Skip to main content
Education and outreach

Education and outreach

Simply the best

01 Dec 2006

With hundreds of popular-science books published every year, it is hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Martin Griffiths looks at what distinguishes a great science book from a bad one

Most physicists can point to a popular-science book that has inspired them more than any other or perhaps even encouraged them into science as children. For some it is The Double Helix – James Watson’s frank and amusing account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. For others it may be Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Millions of people bought Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, although few now judge it as a good way into physics.

But what is the best ever science book? One attempt to answer that question took place at a recent debate at Imperial College London, chaired by science writer Jon Turney and featuring as panellists former Guardian science editor Tim Radford, Imperial College biologist Armand Leroi and Sara Abdulla, publisher of Macmillan’s science-books division. Although Radford described science books as “the ultimate in non-fiction”, the message emerging from the discussion was that popular science should be judged by the same standards as literary works. The quality of writing, in other words, is paramount.

This theme was reflected in the rather broad definition of “science book” used by the three panellists, each of whom selected three books to champion. Abdulla chose Jonathan Lethem’s novel As She Climbed Across the Table, which tells the story of a fictional particle physicist at a US university, and two plays: Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Leroi’s number one choice was Konrad Lorenz’s account of his life with animals, King Solomon’s Ring. The winner, determined by a show of hands by the hundred-or-so audience members, was Radford’s first choice: The Periodic Table, a collection of memoirs and short stories themed around chemical elements by industrial chemist and Auschwitz-survivor Primo Levi.

Notable by their absence were some of the big names of popular-science writing, such as Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and John Gribbin. The panellists admitted this was in part due to a desire to be different, but Abdulla also complained about the lack of literary quality in much mainstream science writing.

“If all someone wants to do is explain scientific concepts in plain English, they should write instructions for aspirin packets,” she ventured. “If authors want people to spend £10–20 of their hard earned cash and several evenings reading 70,000 words, they have a duty to entertain, to enthral, to arouse, and to stimulate.”

Learning from literature

One person who hopes to do something about Abdulla’s concerns is Turney. He is the leader of a Masters course at Imperial College on writing “creative non-fiction”, which is now in its second year. The course aims to teach students how to bring popular-science writing alive using literary techniques such as dialogue and plot. Leroi, who has also turned his hand to popular-science writing with the book Mutants and who lectures students taking the degree, has high hopes. He even thinks that it will “change the course of English literature”, doing for non-fiction what Malcolm Bradbury did for fiction when he set up a creative-writing degree at the University of East Anglia.

If science writing can benefit from literary devices, there is also a trend to incorporate real science into fiction. Janna Levin’s new book A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (reviewed on p40 print version only) is just the latest example, exploring as it does the lives of the mathematicians Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel in the form of a novel. Biologist Jennifer Rohn has even founded a website that celebrates this relatively new genre, which she calls “lab lit”. This is something quite different from science fiction – rather than dealing with speculative possibilities and stereotypical “mad scientists”, lab lit depicts real science and realistic characters in books, plays and films.

Judging greatness

In one sense, history will be the best judge of greatness. How many of today’s science books will still be read in 100 years’ time? Given that science changes so quickly, books about the process and personalities of science – histories and biographies, for example – will probably age better than books about the science itself.

This is one reason for the enduring popularity of The Periodic Table, first published in 1975. Levi became famous not as a scientist, but as a chronicler of his experiences in Auschwitz in the books If This is a Man and The Truce. But The Periodic Table focuses on his career as an industrial chemist and conveys the struggles and small triumphs that make up everyday life for most scientists – for example his failed attempt to create non-marking lipstick by distilling chicken droppings.

Still, there will always be a place for explanations of the big ideas of the day, as the massive sales of A Brief History of Time and a seemingly endless stream of popular accounts of cosmology attest. An early attempt at the tricky task of popularizing cosmology is still remembered as one of the best: indeed, Steven Weinberg’s 1977 book The First Three Minutes – in which the Nobel-prize-winning theorist describes the origins of the universe – was the most frequently mentioned book by contributors to the “Shelf Life” column in Physics World (see box).

It may sound like a cop-out, but there is no magic formula for a great science book. Some, like The First Three Minutes, tap into the public’s thirst for knowledge about the great mysteries of existence, while others tackle quirky topics like The Physics of Star Trek. Some are first-hand, albeit often one-sided, accounts by researchers at the cutting-edge of science, while others are by journalists and historians who can put the great scientific questions in context. You almost certainly have your own favourites that have not been mentioned here, and, if so, we would like to hear from you about them.

Top shelf material

Over the last two years Physics World has asked 24 physicists and science writers for their opinions on popular-science books in our monthly “Shelf Life” column. Each was asked for their selection of the three best science books. There was surprisingly little consensus, with only 10 books receiving more than one nomination, but the clear winner was Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes. His 1977 account of the origin of the universe was a precursor of countless popular-science accounts of the Big Bang and cosmology. The top 10 were as follows.

With five nominations

Steven Weinberg The First Three Minutes

With two nominations

Bill Bryson A Brief History of Nearly Everything
Rachel Carson Silent Spring
Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene
Albert Einstein Relativity
Galileo Galilei Dialogue
James Gleick Chaos
Brian Greene The Elegant Universe
George Johnson Strange Beauty
Carl Sagan Cosmic Connection

• What is your favourite science book, and why? E-mail martin.griffiths@iop.org and the best contributions will be considered for publication in Physics World

Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors