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I very much enjoyed Jamie Zvirzdin’s essay. And I agree that “science writing is often abysmally inaccessible, even for the initiated—like a bizarre ancient ritual that even its most faithful modern practitioners don’t understand but pretend they do.” My particular bête noire, when I worked (as an editor) at NASA Ames Research Center, was the scientists’ use of the passive voice. No one (least of all the author of the journal article) would take responsibility for research—even for great discoveries. How hard is it to say I (or we) did this?
Science was the Holy Grail for many of us growing up in the 1950s. Strict taxonomies governed us. Survival of the fittest meant that the fittest were meant to win. Powerful bombs had proved that might equalled right. Salk had conquered the scourge of polio. We were going to beat the Russians to the moon. DDT had made mosquitoes and cockroaches less troublesome. No one had yet noticed the Silent Spring, nor did they worry about nuclear proliferation.
Science as a way of thinking held us captive. My father was a doctor, my mother had been a math teacher before the birth of four children. However, science was the male preogative. When I was thirteen, we spent a summer in the Badlands of Alberta digging fossil dinosaur bones for my fourteen-year-old brother’s science project involving spectroscopy. All I wanted to do was read Green Mansions by the motel swimming pool. Nevertheless, that year, I won first prize for girls in the citywide science fair for experiments that used a muffin recipe to demonstrate the scientific method. I remember vividly the snowy day when I burst through the door with news of my win and that my photo would appear in the Herald Statesman. The house was dark and quiet, as if someone had died, and my mother hushed my exclamations, not wanting them to eclipse my brother’s disappointment.
And even though the arts was a secondary and feminine type of occupation, my father, when I wanted to attend Bard college, forbade my application, saying no respectable male (good marriage material) would go there. When I wanted to transfer from University of Rochester (which churned out proper marriage material, that is doctors) to Bennington College, my mother cried because only eccentrics (lesbians) went there.
I became a poet anyway. (I loved Jamie Zvirzdin’s revelation that Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” comes from Luigi Galvani’s experiments in bioelectromagnetics.)
As an English major (and MA in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing) I found job prospects in the San Francisco Bay Area to be better in technical rather than literary fields. Getting back to Jamie Zvirzdin’s point, often what being a technical editor amounted to was simply making sure what was being documented was accessible to any reader.
Of course it isn’t just nineteenth-century scientists who utilized literary tools to make factual material accessible. As Einstein and Infield wrote in The Evolution of Physics, “In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. . . . If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations.”[1]
How to explain what you hardly understand? How to explain to yourself first and carry that explanation, like a fragile egg, to your neighbor? As a reader of literature, I was tickled to come across the following discussion of byte ordering in documentation for Informix Database Company (this explanation from Wikipedia, descriptive italics mine):
. . . Danny Cohen introduced the terms Little-Endian and Big-Endian for byte ordering in an article from 1980.[2][3]In this technical and political examination of byte ordering issues, the “endian” names were drawn from Jonathan Swift‘s 1726 satire, Gulliver’s Travels, in which civil war erupts over whether the big or the small end of a soft-boiled egg is the proper end to crack open.[2]
Of course, I’m a feminist as well as poet. How lovely to discover (from Jamie Zvirzdin) Ada Lovelace’s comparison of “the process of weaving with punch cards to the prototype of the computer that she was working on.” This was the first baby step toward the powerful processing machines we are working with today.
Jamie Zvirzdin writes, “One metaphor builds on the next, splits, and expands through the ages to create a greater understanding of both ourselves and the universe.” This is certainly true in physics. Niels Bohr said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”[3]
But how can we describe what we can’t see, feel, or maybe even imagine? “Imagining the unseeable is hard, because imagining means having an image in your mind. And how can you have a mental image of something you have never seen?”[4] This brings me to my pet peeve, the unimaginitive territory of science fiction. Many will say I just haven’t read good science fiction—and they would be right. While poetry might stop at merely creating the uneffable and leaving it at that (“There are, of course, vast and unarticulatable gaps between our experience of the world and the language we use to describe it. Poems are miraculous for this very reason: when they are good, they are able to say what can’t be said.”[5]) Science fiction (cue whooshing sound of death machines) is at a loss because it can’t imagine the unimaginable.
Notes
[1] Einstein and Infield, quoted in introduction to Part 1, K. C. Cole, First You Build a Cloud and Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1999), 13.
[2] Wikipedia, s.v. “Computer Memory” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
[3] K. C. Cole, First You Build a Cloud and Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1999), 15
[4] K. C. Cole, First You Build a Cloud and Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1999), 18
[5] Adrian Blevins, “Adrian Blevins: Word Gluttons and Rhythm Sluts, Book Letches and Paragraph Drunks—The Magic of Metaphor” Vox Populi March 14, 2015.
Comments from other contributors to the Poetics of Science online discussion:
L. Shapley Bassen: DKM and I share much the same narrative, origins, feminism, & all. Brava: [Blevins] “Poems are miraculous for this very reason: when they are good, they are able to say what can’t be said.” But “Science fiction (cue whooshing sound of death machines) is at a loss because it can’t imagine the unimaginable” is more than arguable. Great sci fi has done just that and been credited for it. Just for starters, consider this list. Two other notables that astonish me are “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster, published in 1909 [computers PLUS] and Robert Louis Stevenson’s possibly “magisterial novel” [J.Roebke] The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was first published in 1886, its fragmented form mirroring mental states, antedating publications by Freud.