I used to always read three books at a time: one literature, one social sciences or philosophy, and one science or mathematics.
In the past two or three years I have been neglecting the last category. Partially this is due to a massive upturn in reading literature. 2016, for example, was a year of reading obscure lit I was tracking down in Berkeley's libraries. Partially, though, this was also due to consistent rebuffs in attempting to read physics books.
For my money, no good physics books, that is those which elucidate novel discoveries, were written after the 1930s. Heisenberg, for example, made an effort to ensure his work 'The Physical Principles of Quantum Theory' made sense to a lay audience. Since the "scientific revolution" of the Renaissance most scientists usually took some pains to make sure their work, if obscure or difficult for the non-specialist, came with lots of explanation. (Isaac Newton is a notable exception to this rule.) Preceding and following a couple pages of equations there would be ample text spent on disentangling the meaning of what was just stated mathematically.
Last year I tackled Planck's 'Treatise on Thermodynamics' - only the first third of which was intelligible to a layman like me. The other big scientific work last year was 'Cybernetics' by Norbert Wiener, had the same issue. It was better than Planck, but still a struggle. The year before I only read Levi's 'Periodic Table', admittedly more memoir than scientific text, Muir's work on glaciation in California, and two mathematical works I found all-too-cumbersome for decidedly opposite reasons: Fibonacci's 'Liber Abaci', which was dull as unseasoned millet porridge, and Boole's 'Investigation', which, like Planck, began promising, and then devolved into unintelligible equations for hundreds of pages. 2014 saw Boyle's 'Sceptical Chymist' finally checked off, but providing little of value, with no other works of scientific or mathematical interest being read that year.
I learn best when approaching a subject historically. And so, for the time being, I'm going to give physics a rest, and return to a different field, genetics, where I had left off with Jacob and Monod's theories, and Dawkins. My study of the history of genetics had taken me from Mendel to Sutton, to Dreisch and Morgan, through Beadle and Tatum to Watson and Crick. But it had stopped in the late 60s / early 70s. So that's where I returned. First I picked up an older paper by Barbara McClintock, on chromosomes in maize varieties which was very interesting, published in the mid-50s. Then I took out Gould's 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny', which I just began, and which is quite interesting so far. After this I intend to turn to Carroll's 'Endless Forms Most Beautiful'.
Most students, I wager, would have a hard time naming a living scientist who contributed significantly to their field. Sure they know Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, but what are these men known for? Tyson did a little productive work in studying supernovas, and Nye invented part of a jet engine for the Boeing 747. Neither is known for this work, they are instead science popularizers. Really, beyond Stephen Hawking, there are no superstars in the science field, and most students, at best, would only be able to say (if anything) that Hawking did something to do with black holes. I mean, he hasn't won a Nobel Prize, and most of his theoretical predictions have yet to be proven. Whether Hawking's ideas prove themselves is still to be seen. That's a far cry from someone like Einstein, who in his lifetime saw most of his theory confirmed. Indeed, one of the few sensational science stories of the past two years has been the final confirmation of Einstein waves - showing what a long shadow was cast by our fascination with the German physicist.
It was unusual, back in the 20s and 30s, to have so many superstars all at once. Rutherford and Fermi, Einstein and Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrodinger. Not often do we see this. But for decades this trend continued, with people like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Willard Libby, and William Shockley. The last time Time Magazine put a scientist as Person of the Year was 1996. It was David Ho (he helped pioneer AIDS research, and is not exactly a household name). Twenty years have elapsed since then, and his distinction came after a long pause since "US Scientists" won the title in 1960. By the Watergate era it seemed scientists were taking more and more of a cultural backseat. Sure you have Steve Jobs and the technologists like Tim Berners-Lee, but hard science, physics, bio, chem - we don't really celebrate that much anymore. We hear of new developments, everyone seems abuzz about CRISPR Cas9, but can you name the scientists who discovered it, or those who decoded the human genome? (Craig Venter, a creep who has tried to patent genes and Francis Collins, who is a creationist, for the latter. I don't know who figured out CRISPR either.)
Perhaps our society's turning away from science is because we have so few role models. Since the popularization of the internet, twenty years ago, we've been on a technology binge, and our greatest discoveries have been in the transfer of satellite data, microprocessors, robotics, and software advancements. These are all very cool, and worthwhile, but it would be nice to have another Feynman or Fleming, another Rachel Carson or Marie Curie.
Another reason, of course, and this returns to my reading of Gould, is that scientists don't write for lay audiences. The people publishing the articles, they don't write a tome or treatise on their work and its importance, carefully breaking down how to make sense of it. We learn all of this second hand, from faceless textbook editors, or from news stories.
Finally, the third reason we don't have as much scientific awareness, besides anonymity and not writing for masses, is the issue of cost of entry. High school students today still learn the same cellular structure their parents' did. We all laugh when we hear that "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell", it's become a meme. It's a meaningless phrase - it doesn't tell us what mitochondria really is, or how it works, or what it's made of. School is a limited time-frame, so like anything, you can only cover so much in the time allotted. By the 1950s quantum physics was trickling down to the general population, but you don't get that taught to you in high school now any more than they did back then; because we still need to spend the earliest years of science describing how frogs grow and how there are eight planets around the sun. A child in middle school can be told about DNA, but they won't really get it. Hence why we can all make fun of mitochondria - we're taught facts that are essentially meaningless. I know the words xylem and phloem, but I'd be buggered to describe which is which. The jargon, created by scientists as a necessary result of the increase in their fields' complexity, renders comprehension far too difficult for any but the most capable adolescent minds.
Which is a real problem. We still draw pictures of atoms based on Bohr's orbits, because shells are too complicated. Most students who get a basic high school physics class won't really get Einstein's theories of Relativity. Nuclear radiation we know is bad, and something called half life follows, and that's bad too, because... atoms get scrambled? Somehow? So most people with high school degree's understanding of chemistry would be able to allege.
As scientific literacy wanes, kookiness abounds. Astrology, psychics, creationism, these are all doing fine in our frightening post-truth, "alternative facts" landscape. But it doesn't have to be this way. Firstly, there are giants among us, we just need to see more of them. News programs, late night, podcasts - we need people dedicated to weeding through the noise and taking the time to cover not just headline-grabbing stories, but the actual interesting work that's being done. People need to have a face to put to these stories. Secondly, we need the scientists who are making the big discoveries to start making their writing accessible. Peter Higgs, for example, has complained about his boson being called a 'God particle'. Very well, then he must write a better book, or at least collaborate to create a work, in which he describes his ideas the way he wants them expounded. If you make no efforts to educate the public, you can't really complain if they are uneducated. And finally, we need to consider how we teach science. If we spent less time on admittedly basic specifics, but which lacking context are rendered meaningless, and more time on central concepts of the scientific method, and logic, (combined with a non-problem solving teaching of mathematics) we could start to get people to think scientifically. And then the barrier to entry of these fields would not seem so high.
In the meantime, I'm going to get back on the wagon of reading science books, and trying to figure it out for myself.
In the past two or three years I have been neglecting the last category. Partially this is due to a massive upturn in reading literature. 2016, for example, was a year of reading obscure lit I was tracking down in Berkeley's libraries. Partially, though, this was also due to consistent rebuffs in attempting to read physics books.
For my money, no good physics books, that is those which elucidate novel discoveries, were written after the 1930s. Heisenberg, for example, made an effort to ensure his work 'The Physical Principles of Quantum Theory' made sense to a lay audience. Since the "scientific revolution" of the Renaissance most scientists usually took some pains to make sure their work, if obscure or difficult for the non-specialist, came with lots of explanation. (Isaac Newton is a notable exception to this rule.) Preceding and following a couple pages of equations there would be ample text spent on disentangling the meaning of what was just stated mathematically.
Last year I tackled Planck's 'Treatise on Thermodynamics' - only the first third of which was intelligible to a layman like me. The other big scientific work last year was 'Cybernetics' by Norbert Wiener, had the same issue. It was better than Planck, but still a struggle. The year before I only read Levi's 'Periodic Table', admittedly more memoir than scientific text, Muir's work on glaciation in California, and two mathematical works I found all-too-cumbersome for decidedly opposite reasons: Fibonacci's 'Liber Abaci', which was dull as unseasoned millet porridge, and Boole's 'Investigation', which, like Planck, began promising, and then devolved into unintelligible equations for hundreds of pages. 2014 saw Boyle's 'Sceptical Chymist' finally checked off, but providing little of value, with no other works of scientific or mathematical interest being read that year.
I learn best when approaching a subject historically. And so, for the time being, I'm going to give physics a rest, and return to a different field, genetics, where I had left off with Jacob and Monod's theories, and Dawkins. My study of the history of genetics had taken me from Mendel to Sutton, to Dreisch and Morgan, through Beadle and Tatum to Watson and Crick. But it had stopped in the late 60s / early 70s. So that's where I returned. First I picked up an older paper by Barbara McClintock, on chromosomes in maize varieties which was very interesting, published in the mid-50s. Then I took out Gould's 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny', which I just began, and which is quite interesting so far. After this I intend to turn to Carroll's 'Endless Forms Most Beautiful'.
Most students, I wager, would have a hard time naming a living scientist who contributed significantly to their field. Sure they know Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, but what are these men known for? Tyson did a little productive work in studying supernovas, and Nye invented part of a jet engine for the Boeing 747. Neither is known for this work, they are instead science popularizers. Really, beyond Stephen Hawking, there are no superstars in the science field, and most students, at best, would only be able to say (if anything) that Hawking did something to do with black holes. I mean, he hasn't won a Nobel Prize, and most of his theoretical predictions have yet to be proven. Whether Hawking's ideas prove themselves is still to be seen. That's a far cry from someone like Einstein, who in his lifetime saw most of his theory confirmed. Indeed, one of the few sensational science stories of the past two years has been the final confirmation of Einstein waves - showing what a long shadow was cast by our fascination with the German physicist.
It was unusual, back in the 20s and 30s, to have so many superstars all at once. Rutherford and Fermi, Einstein and Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrodinger. Not often do we see this. But for decades this trend continued, with people like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Willard Libby, and William Shockley. The last time Time Magazine put a scientist as Person of the Year was 1996. It was David Ho (he helped pioneer AIDS research, and is not exactly a household name). Twenty years have elapsed since then, and his distinction came after a long pause since "US Scientists" won the title in 1960. By the Watergate era it seemed scientists were taking more and more of a cultural backseat. Sure you have Steve Jobs and the technologists like Tim Berners-Lee, but hard science, physics, bio, chem - we don't really celebrate that much anymore. We hear of new developments, everyone seems abuzz about CRISPR Cas9, but can you name the scientists who discovered it, or those who decoded the human genome? (Craig Venter, a creep who has tried to patent genes and Francis Collins, who is a creationist, for the latter. I don't know who figured out CRISPR either.)
Perhaps our society's turning away from science is because we have so few role models. Since the popularization of the internet, twenty years ago, we've been on a technology binge, and our greatest discoveries have been in the transfer of satellite data, microprocessors, robotics, and software advancements. These are all very cool, and worthwhile, but it would be nice to have another Feynman or Fleming, another Rachel Carson or Marie Curie.
Another reason, of course, and this returns to my reading of Gould, is that scientists don't write for lay audiences. The people publishing the articles, they don't write a tome or treatise on their work and its importance, carefully breaking down how to make sense of it. We learn all of this second hand, from faceless textbook editors, or from news stories.
Finally, the third reason we don't have as much scientific awareness, besides anonymity and not writing for masses, is the issue of cost of entry. High school students today still learn the same cellular structure their parents' did. We all laugh when we hear that "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell", it's become a meme. It's a meaningless phrase - it doesn't tell us what mitochondria really is, or how it works, or what it's made of. School is a limited time-frame, so like anything, you can only cover so much in the time allotted. By the 1950s quantum physics was trickling down to the general population, but you don't get that taught to you in high school now any more than they did back then; because we still need to spend the earliest years of science describing how frogs grow and how there are eight planets around the sun. A child in middle school can be told about DNA, but they won't really get it. Hence why we can all make fun of mitochondria - we're taught facts that are essentially meaningless. I know the words xylem and phloem, but I'd be buggered to describe which is which. The jargon, created by scientists as a necessary result of the increase in their fields' complexity, renders comprehension far too difficult for any but the most capable adolescent minds.
Which is a real problem. We still draw pictures of atoms based on Bohr's orbits, because shells are too complicated. Most students who get a basic high school physics class won't really get Einstein's theories of Relativity. Nuclear radiation we know is bad, and something called half life follows, and that's bad too, because... atoms get scrambled? Somehow? So most people with high school degree's understanding of chemistry would be able to allege.
As scientific literacy wanes, kookiness abounds. Astrology, psychics, creationism, these are all doing fine in our frightening post-truth, "alternative facts" landscape. But it doesn't have to be this way. Firstly, there are giants among us, we just need to see more of them. News programs, late night, podcasts - we need people dedicated to weeding through the noise and taking the time to cover not just headline-grabbing stories, but the actual interesting work that's being done. People need to have a face to put to these stories. Secondly, we need the scientists who are making the big discoveries to start making their writing accessible. Peter Higgs, for example, has complained about his boson being called a 'God particle'. Very well, then he must write a better book, or at least collaborate to create a work, in which he describes his ideas the way he wants them expounded. If you make no efforts to educate the public, you can't really complain if they are uneducated. And finally, we need to consider how we teach science. If we spent less time on admittedly basic specifics, but which lacking context are rendered meaningless, and more time on central concepts of the scientific method, and logic, (combined with a non-problem solving teaching of mathematics) we could start to get people to think scientifically. And then the barrier to entry of these fields would not seem so high.
In the meantime, I'm going to get back on the wagon of reading science books, and trying to figure it out for myself.
