And when you do get your degree, there may not be a job for you in pure research, because the government believes that science is about wealth creation. However, by not providing the resources to set you off with a good science education in the first place, the government has deprived industry of its potential wealth creators.

I will now introduce Professor Dunbar. His book The Trouble with Science sprang from a series of lectures to his first-year students at the University of Liverpool, so that they would understand what it was they were really embarking on. You probably thought you were going to do science because you liked it. Aha! So science is something you do, is it, or is the thing that you do only part of a bigger thing called science? Is just “doing” real science or is it, as Robin Dunbar puts it, “cook-book” science? What about that ideal form of science that exists in the brain, not the test tube? And is science only done by post-Copernicans of European origin? Or do pigeons conceptualise and experiment too? Is the practical knowledge of Shona tribesmen or Queensland Aborigines actually real science, or grassroots bush-cred?

Some of Dunbar’s arguments seem a waste of time. He says that lots of scientists read good books, go to art galleries, write poetry and listen to concerts, whereas most art graduates don’t understand cell biology, and are rather proud of it. Yes. Too right. But Dunbar must know that lots of literature graduates have never read Proust.

Meanwhile, want to see postmodernism getting a good kicking? Want some nice examples of famous scientists caught in the act of trying to have things both ways? This is a terrific book, with exasperating passages, but even these make you think. Bits of Dunbar’s argument are not so much profound as provoking. He wants better science journalism, but doesn’t say what it will look like.

Dunbar is in favour of a comprehensible language for science – who isn’t? – and tells of the exasperated journal editor who printed two versions of an immunological paper, one of them in English. Everyone approved except the immunologists, who claimed the English version was harder to understand.

Dunbar has fun with the argument that science is a cultural construction and therefore subject to fashion, and he is bothered by Bryan Appleyard’s Understanding The Present, a sustained whimper about science taking away the mystery of things.

Science is not a great way to get lots of money, or these days, even a job. But there are great riches in it, and in this book too. Now read on.

Scientific prose ought to be good: those who think clearly can usually
write clearly, and working scientists (in theory) sit down at the typewriter
with an unusual advantage over lyric poets, genre novelists and sports reporters:
they have something fresh to say.

Of course, it hardly ever works out that way. The genre of the Letter
to Nature demands that the stuff be as free from emotional colouring –
that is, as boring – as possible. However, a powerful school of thought
argues that objective statement is a dodgy idea anyway: even the flattest
prose plays tricks with language.

Jack Selzer had the bright idea of taking an often-cited work, completely
surrounding it with scholars of rhetoric, blasting it with protocol analysis,
deconstruction apparatus, ideational systemics and politeness theory, backed
up by sniper fire from the feminist heights; all this, in the hope that
the emotional colouring, value judgments, intertextual cardsharping and
patriarchal attitudes would come out with their hands up.

So Selzer chose a paper written in 1978 by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard
Lewontin called ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm:
A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’. It was for a London bash at
the Darwin business, and in 1979 it was published in the Proceedings Of
The Royal Society. In it, swipes are taken at sociobiology, and evolutionary
theorists are warned that just because animals have a ‘trait’ that does
not mean the trait is for something – a chin could be a consequence, not
a trait – and that natural selection need not explain absolutely everything
about an organism. Gould actually wrote it: he says that Lewontin provided
the brains, but Gould certainly provided the metaphors, having visited St
Mark’s in Venice shortly beforehand. Okay, got the guilty man, now just
flush out the evidence and convict him. Better still, ask him to make a
statement to the court at the end.

It ought to have been a walkover. The lads were in what Gulf War pilots
called ‘a target-rich environment’. ‘Spandrels’ is not the most compulsive
essay ever written by Gould – it’s for the Royal Society, for God’s sake
– but it became his most cited paper. It is unusual, not because it uses
analogy, metaphor or even polemic, or because it uses debating-society tricks
(if the opponents are Pangloss – Gould and Lewontin are therefore Voltaire,
nice one) or because it sets up an argument about function and ornament
in architecture and redeploys it in biology. No, it is unusual because a
nonscientist can understand exactly what is being said, and read it all
the way through without nodding off, while at the same time veteran and
world-leading evolutionary theorists can read it and apparently have apoplexy.

Scholars of rhetoric, however, do not seen to be able to pull off quite
the same trick. This book is ideal for insomniacs: a paragraph or two and
you are out. Important points are made (well, I suppose they are important).
Gould is accused by one don of a ‘display of his own refined taste rather
than expert testimony’ when he argues that the spandrels of San Marco were
decorated as a consequence of, rather than the reason for, the dome. The
point is rather spoilt when the don admits that the decorated fan vaulting
of King’s College chapel in Cambridge is actually there to hold the roof
up.

Most of them pick up the ‘Me Voltaire, you dickhead’ trick. (This, by
the way, is called ‘intertextual self-fashioning’. Remember the phrase,
it could come in handy.) A feminist calls Gould and Lewontin’s approach
implicitly feminist and pluralist, but then finds them guilty of being
explicitly patriarchal after all because they think some other people could
be wrong. ‘Honestly! Men!’

The best critique in the whole book is, of course, Gould’s, who describes
himself as ‘thrilled as a kid who can still see splendour in the grass’,
says he is not that clever a field scientist and adds that ‘I get away with
it by tacit special dispensation. People say ‘that asshole again: Oh well,
at least he can write’.’

For someone mostly from the other side of the Two Cultures divide, it
is a bit depressing to discover that 16 professors of communication, rhetoric,
linguistics and English can be so tedious, and one Harvard palaeontologist
can see the lot of them off. To play the Panglossian trick with traits,
chins are there for leading with. And skulls are for being bored out of.

Tim Radford is science editor of The Guardian. Before that, he was literary
editor.

In 1965, small groups of scientists were messing about with entertaining but
what seemed like utterly pointless conjecture about the origins of the
Universe. Less than three decades later, physicists now casually talk about
what happened in the first squillionth of a second of time as if the whole
topic were more or less sorted out, final confirmation awaiting a few more
measurements, and perhaps a Higgs boson or two. This is largely because in
1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson built a peculiar-looking aerial
focused on a particular band of the microwave spectrum and almost
accidentally identified the remnant of the Big Bang, and because 20 years
later, on 23 April 1992, George Smoot and some NASA satellite readings
confirmed that the afterglow of the explosion had almost indiscernible
kinks in it.

And that just about wrapped up the argument. The existence, everywhere in
the sky, of radiation around the 3 Kelvin energy band, demonstrated that the
Universe had a beginning and the ripples, inconsistencies or hot and cold
spots in that radiation confirmed that the eruption hadn’t been uniform.
Because of those ripples, the nebula, galaxies, stars, planets and people
ultimately condensed. But then, we are here, so the ripples had to have been
there. The triumph was in finding them.

It was what journalists call ‘a good story’ but, as George Smoot told The
Guardian shortly afterwards, it would have been an even better story if they
hadn’t found them. Then the standard theory of the Universe would have had
to be torn up.

Marcus Chown’s book is a very good piece of story-telling, because it
patiently pursues not only the story’s main thread, but also the wrong
turnings, the exasperations and serendipities of the search for the relics
of creation. What made it difficult was that practically everything radiates
microwaves. Many know about the ‘white dielectric material’ or in other
words, pigeon shit, that confused Penzias and Wilson. We don’t usually hear
anything about the frustrations of trying to eliminate microwave radiation
from almost everything in the Universe – the ground, the Galaxy, the plastic
lenses on the telescopes, the water vapour in the heavens – to detect the
radiation of the cosmos itself. We hear about the winners – Penzias, Wilson,
Smoot – but most of the time we don’t hear very much about the dozens of
others who arrived at the answers prematurely, imprecisely, too diffidently,
too confidently or just too late, but who still played a powerful part in
the Big Answer. Almost everybody who matters (and one or two, such as this
reviewer, who don’t) gets a mention. Chown is very good on NASA news
management and the media circus that followed the announcement, a circus
cheerfully whipped on by all sorts of scientists, perhaps because
astronomers and cosmologists recognised that 23 April was one of those rare
occasions – Chernobyl was another – on which, suddenly and miraculously, the
public were prepared to try to catch up with science, and they should not
spoil the fun by pointing out that really it was only ‘not a bad’ story.

He also goes to some lengths to understand how Smoot of the Cosmic
Background Explorer team was converted into the ‘Indiana Jones of physics’.
He quotes one colleague as saying that Smoot said things to the press ‘in a
way he would not talk to a scientific audience’. Well, all I can say is,
bully for Smoot. Chown writes as if he were addressing his fellow humans, so
bully for him too. Only when you reduce the cosmic understanding of the past
25 years to something like vernacular English can you begin to appreciate
how cosmic it really is. Just think about it for a moment. Chown, in a rare
slip of the imagination, calls it ‘a long slog’. It seems to me that to go
in one generation from confused conjecture to a confident, split second by
split second, chronicle of Creation itself is a bit of a sprint. The book
belts along at a fair old pace as well.

Tim Radford is The Guardian’s science editor.

IN 1964 I opened my New Statesman on Thursday evening, as I always did,
and discovered a poem by J. B. S. Haldane which began:

I wish I had the voice of Homer to sing of rectal carcinoma . . .

and which continued in that extraordinary vein, half rueful doggerel,
half limpid incantation, to its bleak, oddly delightful conclusion. Shortly
after that, my first conscious introduction to the literate scientist, I
began to subscribe to New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ and Scientific American, and to start
amassing a library of Pelicans and out-of-print books by James Jeans, Oliver
Lodge, Eddington, Huxley, Haldane and Frank Buckland, most of which have
been with me ever since.

Why I did so is something inherent in that joke from Punch, in which
the effete young man tells his aunt crushingly, ‘My Dear Aunt, one doesn’t
write about anything, one just writes!’ The best science writing is about
something: that is why it is available. It is about something that widens
the reader’s vision and expands and deepens his or her understanding, and
if it does so in words that delight the ear and fill the mind with indelible
imagery, then it is as valuable as anything by, say, Thomas Mann or Franz
Kafka. Most science writing isn’t, of course, like that. Nor are most of
the books on sale at airport news-stands, but if the conditions are right
you can escape into Robert Ludlum for an hour or two I never heard of anyone
losing themselves in a badly written book about semiconducting.

As it happened, my copy of Bernard Dixon’s selection from science writing,
mostly from this century, fell open at Haldane’s poem. The very next essay,
‘On First Encountering Sodium Benzoate’ was from the pen of an old colleague,
Roy Herbert, who in the 1960s used to walk around with a lofty and almost
cantankerous demeanour, as if he didn’t really want anyone to know what
a nice man he was underneath. To run into two very old friends in the first
few seconds at a party is a very good augury, and sets a benign mood; only
afterwards does one begin to wonder why, say, Nigel Calder and Rachel Carson
put in such fleeting appearances. Those of us who have been trying for years
to lay our hands on Francis Galton’s account of how he measured the calliphygous
charms of African women with a theodolite rather than a tape measure could
have done with rather more of the anecdote than what seems like a half-overheard
snatch of conversation.

There are some tantalisingly brief encounters at this party, and one
or two expected familiars who failed to turn up altogether. But then anthologies
are rather like parties; full of delightful people you never get a chance
to talk to properly, and always at least one crashing bore who has managed
to wangle his or her way in somehow.

The Dixon guest-list (compiled with help from Richard Gregory, Dorothy
Hodgkin, Fred Hoyle, Jonathan Miller and the late Peter Medawar) has so
many attractions, however, that now the carping must stop. Bronowski may
not have popped in for a quick one, but the book is worth it just for the
1978 Bronowski memorial lecture by George Steiner, the man who makes everybody
feel ignorant. Steiner’s wonderful essay on what he calls ‘the speculative
lust’ arches from Thales to George Gamow, along the way dropping names like
other people drop haitches, that is, unconsciously and in haste; Tolstoy,
Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Hegel, Lenin, Blake, Clausewitz, Kelvin,
Clapeyron and Clausius . . .

There are other guests not to be missed. Fred Hoyle on the day’s length;
Stephen Jay Gould on Gosse on whether Adam had a navel; Primo Levi’s beautiful
essay on the carbon atom from The Periodic Table; Peter Medawar on the 17th
century (not forgetting Dr Johnson’s friend who tried to be a philosopher,
but failed ‘because cheerfulness was always breaking in’); Lewis Thomas
on his belief that there must be a single switch at the centre of things
that causes cancer, a central single chemical event that causes schizophrenia,
another that causes rheumatoid arthritis; and Denys Wilkinson on the Universe.

There are small pleasant surprises: a starry-eyed look at the possibilities
inherent in the new technologies from Winston Churchill in 1932; a lively
limerick from Arthur Koestler; Erasmus Darwin as well as Charles, Freeman
Dyson and Richard Dawkins. And there is a modest sprinkling of unassuming
(but never empty) contributions to New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, which Dixon edited for
10 years. In the preface Dixon suggests that scientists (well, actually,
anybody) might learn to write not by reading the good writers, but by studying
the bad, on the grounds that good writers should simply be enjoyed in a
wholehearted uncomplicated way (this I understand to be a heresy in Eng.
Lit. courses, but it’s advice likely to increase the sum of human happiness).

But it’s a preface that, implicitly, raises the old question about books
like these; what are they for? Is the purpose of this one to demonstrate
to people in the scientific community that it is possible for people in
white coats to write like angels? It is possible, but only a few of them
can ever do it; only a few of us can be great lovers, run a mile in four
minutes or write great songs. Is it to persuade a doubting public that scientists
can write interestingly and well? Did anyone ever seriously claim they couldn’t?
Are we somehow back in the tedious, and possibly irresolvable two cultures
debate, tedious because the premises are dubious; irresolvable because there
isn’t actually a debate? Or have we a bedside book that people might dip
into occasionally over the Horlicks? Is Denys Wilkinson on whether the Universe
is open or closed the sort of thing one can read at all while waiting for
the sandman? I’m not even sure that there ought to be a concept called science
writing, that is, something that exists in a bag separate from any other
kind of writing, as if, say, it was like writing about chess. (For a while
I was actually bullied into airing views like this at seminars organised
by the British Association, COPUS and New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.) We write, ultimately,
to explain things to each other; to make sense of the world about us. And
we read because we want to hear someone, a human, recognisable someone from
another time and place, make sense of their world and ours, across the oceans
and the centuries. That’s why we need to learn both from, say, Pepys and
Polkinghorne, Thomas Mann and Medawar, Suetonius and Steiner.

Meanwhile, if we must have a selection of science writing in a single
showcase, I can’t honestly think of a better one. The reservations are few,
the riches of this collection are many.