REFLECTIONS ON TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF SCIENCE WRITING

by Nigel Hey

Words are innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other; so, if you look after them, you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. … If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little, or make a poem that children will speak for you when you’re dead.

—Tom Stoppard, in The Real Thing

When people ask me how I got into science writing I have to say it started with Shakespeare. True, I had written the odd science article in my days as a general-assignment journalist, but it took the Bard to make science and technology an important part of my life. (To this day, if you look for my writings in the New York Public Library index, you’ll find one citation, for an article I wrote for Dance magazine years ago. No mention of my first three science books, and, less surprisingly, no mention of the technology articles and columns.)

The Shakespeare bit started in Albuquerque, when Crawford McCollum read my column in a local newspaper. It was a tongue-in-cheek account of my few experiences in theater, most of them tinged with disaster. The time as a child when I walked onto the set of Rose Marie the moment after the curtain rose (my father was playing the lead and had unwisely invited me back stage). My triumph in the role of a carrot in a nutrition propaganda play, at the age of 12. The secondary-school musical in which, while playing the role of a light-fingered gypsy, I dropped a fellow actor’s heirloom gold watch through my sash, not twice but three times consecutively, loudly onto the stage. My walk-on college parts in Witness for the Prosecution, Romeo and Juliet (when I temporarily crippled myself in an inexplicable fencing accident), and a play whose name I cannot now remember.

McCollum was a mathematician and astrophysicist at Sandia Laboratory, a very large nuclear-weapons R&D outfit on the east side of town. He also ran a tiny but ambitious amateur theater called Old Town Studio. After reading the column he phoned and asked if I would be interested in reading for Richard II. Not, I think, because he thought I might be able to bring humor to the role, but because he suspected I could do a fair job of enunciating a standard sort of English. I said yes and, probably because at the reading my nervous voice quavered in Gielgud-like fashion, he recruited me for the title role. Then he wanted me to do more. In my first Pinter play, The Caretaker, my fellow actors urged me to apply for a writing job with them at Sandia. I said no, I didn’t want to work at a bomb factory, which was rude because Sandia did not make nuclear weapons—Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore designed the nuclear explosives package and Sandia designed the rest of the weapon for manufacture elsewhere. My friends persisted. During rehearsals for The Homecoming I gave in, went for an interview, and was offered a job as a writer of technical manuals. A couple of weeks later, after I had convinced myself that I would always be a newspaperman, I was invited to meet Jim Mitchell, Sandia’s media relations chief.

Mitchell, a shrewd, well-read Oklahoman, sized me up and showed me a list of subjects I might write about, 20 or 25 of them. I looked them over, thought for a while, and my antipathy for the idea of working at the “bomb factory” dissolved. The people at Sandia were doing things that no one had ever done before. They were learning the secrets of electronic materials, making small and highly original mechanical devices, learning how interconnected crystals unzip in the process of corrosion. This was about learning the way nature worked and using the knowledge to make new or better gadgets. I was hooked. A year later, I was explaining this stuff to people at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, and they were writing about it too.

I had written a few articles about space technology in the early days, as a journalist in England and Bermuda, and somewhere I have yellowed clippings of my articles on Project Apollo and the early space probes. But my interest in science and technology didn’t get serious until I joined Jim Mitchell at Sandia, then crafted three books that were published by Putnam and Messner.
From that point, and somewhat to my surprise, I was a science writer, producing articles mostly for Sandia and no longer reporting for the mass media. I got to know the personalities of science journalism, from Mariette DiChristina of Scientific American to Roger Highfield of Britain’s Daily Telegraph, and came to admire them as people committed to bringing the news of scientific and technological developments to a general, or at least interdisciplinary, readership. They are on the front line of bridging the divide between C. P. Snow’s two cultures. Their responsibility reaches beyond the formidable challenge of interpreting unfamiliar information to nonspecialists. Every day they and their colleagues must sort through huge volumes of information that they might report upon. Then, from the items that remain from the first cull, they must verify the facts, determine what third parties have to say in the way of supportive or contradictory information, and consider illustrations. Finally, if the story idea still survives, they must write an article of the right length, in a fashion that will win the interest of their publication’s readers—and hope that copy editors and headline writers do not put a misleading spin on their work.

Meanwhile, I was writing articles other than press releases, on my own time, though these were in reality chapters of books that I planned to publish at some future date—a book about the Strategic Defense Initiative, one on the ethnology and anthropology of New Mexico, even a short one on education. I did much of my writing because the subjects intrigued me, I enjoyed the research, and I enjoyed working with words.

The book that I wanted to publish most of all was a general-readership treatise on space exploration and planetary science, work-titled Beyond the Asteroid Belt. Eventually it was accepted by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a London publisher, with the understanding that I would include both sides of the asteroid belt, and the Sun as well. Weidenfeld & Nicolson made arrangements for the book, now titled simply Solar System, to be distributed in the U.S. by Sterling Publishing, and scheduled the launch for October 2002.

I guess I’ve finally made it.

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Nigel Hey left Sandia National Laboratories after nearly 25 years of service in October 2001, to become an independent science writer and consultant. He is the author of Solar System, http://www.thesolarsystem.org.

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