Also this issue:

Metal Heads
Early pioneers in the art of engraving are on display at the Art Museum.
-Susan Hagen

Artsbeat

The Bell and the Glass
-A.D. Amorosi

Color Forms
-Janet Anderson

ArtQuicks

Bat Boy, the Musical
-Steve Cohen

Review: Nederlands Dans Theater II
-Janet Anderson

Gentlemen Volunteers
-Toby Zinman

May 14-20, 2003

books

Science Friction

In the bag: <i>A Short History of Nearly Everything</
i>'s Bryson on the road.

In the bag: A Short History of Nearly Everything's Bryson on the road.

Bill Bryson on exploring science without putting his audience to sleep.

by Juliet Fletcher

In advance of Charles Darwin¹s celebrated publication of On the Origin of Species, in 1859, Whitwell Elwin, a respected editor, contacted the botanist: The book, he said, was on the nose, but perhaps Darwin should stick to subjects of greater fondness. ¹Everyone is interested in pigeons,¹ he suggested. As this anecdote -- foregrounded in a new overview of science by Bill Bryson -- illustrates, the business of making the genius of scientific discovery palatable has long dogged even its most strident supporters.

For Bryson, a seasoned travel writer who admits to having been bored with science at school, his encounters with technical terms usually coincided with other, more interesting things. Calling from the midst of his American book tour, Bryson recalls hiking the Appalachian Trail in research for his 1999 book, A Walk in the Woods. His guide remarked that in one particular valley, on one side the rocks are 600 million years old, and on the other side they're 400 million years old. And I used to think, ¹How does anybody know that?' So he recognized a symbiosis, that science's big questions -- the shape of Earth, how particles work as building blocks, even the ineffable origins of life -- are orbited by more biographical questions. I find how these researchers worked these facts out as interesting as what they did, Bryson says.

His topic ended up as A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books). To accomplish this exploration from quarks to quakes, Bryson set about picking the brains of many highly respected international scientists, including Richard Fortey, author of Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, and Ray Anderson and Brian Witzke, part of the team who examined the meteor crater found in Manson, Iowa. When I first started approaching scientists, I was afraid my reputation may precede me and that they'd think I was just there to take the piss out of it all. And so they should have -- because that's usually what I do.

Bryson, who's honed his comic observations over travels in Australia, the U.K. and even the U.S., after living abroad for 20 years (see I'm a Stranger Here Myself), planned to craft A Short History as a lightfooted narrative, as much a biography of science as a primer. I realized that scientists who are doing the important thinking also can be quite delightfully veiny and bizarre, he notes. He populates the book with characters such as William Buckland, who conducted his field research while wearing an academic gown, and Edward Drinker Cope, a Philadelphia-born paleontologist whose feud with erstwhile friend Othniel Charles Marsh led to one team's diggers throwing rocks at another team's as they excavated new species of fossilized dinosaur.

Losing track of these characters, even as their work lives on, would disregard an important slice of collective history -- and history, Bryson believes, tells us everything we need to know about what nature will rain on our heads. For evidence of this, he says, you need only look to Yellowstone Park -- best done from the air, from where you can tell that the whole park is a 40-mile-wide volcanic crater. It's a vivid reminder that Earth can be a pretty tough place. One of these days, Yellowstone is going to blow up [again], and you have to hope you're not close to it when it happens. He continues, as human beings, we have almost no perspective on long-term events because we've been here for such a short while. The history of Earth is one of murderous events.

In fact, it's surprising to Bryson that the men in lab coats haven't capitalized on science's morbid streak to capture a wider audience. Many people leave school without having been excited by science, he muses. They're still stuck on trying not to teach appreciation, but to make you a mechanic; you can drive a car and really enjoy its exhilaration, or you can be taught how an internal combustion engine works. In his attempt to make sense of the biggest picture, Bryson's book acts as a tour guide in scientific non-fiction, providing a clear beacon to the uninitiated, while pointing readers towards substantially harder scientific writing, which he leaves to the experts. Why just focus on the combustion engine side of things, and miss out on the joy of the wind in your face and getting out on the open road?

Bill Bryson reads Tue., May 20, 7 p.m., free, The Free Library, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322.