Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002

Foreword Every profession has its rite of passage, a crucible guaranteed to roil doubts and second thoughts about career choices. Pilots have their solo flights, surgeons their operations. For science journalists, it"s that first crucial interview when they realize, with mounting unease, that they don"t understand a single word of what some scientist is telling them. It happened to me several years ago. I had just started working as a reporter for Discover magazine and managed to convince my editor that I was ready to write a feature. One of the people I needed to interview for the story was an eminent physicist, a Nobel laureate. He graciously set aside two hours of his time one wintry afternoon in Princeton to talk to me about a perplexing problem in his field, a problem that was to be the subject of my article. I turned on my tape recorder and asked my first question. In reply the physicist said something about an "antisymmetric total eigenfunction." It wasn"t the sort of answer I was looking for. Worse, it wasn"t the sort of answer I could understand. From there the gap between what the physicist said and what I followed could have been measured in megaparsecs. For the next 7,200 seconds I had almost no idea what this kindly, renowned, thoughtful gentleman was talking about. Sure, I could recognize the odd phrase here and there, but entire sentences might as well have been transmitted in a frequency range audible only to canines for all they meant to me. Somehow the few questions I sputtered during the remainder of the interview didn"t betray my utter befuddlement and growing panic. For the most part I sat silently perspiring, nodding or grunting now and then to foster the illusion of comprehension. When the interview finally ended I walked from the snow-covered campus to the train that would take me back to Manhattan, wondering how I would ever wring a story from such impenetrable raw material before my deadline. Over the next few weeks, after many more hours of interviews and phone conversations with perhaps a dozen physicists, I finished the assignment. The work was grueling, but satisfying. That first interview turned out to be similar to many others in the years ahead. Although the panicky fear of failing to deliver a story eventually faded, the hard labor of translating the work of scientists into something that people will pay to read hasn"t changed at all. Good writing is never easy, but writing about science is extraordinarily challenging. Most journalists, whether they"re covering crime, politics, or business, can at least assume a common vocabulary, a certain degree of shared knowledge, on the part of their readers, not to mention their interview subjects. Science writers don"t have that luxury. First they need to understand enough of the subject at hand to ask relevant questions. Then they must mold their interview notes and background reading of sundry science journals into a narrative that a reader will not just understand but enjoy. Not an easy profession. Fortunately for us, there are many people who do it extremely well. The stories they tell are compelling, perhaps the most important of our time. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the controversial physicist who headed the Manhattan Project during World War II, once said, "Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics." The stories science tells us are not always comforting. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate physicist (not the one who so confounded me years ago), has said that the more physicists study the universe, the more pointless it all seems. Scientists have not found any evidence of a special role for humanity in the scAngier, Natalie is the author of 'Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002' with ISBN 9780618082971 and ISBN 0618082972.