Q & A: Natalie Angier

When science journalist Natalie Angier was a student at Barnard College, she dreamed of starting a popular science magazine for intelligent lay readers. Instead, in 1980 she became a founding staff member of Discover magazine, where she specialized in writing about biology. In 1990, she joined the New York Times as a science writer and won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting in 1991. This May, her fourth book will be published by Houghton. The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (LJ 2/1/07) takes an "exuberant" look at the joys of doing science.

How do you define the term science literacy?

If you meet someone at a party who tells you that he or she is a scientist, and you don't run off screaming but instead ask questions about the researcher's work, then you are scientifically literate. You don't need to have a detailed understanding of that person's field. Science literacy, in my view, is simply a matter of feeling comfortable enough with science to want to take a peek behind the curtain.

I flunked my high school science courses. Can I hope to be science literate?

Did you really flunk all your science courses? I ask this only partly in jest. I and many of the scientists I interviewed have heard this lament from the public an untold number of times. Jackie Barton, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, has marveled that nobody in the United States appears to have gotten say, a B- or C+, in chemistry. A few people, like her students, aced their high school chemistry, she said, while everybody else just "flunked" it. And in that casual proclamation of utter failure, she said, people just as casually shrug off the entire scientific enterprise and their capacity or desire to claim it as their own. Which is really too bad because science belongs to all of us. We pay for it with our taxes, and we live it with our lives.

Of course, you can learn, at any age, what we know about how the world works, the approximate, provisional portrait of the universe and its parts that science has to offer. You can also learn how much we don't know. If you feel ignorant about science, take heart: scientists feel ignorant and incompetent all the time. For them, however, ignorance is the best possible excuse—not to give up or walk away but to do more science. Most of them are incorrigible optimists, and their optimism has a way of rubbing off on those who follow what they're doing. Here, then, is another good reason to delve into science: it just may restore your faith in the human race.

In The Canon, you write that, contraryto popular impressions, science in fun. How so?

Some scientists compare it to cooking, others to solving puzzles, still others to playing a game, an intellectually bracing game like chess or Mastermind, which features in my first chapter as a metaphor for science. For nonscientists like myself, science is fun because it's rich in ideas. I also find it oddly comforting. We're mortal. We're stuck on one roundish rock that's circumnavigating one middle-aged, middling-massed star admidst a swirling carousel of a galaxy, yet we've managed to sketch out a decent first-pass map of the entire visible universe.

What are some of the tricks and techniques of writing about science for nonscientists?

Good science writing is no different than any other sort of good writing. You must be clear. Other techniques that are particularly important in science writing: be specific, give examples, use analogies, and whenever possible, imagine the invisible thing as it might be if it were visible. For example, I asked a biologist what a cell would look like if it were blown up big enough to place on her desk. Her extremely vivid reply: snot.

You interviewed dozens of scientists for this book. Whom did you find to be the most engaging?

I loved going out in the field with the geologist Kip Hodges and getting very, very chilled while perching on a big boulder that looked like a giant chunk of chocolate chip cookie dough and that dated back half a billion years. I loved hearing about the universe from astronomer William Blair, who used a roll of toilet paper to illustrate the passage of time. In retrospect, I even loved it when Scott Strobel tried to force me to learn to play Mastermind, and guess what? I flunked. But from that experience came my opening chapter, and for a writer, nothing is more lovable than that.