Cutting-edge of the past
Were popular science authors just better at it, years ago?
Our astronomer has been reading some recent popular-science books these past few months, mostly as background for a book he is (intermittently) working on himself. It might be chance that three of the past four have been really disappointing. Indeed, two of them have wound up in unenviable company, there on his bookshelf of Bad Examples. This normally requires either wrong science or poor writing or both.
He can’t help but contrast this with a study he did of popular astronomy books in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was really hard in most of them to find anything scientifically incorrect; when they didn’t know something they said so, and when they made guesses the process was plain. There were no faults in the writing that he noticed. Granted, the style of writing then was different. The first sentence of Sir John Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy (1833) goes over onto the second page. But that came from being exact in one’s meaning, which sometimes does require additional words to make clear. A little patience is required. It is not the sort of patience one needs with some current books, where it takes time and several rereadings to work out what a sentence is actually trying to say.
He has considered redoing the study using popular astronomy books from the 1940s and 50s. It was a time of great change at the cutting-edge, and cosmology had newly become a real science. In contrast with the previous books, many things were set out as true or highly probable that turned out to be entirely wrong. This is troubling to us as scientists, and we’re not quite sure how to approach it. The writing styles are much more colloquial. This is to be expected in a less formal time, especially since some of the books originated as radio talks. But they are still quite understandable and examples of good English. (Indeed, our astronomer sometimes wishes George Gamow had been less entertaining as a writer and more careful about his science.)
In contrast, the recent books have managed to be weak on both science and in writing. One promises to make certain features of Quantum Field Theory clear, but fails even for those of us who understand the math. Another has two explanations of the geological carbonate cycle that contradict each other. There is no need to choose either, though, since one is gibberish and the other is just wrong. And all too often an apparent desire to be up-to-date in the language only masks muddled thinking.
We’re no doubt being too hard on modern writers. The earlier authors were chosen as being foremost scientists themselves, whose works are acknowledged as being good and interesting after decades. The current ones mostly include science journalists and were chosen as having written on specific topics recently. There is no doubt very good stuff out there now. We just haven’t run into it.
