Science for dummies?

How to enjoy science reading if you’re no scientist

I often wish I had paid more attention in science class in high school, but I know why I didn’t. It was boring.

Science was taught as if it were a bunch of known facts that other people had already figured out, and we just had to memorize them—the elements on the periodic table, the characteristics of different minerals, the anatomy of an earthworm. When I asked my teachers—genuinely, but perhaps with too much teenage snark—why we had to know these things, I never got a satisfactory answer. The curriculum was not optimized to teach us that the job of a real scientist is to ask questions and then figure out some possible answers, which would have interested me a great deal more. I’m not saying no one ever told me that’s what science is, but it certainly never sunk in.

I know this still happens in many science classes today because my college students used to tell me, frequently, that they saw no value in taking a writing class—that is, my class. They were going into science careers, and all they needed to do, they said, was learn the facts. No, no! I would protest. You need to learn how to formulate questions and follow those with convincing arguments about the theories you come up with so that you’ll be able to move your colleagues to listen to you instead of shutting you down. I mean, sure, you could choose to be the kind of science professional who just follows the existing rules and never asks a question. But how do you think we get medical breakthroughs and new technologies? How do you think we’re going to solve the most intractable problems of our day, like the climate crisis? A big part of the solution is scientists asking new questions and dreaming up possible answers, then testing them out and sharing their successes with the rest of us—and not just the obvious, practical questions, but also deeply theoretical questions whose implications are as yet unimagined. (This cuts both ways, as you know if you saw Oppenheimer.)

I’ve become much more interested in reading about science in middle age. Not textbooks, but science articles written for lay people like me. The problem, though, comes full circle. I didn’t pay enough attention in science class in high school.

Among the books in my TBR pile is one recommended by my daughter, who majored in computer science and studied a fair amount of physics—a class I skipped altogether. (How I ended up the parent of a computer scientist is a question for another day.) It’s The Little Book of String Theory, by Steven S. Gubser, and it is, indeed, pretty little, logging in at 162 pages. The small illustration on the front cover reminds me of a Spirograph design from my childhood. In his photo on the back inside flap, the author appears as a sweet-looking young man who reminds me a little bit of my cousin. So far, I’m not intimidated. The inside front flap description assures me that, “After reading this book, you’ll be able to draw your own conclusions about string theory,” and Gubser will use “plain English” and “a minimum of mathematics.” But then it lists the topics he’ll cover: “strings, branes, string dualities, extra dimensions, curved spacetime, quantum fluctuations, symmetry, and supersymmetry.”

Ummmm, I know what the word “symmetry” means.

I don’t want to make myself out to be a total idiot. I enjoy reading articles about current questions in science, particularly for my job at an environmental organization. I’m reteaching myself, bit by bit, for professional reasons (that is, not wanting to sound like an idiot when talking with colleagues who are scientists) about the water cycle and how trees absorb CO2 and how electricity is generated and so on. But string theory? How far can I push myself?

The fact is, you do need some basic science knowledge in order to enjoy reading about science. But I find this humbling exercise is actually good for me because it reminds me how difficult reading literature can be for someone who hasn’t read deeply in that field—all those allusions to other works and complicated sentence structures and unfamiliar vocabulary and what my students always called “hidden meanings,” as if the author were trying to keep something from them. Usually, those things were hidden because the students didn’t have access to what the author was up to. They didn’t have enough context or experience or base knowledge to make what was hidden seem subtle or clever or delightfully sophisticated instead. I imagine they felt kind of like I feel about the first page of The Little Book of String Theory, on which Gubser writes:

Briefly, the claim of string theory is that the fundamental objects that make up all matter are not particles, but strings. Strings are like little rubber bands, but very thin and very strong. An electron is supposed to be actually a string, vibrating and rotating on a length scale too small for us to probe even with the most advanced particle accelerators to date. In some versions of string theory, an electron is a closed loop of string. In others, it is a segment of string, with two endpoints.

OK, I remember electrons. I had a good chemistry teacher in high school, and I still recall the exercise where he put four chairs, facing each other in pairs, at the front of the room and had one student sit down in any chair of their choice and then invited up a second student, who, because of human nature, sat diagonally opposite. Which, I learned, was what electrons do, because particles with like charges (two electrons) repel one another. But, see there? Particles. I certainly wasn’t taught to think of electrons as strings. The internet, by the way, is telling me variously that string theory is dead, string theory isn’t even physics, string theory is still relevant. I’d just like to know what it is.

I have come to understand, as an adult, that one of the basic problems I had with my science classes was distinguishing between metaphor and reality. A string in string theory is not literally a “little rubber band,” but where does the metaphor end and the theoretical reality begin? In addition, sometimes scientific facts seemed so strange that I thought they must be metaphors. Especially when it came to things I couldn’t see for myself, like electrons. The whole thing just seemed… made up.

On some level, it is—or, at least, it’s way less definitive than we pretend it to be. In her essay “Quantum Enlightenment,” which is included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022, Ruth Robertson argues that we should “become comfortable with not knowing.” She writes:

My People, the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation), acknowledge the authority of Takuskanskan, a deity that we can only describe in English as being “that which moves all things.” It is the Great Mystery, but also the Universe, and everything within it. It is inside you and me. It is the Source of all life, but also motion absent any living thing. It is both the pilot wave and as Einstein said, the “spooky action at a distance.” Takuskanskan is the knowledge of an observable phenomena, without being able to fully explain what it is. Takuskanskan is the humility to accept the impossible as real, and also the understanding that our reality is determined by our interaction with our surroundings.

Incorporating “Indigenous ways of knowing” into science, she says, “will foster enlightenment and open the door to the merger necessary for greater understanding.” This, oddly enough, makes more sense to me than an argument that electrons are not particles but, rather, strings.

What I need to do when I read something like The Little Book of String Theory is go very slowly, annotate, and look stuff up. It’s painstaking. I get why so many of my students who weren’t enamored of English struggled with literary texts. I really, really get it.

Aside from these strategies, another way to get better at reading something difficult is to practice, practice, practice. So, if you, like me, are a non-scientist interested in reading more science, find some newsletters and publications that write science for lay people and start reading. There’s no end to this project. Just embrace it as a thing you do.

The following are not necessarily recommendations for you, because they’re particular to my situation, but consider similar choices for yourself.

• One newsletter I now read a lot is a daily digest from the Energy News Network, which comes into my work email and gives me the top stories of the day from various sources related to climate issues. Sometimes I poke my nose into my husband’s monthly copy of Smithsonian magazine. The aforementioned Best American Science and Nature Writing series is chock full of pieces on current topics in science from publications writing for non-scientists: The Atlantic, Scientific American, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Orion, etc.

• I’ve been picking up more books with a science bent, too—most recently, Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, which alternates personal chapters about her journey and travails as a professor and lab scientist (grant funding—ugh!) with chapters about the science of plants. I’ve been listening to it on audio, and one day this past week as I circled up through the levels of the parking garage looking for a space, I half heard her chapter on the growth curves of different plants and misunderstood the “lazy S-curve” of a corn plant to be describing the shape of its stalk (Really? I thought. Not the corn plants I grew up around!) rather than the shape of a graph of its growth. I probably shouldn’t be listening to science books on audio, at least not while I’m also trying to drive.

• Finally, you can do what my students always did when they got stuck: search for some videos to help you out. Khan Academy still looks like a good bet.

I feel some readerly regret that it has taken me so long to augment my lackluster performance in science class with a genuine effort to learn. But, here we are. I need to go back to the basics so I can keep on reading about science. Someday, I will tackle The Little Book of String Theory, pencil in hand, and do my best to understand what my daughter does already. When I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Image based on a photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash