the Washington Post. "When I had more or less mastered it, we had a chimney fire. I found the word processor melted to the table on which it had been placed. It looked like a piece of found art, and then I decided to go back to longhand."
Maybe because of the longhand, or the unfettered writing late at night, past deadline, Thomas’ essays are like extended musings, and flights of fancy, mostly centered on biology and humanity. The details are keenly observed, the prose is lucid for most part (for he was as much a lover of language, as he was of the bio¬logical world), the tone is warm, modest, confident, and optimistic, like a scholarly conversation with a kindly, erudite man, which he was.
His essays, which mostly stuck to the 1,200 word limit (dictated by the size of a page in the Journal), are elegant. Using biology as a cornerstone, Thomas mused about our species, it’s past and future. One of his major themes was how lit¬tle we know about the world we live in. He constantly wrote about symbiosis, in various guises, an exploration of the intricate partnerships that exist around us. The medusa (a jellyfish) and the snail (a sea slug) formed the basis of one such essay, in which he explored their bizarre and unique relationship. He argued that altruism was better than selfishness, that, in nature, the whole was always greater than the sum of the parts.
Music was important to him, a reminder of our accomplishments as a species. So was language. He was an amateur philologist, in love with words."Every word, no exceptions, is an enchantment, a wonder, a marvel," he wrote. In his book, Et Cetera, Et Cetera, he explored this fascination.
Some evolutionary biologists criticized him for suggesting that the earth’s body represents a kind of organism, a theme that kept cropping up in many of his essays. The Earth, to Thomas, resembled an enormous embryo, still developing toward its yet unknown future.
He was enamored by the idea that we are here by chance, a freak of nature. "Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of sur¬prise," he wrote.
Toward the end of his writing career Thomas shifted themes: AIDS, drug abuse, aging, and a concern for our planet. But he maintained his optimism, albeit cautiously: "I have a high regard for our species, for all its newness and immaturity as a member of the biosphere. As evolutionary time is measured, we have arrived here a few moments ago and we have a lot of growing up to do. If we succeed, we could become a sort of collective mind for the earth, the thought of the earth," he wrote. "I trust us to have the will to keep going, and to maintain as best we can the life of the planet."
Encouraging words from a splendid specimen of the species, a man dedi¬cated to the health of individuals, but never forgetting to exhort us to look beyond ourselves, at the larger picture.

A footnote. Maybe the fixed word length is a good way to get memorable results? It brings to mind one of Thomas's peers as an essayist, Miroslav Holub, great poet and pretty respectable immunologist, who wrote a newspaper colummn of 43 lines. Collected in The Jingle Bell Principle (Bloodaxe, 1992), they are a great delight. (Current Amazon sales rank: 1,592,147). The essays in the better-known The Dimension of the Present Moment (Faber, 1990) are slightly longer, but the subject matter more scientific. I'll post a bit of Holub another time.

Archbishops and others

2006-10-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

Another stage in the world-wide media build-up to the event on Thursday next... (bold/italics added)

Scientists, writers and the Archbishop of Canterbury reveal their favourite science books

A survey released today reveals the top science books of prominent scientists and public figures. In the survey the Royal Institution and the Science Communication Group at Imperial College London asked scientists from many disciplines, as well as authors and other notable people, to name their favourite science book and why they like it.

Unsurprisingly, books that tackle deep ideas like evolution, quantum physics and the secrets of the mind scored highly. The Archbishop of Canterbury favoured A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks, the New York-based neurologist made famous in the film Awakenings. Rowan Williams said that the book, about Sacks’ recovery from a severe accident, ‘challenges all sorts of assumptions about mind and body’.

Susan Greenfield’s favourite science book was How to Build a Time Machine, a book about quantum physics by Australia-based physicist Paul Davies. Baroness Greenfield, the Director of the Royal Institution, said the book ‘looks easy – like a picture book – but introduces you to lots of difficult concepts’.

Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was cited by psychologist Susan Blackmore for its ‘simplicity and power’, and by science writer Matt Ridley, who remembered reading the book for the first time as an undergraduate. He said, ‘Until now, my teachers had helpfully divided the world into right or wrong ideas. But here, I suddenly realised, I was going to have to make up my own mind’.

As much as some choices were about ideas, others were made for inspiration and pure enjoyment. Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at Oxford University, chose A Mathematician’s Apology by G H Hardy, which he first read when he was in school. ‘It was like hearing real music for the first time after practising scales and arpeggios for years,’ he said. ‘Being exposed to the power of this logical language to prove things with 100% certainty was very empowering to an adolescent whose world was constantly shifting.’

Another childhood favourite was Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Mark Miodownik, an engineer from King’s College London, said ‘I found the book so much funnier and cleverer than any other book I had read that I wore my dressing gown to school for a week’.

One book was enthusiastically cited for being both great science and a great read: The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. Geneticist Steve Jones said it has ‘more adventures on a single page than most modern writers manage to squeeze into a chapter, or an entire book’. Science writer and broadcaster Vivienne Parry has had to replace her much-loved copy of The Voyage of the Beagle three times. She said, ‘It works as a terrific travel book, as a riveting insight into the scientific journey of one of the world’s great scientists and as a great read. What more could you want?’

NOTES TO EDITORS

1. The complete list of responses to the survey can be found on the Royal Institution’s website, HERE
2. The survey was conducted to coincide with a public event at Imperial College London, ‘The best science books ever’. Three writers will each put forward their choice for the best science book, and the audience will vote on the one they think should win. Tickets are available to the public by calling the Royal Institution on 020 7409 2992 or going to www.rigb.org. Press tickets are available by calling the same number.

The main event - reminder

2006-10-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

Time for another top of the page reminder that this blog links with an event on October 19 at Imperial College London where we will vote for the "best science book ever" (see Royal Institution link in the sidebar).

It won't be the final word - the point is to have the conversation. Examples of what is good, with arguments why, might add up to something. At least, we'll have a list of books to supplement Ian McEwan's science canon (see earlier post).

Anyone who wants to mention a particular title not so far highlighted here, please do - maybe with a few words about why it is worthy, or unworthy. I've had conversations about Lewis Thomas, for instance (remember The Lives of a Cell, or The Medusa and the Snail? ), but no-one has mentioned him here yet. The RI is also polling some of the scientifically inclined literati to see what they think, which ought to be fun. More on that soon.

At some point, I'll put up a list of everything which gets mentioned. Maybe a top 50. If we get to 100 titles, I might even feel a book proposal coming on (though nobody wanted to play last time I tried that one).

A Fire on the Moon

2006-10-03T13:18:00.000-07:00

Hard to think of any two men less alike than Neil Armstrong and Norman Mailer (or Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin -left- for that matter).
Mailer's A Fire on the Moon, 1971 is the second of Tim Radford's choices for best science book highlighted here. Another one I've never read, dammit. I'm claiming I was too young. But I know of it as an example of New Journalism, Mailer style. That is, it is as much about Norman as about the Apollo programme. He was, according to a recent aside in the New Yorker,
"the only important American writer aside from John Updike to find the lunar voyage worthy of sustained attention".

It is also, evidently, less... well, starry-eyed about the whole thing than you were supposed to be at the time. Mailer was allergic to NASA's corporate techno-bureaucratic culture, which is obviously to a person's credit, however astronomical their writerly ego. There's a penetrating recent review of it from Spiked Online.
An interesting one to re-evaluate post Challenger, post space station, and in the light of books like Marina Benjamin's Rocket Dreams, on the demise of the space age, or Andrew Smith's Moondust, chronicling his search for the survivors from Apollo - which is noticeably indebted to J. G Ballard, always a Good Thing, and I suspect is the best written of the lot.

So, does the earlier offering wear as well as Tim thinks it does?

King Solomon's Ring

2006-10-01T03:55:00.000-07:00

Can't find a larger image, but this is one of the more pleasing cover designs from many editions of Konrad Lorenz's King Solomon's Ring, first published in German in '49, in English from 1951 - most recent edition is a Routledge Classics paperback.
This is another nomination from Armand Leroi, the best-known work by the one of the more intriguing authors one could choose - the Viennese goose lover, ethologist, joint Nobel Laureate with Tinbergen in '73, theorist of animal domestication and racial decline. You can read a capsule biography of Lorenz here.

The book is a brilliant series of essays on animal behaviour, has immense charm and conveying several concepts still important in the field. One the other hand, there's a well-documented essay which gives a view of the book informed by Lorenz's well-elaborated commitment to Nazism here.

So a man whose career remains controversial - he undoubtedly had some odd ideas about wolves, but his geese loved him...

Art in/of Nature

2006-09-28T01:53:00.000-07:00

Isn't this astonishing? It is just one plate from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur, (Art Forms in Nature), which is one of Armand Leroi's three nominations for best science book ever for our discussion on Oct 19.
I love this partly because I had not come across it before. So I can only lift the description of one of the English versions (which are mainly about the pictures) which are available:

"Art Forms in Nature" is a glorification of function and form, a demonstration of organic symmetry that has nothing--and everything--to do with nature as it actually exists. Each plate exhibits organisms carefully arranged and exquisitely detailed, "a symbiosis between decorative sketches and descriptive observations of nature," as Olaf Breidbach states in his fascinating introductory text. The radiolarians, medusae, rotifers, bryozoans, and even frogs and turtles lovingly recreated here are gorgeous and self-explanatory, rendered in delicate, filigreed lines, and colored gently with muted green, delicate pink, and sepia. 139 pages, Pb, color images and prints.

If every picture is worth a thousand words, then a book with unadorned text will need to be quite long to outdo this one. You can view lots more pretty pictures here, but you will have to navigate around this rather splendid site in German.

So that's a gap in my education I am glad to fill. Is this book as widely loved as I suspect it is?

The Double Helix

2006-09-26T01:32:00.000-07:00

Here's the first title from Tim Radford's trio of selections for best science book - Jim Watson's Double Helix.

Must be a candidate in terms of impact, musn't it? The opening sentence is being quoted around the place at the moment in connection with Matt Ridley's excellent new biography of Francis Crick. (OK, I'm assuming it is excellent as I haven't read it, but he spoke very engagingly about Crick in London last week.)

Still lots of questions to ask about Watson's memoir/non-fiction novel, or whatever we decide to call it, after all this time. Does it draw people to science or put them off, for example? Why was it such a success? Why is the sequel so unreadable?

If you've never read the book - a minority of those who read this, I imagine - someone with a name quite like mine seems to have reviewed it briefly here on the Wellcome Trust's genome website. Friedberg's The Writing Life of James D Watson is also q. interesting for background, if you can get hold of it.

Anyhow, it is a good read, and influential. Best science book ever? We'll see.

The main event

2006-09-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

These blog things work bottom-up, so here's a reminder of of what started this one at the top, where people actually read stuff.

On October 19 there's an event at Imperial College London where we will vote for the "best science book ever" (see Royal Institution link in the sidebar).

OK, we don't expect the verdict on the night to go down in history. The point is to have the conversation. Examples of what is good, with arguments why, might add up to something. At least, we'll have a list of books to supplement Ian McEwan's science canon.

On the night, we will hear from Tim Radford, Maggie McDonald and Armand Leroi, who will explain why they chose their top three, and argue for their favourite.

They've read lots, but two of them have already got their list down to three titles - and their nominations will be highlighted here. I hope they may add some near misses, too.

Anyone else who wants to mention a particular title, please do - maybe with a few words about why it is worthy, or unworthy. The RI is also polling some of the scientifically inclined literati to see what they think, which ought to be fun.

If we get to 100 titles at some point, I might even feel a book proposal coming on (though nobody wanted to play last time I tried that one).

If we don't the list should certainly remind people about some writers who have fallen beneath the radar since the pop-science publishing boom took off in the '80s. Loren Eiseley, anyone?

Handy guides

2006-09-23T03:23:00.000-07:00

Flicking through my copy of A Guide to Science Reading (1st ed, 1957, revised 1964) shows how things have changed for pop-science in fifty years. There were perfectly readable popular books then, though many still dated from the first half of the century. On the other hand, the 900 odd titles listed in this handy guide prepared for the American Association for thr Advancement of Science include a hefty proportion of technical primers which would hardly get a look in now.

Take "Atomic and Nuclear Physics", for example. Pretty important subject in the '50s and '60s. The eager reader might try Bohr, Neils, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, "a collection of articles written by the author on various occasions over a period of 25 years. The general theme of the papers is the lessons in theory of knowledge (epistemology) which have been provided by the modern development of atomic physics".

If that doesn't grab you, try Norman Lansdell, The Atom and the Energy Revolution, (Penguin!), "based on an investigation and report of a management consultant who was commissioned to make a study of the implications of atomic energy". Thrilling stuff, no doubt.

Now we have, probably, thousands of more reader-friendly titles (and Roger Penrose). And to guide the curious to the right ones?

That is harder. Waterstones published a quite lengthy Guide to Popular Science Books in 2000, but they were all good, according to them. The British Council's Hunting Down the Universe: A select science and literature bibliography, also highlights good stuff, as long as it was written by a Brit - which is something of a limitation in this area. Still downloadable, though.

And Brian Clegg's Popular Science website has a growing list of reviews, and only one of his own books gets five stars (along with Armand Leroi, Matt Ridley, and, I fear, Stephen Hawking).

Are there any others?

Brief, briefer, briefest...

2006-09-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

One of the comments on the post below asks, has anyone mentioned Hawking? So, should we mention him? Lots of copies sold, but are they good books? And are there reasons to prefer A Brief History of Time (killer title, poorly explained text), Briefer History (which I haven't read) or Universe in a Nutshell, which I recall reviewing unfavourably when it came out - and the wonders of the Guardian archive will still tell you why.

There was another round up of comment on the book from other folks a little later.

I reckon Hawking has been more of an inspiration to other writers - and publishers - to try and crack the market, rather than an example of how to do it.

Hybrid vigour?

2006-09-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

Just reading Janna Levin's A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (to be reviewed in Physics World), which is a re-working of the lives of Turing and Godel, labelled as a novel. It set me thinking about all the books which fall somewhere in or near popular science which are hybrids, mixing up fiction and non-fiction. They're so varied it's hard to say what else they have in common - from Gamow's Mr Tomkins to Russell Stannard's children's books to Carl Djerassi's "scientifiction" (ugh) in Menachem's Seed or The Bourbaki Gambit.

But the ones worth looking out for, I reckon, mostly turn out to be proper novels, closely based on historical materials :

Alan Lightman - Einstein's dreams (OK, not a novel)
Clare Dudman - Wegener's Jigsaw (see my review from 2003 here)
John Banville - Dr Copernicus, and Kepler
Harry Thompson - This Thing of Darkness (about Fitzroy and the Beagle)
Russell McCormach - Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist

any more...?

deja vu (again)

2006-09-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

Another level of déjà vu re Dawkins comes from the conclusion to Martin Amis’s controversial dissection of “horrorism” in the previous week’s Observer. As usual of late, Amis over-reaches himself striving for significance, but he is modest enough to close with a quote which is the most memorable bit of the piece.

We should be with Joseph Conrad, he says:

'The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

'Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness.' ('Author's Note' to The Shadow-Line, 1920.)

A pretty succinct summary of Richard Dawkins’ position, no?

God and deja vu

2006-09-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

One way to narrow the choice of the best books may be to rule some categories. Maybe one good candidate for exclusion would be pop-science books about God.

There are lots, and they helped to fuel the popular science publishing boom. They faded away for a bit, but seem to be making a partial come-back. Partial because the lengthy piece which just ran in the London Observer prompts serious feelings of déjà vu.

It hangs on the fact that both Richard Dawkins and Paul Davies have new books on the meaning of life. Haven’t read either, but their summary contents are pretty much what they've been writing for the last twenty years. I recall writing a column comparing their views – biology sanctions atheism but cosmology makes it seem as if, somehow we are meant to be here – almost that long ago.

Hard to believe that either of the new offerings will be a book to compare with their authors’ best. Striving for answers to questions like this tends to be unconvincing to any but the already converted.

Instead, I prescribe a dose of metaphysical minimalism for popular science. Something like this:

There is something rather than nothing.

Some of the stuff which exists appears to
become the kind of stuff which can do things.

We have no real idea whether we are equipped to work out what any stuff ultimately is, or the meaning of the things it can do.

We can have a mildly entertaining time trying, though, and there are grounds for supposing we have made some progress. We may possibly be less wrong than we used to be, in some areas.

There’s no particular reason to believe anything else anyone tells you about the nature of the universe which is formulated as a general, and universally or eternally true statement.

It is always tempting to try and make such statements, but it is tricky spotting the really dangerous ones before they do harm, so the sport is best avoided for most people.

As well as avoiding all kinds of silliness, I reckon this creed has the advantage that dragging it out to book length would never sell - so it would encourage people to write about something else.

scientists' self-portraits

2006-09-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

Interesting piece in The New Atlantis about scientists' memoirs by Christine Rosen. Peter Medawar said Watson's Double Helix (of which more anon) invented the genre of scientific memoir. Rosen goes back a lot further - Priestley, Darwin and Max Planck. She also quotes Medawar, intriguingly, in support of her claim about the importance of memoir. OK, the doing of science is often dull, but "in another sense memoir is a good fit for scientists, since their work is, in some ways, about constructing narratives. As ... Medawar observed, the work of scientists is 'building explanatory structures, telling stories which are scrupulously tested to see if they are stories about real life.'"

I like that. It would be interesting to take it beyond Watson, though, where she stops. Try Kary Mullis, Robert Sapolsky, John Sulston, Francis Crick, just among the biologists...

deja vu?

2006-09-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

Great, now I discover someone has done this before! There's a lengthy blog-based discussion of the best pop-science book ever on the astrophysicists' blog at Cosmic Variance blog - ran from mid 2005 into 2006 but now closed.

Actually it's great. Another chance to compare lists, though a pretty scientific bunch of commentators, and leaning toward physics and maths. There's no final conclusion, though, and not much discussion of actual criteria - except the suggestion that Penrose's Roads to Reality isn't really a popular science book. I agree. Do you know anyone without Master's level physics who has read it?

Read the whole thing in the archive

a longer list!

2006-08-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

Interesting to compare McEwan's list (previous post) with the "top 100 science books of the century" compiled for American Scientist - not to be confused with Scientific American for their Nov-Dec 1999 issue. It was published with a series of commentaries by scientific luminaries and aithors on which book had influenced them. You can read the whole thing here.

American Scientist, incidentally, has much the best science book review coverage of any magazine I know - wide-ranging, authoritative, well written, and always available on the web. Now that New Scientist in the UK has more or less given up on books, it is one of the few places where significant science books which fail to catch the attention of literary editors get the attention they deserve.

The list covers technical books and biographiers as well as what we now call pop science, and is not one any sane person could set out to read through. But it is packed with interesting things.

Ian McEwan's top ten

2006-08-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

Novelist Ian McEwan is a bit of a science buff, and put up a top fifteen list - a first stab at a popular science canon - earlier this year. It was unveiled in a talk he gave at a meeting to mark the 30th anniversary of Dawkins' Selfish Gene, itself a strong contender for most influential pop science title of recent years, if not the best book.

You can read McEwan's essay as published in The Guardian, or find it on John Brockman's Edge website, along with the rest of the talks.

His top titles:

A science canon

Francis Bacon Advancement of Learning

Antonio Damasio The Feeling of What Happens

Charles Darwin The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (ed Ekman)

Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene

David Deutsch The Fabric of Reality

Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel

Galileo Galilei Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

Brian Greene The Elegant Universe

David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature

Ernst Mayr This Is Biology

Steven Pinker The Language Instinct

Matt Ridley Nature Via Nurture

Voltaire Letters on England

Steven Weinberg Dreams of a Final Theory

EO Wilson The Diversity of Life

The Voltaire is there, by the way, because he explains Newtonian physics. I'd probably keep Deutsch, Diamond, and Greene, would prefer other books by Darwin, Damasio, Dawkins, Ridley, Weinberg and Wilson, and do without Hume, Pinker, Mayr and Bacon. But a nice place to start a discussion...

A good read?

2006-08-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

A good read?

This blog's interest is popular science writing, especially the kind which ends up in books. There are thousands of them these days. What mainly interests me is what makes a good one. So posts will be about good or bad bits of books I happen to be looking at. Occasionally, I may stir myself to review a whole book, but that's not the main point. I am more interested in comparison and contrast, and testing out a few critical thoughts on the whole genre (if genre it be).

To start with, the comments are geared to an event in London in October which will try and identify the best science book ever. Visit the Royal Institution for details (though the event is at Imperial College).

I will be asking the three people who will be acting as advocates for their favourites - Armand Leroi, Maggie MacDonald and Tim Radford - to reveal their top titles in advance. We'll see what follows from that, before the event, and maybe after.