The art of writing about science

Science writing has become an invaluable genre of its own in contemporary America. As science in all its guises and complexities rushes away from the nonscientist like a fantastically expanding universe, those unlearned in its ways all the more urgently need guides who can tell us in plain English what is going on.

Some contemporary science writers excel in the art of writing itself: John McPhee’s books on the geology of America, for example, and David Quammen’s about the diversity of species and their habitats. Their efforts set a mark that others reach for and quite often, as demonstrated in “The Best American Science Writing 2003,” attain.

The naturalists have it the easiest. Their subjects are usually extensions of that we can see, like frogs, whales and forests. Those who try to explain contemporary physics in all its mind-stretching complexity have tackled the hardest job. Most readers have heard often enough of black holes so that the words and images the scientists and their explicators use are familiar. Some readers could probably even pass a simple test describing a black hole. But how many can truly grasp the concept, to get, as the expression goes, their minds around it?

The writers in this collection, edited by neurologist Oliver Sacks with Jesse Cohen as series editor, help their readers do just that. The collection demonstrates that in U.S. newspapers and magazines, the general reader has access to a high order of clear and engaging articles about science. (No book excerpts are included.)

Some of the articles quickly get one’s attention. Trevor Corson writes in the Atlantic Monthly about Maine lobstermen (well, nearly all of them are men) who believe they, and not less experienced ecologists, know the most about the habits of creatures they catch and we eat; overfishing is not to be feared as long as the lobstermen are allowed to employ their own fine knowledge of their craft to limit the catch.

Peter Canby takes us in Harper’s magazine to one of the remotest places on Earth -- 1,700 square miles of nature preserve in the Republic of Congo. He leaves us worried about the eventual fate of its wondrous jungle elephants and other animals as pressures for development and exploitation grow.

Atul Gawande writes in the New Yorker from his own experience about an aspect of medical training that would provoke anxiety in more people if it were better known: how surgeons learn their specialties by practicing, not always successfully, on unsuspecting patients.

Jennifer Kahn in Discover explores the X-files in UC Berkeley’s physics department -- its collection of notions about science assiduously promoted by cranks. Of course, she adds, not all offbeat ideas are goofy, and she cites as evidence the famous story of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. In 1913, the “uncouth” port clerk in Madras sent 120 theorems to celebrated Cambridge University mathematician Godfrey Hardy, who at first dismissed them as “gibberish,” only to find upon a more careful look that some of them were revelatory. Ramanujan was elected to the Royal Society five years later.

A problem that surfaces from time to time in science is examined by Leonard Cassuto in Salon: how pressure to build a career once in a while leads to what would be a sin in science if science encompassed so religious a notion -- the falsification of evidence to produce a desired result. He cites the case of a young physicist at Bell Labs who used the same set of data to tell different stories.

Some of the pieces in this collection do indeed stretch the mind. One is Frank Wilczek’s consideration in Daedalus of whether Pythagoras’ 6th century BC credo that “all things are number” applies to the modern understanding of quantum mechanics.

Another is the New York Times’ Dennis Overbye’s inquiry into Stephen W. Hawking’s idea about black holes and its progeny, including the elusive string theory of the universe.

“The Best American Science Writing 2003” provides both an informative survey of some contemporary developments in science and good examples of a flourishing craft.