September 24th, 2008
by
Ide Cyan
I’m in the middle of reading The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier (feminist scientific journalist extraordinaire). It’s really great. Her style is convivial and vivacious and informal. Unavoidably, perhaps, a lot of the language that she uses to come off so vividly is couched in U.S.-centric and culturally-specific allusions. Like, for instance, knowing the name of a product-placement character in the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, or “we” finding “another Saudi Arabia”. And very many turns of phrase rest on a sense of humour that treads a very thin line by dropping straight-faced absurdities around literal scientific references — which is great if you’re in the know enough to get it, but dangerously susceptible to misinterpretation if you miss a joke.
But I totally dig her construction of the book. The way she introduces and interlinks scientific concepts, how she progresses from one idea to another and how she illustrates them is wonderfully enlightening and structured. I’m partway through the chapter on physics, at the moment, and in two pages she’s begun to lay out the mechanism of the second law of thermodynamics without even touching the beautiful words “entropy increases”. With ice cream cones and coffee cups. And Humpty Dumpty. And the solid bases of information about elementary particles that she’s already covered.
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