http://tinyurl.com/69mh4w A whirligig tour of scientific fundamentals makes an appeal to intellectual enjoyment The genre of popular-science writing has something of the paradoxical about it, owing its very existence to science’s lack of popularity at school and its peripheral role in our cultural life. In a world where an American President can claim that the “verdict is still out” on evolution, where half of the population of the European Union has no idea that an electron is smaller than an atom, and where only 7 per cent of English teenagers between the ages of thirteen and seventeen think science is “cool”, science’s unpopularity is matched only by its importance in shaping our lives. It is a situation of which Natalie Angier, the author of this popular-science primer, The Canon, is keenly aware. After a quarter of a century working as a science writer, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for a series of features in the New York Times, when people call science “bo-o-oring” she takes it personally. But how to interest a society as indifferent to scientific ideas as it is hungry for their technological results? Dispensing rapidly with the usual arguments for greater public understanding of science, Angier makes a direct appeal to intellectual enjoyment, which sets the tone for the whole of her whirligig tour. “Of course you should know about science, for the same reason that Dr Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things are fun, and fun is good.” With fun as her watchword, armed with interviews of “hundreds” of scientists, Angier sets off in pursuit of everything “ nonspecialist nonchildren” should know about science, what she calls the “ beautiful basics”. Very basic they are too, with no time in 264 pages for anything much on fundamentals such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, Avogadro’s number, or kin selection. She begins with a straightforward account of “scientific thinking” which describes science as “a way of viewing the world” and warns of the dangers of presenting science as “a body of facts” – an admonition largely ignored for the rest of The Canon, which chooses to follow a sightseeing trip round current scientific knowledge rather than trace the historical development of scientific theories. Science is a “dynamic process of discovery”, which studies “objective reality” by breaking problems up into “tractable pieces ”. Scientists “thrive” on uncertainty and “demand evidence” to “rule out competing hypotheses” as a way of “approximating the truth”, an account which offers little to explain either science’s striking effectiveness, or its bewildering alternation between sweeping consensus and all-out dispute. Angier pushes aside the notion that mathematical ability is required for scientific sophistication, quoting Brian Greene’s assertion that “In principle, every equation can be expressed in English as a sentence”, but admits the need for what she calls “quantitative thinking”, devoting the next two chapters first to probability and then to an exploration of the proportions of the universe from the nano-tiny to the giga-large. The stage is now set for the compendium of basic facts Angier was keen to avoid, with chapters giving the bare bones of physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology and astronomy. Apart from a chapter-long defence of evolution, the politics of science is left mostly to one side, with only a glancing treatment of debates about GM food, global warming and stem cells, making plenty of room for exploring the scientific consensus on everything from atoms to dark energy. Here there are arresting nuggets and breathtaking concepts galore – the fact that a cell cut from your kidney will start crawling around independently if given the chance, the insight that geological change is driven by the transfer of heat from the Earth to space – but they are presented in an excitable prose style which is often too showy to be straightforwardly comprehensible, and once or twice even veers off towards nonsense. Angier seems to have decided that the way to have “fun” with science is to spice up her prose style, offering generous helpings of slang, bombast and anecdote, seasoned with puns, rhymes and a big dollop of alliteration. Open the book at random and we find chlorine’s “outer shell” of electrons “shy of satiety . . . so chlorine leans towards mean, toward stealing electrons when it can”, or a “cadence of swishing . . . [which] can instigate a smooth, sinuous, motivated wave, which would surely buoy a rubber duckie outward through all of space, time, and divinity if not for the walls of the tub”. When the “slowing down” of “Earth’s dervish dancing” is attributed largely to the “tidal tugging of our tagalong moon”, or when atoms are described as cohering “covalently as molecules, ionically as salts or ironically as metals”, the writing has begun to get in the way. Angier’s enthusiasm is at such a pitch that it can sometimes seem that she is turning stylistic cartwheels out of an underlying lack of confidence in the material, but eventually she wearies even herself: "Life is the anti-accident, the most thermodynamically profligate heave-ho ever instigated and subsequently amplified, annotated, explicated, expurgated, renovated . . . well, you get the idea." One of the reasons Angier’s prose has to do so much of the heavy lifting is that this is a book free not only from mathematics, but also from illustrations. The orthogonal relationship between the electric and magnetic fields that make up a beam of light is only as “hard to envision”, as she declares, for readers deprived of a simple line-drawing. This is a general-science primer with no picture of the phylogenetic tree of life, the covalent bond, the DNA molecule, the convection currents in the Earth’s mantle, or the Gaussian distribution of probability, to name but a few. The invitation to “compare the following foursome of forelimbs” would be a much more convincing plank in building a case for evolution next to a diagram of a bat wing, a penguin flipper, a lizard leg and a human arm. Angier’s aversion to images shows more than a predilection for making things harder than they need to be, it also reveals something of her attitude to scientific models, arguably the missing piece in her account of the scientific method. It is the repeated abstraction of complicated reality into simple models which gives science its power. Electrons don’t really orbit atomic nuclei at all, but if you think of them as being a bit like planets you can apply similar mathematics to make useful predictions, explain what is going on in the street lamp outside your door, or build a laser. Science is successful and unified because scientists’ simple pictures have captured something of how the world we live in actually works. At the same time it is uncertain and riven with dispute because complex problems can be modelled in many different ways, and the simplifications which are appropriate in some circumstances may not hold in others. For all Natalie Angier’s thorough research and prodigious effort, The Canon is not a book that will make science truly popular. --

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