Bookplanet: a brief history of best-selling science books

Pop go the scientists
Science-made-simple might still be topping the book charts, but where does that leave the hard stuff?
By Bryan Appleyard/UK Sunday Times

Pretty soon, you will know why hot water placed in your freezer turns to ice faster than cold. You will also be clued up on the vexed questions of why portholes are round and penguins’ feet don’t freeze. In addition, you should have a working knowledge of cosmology and know what the first Sun front page looked like about 14 billion years ago. You will, in short, have been immersed in Christmas science books.

Popular-science books are being reborn in new and strange forms. The penguins and the portholes, for example, came from two current bestsellers based on New Scientist’s Last Word column. The cosmology comes from Bang! by Patrick Moore, Chris Lintott and the former Queen guitarist Brian May. The Sun front page comes from Giant Leaps, a complete history of science told through tabloid splashes. All are doing phenomenally well: the first New Scientist book has sold more than 500,000; the second has already passed 100,000. Meanwhile, Bill Bryson’s science book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, continues to walk out of the shops. Yet the institution of science is in disarray. Last week, the University of Reading confirmed it was closing its physics department. Across the country, 10% of maths and science courses have been ditched in the past decade. Soon there will be a national shortage of scientists. People, it seems, want to know — they buy the books — but they don’t want to learn.

Here’s a theory. The previous wave of science bestsellers began in 1988 with the publication of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The book was a global bestseller and spawned a wave of science books that made familiar names out of scientists such as Steven Pinker, Steve Jones, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Simon Singh et al. Some found themselves the dazed recipients of £1m+ publishers’ advances. That wave finally crashed onto the beach four or five years ago. Jack Challoner, co-author of Giant Leaps, was there when it did. “I had written a book on cosmology that had been bought by the publishers. It was very much in the Hawking-Dawkins style. But they never published it. They said the market for those books had collapsed.” Science had been succeeded by history — Schama, Starkey, Burleigh — as the big new publishing sector. The science shelves in bookshops quietly shrank.

The Hawking wave produced science books of a particular type. As Challoner puts it, they were aimed primarily at middle-aged men who did not necessarily work in science, but who watched Horizon, perhaps read New Scientist and generally liked to keep up. The books, as a result, tended to be quite demanding and to assume a fair amount of prior knowledge. Frequently, they assumed too much — there are plenty of physicists around who will happily admit they still don’t understand A Brief History of Time.

But there was another important aspect of these books. Many of them were riddled with attitude. When I interviewed Hawking just before the publication of A Brief History, he made it clear he thought physicists would soon have the theory of everything that would explain the entire history of matter. He also would not listen to me when I pointed out to him that he had simplified the thought of Wittgenstein to the point of rank inaccuracy. It was, in retrospect, the most shocking interview I have ever conducted.

Hawking was backed in his idea of the impending completion of physics by writers such as the Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg, whose Dreams of a Final Theory was another of the big books of the Hawking wave. This dream, as I pointed out to Hawking, was an irrational statement of faith. Even if a theory was imminent, why should it not be disproved in the future? Very soon, the faith was proved misguided. We are now as far from a final theory as we ever were. In Hawking’s case, as his then wife told me, this faith was also accompanied by virulent antireligious feelings. Later, when the bestselling physics books were joined by biology books, the attitude was still bigger than the science. Now it was DNA rather than cosmology that had unlocked the secret of life, but the implication was the same: we, the scientists, have all the answers. Antireligiousness was an important aspect of this creed. The philosopher Daniel Dennett gave intellectual weight to this attack on faith and, in Breaking the Spell, formally codified the destruction of God as a necessary element of the progress of science. In the case of Dawkins, of course, it became the only element. His latest bestseller, The God Delusion, is not about science at all, but about his faith: atheism.

The image created of science was that of an impregnable and rather cantankerous fortress of certainty. There is no logic that dictates that the science of Hawking and Dawkins should entail a loathing of religion, yet somehow, to these imperious imaginations, it did. Another big science writer, Lewis Wolpert, extended this antipathy to include philosophy, a discipline that, he insisted, had nothing to tell us. Such crude certainties are, of course, absurd, since good science is predicated on uncertainty, but it was essential to the marketing of these books. Uncertainty, it was thought, doesn’t sell. What sold were big final statements.

These books — especially those by Dennett, Hawking and Dawkins — were preaching to the converted, to people who broadly accepted the terms of this impregnable certainty. They sold well because they became the texts of the dominant faith of our time: secular scientism. They were exclusive works: you were either in or out. It’s not stretching a point too far to say that their hard certainties and exclusivity played some part in the decline of interest in science among the young. They lacked the essential ingredient that turns children into scientists — wonder.

In fact, wonder had been systematically bled out of science in other media as well. Mick O’Hare, editor of the New Scientist books and Last Word, points out that Tomorrow’s World is now no longer on television; it ended in 2003 after 38 years. It was a weird, slightly naff show, but it was, at its best, exciting. Furthermore, the great panjandrums of certainty had displaced more humble yet more exciting writers such as James Jeans. His books used to be in every home. “They were really popular in style and beautifully written,” says Robin Rees, whose Canopus Books produced Bang!. “We deliberately set out to produce a book like that.”

Wonder is not laden with scientistic attitude. It is open-minded and embraces uncertainty. Indeed, the greatest living science writer, EO Wilson, admitted, while contemplating the Amazonian rainforest, that some part of him resisted the scientific impulse to know and explain all. He wanted the wonder and mystery, as well as the knowledge. Wonder also illuminates everything, no matter how small. Does Anything Eat Wasps? and Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? are based on the idea that science adds something to even our most banal interactions with the world. O’Hare explains that the column started in 1994 specifically with the brief of avoiding big scientific questions, such as ‘what is a black hole?’. It tried only to answer questions such as why, whatever they contain, dustbins always smell the same. O’Hare was originally told that the column wasn’t expected to last long: it was assumed the number of such questions was limited. But he now realises there is no limit. Every aspect of the world requires explanation, and these aspects are infinite in number. The world, in the words of the physicist Freeman Dyson, is infinite in all directions.

In the case of Giant Leaps, produced by The Sun and the Science Museum, wonder is preserved partly by Challoner’s serious and lucid essays accompanying the front pages, but also by the central joke. Imagining what the paper that once ran the headline “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” would do with Galileo looking through a telescope in 1610 is, in itself, a source of wonder. In fact, the front page of the book has the headline “Earth Revolves Around” — you guessed it — “The Sun”. The point is, of course, that these really were big stories — the biggest, in fact. Placing them in a context usually filled by celebrity fluff or the fleeting nonsense of contemporary politics has the effect of humbling contemporary vanity. The Sun reporting on the Big Bang or on Isaac Newton’s apple is a good joke precisely because it couldn’t, and raises the question: would it if it had the chance? Either way, the wonder of the event itself is enhanced.

Furthermore, this type of popular science does not need to be sectarian, demanding the capitulation of other faiths and philosophies. In compiling Bang!, May says, the authors agreed that science and religion were separate areas; there was no opposition for science to crush, only different explanatory frameworks. May, as a governor of his old school, has noted with sadness the decline of interest in science. “TV and film have made children interested in media and the arts, which is good, but it has become unbalanced.” His own story is symbolic of this phenomenon. He was finishing his PhD on interstellar dust at Imperial when Queen hit the big time. He abandoned the thesis — pop culture had taken him away from science. But he has returned. And he has gone back to Imperial and his thesis, which he hopes to complete in a couple of years.

What is at issue here is not just a few successful books: it is the freeing of science from the enclosed world of sectarian certainty into which it has descended. People, as the success of this new wave of science books makes clear, want to know, they want to know what is known and, more important, to know what isn’t. Deprive them of access to both our knowledge and our ignorance, and they will turn away from science in disgust. Give them the wonder of both and they will read on.

These new, humble, wondrous books — and, indeed, that great TV testament to wonder, Planet Earth — are an unalloyed good. They restore the true faith, and will, in time, send children to seek out whatever maths and physics courses they can find amid the debris of the science faculties.