CENTRE POINT
The hopeless task of making quantum mechanics as entrancing as Jane Austen, as thrilling as sex
SIMON JENKINS
Book prizes are as outrageous as school league tables. They compare the incompa- rable. But if book prizes there must be, the more the merrier. Let us have prizes for the best dahlia manuals, the best dahlia manu- als, the best John Major biographies, the best bad novels, the best dust-jackets, the best blurbs, the best book reviews. I have been chairing this year's Rhone-Poulenc £10,000 prize for the 'best popular science book'. The choice was near impossible.
The final decision was split between Steven Pinker's remarkable work of scien- tific imagination, The Language Instinct, and a simple reference book, John Ems- ley's Consumer's Good Chemical Guide. Two works could hardly have less in com- mon. Pinker's book is a tour de force, bring- ing the science of language to bear on the wilder shores of anthropology, neurology and genetics. To Dawkins' selfish gene we must now add Pinker's grammatical gene (albeit with some help from Chomsky). It is a work of philosophy as much as sci- ence, with that teasing hint of theology that made Stephen Hawking's Short Histo- ry of Time a bestseller. Pinker is an intel- lectual hedge-hopper, but his narrative is tight and its sequences hard to penetrate. Once entered, I found it hard to leave. But the majority of the judges regarded it as too challenging to pass the final test of `popularity'.
Emsley passed this test with flying colours but in a different category. Last year some 140 'general' science books were published and the first sift of any long list depends heavily on cosmetics, on jacket, pictures, blurb, even preface. These are any book's outer blossom. If they fail to draw a passing customer they will not draw a jury. Most general science books come in one of three groups: the pleaders, the autobiogra- phers and the breathless narrators. The pleaders grab at the reader like the Ancient Mariner. They cry, 'Quantum mechanics theory is as entrancing as Jane Austen or as thrilling as sex if only you would give it a try.' They then prove the precise opposite.
The autobiographers are mostly dread- ful. The author tells at length how he, with Bob and Sue and Boris from Moscow, spent a decade up a tree researching woodlice 'which are just like us humans'. The breathless are mostly science journal- ists describing the hunt for a biochemical formula as if it were an Agatha Christie novel: 'Late one spring evening in 1964 a test tube in laboratory No 26 crashed to the ground and . .
Some of these genres succeed. Jared Dia- mond's Rise and Fall of the Third Chim- panzee was a masterpiece of autobiographi- cal discovery. Every sentence of Hawking's covert plea for advanced physics flattered his reader's intelligence, engendering a sense of uncomprehending awe. Many such books fall by talking down to their audi- ence, like pious tracts on a church book- stall. They assume readers are both con- verted and yet in need of conversion. They patronise their mostly young customers, reading under duress, and yet suspend liter- ary rigour because 'of course we scientists are not meant to be writers'. This dis- claimer would have appalled the great sci- entific communicators such as Medawar and Bronowski, both masters of lucid prose. A science book may be good science but fails if it is bad English.
Scientists seem frustrated at having to engage the services of literary mercenaries to fight their way to public attention. Their writing is cursed by science's paranoid mode; its craving for status, attention, love and money. Apologists treat science as if its endeavours would wither away were they not propped up by the assent of 'the gener- al reader'. They assume it cannot cultivate its own garden or stand on its own merits, that Einstein was right in saying that 'imagi- nation is more important than knowledge', that the arts are the Senior Culture.
This is hopeless. Most writing about any subject is primarily of interest to its practi- tioners. I can work a computer without reading a 'computers-made-easy' book, as I can drive a car without knowing mechanics or buy a mortgage without knowing eco- nomics. As Dr Johnson said, science 'is not the great or frequent business of the human mind — we are perpetually moral- wear a little black dress.' ists but we are geometricians only by chance'. Morals, like politics and eco- nomics, are constants of cultural discourse. Snow's two cultures myth has blighted -the image of British science since the 1950s. By ignoring this and demanding droit de seigneur over the national curriculum, • sci- ence has oversold itself. Its declining appeal to students is one indicator of this.
I accept that discovery has always been one of the great civilising enterprises. Sci- entific research yields advances in engi- neering and Tedicine. We give a patriotic cheer when a Briton wins a Nobel prize, it is like being first up Everest. But nobody will persuade me that dragooning millions of unenthusiastic pupils into science class- rooms contributes to this, any more than conscripting them into the infantry would help win a nuclear war. More likely, it diverts government resources from the advanced research that nurtures the even- tual Nobel winner.
Hence the book we chose as this year's winner. It was not pleading. apologetic, breathless or autobiographical, and certain- ly not a work of scholarship, genius or liter- ary skill. John Emsley's Good Chemical Guide is simply excellent at what it sets out to be: a work of reference intended to tell lay people enough chemistry to make them more aware of their environment and scep- tical of confidence tricksters. It is reminis- cent of John' Allen Paulus's hook on useful maths (mostly devoted to statistics and probabilities). There are no compounds or equations, merely well-indexed essays strip- ping away the quackery from cosmetics, alcohol, cholesterol, sweeteners, vitamins, diet pills, additives, gases and a dozen other daily manifestations of this Cinderella among the sciences.
Few hooks hold the attention of the reader through communicating the full wonder and majesty of science. I am con- vinced that Hawking's success lies not in his content (nor , in his disability) but in his casual, thrilling leap. To know the answer to his last question, he remarks, 'is to know the mind of God'. Such hooks are rare and can be tough reading. For most people, the science they encounter in their daily lives is dull and marginal. They can negotiate its twists and turns unguided. But sometimes a good map comes along and proves its use- fulness. Let us salute the map-makers.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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