Broadening the vision

‘Popular science’: for some readers this remains a problematic category. I’m sure proper scientists look askance at civilians reading such books on public transport, imagining their own abstruse specialities dumbed down for the hard-of-thinking. And the vast mass of arts graduates, who hate and fear science, remembering the bad trousers and unfortunate hairstyles of science undergraduates in their day, happily admit that they know nothing of the subject and understand even less. Some people I know have been boasting for nearly 20 years that they gave up A Brief History of Time before the end. It’s all too sad for words.

Stephen Hawking, though, has much to answer for. In his book, relatively straightforward ideas would be explained from first principles, while complex numbers, one of the most mind-blowing ideas in all mathematics, were swept aside in a single paragraph. Many of us had maths masters like this: so clever they could understand anything, except for the one thing they were paid to understand, which was that their pupils weren’t all as clever as they were. Other popular science titles, even award-winning ones, have read like PhD theses, telling you everything interesting in an extended introduction, and then saying it all again, at greater length and more boringly, in the rest of the book. Then there are the science writers, usually American, who think they are wacky and zany and wish they’d been Douglas Adams, and long before you throw their books aside in disgust, you want them dead or, at least, very seriously harmed.

Recently, though, the genre has shown signs of growing up; certainly, better books are being published. Simon Ings’s book is one such. Ings is probably best known for his science-flecked novel The Weight of Numbers and also for not being the science writer Simon Singh (unless I have missed something and he is).