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by Christen Opsal
Review:
The Best American
Science Writing 2001
Timothy Ferris, Ed. New York: Ecco, 2001.
If The Best American Science Writing 2001 truly reflects its genre, then American science writing comes in a handful of basic forms: portraits of individual scientists, scientific assessments of social problems, explanations of new scientific conclusions, explorations of the history of science, descriptions of technological advances, observations of animal behavior, and examinations of physics.
Six of the 23 pieces in this year's anthology are about physics. But half are so technical that I couldn't comprehend them enough to classify them further. Most of the (non-physics) pieces in the anthology are cross-disciplinary works written for a general audience by career writers; half of the articles on physics-related subjects were penned by nonliterary academics and lack the universal relevance of the other pieces in the collection.
This preponderance of highly technical physics articles may be attributable to the editor of this year's collection, Timothy Ferris. (The series, which began last year with The Best American Science Writing 2000, edited by technology writer James Gleick, assumes a new editor each year.) Ferris wrote such "classics" of physical-science writing as Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Mind's Sky.
A professor emeritus of journalism at Berkeley, Ferris possesses more knowledge of physics than the general reader. In choosing the physics articles, he may have assumed that readers would have a greater knowledge of physics than the subjects of the other pieces. Of course, the public may have more conscious experience with subjects like medicine and natural resources than it does with subatomic particles and space-time.
Whatever Ferris's motivation for including them, I found three essays on physics to be among the least engaging selections in the book. They frustrated me because they lacked a crucial component of any good writing for a general audience: They failed to explain their subject adequately, so I could understand why their argument about it should matter to me.
In "More Than Meets the Eye," Michael S. Turner gushes, "In the next fifteen years … astronomers will finally be able to identify the nature of the full inventory of ingredients that make up the universe." Once scientists understand this, the University of Chicago astrophysics professor explains, they will be able to predict the behavior of the universe. Is that something we would want to do? What would those predictions tell us, really? Turner fails to address the ramifications of the desired achievement.
Erik Asphaug's personal obsession is asteroids. As an assistant professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he seeks to answer many questions about them: "Are they solid inside or aggregate assemblages? What minerals are they composed of? How do they survive collisions with other small bodies? Could a lander or astronaut negotiate an asteroid's weird surface?" Again, the author fails to convince me that I should care about the answers to these questions.
Finally, Princeton physics professor emeritus John Archibald Wheeler asks, "How Come the Quantum?" In three pages, he identifies the quantum as a persistent scientific mystery, notes his personal contributions to quantum physics, and concludes that the answer to this question will also help us answer another: "How come existence?" I suspect that speculative answers to the latter question could take up a book in itself; Wheeler only breeds confusion by mentioning it in passing.
In contrast, two of the remaining essays on physics—Joel Achenbach's "Life Beyond Earth" and Alan Lightman's "A Portrait of the Novelist as a Young Scientist"—are by writers who know that we need to understand the subject in order to care about their conclusions. They go to great pains to bring us up to speed.
Achenbach, a reporter and columnist for The Washington Post, seems accustomed to explaining scientific concepts to a lay audience. He writes carefully, taking no background knowledge for granted: "Our ideas about extraterrestrial life are what Sagan called ‘plausibility arguments,' usually shot through with unknowns, hunches, ideologies, and random ought-to-bes," he explains.
Achenbach, Lightman, and most of the other writers featured in the collection don't assume that readers have a background in their field, and they also aren't condescending about bringing you up to speed. This is a good thing: Given the breadth of subjects and styles that appear in this collection of science writing, we need all the help we can get.
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