HOW do you make the stuff of science with all its messy data and tricky ideas palatable both for the practising scientist and the educated generalist? One interesting answer of late has been to sweeten the pill of hard science with a generous dash of good old-fashioned storytelling. In 1996, Dava Sobel’s Longitude set a pattern for heroic, historical tales and would-be Sobels appear each year. They’re beginning to look like a part-work approach to both science and history, but there’s no doubt that their narrative approach is still a huge success.
Someone who has pulled off the trick this year is Jenny Uglow. The Lunar Men is delightful, and manages to weave both the science and the impact it had into the history of a group of 18th-century luminaries such as Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood. Another gem was The Glass Bathyscaphe by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, moving beyond the heroic tale to track down a material – glass – through the ages.
Another kind of storytelling – biography – has also turned out some of this year’s best books. Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox gives a vivid and exhilarating account of scientific and personal politics in the lab during momentous times in science. Janet Browne’s powerful second volume of her Darwin biography, The power of place, continues the massive task she has set herself (see “Labour of love”, this issue for a full review). And Lisa Jardine’s On a Grander Scale: The life of Christopher Wren is a classic work.
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As for autobiography, its great strength is that scientists can tell their own stories within the rich context of science. Jon Beckwith in Making Genes, Making Waves reminds us that he first warned about the social impact of genetic engineering back in 1969. His autobiography shows what hard work it is to combine science and politics, to keep different networks of interests alive.
Networking as a theme also runs through many of the biographies. We may think of Darwin in his later years as a recluse, but his wide correspondence contradicts this impression. The members of the Lunar Society were living links between industry, ideas and experiment. And any network follows the same powerful and simple rules, whether it’s a supermarket chain or the Internet, a desert ecosystem or a terrorist group. Mark Buchanan’s Nexus explored the work of the scientists behind these discoveries. One of them – Albert-Laszlo Barabasi – brought out his own book, Linked. It’s a harder read, but has the authority of discovery: you’re hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth.
Robert Kirshner is another insider. He introduces the general reader to a thoroughly counterintuitive idea in The Extravagant Universe. It’s a good introduction to the notion that the Universe is speeding up as it gets older, rather than slowing down. He’s also known as a great lecturer, which may explain the clarity of this book, a pleasure to read.
If you enjoy following the physical sciences, then add these to your reading list: John Barrow’s masterly marshalling of The Constants of Nature into one book; Douglas Rushall’s Our Molecular Future, which did a good job of removing the hype from nanoscience; and Martin Rees’s Our Cosmic Habitat, a fabulous journey round the cosmos in excellent company.
Heading for the life sciences, the must-read is clearly Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. A book on the grand scale (that’s nearly 500 pages). Not a man to shy away from controversy, Pinker has used his undeniable intellectual energy to produce a huge comprehensive exploration of human nature. He’s done the hard work for the reader by marshalling a huge swathe of ideas about human nature. And, no, the good news is that we aren’t blank slates. What we are is a whole lot more complicated. The second half of this tome is more controversial, showing the author’s attraction to evolutionary psychology’s explanatory powers. Not for the faint-hearted.
For evolution pure and not so simple, try the excellent What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr, which looks destined to become required reading. Mayr is not a man to pull his punches with the difficult subject matter, though his elegant explanations are a great help. (If you just want a quicker fix so you don’t embarrass yourself in front of your bright nine-year-old, Carl Zimmer’s heavily illustrated book Evolution will do the trick.)
Advice on how to think is always useful, and you may need it to tackle Pinker – though not Mayr. Evelyn Fox Keller’s Making Sense of Life is strongly recommended. A mathematician by training, she is now a biologist. Here, she uncovers the disparities between two cultures, not the usual suspects, the humanities and the sciences, but between the life and physical sciences. She examines why, for example, biologists are so nervous when dealing with the concept of proof compared with mathematicians.
This year has also produced a good haul of those useful books that take a sweeping look at a whole field – even if the writing style can sometimes be pedestrian. Happily, this is not true of Rita Carter’s Consciousness, which has enough brio to see you through a tough field. Nor of Walter Gratzer’s entertaining sweep through the personal side of science in Eurekas and Euphorias. His swift word pictures of discoveries in often astounding circumstances will entertain and intrigue even the most jaded.
While history is sweetening science, interestingly enough science continues to provide historians with a bit of theoretical backbone. The boldest attempt so far has to be Manuel DeLanda’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Zone, 1997). Turbulence and non-linear dynamics may seem uneasy bedfellows for the history of towns, but do try this book, in which a historian dives into problems of urbanisation by treating people, materials and place as turbulent flows of information to be tamed by scientific tools. Network theory is next. The hope is that it will make human sense out of masses of physical fragments: the tale of the Roman brickmaker, not just monuments and emperors.