The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002 (The Best American Series) - Softcover

Angier, Natalie; Folger, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618134786 ISBN 13: 9780618134786

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2002

Synopsis

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, edited by Natalie Angier, is another "eclectic, provocative collection" (Entertainment Weekly). Malcolm Gladwell, Joy Williams, Barbara Ehrenreich, Burkhard Bilger, Dennis Overbye, and many more of the best and brightest writers on science and nature explore such topics as the rise and fall of Islamic science, disappearing cancers, and the meaning of mountain lions in the back yard.

About this title

About the Author:

NATALIE ANGIER is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science columnist for the New York Times. She is the author of The Canon, The Beauty of the Beastly, and Natural Obsessions. She lives outside Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Foreword

Every profession has its rite of passage, a crucible guaranteed to roil
doubts
and second thoughts about career choices. Pilots have their solo flights,
surgeons their operations. For science journalists, it"s that first crucial
interview when they realize, with mounting unease, that they don"t
understand a single word of what some scientist is telling them. It
happened
to me several years ago. I had just started working as a reporter for
Discover
magazine and managed to convince my editor that I was ready to write a
feature. One of the people I needed to interview for the story was an
eminent
physicist, a Nobel laureate. He graciously set aside two hours of his time
one wintry afternoon in Princeton to talk to me about a perplexing problem
in
his field, a problem that was to be the subject of my article.
I turned on my tape recorder and asked my first question. In reply
the physicist said something about an "antisymmetric total eigenfunction."
It
wasn"t the sort of answer I was looking for. Worse, it wasn"t the sort of
answer I could understand. From there the gap between what the physicist
said and what I followed could have been measured in megaparsecs. For
the
next 7,200 seconds I had almost no idea what this kindly, renowned,
thoughtful gentleman was talking about. Sure, I could recognize the odd
phrase here and there, but entire sentences might as well have been
transmitted in a frequency range audible only to canines for all they meant
to
me. Somehow the few questions I sputtered during the remainder of the
interview didn"t betray my utter befuddlement and growing panic. For the
most part I sat silently perspiring, nodding or grunting now and then to
foster
the illusion of comprehension.
When the interview finally ended I walked from the snow-covered
campus to the train that would take me back to Manhattan, wondering how
I
would ever wring a story from such impenetrable raw material before my
deadline. Over the next few weeks, after many more hours of interviews and
phone conversations with perhaps a dozen physicists, I finished the
assignment. The work was grueling, but satisfying.
That first interview turned out to be similar to many others in the
years ahead. Although the panicky fear of failing to deliver a story eventually
faded, the hard labor of translating the work of scientists into something
that
people will pay to read hasn"t changed at all. Good writing is never easy,
but
writing about science is extraordinarily challenging. Most journalists,
whether
they"re covering crime, politics, or business, can at least assume a
common
vocabulary, a certain degree of shared knowledge, on the part of their
readers, not to mention their interview subjects. Science writers don"t have
that luxury. First they need to understand enough of the subject at hand to
ask relevant questions. Then they must mold their interview notes and
background reading of sundry science journals into a narrative that a reader
will not just understand but enjoy. Not an easy profession.
Fortunately for us, there are many people who do it extremely
well. The stories they tell are compelling, perhaps the most important of our
time. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the controversial physicist who headed the
Manhattan Project during World War II, once said, "Taken as a story of
human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences
are among the great epics."
The stories science tells us are not always comforting. Steven
Weinberg, a Nobel laureate physicist (not the one who so confounded me
years ago), has said that the more physicists study the universe, the more
pointless it all seems. Scientists have not found any evidence of a special
role for humanity in the scheme of things. Instead, human life looks like a
very marginal phenomenon. Knowing that countless other species have
arisen and disappeared on earth over the past 3 billion years, the existence
of Homo sapiens seems less and less divinely ordained and ever more
contingent. When asked about Weinberg"s bleak view, Jim Peebles, a
Princeton astrophysicist, said, "I"m willing to believe that we are flotsam and
jetsam."
But maybe those cold truths from the unflinching, vast perspective
of science are what we need to hear. Genetic evidence suggests that every
person now alive descends from the members of a small group of humans
who lived in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Maybe the
knowledge of our tentative, fragile place in the cosmos, and of our relatively
recent common origin, marks the beginning of our maturity as a species.
Maybe it"s time to set aside the myths and legends that still sustain — and
divide — so many of us.
Of course, such knowledge isn"t welcome everywhere. As
Frederick Crews writes in "Saving Us from Darwin," creationists still refuse
to
accept the full implications of The Origin of Species 143 years after its
publication. They prefer to cling, using the most tortured reasoning, to a god
who is "a glutton for praise," Crews writes. Their efforts to distort and
suppress the teaching of science might seem ludicrous were they
supported
by only a few in our society. Unfortunately that"s not the case, which
makes
Dennis Overbye"s "How Islam Won, and Lost, the Lead in Science"
disturbingly relevant. Science — and the liberal culture of tolerance and
dispassionate inquiry that makes possible its pursuit — has many
enemies.
Perhaps the articles collected here will help win it a few more friends.

Working with Natalie Angier has been a particular pleasure for me — she
was once my professor at New York University"s graduate program in
science writing. The only disadvantage of having Natalie as the guest editor
is
that none of her own writing could be included. Her reflections on the
extraordinary sacrifices of New York"s firemen, policemen, and other
ordinary
people on September 11 would have been one of my top picks for this
volume. Search a library or the Internet for her story — "Altruism, Heroism,
and Nature"s Gifts in the Face of Terror," published in the September 18
edition of the New York Times. I am very grateful to Deanne Urmy and
Laura
van Dam, my editors at Houghton Mifflin, for their good humor, guidance,
and
suggestions. Peter Brown, the former editor of The Sciences, put me in
touch
with Laura and Deanne. I keenly regret the demise of The Sciences, one of
the country"s best magazines, which ceased publishing last year. Had it
survived, I"m sure that it would have been represented in these pages.
Burkhard Bilger, the editor of this series for the past two years and a
contributor this year, offered much valuable advice. Finally, I can"t
adequately
express my gratitude and love to Anne Nolan, who gave up Manhattan —
and
Brooklyn — to join me in Gallup, New Mexico.

Tim Folger
Introduction
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, when all light and sense,
inflection and comprehension, seemed to vanish overmorning right along
with
those gorgeous, goofy, minimalist-maximalist twin towers, I was wracked
with apocalyptic visions of a desolate world to come. The ancient curse of
millennial psychosis had struck at last, I thought, and now my daughter
would grow up in a time of brutal piousness, intolerance, and de-
encephalization, as brigades of Truth Police roamed the streets, snarling
Presa Canario dogs in tow.
So I wept and whined and flailed, and wrote violent little fantasy
vignettes about mothers and daughters who figure out how to kill Osama bin
Laden; and like so many people I couldn"t sleep, night after night, and I
exercised fiendishly, and drank a lot of white russians, and might really
have
fallen into a persistent state of vegetative gloom had I not started reading a
book by Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate physicist and atheistic
belletrist, called Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. I pounced
on the chapter entitled "Before the Big Bang," in which Weinberg discusses
various theories about the origins, or pre-origins, of the universe. To
hypothesize about anything prior to the Big Bang, which brought time and
physical laws as we know them into existence about 14 billion years ago,
had long been taboo among astrophysicists: scientists don"t like asking
questions that they feel are impossible to answer, and this question
seemed
like the dooziest unsolvable problem of them all.
Happily, new theories such as superstrings and the inflationary
model of the universe allow researchers to begin grappling with how the
Bang
came to be — or rather, the bang we know best. One version of inflation
theory, called chaotic inflation, suggests an image of a nicely simmering
pot
of stew, with different bubbles of "scalar energy" popping up here and there,
each a universe of its own. Very far away from our corner of the cosmos,
Weinberg writes, "there may have been other big bangs before our own, and
there may be others yet to come. Meanwhile the whole universe goes on
expanding, so there is always plenty of room for more big bangs." He
continued, "Thus although our own Big Bang had a definite beginning about
10 to 15 billion years ago, the bubbling up of new big bangs may have been
going on forever in a universe that is infinitely old."
Certainly, this business of pre-bang astrophysics is very much a
baby bubble of its own, and it may burst into nothingness, but Weinberg
argues that the problem of origins is not beyond the reach of science. "We
don"t know if the universe is infinitely old or if there is a first moment," he
concludes, "but neither view is absurd, and the choice between them will
not
be made by intuition, or by philosophy or theology, but by the ordinary
methods of science."
Oh, how I loved that line and its almost coy blandness, and in that
line I found my hope for the future in those moments when a new Age of
Endarkenment leered large. I thought about the ferociously smart Weinberg,
and his ambitious, hard-driving students, and the thousands of researchers
and theoreticians like them at universities here and abroad, hammering
away
at "ordinary" science, which means solving equations of the sort of florid
density so easily parodied in a New Yorker cartoon; and fighting for time at
the Fermilab particle accelerator or on the Hubble space telescope; and
crunching numbers and data on a mainframe for days or weeks at a time;
and emerging at last with a reasonable portrait of places and spaces so
unreasonably far and wide it makes my prolapsed mitral valve flutter just to
think about them.
Equally astounding is what geologists have discovered about the
history of our earth just by going to places such as the Grand Canyon and
doing something more than complain about the tourists; or what
paleontologists have learned about bestiaries gone by; or, more recently,
what biologists have learned about the human genome — that it rambles,
and
repeats itself, and appears to be a La Brea tar pit for every drunken virus
ever
to stumble into an ancestor"s cells.
In sum, when I felt really terrible, stuck in the deepest of tar-black
funks, I thought about science and what it has wrought, and I knew that
they
will never win — they being the incuriosities of the world, whatever the
particulars of their theology or ideology. They can never muzzle the mind,
the
many minds of science, the need to know. Science has been such a
spectacular success — how could we ever give it up? It"s like indoor
plumbing: once you"ve tried it, the outhouse will never feel quite the same.
Beyond its extraordinary explanatory powers, science has
another
trait in its favor: its worldliness. If music is the universal language of the
soul,
science has become the lingua franca of the intellect. The greatest
laboratories in this country are remarkably multicultural, the sort of places
where you keep expecting Kofi Annan to walk in the door. Young
researchers
come to the United States from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Indian
subcontinent, the Middle East, South America, Alpha Centauri, the Delta
quadrant, even Canada. Once here (and please forgive this jingoistic
spasm)
in the world"s greatest scientific candy store, they work together with the
same goals and values: to do clever experiments well and elegantly, with
the
right controls, yielding results that any scientist, of any melanic, political,
theistic, or zodiacal subtype, can recapitulate in the privacy of his or her
own
petri dish. In science, as in weapons negotiations, the code of conduct
is "Trust, and verify." How nice it is not to have to take people at their
dogma,
but to be able to ask, in that snarly, whiny, chummy way that scientists do,
what exactly the evidence is.
Yes, I love science, and I can"t think of anything that is more
worth writing about, or in greater need of good explanatory writing. For all
their passion and productivity, scientists labor in profound anonymity. Last
night, for example, while I was going over a list of some two dozen finalists
for a big award given each year to a prominent woman in science, a friend
stopped by to chat. I was curious to see whether any of the names on the
list — many of them quite famous in their fields — would ring a bell with
somebody who was neither a scientist nor a science journalist. As I ticked
the names off one by one, my friend"s head never stopped shaking.
"Nope. Never heard of her. Nope, that one doesn"t ring a bell
either. Sorry, no."
"Okay, how about male scientists?" I asked. "Can you think of the
name of any male scientist?"
"Louis Pasteur?" she offered.
"Well, it"s a good thing scientists are such a cliquish lot," I
said. "It"s a good thing that most of them only care about winning the
respect
of their peers, because they sure aren"t getting it from anybody else."
"What can you expect?" she said. "Most people don"t understand
the first thing about science, so they don"t follow it. They don"t have a clue."
This of course is an old refrain, one that I"ve had to cope with for
the twenty-three years or so that I"ve been in the science writing business.
People don"t understand science. They"re afraid of science. They"re in awe
of
science. They"re bored by science. They flunked high school chemistry.
They"re Barbie, they"re Ken: "Math is hard!" And there"s no denying it. Math
is hard, science is hard, and it doesn"t help that many high school
chemistry
teachers, if you threw them in the bay, would scare the sharks away.
But still. Is science really any harder than, say, Middle East
politics? Or the fashion industry, for that matter? Look at a fashion
magazine
and explain to me who exactly wears those clothes, and what the obscure
semiotics of the business are supposed to mean. My point being, science
is
a human endeavor like any other, and sure, it has its insiders who are
possessive of their trade and expertise and use jargon like porcupines use
their quills, smugly and defensively. Yet with a little effort, just about
anybody
can become reasonably literate in science, an...

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0618134786
• ISBN 13: 9780618134786
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320