The Chapel Hill News
November 25, 2001
Eureka! Science for everyone
By Phillip Manning
Science is mankind's great intellectual adventure, and in the last 500 years, it has dramatically changed the way we live. Thanks to science, we can move from continent to continent with an ease that was once unimaginable, and our daily lives are comfortable in ways that were inconceivable a few generations ago. We can cure diseases that once were thought incurable, and, as a consequence, life expectancy of Americans increased 50 percent in the last century. Yet the science behind these advances remains a mystery to many people.
The question most often raised when I talk about scientific literacy is rarely stated baldly, but it amounts to, Why bother? As long as someone else knows this stuff, why should I learn it? I usually start with the "informed citizen" answer. Our government routinely begins and ends multibillion dollar projects that revolve around science and technology issues. How should a citizen react to and vote on such projects? Should we build the superconducting super collider? A missile defense system?
This answer has merit. In their book "Science for All Americans" (Oxford University Press, $15.95), F. James Rutherford and Andrew Ahlgren write that, "What the future holds in store for individual human beings, the nation, and the world depends largely on the wisdom with which humans use science and technology."
Indeed, science and technology shape our environment. And an informed citizen should know something about them, just as a scientist should know something about politics and religion and literature. But there is another reason for learning about science. Finding out how things work is fun. That's why I got interested in science, and I suspect the same is true for many scientists. Scientists have what they call "Eureka! moments," which are moments of pure joy that come from solving a difficult problem or seeing a thing clearly for the first time. (The term comes from a story about the Greek mathematician Archimedes, who supposedly ran naked through the streets the streets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka!" after formulating the law of buoyancy while taking a bath.)
I had a minor Eureka! moment a few years ago when I was trying to visualize how every star in the universe could be moving away from every other star. I knew this was happening; it is a logical consequence of the Big Bang. But I couldn't envision it until I found the perfect analogy in a book. Make raisin-bread dough, the analogy went, and shape it into a ball. When you bake it, the ball will expand and -- Voila! -- the distance between each raisin will increase, just as the stars recede from one another in an expanding universe.
But Eureka! moments are not confined to scientists or Greek mathematicians. Anyone who figures something out can have such a moment. The question is how does one learn enough science to figure things out?
The flood of popular science books that have hit the market in the last decade or two make scientific literacy possible for anyone. These books are written for the public, and they are entertaining, generally accurate and amazingly informative. Popular science books are not necessarily popular; you will rarely find one on a best-seller list. Nevertheless, they can be crucially important to the way we think and live.
In their monumental series of books "The Story of Civilization," historians Will and Ariel Durant point out that three books shaped the mind of modern Europe. All three were about science and were intended for a popular audience. The books were Nicolaus Copernicus's "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" (1543), in which he proclaimed that Earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way around; Isaac Newton's "Principia" (1687), which stated the laws of motion and gravity that govern the universe; and Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" (1859), the book that introduced the ideas of natural selection and evolution.
But not all science books are written by scientists; some very good ones are written by science writers, ordinary people like you and me who have learned enough science to write about it for a wide audience. Because these books aim to inform you but not make you into a scientist, they do not resemble the equation-heavy textbooks that have turned so many off to science. A chemist must understand the mathematics behind the second law of thermodynamics to calculate entropy change, but you don't need mathematics to understand the concept of entropy. The same thing is true for special relativity, quantum mechanics, and, of course, the expansion of space after the Big Bang.
Popular science books are available on all of these and dozens of other subjects. In my next column, I will suggest specific books that will provide the backbone of your education in science. All you have to do to embark on this grand adventure is to pick one up and read it.