You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Science Writing' category.
Please read “Physics is Beauty“, by Lindsay LeBlanc. I think this is how most scientists feel (certainly it is how I feel):
Physics is worth knowing because it is beautiful. It is the hidden secret of the scientist. We may claim to be researching some topic or other because it is “useful to society” or it will revolutionize some technology but, more often than not, we are simply fascinated by some small detail about how the world works and we can’t stop thinking about it until we understand it better. We are constantly astounded by the way a few basic principles work together to explain so many different things, and sit in wonder and awe at the beauty of the world. Like an artist, I want to share this beauty with others. I want them to know what it is to see through my eyes.
Theodore Gray (of periodictable.com) has a nice post on the Powell’s Books.Blog, Is Science as Important as Football?. A sample:
We have turned science, which should be the most exciting, the most engaging, the most relevant hour of the school day, into a deathly boring series of lectures and video games. Is it any wonder kids would rather become accountants, when chartered accountancy is made to seem like a more exciting profession than science?
The inevitable result is the well-documented decline in students entering universities to study science. But even worse is the equally well-documented decline in the understanding and appreciation of science by the general public.
That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. I just can’t read The Canon. Anyone want a copy? I love what is in the Canon, I just can’t get past the way it’s written. I’m tempted to try and see what someone in our writing center would think of it, or even better, one of our English professors.
I’m back on track, and am starting to enjoy reading this book again. In chapter 3 of The Canon, Angier takes on measurement and types of scales. Her primary focus is on getting readers to look beyond their normal human-based sense of scale, so that they can deal with the extremely large, and the extremely small, both of which we are not really equipped to easily understand. Basically, calibration in this chapter is about fitting these into our human perspective of them.
Sorry it took so long for me to get back to The Canon. In the second chapter, Angier writes about probability. As I posted earlier, I had a hard time reading this chapter, mostly because everytime that Angier seemed to be getting to a point, she would veer off in another slightly related direction. What my friend earlier called tangents.
It seems like this is probably a reasonably good chapter for introducing non scientists to basic statistics. Angier concentrates on the types of statistics that are widely reported, such as medical studies. she gives a sense of what 95% confidence means, especially when N is really large (sometimes there are a large number of outliers).
Mean vs. median is covered, as is the universality of the normal distribution. The biggest omission, in my opinion, is lack of any mention of the standard deviation. In my experience, this is just as important a measure of a distribution as it’s mean and median, and seems like an important concept to get across to the general public.
Believe it or not, I am still reading The Canon. I’ve been mired in the chapter about probability for quite a while. The information is interesting, but one of my friends said it quite well in an email:
“I started reading the Canon, and I have to admit that I find her writing style very distracting. It’s too bloated with weird or unnecessary metaphors and tangents.”
I have to agree. Scientists are taught very early on to write concisely with well structured sentences and paragraphs. While this blog may not be a good example of that type of writing, I’d argue that The Canon is even worse. I guess that’s what the “Whirligig” part of the tour in the book’s title means.
I promise to get something posted about chapter two this week. Really.
“The quest to answer a question is where the learning takes place, not the answer itself.”
-Dick Zare, Stanford University in his Chemical and Engineering New editorial (July 14, 2008).
I really hope that a lot of non-scientists read this book. I also really hope a lot of scientists, and students who are thinking about becoming scientists do too. Angier’s synopsis of her intereviews with scientists about what scientific thought is are good. Wordy, but good. [1]
Here’s some of what you might get from this chapter:
- Science is a way of thinking, not a set of facts to memorize.
- Science is not reductionism. Understanding science enhances one’s appreciation for the natural world.
- Scientific thought is based on evidence. Good evidence can (eventually) be revolutionary.
- Science is uncertain. And that is certainly a fact.
- Scientific thought is not math.
I’ve always been interested in how to communicate science and what I do to non-scientists. I admit, I’m not always the best at it, but I hope I am able to convey some sense of the fun I have doing it. Last week, on a trip to Powell’s with a colleague and some of our summer research students, I picked up a copy of The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier, a science writer at the New York Times. I had seen it advertised somewhere, and had been meaning to read it sometime soon as I prepare to teach a non-science major writing course next spring semester.
My plan is to blog as I read each chapter in the book. I want a record of what I think about the book so I can look back as I prepare for the course I’ll teach in the spring since I’m thinking about using Canon (and I’ll have to be careful not to write Cannon) for the course. My goal, by the way, for this course is to get non-science majors interested in science. We’ll see what happens. If any of the dozen or so folks who read this blog have the time, I’d love to get your feedback too. Sort of an on-line book discussion, but don’t feel like you have to read the book. I’m especially interested in the thoughts of any non-scientists out there.
Below the fold, I’ve summarized what I think about the Introduction.
Recent Comments