Sunday, May 27, 2007
Science Times
In this book review Harvard professor Steven Pinker deconstructs Natalie Angier. Angier has been one of those writers at the Times that has destroyed the great pleasure I used to feel when reading Science Times, the Tuesday roundup of good-news from the life of the mind. Issue after issue deteriorated until I finally gave up. Don't know why it happened, maybe a change in editors, but Angier is emblematic of the problem. (Angier won the Pulitzer, living proof that awards don't tell you much.) Even the Science Times podcast has become a bore.
Delicately, Pinker says, “[Angier's] approach doesn’t always serve a widespread understanding of science.”
… all too often in Angier’s writing, the similarity is sound-deep: the more you ponder the allusion, the worse you understand the phenomenon. For example, in explaining the atomic nucleus, she writes, “Many of the more familiar elements have pretty much the same number of protons and neutrons in their hub: carbon the egg carton, with six of one, half dozen of the other; nitrogen like a 1960s cocktail, Seven and Seven; oxygen an aria of paired octaves of protons and neutrons.” This is showing off at the expense of communication. Spatial arrangements (like eggs in a carton), mixed ingredients (like those of a cocktail) and harmonically related frequencies (like those of an octave) are all potentially relevant to the structure of matter (and indeed are relevant to closely related topics in physics and chemistry), so Angier forces readers to pause and determine that these images should be ignored here. Not only do readers have to work to clear away the verbal overgrowth, but a substantial proportion of them will be misled and will take the flourishes literally. (Trust me: I’ve graded exams.)
Feminist Angier writes like an old-time “woman's magazine journalist”. The narcissism inherent in Angier's high display does a greater harm in that she is trying to encourage involvement in the mysteries of the world manifested in scientific knowledge — in our time threatened by a fearfulness about science some derive from religiosity.
At first I admired Pinker for being so critical of Angier, someone who could be reviewing his next book or blowing off his opinion in an article related to his field. But at the end of the article Pinker disappointingly suffers a complete collapse of nerve: “[Angier's book] is an excellent introduction (or refresher) to the beautiful basics of science, and I hope it is widely read. It could make the country smarter.”
Pinker ought to re-read his own review.