by Ashutosh Jogalekar
There are two kinds of science writers which I will call “artists” and “craftsmen”. Since I might face the opprobrium of both groups by attaching these labels to them, and especially because the two categories may overlap considerably, let me elaborate a little. Artists are big on literary science writing; craftsmen are big on explanatory science writing. Artists write beautiful prose; craftsmen write clear prose. Artists write relatively few books and are likely to win big book awards like the Pulitzer Prize; craftsmen are content to be merely prolific, often writing dozens or even hundreds of books.
Let me quote from a master craftsman of the trade to put the discussion into context. Isaac Asimov who wrote more than 500 books, seemingly on every subject conceivable, had the following to say about his writing style:
“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be ‘clear’. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”
Asimov wasn’t just a great science fiction writer but a great science writer. He was known as “The Great Explainer” for his ability to explain complex, sweeping scientific topics to laypeople. But Asimov’s quote above also illustrates a central dilemma of science writing. That dilemma was best captured by the physicist Paul Dirac when he expressed puzzlement to Robert Oppenheimer who he had befriended while the two were researchers at the University of Göttingen in the 1920s. Oppenheimer, a man with broad interests across science and the humanities, studied both physics and poetry. Befuddled, Dirac once asked him, “Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry it seems to be the opposite”. Dirac had a point. In science a tiger is a striped mammal and an apex predator. In poetry a tiger is a “tyger”, with an “immortal hand or eye framing thy symmetry”.
On one hand, science writing is about the facts of the universe – about evolution and the Big Bang, dinosaurs and rocks, electrons and earthworms. On the other hand, it is about the human beings who do science. Any fair view of describing science, while grounded in the facts of science, also has to pay its respects to the people who do science. And each of these aspects of science deserves its own style.
A literary style doesn’t always work well for explaining the basic facts. In fact it might even obscure them. This is simply because when you are explaining complex scientific facts, you are already making the reader’s mind work overtime in understanding fairly complicated concepts – quantum mechanics, relativity, population genetics and the like. You don’t want to further burden the reader by having them wind their way through literary flourishes, metaphorical allusions and clever wordplay.
On the other hand, a style that merely explains the facts, no matter how well, doesn’t always do justice to the human side of science. Science is a human adventure. The lives of scientists are linked inextricably with the discoveries of science, and so are, often, the social and political times in which science is done (this is not some kind of extreme postmodernist spin on science – the facts don’t have a built-in human bias, but their interpretation and reception often does). All this makes for grand drama and a great story, the kind of story that can definitely benefit from a novelist’s sense of character, timing and poignant detail.
The challenge of good science writing is to blend both these styles in a way that seems seamless and smooth, wh
