Atomic Nerds

The contact e-mail address doesn’t see too much action- and by the by, if you do e-mail us, don’t be surprised by a lengthy-ish delay as due to this reason we tend to forget it’s there- but we recently got an interesting reader request there, which was for accessible layman’s reading on modern science topics. It’s a good question; science writing (as opposed to science journalism, an entirely different kettle of fish) is a very tricky balancing act between not losing informational content and not getting too dense and technical. It’s very, very difficult for a writer very well-versed in his or her field to keep track of what a layman can and can’t be reasonably expected to penetrate, and to walk the line between being accessible and informative and treating the reader like a retard. Worse still is if nothing comes across at all but a wall of text.

Compounding the issue is that a great deal of science books aren’t written to provide a “guide to science”, as it were, but are written so that the author can hold forth on one particular aspect of his interest that happens to involve science, such as the impact of infectious disease and parasites on the spread of empires, or the restructuring of urban ecologies, or the problems of conserving top predators. It’s science writing, yes, but it’s for people that are either already very familiar with the science involved and just want to explore this implication or aspect of it, or else the science only needs to be sketched in lightly as interesting background details to some sort of drama. Books that are actually written to explain a field to the layman that aren’t textbooks are exceedingly rare. Such books that are also good are rarer.

So this list will be rather scattershot; I’m focusing more on authors with the skill to explain science on several different informational levels at once than I am on actually filling out a good list of good sources on all subjects. Commenters, feel more than free to kick in your contributions where you see holes.

I’m going to get my most superficially embarrassing recommendation out of the way first: the Science of Discworld series.

Okay, stop laughing at me, goddamn you. I know I’m a shameless fangirl, but I’m recommending these to non-fans for a reason.

Most “the science of (insert show, book, whatever” tie-in titles are discussions of the various correct representations and distortions of science in that show, and are especially popular with science fiction series. The science of Discworld books are a complete inversion of this pattern; instead, the authors- Terry Pratchett provides the framing, the real heavy lifting is done by Jack Cohen, an evolutionary biologist, and Ian Stewart, a mathematician- are using the tropes and illustrations of the fantasy series to illustrate principles of modern science. Since Terry Pratchett is quite fond of taking science and turning it inside out for purposes of plot device or in-joke, this all works far better than it should. The first book primarily covers physics, chemistry, and essentially “why earth looks and acts the way it does”, the second covers human culture and the rise of science as a system, and the third book covers causality, theories of multiple universes, and anti-science movements. One of the major reasons I recommend these is that the authors seem to have worked out a lot of methods of bridging different ways of thinking- I hate to say it was one of these that first made me really understand why just about every damn thing in the universe is either round or round-ish, but it was. The math never got through to me, but the narrative explanation did.

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart have written several other good books, but these are by far the most generalist- the others are on more specific topics in math, biology, and complexity.

Bill Bryson, a travel journalist, undertook a fairly ambitious project to write a summation of basic science for people like him that zoned out in dry public school classes, and by most accounts succeeded fairly admirably with A Short History of Nearly Everything. I hesitate to recommend something that I haven’t actually read, but I’ve read basically everything else he’s written and he’s always done a very good job of explaining the science involved when he happens to touch on it in his travel writings, as he often did in A Walk In The Woods. Worth a shot if this kind of thing is what you’re after.

One level of complexity and general rigor from Bryson is Natalie Angier’s The Canon, which is a very similar undertaking- but written by someone with a rather more advanced understanding of science and immersion in its worlds. In other words, it’s an overlay of modern science for the layman written by the scientist rather than the layman. It also devotes more time and space to how the business of science actually grinds along and how to see the world through that particular prism, rather than “this is what happened and this is how we know it did”, which is the approach that Bryson takes. Again, Angier has written several other books- I think she improved over time after this one, too.

Quantum physics, as a subject, is an absolute bitch and a half. I never felt I understood a damn thing about it until I read Robert Gilmore’s Alice In Quantumland- which borrows the basic Carroll structures to illustrate guess what. The framing device gets rather annoyingly twee at times, but the important thing about it is that it works- it seems like it would necessitate dumbing down the concepts, but for the most part it doesn’t. The book looks slim and unimposing, but it took me about four times longer to chew through it and feel I’d understood it than most books do, and it was definitely not because it was unclear. It’s just a complex subject. This is the only one I’ve read, but it looks as though Gilmore has quite the body of work taking this approach with various subjects in physics, such as particle physics, topology, and cosmology.

He doesn’t have much in the way of “generalist” books, but one of the biology science writers I admire the most is Robert Sapolsky. His essay collections The Trouble With Testosterone and Monkeyluv are probably the best examples of his talent and skill at taking a complex or unexpected biological phenomenon and writing about it in a way that is comprehensible to laymen but interesting to experts. If you’re at all interested in what exactly stress does to your body and psyche, his much longer book on that topic is extremely recommendable; there’s some slogging for those that are really unfamiliar with hormones and the brain, but the various payoffs are well worth it.

If you want evolutionary biology and the basics thereof explained to you, much as he annoys me nowadays, try Dawkins. His anti-religious polemics are usually theologically illiterate as well as adversarial, but his real talent was always in writing about evolution and science, and those older books are still well worth the read. Have a go at Unweaving The Rainbow, probably his best, or River out of Eden or Climbing Mount Improbable.

Off the beaten path of the standard Big Three of biology, chemistry, physics- and sorry I haven’t got any chem books in here, by the way, it’s just not a subject I ever felt the need to buy such a book on- we have one of Stingray’s favorite areas, the science of cryptography. If you wish to learn yourself up good on this subject, he recommends Simon Singh’s The Code Book. Since secrets and the preservation and untangling thereof are such a very human field, this one is as much history as it is science- so if you’re into fun stuff like the code arms races of World War II and the Cold War, you’ll like this one even leaving the science out.

So, readers- what are your favorites? Speak up! Doesn’t have to be just science- philosophy and epistemology tomes in the same general for-the-layman spirit are also welcome.

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