I once interviewed the Northern Irish physicist John Bell, who told me a curious tale about the wife of the then-American ambassador to Switzerland. Bell recalled how she rolled up at his office at CERN bearing a dog-eared copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a book by the author and “soul-healer” Gary Zukav, seeking answers to her questions about the connections between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism.

I expected the seasoned, hard-nosed physicist to take a dim view of both book and woman, and was startled when he did not. Bell said he felt that there was little harm and some good in Zukav’s book. Quantum physics was marvellous, but so inaccessible that anything that allowed outsiders to start conversations with physicists was fine with him.

Although we classify such books as “popular science”, it is a category that embraces quite a bit. Popular science can refer to science that is popular with the public — dinosaurs, superbugs, cosmology and the like. It can refer to science that appears in literature, such as plays by Tom Stoppard. Or it can refer to “expository” works that set out to explain scientific ideas to non-scientists, be they written by scientists such as Richard Feynman or non-scientists like Zukav.

Elizabeth Leane, a lecturer at the University of Tasmania in Australia, has recently looked at such expository works in a new book called Reading Popular Physics. In it, she notes that such material plays a strong role in shaping the interface between science and culture, as it is almost always what novelists and playwrights consult when learning about science. Stoppard’s play Hapgood, for instance, begins with a quote from a Feynman popularization about how the double-slit experiment contains “the only mystery”.

Strategies of popularization

It is tempting to view popularizations in what I call the “Moses and Aaron” framework. Just as Moses, the prophet, wrests knowledge from the beyond that his brother and spokesman Aaron transmits to the masses, so scientists discover truths about nature that popularizers translate into everyday language. The Moses and Aaron model treats popularization as a single skill directed at a single community.

But Leane points out that popular exposition is far more complex. There is a variety of literary tools — or “textual strategies” as she calls them — for starting conversations, and different branches of science lend themselves better or worse to each. Using Paul Davies’ triage of the physics frontiers into “the very small, the very large and the very complex”, Leane describes the characteristic strategies used to popularize cosmology, quantum physics and chaos/complexity.

Explaining quantum theory, for instance, seems both to require and to shipwreck metaphors — for what is “down there” just does not behave like what is “up here”. A common tool is to anthropomorphize, personifying elements of the quantum world. Certain books, such as George Gamow’s Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom, use such anthropomorphic metaphors guilelessly, trusting the reader to recognize the difference between what is literal and what is not. Others, especially the “new-age” accounts, tend to deliberately blur that difference for their own ends. These include Zukav, who moves from a claim about the role of observation on atomic systems to the claim that “physics has become a branch of psychology”.

Expositions of cosmology tend to appropriate the narrative conventions of the novel. These are “mythic” to the extent that they depict the course of science as having a smooth linear structure and as heading towards an ultimate, yet-to-be-achieved goal, when in reality science follows blind alleys, false starts and dead ends. Leane shows that while a book like Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes denounces the blurring of myth and science, it also deploys “mythic narrative structures” in depicting unification theories as the ultimate goal of the universe.

Finally, Leane examines James Gleick’s Chaos and other books that emphasize details of person, place and time. Expositions of this kind, she says, often borrow from established literary character types in their portrayals of scientists and scientific advance; Gleick favours the hard-nosed detective “mixing it up” with the world. But these character types carry additional baggage — they tend to be loner males with dysfunctional families — which can distort the underlying story.

Many strategies discussed by Leane appear in “the top 10 books from the last 20 years” that were picked by the Physics World editorial team last October (p33 — print edition only). For example, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (which topped the list) presents a linear progression of the universe in a cosmic evolutionary narrative that starts with the Big Bang and culminates not with the end of the universe, but with the end of physics — the search for a “theory of everything”. Dava Sobel’s Longitude (in fourth place) is more historical and character-based, focusing on an artefact and its creator. Feynman’s What do You Care…? (ninth) is a classic example of the cultivation of a popular stereotype of the scientist.

The critical point

All too often, Leane writes, the public and even non-science scholars treat popular expositions of science naively as “information sources” rather than as “textual reconstructions”. This can create profound misunderstanding, and Leane traces much of the hostility between the sciences and the humanities to distorted images of the other side gained from the innocent use of popularizations. Leane’s work shows that the literary character of popularizations should not be ignored just because they are about science, but should be as much the subject of literary analysis as any other form of writing.

Starting conversations — as Bell told me that Zukav’s book does — is one thing, but maintaining and strengthening such conversations is another. Encouraging good conversation requires understanding conversational strategies — both their use and misuse — and for this purpose Leane’s book provides a fruitful beginning. For while the long-term strength of science depends on many things — funding, reliable careers and good teaching, among others — it also depends on healthy, long-term conversations between scientists and non-scientists.