Get Your Nerd On: The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier

     I read about Canon from the book section in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly. My interest was captured because it was reviewed as a well written and trendy science compendium. It sounded like this could be the next Freakonomics, an economics book that I surprisingly loved so much that it taught me how to appreciate numbers. So, I quickly searched for an excerpt of Angier's book and I am liking what I am reading so far. She seems to have a grasp of turn icky subjects like science into something fresh and practical. I can't give a definitive verdict until I read the book but I will leave two excerpts for you to judge.

   On being misunderstood as a science nerd: 

    

As youth flowers into maturity, the barrier between nerd and herd grows taller and thicker and begins to sprout thorns. Soon it seems nearly unbreachable. When my hairstylist told me he was planning to visit Puerto Rico, where I'd been the previous summer, and I recommended that he visit the Arecibo radio telescope on the northwestern side of the island, he looked at me as though I'd suggested he stop by a manufacturer of laundry detergent. "Why on earth would I want to do that?" he asked.

"Because it's one of the biggest telescopes in the world, it's open to the public, and it's beautiful and fascinating and looks like a giant mirrored candy dish from the 1960s lodged in the side of a cliff?" I said.

"Huh," he said, taking a rather large snip of hair from my bangs.

"Because it has a great science museum to go with it, and you'll learn a lot about the cosmos?"

"I'm not one of those techie types, you know," he said. Snip snip snip snip snip.

"Because it was featured in the movie Contact, with Jodie Foster?" I groped frantically.

The steel piranhas could not be stilled. "I've never been a big Jodie Foster fan," he said. "But I'll take it under advisement."

"Hi, honey!" my husband said when I got home. "Where did you put your hair?"

  The Importance of Science:
 

A fair question to interject here is: Need we do anything at all? Does it matter if the great majority of people know little or nothing about science or the scientific mindset? If the average Joe or Sophie doesn't know the name of the closest star (the sun), or whether tomatoes have genes (they do), or why your hand can't go through a tabletop (because the electrons in each repel each other), what difference does it make? Let the specialists specialize. A heart surgeon knows how to repair an artery, a biologist knows how to run a gel, a jet pilot knows how to illuminate the fasten seat belt sign at the exact moment you've decided to get up and go to the bathroom. Why can't the rest of us clip our coupons and calories in peace?

The arguments for greater scientific awareness and a more comfortable relationship with scientific reasoning are legion, and many have been flogged so often they're beginning to wheeze. A favorite thesis has it that people should know more about science because many of the vital issues of the day have a scientific component: think global warming, alternative energy, embryonic stem cell research, missile defense, the tragic limitations of the dry cleaning industry. Hence, a more scientifically sophisticated citizenry would be expected to cast comparatively wiser votes for Socratically wise politicians. They would demand that their elected representatives know the differences between a blastocyst, a fetus, and an orthodontist, and that one is a five-day-old, hollow ball of cells from which coveted stem cells can be extracted and theoretically inveigled to grow into the body tissue or organ of choice; the next is a developing prenate that has implanted in the mother's uterus; and the third is never covered by your company's dental plan. . . .

Book Website: The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier

   Release: Coming Soon