Riding a wave of wonder

You can explain to people who don’t know much of the physics, the early history... how Newton discovered... Kepler’s Laws, and equal areas, and that means it’s toward the sun, and all this stuff. And then the key — they always ask then, ‘Well, how do you see that it’s an ellipse if it’s the inverse square?’ Well, it’s God damned hard, there’s no question of that. But I tried to find the simplest one I could.”

Welcome to science. Treading through which is bound to give any writer squeaky bum time. Above are the words of Richard Phillips Feynman. In addition to being a physicist in the Manhattan Project, he was more celebrated for the “finest writings on physics”, scribbled as notes, but later compiled into “The Feynman Lectures On Physics”. The extract is from a lecture on something as simple as — “The Motion Of Planets Around The Sun”.

 

Feynman, though, can be said to have had it easy — after all he was addressing academia. Try, as a journalist, pitching a science story to an editor. If you manage to convince about its gravitas, you do walk away with the carte blanche to stick to the news. That in contemporary terms is trying to fit an x-ray burst in a distant nebula or explaining a new miniaturisation in nanotechnology in exactly 350 words. And all that it gets from the morning reader is “whatever...”.

Even Natalie Angier, the Pulitzer-winning science journalist of the New York Times deserves sympathy. It seems, on the back of readership surveys consistently voting the ‘Science Times’ on Tuesday the most-read pullout, the chief editor of the newspaper decides to congratulate the staff with a note that he too looks forward to the pullout on... Wednesdays. You couldn’t not fall in love with her book The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science after an introduction like that.

It is a daunting prospect with such a title. Though covering topics from mathematical probability to evolutionary biology and astronomy, it is not a competitor to an encyclopaedia. It is an effort to make you imagine, start a fascinating journey of questions that finally lead to an understanding of science. Angier is biased when her tone suggests ignorance of science is blasphemous, but she tempers it with quite energetically blending flowing feature writing with non-pliable facts.

The trip begins with a narrative of parents swapping their museum and zoo memberships for theatre and club memberships as their children grow up. It then moves seamlessly on to explain science through a career’s worth of anecdotes. The writer has in the past spent years in the company of white coats, her past books and reportage are evidence, but thankfully it comes through as refreshingly light. There is enough room for a sprinkling humour and an appreciable lot of self-depreciation.

The approach to demystifying facts always starts from zero, for example, the earth is discussed from the core to the atmosphere and outer space in one seamless section. But considering this is a book, one is left disappointed that it does not take sides in the most debated issues in science today. The only stand Angier takes is atheism (to which she has been long committed), while throwing her weight behind Darwinian theory.

It is rightly being suggested the book find a place in US school libraries, as the country finds itself in a situation where a significant percentage of science students in college are foreign, and those few Americans who do graduate turn stockbrokers (though it is hoped that will change with the economic downturn). But the appeal to an Indian who is fed a compulsory diet of science till tenth grade is rather limited. Unfortunately even the style of writing won’t be enough to keep a reader here engaged through the length.

It will make a difference here, though, if those who preach science in the manner required to ace a myriad of competitive exams, decide to take a leaf and try to get their pupils to do what the book says they must — imagine and wonder. You have to agree with the author that there are only a precious few of us who have managed to do that.

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THE CANON
THE BEAUTIFUL BASICS OF SCIENCE

Natalie Angier
Penguin India
Rs 399; 293 pages