The Canon

The Canon by Natalie Angier

Category: Popular Science Grade: B+

In the introduction, Angier states her goal -- to make science interesting to people who don't seem to be interested in science. It's an admirable goal. As with other subjects (and as you've seen me rant before), our educational system seems to be intent on leaching the joy out of all the subjects in gets its hands on. When it comes to history, we teach dates, battles and icons instead of the really interesting stories of the real people who, for example, became our Founding Fathers. In literature, we make reading a chore by pushing Silas Marner on teenagers instead of making them love reading by giving the interesting and appropriate books to read. Similarly, Angier's correct contention is that we force kids to memorize periodic tables and molecular diagrams instead of teaching them to be fascinated by our universe, our planet and our biosphere. We work hard to make sure that by the time they're 18, our kids know a fair number of useless facts, but have no interest in lifelong learning.

So, you might ask, why do we care if our adult population is interested in science? OK - here comes another rant. Did you watch the first debate among the Republican candidates? At one point, the moderator asked all the candidates to raise their hands if they didn't believe in evolution. Out of ten candidates, three adult, very smart, very well educated men raised their hands!!!!! Sadly enough, that statistic is reflected in the population at large with a third of college educated people throwing the undeniably valid and undeniably beautiful system of evolution out the window. In another arena, a lack of understanding of our procreation system leads to truly silly policies like the federal government's stance on stem cell research - that it's OK to take minute blobs of jelly that may potentially become a fetus and freeze them forever or throw them in the garbage, but its morally wrong to use those cells to answer questions about diseases that kill people every minute! If we had an adult population that had even a basic understanding of the underlying science, maybe we could get off the dime.

Sorry -- back to the review...

The Canon comes close to succeeding in Angier's goal of making science more approachable. I'd say, if you could measure your interest in science on a 1 (fascinated by textbooks) to 10 (bored to tears by Planet Earth) scale, most science writing captures the ones and twos. This book probably extends to the threes and fours and maybe even the fives. In just 250 pages, Angier covers, well, everything with chapters on the scientific method, probability, physics, chemistry, evolution, biology, geology and astronomy. She gets reasonably in to the science but she leavens the details with lots of analogies that let you visualize really complex topics.

One downside to the book that I, eventually found annoying -- Angier is really a science journalist. She's used to writing columns and stories for The New York Times for which she's won the Pulitzer Prize. She writes with a somewhat flippant style - constantly trying to be funny or, at least, cute. For example, at one point she's talking about the difference in the body between sprinting and distance running (anaerobic versus aerobic) and says that with oxygen (aerobic) you can run "the whole day if you're training for the Olympics, or owe a lot of money to an unofficial lending source in New Jersey". In an essay, this kind of humor can be entertaining. For hundreds of pages, it isn't.

Other than that quibble, if you're even remotely interested in knowing more about the basics of science, this book isn't bad. Her subtitle aptly calls this book "A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science". For the most part, its fascinating.