The Canon (3 page)

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.