The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

[sawyl]

I've mentioned this a few time, but my recent journeys to and from work have been greatly enhanced by The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing edited by Richard Dawkins, who proves himself to be a thorough and knowledgeable guide full of boundless enthusiasm and with supreme literary sensibilities.

Having set himself the challenge to pick out the best that twentieth century scientific writing has to offer, Dawkins divides his prizes into four broad categories: what scientists study; who scientists are; what scientists think; and what scientists delight in. As might be expected the anthology shows a bias towards the biological, especially in the first section, but the range and quality of the writing on display more that justifies the selection. The second section, on scientists as people, featured a range of essays, some more amusing than others, on what it means to be a scientist and the sorts of scrapes scientists get themselves in. Although most of the pieces were good, I particularly liked Oliver Sacks' brilliant Uncle Tungsten and Steven J. Gould's Worm for a Century, and All Seasons.

The third section, on scientific ways of thinking, shifted away from the biological and the personal to the mathematical and cosmological. There were classic essays from Shannon and Turing, some excellent pop maths columns on Conway's Life game and Zeno's paradox, and, as a finale, a handful of pieces on relativity, non-euclidian geometry and string theory. The book finished off with a consideration, again more mathematical than biological, of what it is that makes a theory beautiful or elegant; what sort of puzzles and ideas tend to capture the scientific mind; and what the complexity of life or convolutions of the carbon cycle or the wonders of astronomy teach us about life.

As an anthology of scientific writing, I can't recommend this highly enough. Although I might not have liked every essay in the book, almost everything was though provoking and a large proportion were extremely beautifully pieces of writing and I definitely felt better for knowing of their existence; while the essays I loved left me wanting to chase down the original sources to see where they might take me.