‘Science is huge,” explains Natalie Angier, “a great ocean of human experience; it’s the product and point of having the most deeply corrugated brain of any species this planet has spawned. If you never learn to swim, you’ll surely regret it; and the sea is so big, it won’t let you forget it.”
So begins the charming high dive act of Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science , the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer’s playful riposte to our day’s popular indifference to the wages of the scientific enterprise. The book, a conversational survey of the fundamentals of the hard sciences (physics, geology, chemistry, astronomy, biology), also limns world-shifting discoveries from each (like DNA, plate tectonics, the Big Bang and natural selection) and sketches its colourful, white-coated natives. Smartly foregoing snobbery, defensiveness and scare tactics — oh, well, the “average adult American today knows less about biology than the average ten-year-old living in the Amazon” — Angier takes her subject into a full-bodied embrace. Her egghead croon to science’s virtues lends The Canon an unexpectedly appealing emotional tilt.
Written for science novices, Angier’s bid for attention is sustained most effectively in the early chapters, in which she decodes the scientific mindset through a series of scientist walk-ons and, cue this review’s surprise, in epiphanic asides from the presumably dry world of probabilities and statistics. Her dissection of established human penchants – for imparting coincidence to random events and for valorizing Gladwellian gut-check thinking – are particularly spirited. The rub of a probabilistic mindset? Suddenly, “the less amazing the most woo-woo coincidences become.”
Finally, the real-world utility of scientific notation, explained — with nary a dweeby math punch line.
The Canon comes into its own not just as a guidebook to science fundamentals, but also as a primer on the scientific mind. Here, Angier’s argument for a scientifically literate public shines brightest. Science literacy is not a matter of knowledge; it’s a manner of thinking about the world. “Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face.” The empirical universalism of science, Angier suggests, tugs us past the overwhelming dread of “inconvenient truths” such as ecological collapse, to a shared way of seeing the world, one that transcends the parochially political for the scientifically self-evident.
How does one survive, let alone thrive, in such uncertainty?
Turns out, science’s steady emphasis on critical thinking can be a balm. For one thing, scientists talk “about the need to embrace the world as you find it, not as you wish it to be.” What’s more – prick up your ears, poststructuralists – there is an objective reality. “To say there is an objective reality,” Angier writes, “and that it exists and can be understood, is one of those plain-truth poems of science that is nearly bottomless in its beauty.”
Well, maybe. But here’s the kicker: It’s just as likely we’ll never know it. ” ‘Working scientists don’t think of science as ‘the truth,’ ” notes one of Angier’s interview subjects, ” ‘They think of it as a way of approximating the truth.’ ” Scientific sloganeering of this sort, science as an ironic T-shirt phrase, has enticing philosophical chops for today’s ideologically savvy but politically adrift Westerner.
Despite its primer-level content, The Canon may prompt some surprises. I was caught by the molecular biology discussion in which Angier enthuses that, like ants that can hoist objects 10 to 20 times their size, the humble cell can yank beads, with the right encouragement, “an act not unlike a human uprooting a tree.” Which is a fine way of rekindling one’s Franken-fright for nanotech’s near future. In another passage, the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould puts to rest the myth of the nature-nurture debate in a manner likely to cheer readers long exhausted by the seeming irreducibility of that flawed binary.
Angier’s comic touches work best when she slides the lab-coated specimens under her microscope. For instance, cue the lowly chemists: “They may be thought by many adult survivors of a high-school education to have the sex appeal of a cold sore,” and yet, “all the material needed to construct any device imaginable, a warp drive, a transporter, the perfect toupee, is already there, somewhere in the periodic table.” Or the geologist, the “ultimate interdisciplinarian” for whom “every stone is a potential Rosetta stone.” Then there are astronomers, who sometimes “complain about being comically misunderstood.” ” ‘I don’t do horoscopes, and I am not a failed astronaut,’ ” explains one, aptly. Instead, she considers theirs the “chaste science”: “Astronomers are pure of heart and appealingly puerile” since they gaze into the sky, posing cosmically big questions.
And yet, for the sprawling menagerie of scientific personae, the zoology still feels a little thin when Angier opts to become the dominant voice. In those stretches absent the contributions of her quirky interviewees, the pacing slows to an occasional slog reminiscent of this lifelong arts major’s finest moments of science-class boredom. But that fault — where are the explanatory diagrams? — may be inherited, Mendeleevian style.
More distracting is how Angier’s excitement leads to a surfeit of extravagant diction: “Climb to a scenic overlook in the mountain range of your choice and gaze out over the vast cashmere accordion of earthscape, the repeating pleats swelling and dipping silently into the far horizon without even deigning to disdain you,” and “We are all of us starstruck from the start, mesmerized by the spangled velvet of the nighttime sky, now longing to pull it close, like a mother, now shrinking beneath its inviolate diamond detachment.” Such passages have a slackening effect and could have been treated through the ministrations of a surefooted editor.
Whatever its blemishes, Angier’s “geography of the scientific continent,” as she has described The Canon , will make tourists of some readers, and immigrants of others. It’s difficult not to be taken with Angier’s sense of the transporting outlook onto human knowledge, and life itself, that science makes possible.
Consider her hymn to evolution’s central, world-redeeming insight: “Natural selection is the force that transforms drift and randomness into the gift of extravagance. It takes the doctrinaire sloth of the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency of every system to get frowzier over time, and hammers it into a magic, all-purpose, purpose-making machine that turns around and breaks entropy at the knees.”
Take that, you millennial downers. Science saves.
Jeffrey MacIntyre, who writes on culture, science, media and technology, is a Canadian freelance journalist in New York.
