science writing_ 'when a kid is excited about ideas, that feels good' | books | the observer

7/28/2019 Science Writing_ 'When a Kid is Excited About Ideas, That Feels Good' | Books | the Observer

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Left to right: science authors James Gleick, Lone Frank, Steven Pinker, Joshua Foer and Brian Greene in the library

at the Royal Society, London. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

Last Monday, five of the world's foremost science writers gathered in London to learn if they

would receive the Royal Society's Winton prize for science books 2012. Prior to the evening's

awards, we gathered them in the society's library to talk about reporting on what one of them,

James Gleick, called the "very edge of what I'm able to understand". Writers such as Gleick

play a vital role in how we comprehend the world around us. And as science discovers more

and more about our universe, its theories and findings become more and more technical and

data-driven.

So the role of scientists and science writers, such as the five assembled here, in turning this

complex work into accessible, illuminating prose becomes trickier and more vital. The sixth

nominee for the prize, Nathan Wolfe, author ofThe Viral Storm, was unable to attend on

account of being in the Congolese jungle. No live satellite link-up was needed, however, since

the judges awarded the prize to Gleick for his bookThe Information.

Ian Tucker: Why is popular science reporting important?

Joshua Foer: When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, it was still possible for an

educated person, a polymath, actually to know something about everything. Today, that is not

possible. Steven Pinker might be a great cognitive scientist but I bet he can't explain how they

discovered the Higgs boson.Brian Greene: He just explained it to me earlier and he did quite a good job.

JF: That speaks to why we need great interpreters more than ever. And what we do becomes

more and more important because as science becomes more esoteric it requires people to help

the rest of us to understand it.

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Science writing: how do you make complexissues accessible and readable?

As London's Royal Society prepared to award its annual book prize,

we asked five top writers Steven Pinker, James Gleick, Brian

Greene, Lone Frank and Joshua Foer to debate what makes good

science writing in a technically minded age

Ian Tucker

The Observer, Sunday 2 December 2012
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When you are writing where do you set the difficulty dial? Do you want your

readers to finish your book in one sitting or work hard at every sentence to glean

some insight from it?

Steven Pinker: Before I wrote my first cognitive book, I got a bit of advice from an editor,

which was probably the best advice I ever received. She said that the problem many scientists

and academics have when they write for a broad audience is that they condescend; they

assume that their target audience isn't too bright, consists of truck drivers, chicken pluckers

and grannies knitting dollies, and so they write in motherese, they talk down. She said: "You

should assume your readers are as smart as you are, as curious as you are, but they don't

know what you know and you're there to tell them what they don't know." I'm willing to make

a reader do some work as long as I do the work of giving them all the material they need to

make sense of an idea.

BG: The ideal thing is that readers can take in a book at a variety of levels. If they really want

to dig in deep to understand every last thing, including the end notes, then God bless you,

that's fantastic! But others who just want get the gist of it, to let the ideas wash over them, I

hope the text has enough momentum to propel them through that. It's a hard balance to

strike, but I think people appreciate it when you are at least close to that target.

Lone Frank: A lot of people will say don't use difficult technical terms, but basically you can

explain anything to people if you do it by good writing using plain words.

Has anyone omitted anything because they found it too difficult to explain?

BG: Ever? Always. I agree in principle that you can explain everything, but you try to explain

[symmetries] in algebraic geometry to a lay audience. Good luck. There are things that really

are too hard to understand without a technical training, but the art is still leaving enough of

the heart of the subject so you haven't eviscerated it and you've done justice to the subject.

JF: Ultimately, everyone in this room is on some level an entertainer. We are competing for

readers' attention against blogs, video games and movies. What I'm trying to do is tell stories

that can take people from place A to place B, not just in a narrative arc but in terms of their

understanding of a subject. It can be tremendously rewarding to be taken on a journey like

that.

James Gleick: I don't know whether this is confessing or bragging, but I'm often at the very

edge of what I'm able to understand myself. I'm writing books about things that I care about,

telling the stories that I think matter to our culture and our culture is more and more about

scientific things. My bookThe Information is in some ways not a science book at all, but in

writing it I had to grapple with some things that were quite technical. So for me to get to grips

with it often requires asking smart people a lot of dumb questions.

The lay person might not realise there are particular issues with science writing

and lump all non-fiction together.

JG: I'm with the lay person. I don't think I'm typical here; everyone but Josh [Joshua Foer] is

or was a scientist. I backed into it by way of journalism; I never meant to be a science writer. I

resist the idea.

LF: I agree. I think a lot of the time what distinguishes science writing from non-fiction is that

is quite boring, quite formulaic.

SP: As the mindset of science is applied to other fields, the distinction is going to harder and

harder to make. My book [The Better Angels of Our Nature] is an example. It's partly a book

of history, partly a book of cognitive and neuroscience and it has also been nominated for a

history prize. I look at historical trends and in my view if you talk about a trend and you use

the words decrease or increase there should be numbers attached. So I report history that can

be quantified and summarised in graphs. Not all historians are on board with that approach to

doing history. To the extent that they are, the distinction between science and general non-

fiction is going to erode. Also if one wants to explain historical phenomena as I do that is

not one damn thing after another, but why things seem to go in a particular direction if you

have a phenomenon and you are trying to explain it in terms that are more general and

simple, in a sense you are doing science.

Learning is associated with difficulty in most people's minds. Do you think

sometimes it has to be hard, otherwise it's not considered science?

SP: I'll give you an anecdote that might give you the difference between the mindset of the

scientist and the humanities scholar. I once went to an interdisciplinary conference with

scientists and humanities professors. At the end of a talk exploring a painting, the speaker

said: "Well, I hope to have complicated the subject matter in several ways." I thought, that's
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the difference between a scientist and a critic the scientist would say: "I hope to have

simplified the matter in several ways."

LF: A lot of readers have an expectation that everything should be easy these days; you

shouldn't work for absolutely anything, so you won't read a book if it's a little too difficult; you

just throw it away and find something else.

JG: That's a depressing thought. I hope it's not true. I certainly don't write as though it's true.

I think people like to be challenged. And it doesn't have to be about science there are books

on history and of literary biography that are challenging. If you're reading a book of any

length it's because you want to.

LF: I think you're talking about the 1% and not the 99%.

JG: You know, in the book business it is about the 1%.

BG: That's a lot of sales; in the US that's three million.

LF: I think there's probably a cultural difference. Where I come from, Denmark, science is

just not valued at all, we hardly have any science writing. For example, Richard Dawkins

cannot get his latest book translated because there's no market for it. That tells you

something.

There seems to be a mini boom going on in science books at the moment. Would

anyone like to speculate why?

BG: Thankfully, my experience has been so different from what you described in Denmark,

which is frightening. Obviously, it's a very self-selected group that I encounter but I think

there is a growing body of people that really wants to know what's happening in the world of

science.SP: Also, more and more, we educated people live in a world that is described by science.

People don't believe that the world was created 5,000 years ago, at least the kind of people

that we try to attract to buy our books. Educated people will accept that we are evolved from

primates, that our mental life depends on the functioning of our brains, that we're subject to

illusions, fallacies and biases. These are deep existential questions and it's science that is

posing and answering them.

JG: You've just defined an entire American political party as uneducated!

SP: Yes, indeed.

JG: It used to strike me as obvious, that the question didn't need to be asked: of course we

care about science, of course we understand that science is what explains the questions we

most care about finding answers to. The scariest thing is the opposite tendency in our country

(where four of us live), where suddenly it seems to me people are increasingly antagonistic to

the notion that science is the place to go to answer these questions. I didn't see that coming.

When I started writing about science it didn't occur to me that that would ever be

controversial.

SP: It might be in that America one of the two political parties seems to defiantly oppose the

world science view. But I suspect that isn't the best way of understanding it, because they still

look for oil using the assumptions about the age of the Earth that we all believe in; when they

get sick they go to a doctor and they worry about the evolution of drug resistance just as we

do. They're not Amish, they don't return to the land. So in a sense they have already bought

into the scientific world, but there are just a few highly symbolic issues that define your moral

and political identity that they stake out a position on, and I think that is very different from

scientific ignorance. In fact, one study done by a former graduate student at my department atHarvard showed that people who endorse the theory of evolution don't understand it any

better than those that deny it. We shouldn't confuse the moralisation of a small number of

hot-button issues with hostility with the scientific world view in general.

How do you judge a successful book? Sales? Feedback from academics?

BG: All that's part of it but one thing I ask myself is what it would have been like to write a

book 20 years ago when there wasn't the ability of someone just to send you an email? When

an eight-year-old kid writes to you with questions and is excited about the ideas, it's not

anything to do with sales or overarching impact, but that one feels good when one person is so

excited about your book.

JF: I don't think I would be sitting at the table if it wasn't for the three of you guys writing

books that I read in high school that deeply impacted me Chaos [by Gleick], The LanguageInstinct[Pinker] and The Elegant Universe [Greene]. All the books I read in high school

shaped how I thought about the world and what I wanted to do with my life. I don't think you

recognise the ways in which you affect people that you don't hear about until years later.
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Joshua and Lone, you've both written books that thread science through your

own experiences . Were you worried about treating your subject in a less

objective way?

LF: In a book about personal genomics, it's very hard to go out in the third person and ask:

"How did it feel to get this information?" You might as well go and get it yourself. My

experience is one experience; somebody else will handle it differently. So I just use myself as

the guinea pig to tell both sides of the story. It's also a way of drawing some people in. They

will bite on to the personal story and get the science along with it.

JF: I'm only interested in writing insofar as it's a tremendous vehicle for exploring questions

that I'm interested in and hopefully finding answers to those questions. I wasn't supposed to

be in my book; that happened a little way down the line when my interest in the subject

sucked me in to a degree where it would have been impossible for me to tell the story without

being a part of it. So it's a happy accident that I'm one of the main characters. I can't imagine

writing a second book and not similarly being that deeply engaged.

Brian or Steven, would you write a book in the first person?

SP: I did a personal essay on having my genome sequenced several years ago. Also, I can

imagine writing a book on the pitfalls of recounting life from the first person's point of view,

drawing on what a psychologist knows about how self-serving and distorted our memories

are.

BG: Chapters ofThe Elegant Universe are written in the first person. Initial drafts were not

because the concern was it would feel too self-serving to write about your own work in a book

for the general public. So the first draft had no names; it was just the ideas and it was utterly

crap. So I went back and I put it all in, who had done what, the arguments about this, the

decisions about that. Then, when it came to my own work, it was natural that, since I was

involved in it, I told it from the first-person perspective. If you don't tell the story, it's not

going to work.

Analogies. Is it better to make do with an accessible but maybe imperfect analogy

rather than to describe in detail in possibly an impenetrable way?

SP: Analogy is enormously powerful. In fact, one could argue that we understand everything

except for the physical world of falling objects by analogy. If you look at our language it's

almost all metaphorical. But, there is a difference between literary metaphor and scientific

analogy, and that is in a literary metaphor the more connections there are between the figure

of speech and the thing in the world the richer and more wonderful it is, and in the scientificanalogy if there are too many ways in which you can relate the analogy to the world, that

makes it a bad analogy, not a good one. Analogies have to be chosen and explained carefully.

You've got to point the reader to the correspondence, point for point between the thing in the

world you're explaining in terms of your analogy. To be whipsawed between one analogy and

other so you don't know what point is doing the work, that's what can make an analogy

misleading.

I read somewhere that analogies are like ill-fitting coats the most important

parts are covered, but some may protrude and may restrict movement.

JG: I don't buy that! Anything can be done badly, but I also believe that analogy is the way

humans learn and explore our world. It's true at some level that a physicist will say that the

language of nature is mathematics, but I also believe that any physicist in creating his or herown understanding of the world is automatically thinking in terms of analogies. I believe that

any scientific model or theory is a kind of analogy, which is to say imperfect, flawed by

definition and at least incomplete. It's a model, it's not the world itself.

Has anyone here tried writing a novel?

SP: I'm married to a novelist so I recognise my incompetence.

BG: I published a short story that had real science in it. It was about time travel. It was one of

the most fun things I've done. There's a certain kind of freedom that comes with the fictional

aspect. The fact that it's tethered to reality by real science gives it a sense of stability that I

would have trouble finding if I was just making it all up.

Are science writers reporting on the frontiers of knowledge or imagination?

LF: A lot of people don't realise that what comes out of science really affects the way they

think. They think that culture comes out of philosophy, plays and theatre and stuff, and

science just produces gadgets. I really want to show how the knowledge we have from science

shapes our culture.
http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/lost-in-translation/


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BG: I think it's imperative kids recognise that science involves as much creativity as any other

so-called creative discipline.

JG: I don't think anybody at this table would be writing about science if we bought into the

idea that the process of science was a matter of rote and grunt work. All five of us have

focused on imagination and creativity, not just as the occasional accidental part of the

scientific process but as the things that make it work, make it exciting.

SP: The only proviso to all of this is that in science it's not enough to be imaginative and

creative, it also has to be right. There are plenty of very imaginative people history forgot,

because their beautiful, elegant scheme didn't fit the facts.

How has the formal, technical way scientists write journal papers affectedpopular science writing?

BG: I was looking back over some quantum mechanics papers from the 1920s and in one

article the scientist described an accident in his laboratory when a glass tube exploded, a

nickel got tarnished and he heated it to get rid of the tarnish he went through the whole

story himself in the technical article. You don't really see that much these days. I don't know if

that is a one-off example, I haven't done an exhaustive study, but have journal articles moved

away from telling the story of discovery to just a more cut-and-dried approach?

SP: They have; I think that's been documented. There is scientifically a problem with that, as

opposed to narrating what happened. The problem is that since you're under pressure from

the journal editor to tell your story leading up to your conclusion without talking about all the

blind alleys and accidents, it actually distorts the story itself because it inflates the probability

that what you discovered is really significant. If you tried 15 things that didn't work and onething that did work and didn't talk about the 15 that didn't work, then the statistic that makes

it significant is actually mistaken. The statistic has to be computed over all of the experiments

you ran, not just the one that happened to work. In the social sciences especially, we're seeing

that there's a lot of damage done by the practice of only reporting the successes and telling the

story as if it was a straight line to a successful result.

Are scientists their own worst enemies when it comes to communicating their

work?

JF: People like me probably should be unnecessary in the whole process. Ideally, scientists

would be great communicators and there wouldn't be any place for people who are non-

experts to step in and put together a cohesive story about the work that scientists are doing.

JG: But those skills don't have to go together. You can be a great scientist and not have theslightest interest in communicating; Isaac Newton was a lousy communicator. I think we

should just think that we're lucky that someone like Brian Greene is not only a great scientist

but also a great communicator. I think that's more exceptional than typical.

JF: But I wonder whether scientists wouldn't be better scientists if they were better

communicators?

BG: There are some who certainly think so. There's a new institute at Stony Brook that is

geared toward having science communication as part of the training for graduate students of

science. It seems reasonable to me that if people could communicate even at the level of

scientist to scientist, more freely, more articulately, it might spark more things.

JF: What you're supposed to be doing in a science book or popular article is distilling, finding

what is essential and communicating that. That's not just an act of storytelling, it's an act of

thinking and it requires a kind of clarity of communication that not just the scientists but

academics in general have moved away from and I think it makes them think less clearly.

Steven and Brian, do you feel that your academic colleagues take you less

seriously because you write popular books?

BG: I was afraid of that early on, at least with my first book. But I found that at least to my

face, the vast majority of people in the field of string theory felt that they were in this little

corner of science that nobody knew much about and they just liked the idea of getting it out to

the general public.

SP: My experience is the same, in that I don't want to let myself think those thoughts

because it would too easily furnish me with an excuse to blow off people who are criticising me

and give me an excuse not to take the criticism as seriously as I ought to as a scientist.
http://www.centerforcommunicatingscience.org/http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/02/science-writing-debate-pinker-gleick-greene-frank-foer/print#http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/02/science-writing-debate-pinker-gleick-greene-frank-foer/print#


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science writing_ 'when a kid is excited about ideas, that feels good' | books | the observer

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