by Lee Edson
Good science writing, as we all know, (we do know, don’t we?) is writing that is clear, well constructed, full of imagery and rhythm, and with what the literati call a voice. We can recognize it when we see it. Or as a long-gone editor of mine at Colliers once said, we know it’s good writing if we keep reading through hunger, thirst and the call of nature.
But now shift to higher gear: What constitutes great science writing? This question faced New York science writer Edmond Blair Bolles, who set himself the formidable task of distilling 2500 years of science writing to a fine residue that provides examples discarded or overlooked by the anthologists who preceded him. The result of his ambitious search is Galileo’s Commandment, a compendium of 6l essays, articles and book sections that share a common thread beyond literary merit. They all, according to Bolles, obey the l6th-century astronomer’s edict to scientists: Contribute to science in some important way.
Selecting such a compendium is daunting. Actual contributions to science expressed with literary merit are not only hard to find, even over the broad landscape of human history, but the selections have to appeal to contemporary readers and be sufficiently different to justify a new anthology.
Bolles deals with the problem by extending the boundaries of science to include the works of what used to be called natural history, noted for its inherent colorful imagery. At the same time he extends the range of authorship beyond the scientific fraternity to philosophers, reporters and historians. For example, he resurrects an essay by Herodotus on the silting of the Nile and the creation of Egypt which the fourth-century B.C. historian proves to have come about through natural forces rather than the intervention of the Gods. He balances that with an account of the discovery of sea floor spreading by Walter Sullivan, the late New York Times science reporter.
Bolles also opens his net wide to include as contributions to the language of science and some arguments against antiscience. John McPhee, the New Yorker writer, earns a place through his charming exposition of the tortuous naming of rocks in geology. Stephen Jay Gould is represented by a slashing attack on the early anthropologists who mismeasured man for allegedly devious purposes, and Carl Sagan’s enthusiasm for science is a curiously futile argument of trying to prove some negatives by the numbers. Using the Santa Claus legend as an hypothesis, he proves it wrong because it is impossible from what we know for Santa Claus to visit a hundred million chimneys in a single day. (It takes three years, according to Sagan.) Using similar arithmetic, Sagan knocks out the hypothesis that Earth was visited by aliens from outer space because, he argues, it would take too many rocket launches from too many alien worlds at incredible distances apart to land one UFO on our tiny planet in the vast cosmos. The problem is that reports of visits from outer space continue unabated, and I have never met a youngster who has not been visited by Santa Claus.
On the whole, Galileo’s Commandment works for the reader because Bolles structures his book to make it work. Like Gaul, the book is divided into three parts—first, an examination of the scientific imagination showing scientists (John B. Watson, Arthur Eddington and Ernst Mach, to name a few) fulfilling their mission of trying to understand science through logic, observation, and experiment; second, the scientific imagination generated by creative minds (e.g., DaVinci, Darwin, and Pavlov) to try to understand nature; and third, what Bolles calls style and scientific imagination, an attempt to transform scientific effort and thinking into literary achievement. Here Bolles’ choice ranges from the Socratic dialogue of Galileo to explain the law of falling bodies to Primo Levi’s engaging (and somewhat well-publicized) treatise on carbon from his book, The Periodic Table.
Bolles’ overall goal, like those of anthologists before him, is to convince the members of that other culture through his exemplars that science writing is worth a prominent and permanent place in our literature. Whether he achieves this will depend on the gatekeepers of our literary standards.
There is no doubt, however, that NASWers will find in this book something to suit their every taste. Bolles roams freely over the disciplines, seizing upon gems of prose from astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics and psychology. He seems to be at home with the greats of these sciences as well as the lesser knowns. We can forgive him for including with appropriate hemming and hawing his own piece on Gestalt psychology.
Anthologists, of course, are vulnerable to an end game played by some educated and sophisticated readers. What is left out in Galileo’s Commandment? Who has failed to make the list? Given the limits of anthology, not to mention time, this may not be a fair question but I for one miss seeing extracts from the great French mathematician Poincare who wrote eloquently of mathematical invention in science, and the enchanting observations of biology watcher Lewis Thomas, the closest we ever had to a poet laureate of science writing. I was also disappointed at not finding Archimedes’ discovery of the laws of displacement, described so well by Plutarch.
But such omissions should not be regarded as flaws in an otherwise excellent selection of scientific authors with something important to say. Readers will find enough here to allow for pleasant browsing. And there may be a model or two from a great craftsman to inspire a young science writer of the future.