What are the three best popular-science books?
I will name three books that are excellent in terms of writing or content or both, and that have a special meaning to me because they helped me to develop as a science writer.
Taming the Atom: The Emergence of the Visible Microworld by Hans Christian Von Baeyer. This book showed me that it is possible to write about difficult scientific topics with complete accuracy, yet in beautiful well-crafted prose that has unquestionable literary merit. Von Baeyer’s regular pieces in The Sciences magazine (now sadly defunct) always displayed this same enchanting mix of content and style. To see it sustained in a whole book was a revelation.
Hubble Wars: Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion-Dollar Struggle Over the Hubble Space Telescope by Eric Chaisson. This book was a pioneer in presenting the mix of science, technology, economics, politics and sheer brute human ego that is the reality of big science projects. Non-scientific reviewers were astonished at the degree of realpolitik involved in the Hubble project.I think it is valuable for the public to see science removed from an imaginary remote realm of inhuman objectivity and cast as it really is: an essential, human activity that strives for objective perfection but that is subjected to the stresses and strains of human nature and the real world. The book also helps scientists to understand more clearly how science and the rest of the world influence each other outside the laboratory.
Alexander A Friedmann: The Man Who Made the Universe Expand by E A Tropp, V Ya. Frenkel and A D Chernin. This book is not especially well written, although that may be the fault of the translation from Russian into English. Its authors have also been accused of whitewashing some of the political implications of this story of Soviet scientists who persuaded Einstein to trade his static universe for an expanding one. But Friedmann’s life is fascinating, mixing his military science with highly abstract nonlinear mathematical physics against the backdrop of the First World War and the early days of the Soviet Union. There is also drama and a message about scientific recognition. The story impressed me so much that I wrote a play called Friedmann’s Balloon that was produced in 2001.
What science books are you currently reading?
When I’m working on a book, as I am right now, my general reading time is cut down because I focus on research for the book. My current book project is about how science and scientists are treated in film, so I am watching a lot of movies and reading relevant books. For my chapter on nuclear science and scientists in the movies, I am reading Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Robert Jungk’s Brighter Than A Thousand Suns.
What else are you reading?
I have just finished Charles Chadwick’s It’s All Right Now (a novel about character and human interaction); Jeffrey Shaara’s semi-non-fiction novel To the Last Man (about the First World War); and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (about drugs, violence and the old traditions of the American West). Next on the list is My Life in the Middle Ages – a memoir by the writer James Atlas.
Which popular-science book have you never read, but feel you ought to have tackled, and why?
It is not exactly a popular-science book, but I have never read more than a few snippets from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This seems to me to be required reading for any scientist or science writer for many reasons: the importance of the theory per se; its wide relevance to other areas of science and other human endeavours; and the insight that it gives into a certain kind of scientific mind.
I imagine that the book would also help one to understand what evolution really means, especially in light of current attempts to conflate and confuse scientific and religious views of how we came to be.
