Nearly Everything

Speaking of stories, I've recently been reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Within the pages of this book, I've finally found an answer to the question people always ask me about my majors (Chemistry and English if you didn't know), namely, how do those work together? Up till now, I usually stick with the tried and true "They don't" or an extended "Well. . . ." Sometimes I just laugh. But really, this book shows that there's not as much difference between the sciences and the humanities as modern education might lead you to believe.

Although the science in the book is a little below my level, I've nonetheless enjoyed the book because of the history it gives behind all of our modern knowledge. When you learn this stuff in science class, they sometimes throw a name at you, but that's about all you get. (Much like what I was talking about yesterday with politics.) But in A Short History, you get the entire wacky personalities of the scientists themselves, including personal quirks, grudges, and mishaps. Seriously, it's a wonder that we ever learned anything between geniuses who solve the mysteries of the universe but tell no one, scientific societies full of social climbers anxious to knock off anyone who actually does serious work, and feuding researchers taking away each other's funding. Plus, it makes fun of the French; what more could you want?

As I read this book, I realize that the majority of scientific discovery is not done in a lab, but in writing. New understanding comes through the stories we tell ourselves to explain our experiments, not through the experiments themselves. Each test gives definite results, but establishing what those results mean is quite another matter. It's a debate over truth almost every bit as subjective as what you might find in lit crit, including some really out-there theories. (Someone once proposed that the craters on the moon were caused by swarming insects.) In fact, this book oddly reminds me of nothing so much as Hesiod's Theogony, in that it's almost a religious text for our scientific non-religion. It is the story of how our modern world--and our beliefs about it--came into existence, including the quirky personalities and the ironic inescapability of fate. I mean, as I read the pages, I wait for all the classic Gods of science to step in--Newton, with his secretiveness and alchemy, Einstein with his brilliant start dwindling into a tragic backwater--along with the lesser gods--the Curies, Planck, Bohr. This is the stuff of myth, not science, of storytelling, not empiricism.

Which is why I'm excited to discover that one of the unfinished scientific stories in the book was finally concluded today. As of today, you may live in a universe of twelve planets, not nine. Finally, a definition of planets that makes sense! Very exciting to see science moving along. :D