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Why read popular science books? 

By Mind Mover Uzzie

I never really knew that popular science books existed and that there were a number of them out in the market. To my surprise, a number of them is also wonderfully written. Popular science books are works of literature aimed at accessing people who do not necessarily have science backgrounds. They communicate scientific findings without alienating them with jargon that will obscure the meaning of what scientists found out. Like what my great colleague said, science should not be a secret.

My first encounter with popular science books was in my college library. I read the biographies of Richard Feynman. Soon after graduating, I met friends at work, who also loved reading popular science books. I got hooked by Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and many more. Why? Reading those books was an unconventional way of learning, it also changed the way I looked at nature, and the doing of science itself. It also changed the way I think about how I think and how other people think.

For many reasons, people get turned off by science. One, it appears to be a mere cold collection of facts. To build science, you have to get involved in learning those facts and spending hours doing repetitive tasks like measuring things, taking note of your observations, integrating, differentiating and many others. Reading popular science books allows you to see beyond those mundane activities and that they will (sometimes) lead to wonderful discoveries that will change the way we live or look at the world.

Popular science books wonderfully explain scientific ideas in a way that even kids would understand. For instance, I cannot forget how Brian Greene used colored boxes to explain Quantum Entanglement and how Carl Sagan explained the Triune Brain.

Science seems too farfetched and it is of no economic interest. I’m not going to deny it. There are those working in string theory, those spending billions of dollars to look for missing particles (while there are those who cannot eat) and yet the general public and even the scientists themselves do not know if what they are doing would ever amount to anything. Let us recall the story of Michael Faraday. A long long time ago, I think in the 1800s, he was asked by the British Finance Minister about the practical value of his discovery. He had a contraption that had a magnet and a coil of wire. When you let the magnet pass through the coil fast enough (or rotate at an opening of a coil), the change in the magnetic flux, you generate electricity.

Faraday’s answer was “One day sir, you may tax it.” If Faraday did science just to do something practical, he may never have found out about electromagnetic induction. The relentless pursuit for understanding, for doing science for science’s sake, going for the thrill of the discovery is what will eventually lead people to learn more and be more ready or prepared for discoveries that could have practical applications. When you read popular science books you will encounter more stories about useless discoveries and yet they inspire wonder. You will learn about people who unconsciously say “Science is what I live for.” You will also learn about people with different eccentricities – people like the arrogant, testorone-filled Zwicki, the man who theorized dark matter, the incredibly shy and anti-social Henry Cavendish (the man who measured G), the novel and funny raconteur Richard Feynman (famous for his work on Quantum Electrodynamics, his undergraduate Physics lectures, and of course his personality).

Science of course is a human endeavour. Individuals sometimes independently discover things or create their own theories. More importantly, they build upon one another’s work. When you read popular science books you can also learn how people learned more about nature. One of my favourite stories was how people began to learn more about planetary motion and gravity. People had guesses of course. They said the planets moved because there were angels that flapped their wings and carried the planets around our planet. People believed that we were at the center and all the other objects they saw at the night sky were moving around us because we were special. There were contradictory guesses and the way to settle the issue was to do measurements and experiments. Tycho Brahe made the measurements, Kepler analysed them and came up with his laws of planetary motion and many years later Isaac Newton created a universal law of gravitation. With all these, a wave of other experiments and expeditions were spent on in order to measure the weight of the earth and how far the planets were from the sun[UMP1] ! \footnote{Read the chapter on The Measure of Things in “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson}. Another story I like is how some particle physicists theorize that there must be a particle that accounts for a missing energy in a collision for instance to satisfy the law of conservation of energy. So they made colliders, one of them the famous Large Hadron Collider. For instance, they’ve searched the Higgs Boson particle for a very long time and they only found it 50 years after it has been theorized. It’s amazing how something conceived by the mind alone with the use of mathematics and physical laws actually exists in nature as confirmed by experiments!

Recommended Movie: The Skin I Live In

Written by Artha Ting

In an attempt to steer away from mainstream movies, I stumbled upon a 2011 Cannes Film Festival entry from Spain starring our well-loved Zorro and Spy Kids dad, Antonio Banderas. He plays Dr. Robert Ledgard, a renowned surgeon whose wife was burned to near-death in a car accident triggering him to create artificial skin (which he named “Gal” after his late wife) resistant to burns and insect bites which he claims to have tested on athymic mice – or mice that have a genetic mutation to be born without fur. Several scenes in the film show Ledgard using pig blood and human blood to perform transgenesis, the fusion of animal and human genetic material, much to the horror of other scientists who uphold bioethical laws.

This wonder skin is, in fact, tested on a woman named Vera Cruz, who he holds hostage in his house. Flashbacks depict the true identity and history of Vera including what happened to Robert’s wife and daughter Norma. Norma witnessed her mother horrified by her disfigured face and plunged to death from her bedroom window causing Norma to be traumatized and placed in a mental institute. Years later, after her psychiatrist suggested it was time for Norma to socialize, Robert takes her to a client’s wedding party. There, she was raped by a young man named Vicente. Dr. Ledgard hunts down the perpetrator, kidnaps him, and eventually it was revealed that he was given a vaginoplasty. Putting the pieces together, in a span of six years, Vicente became Vera, an exact replica of his deceased wife Gal.

 “The Skin I Live In” may scare and scar you but through the eyes of a science geek, the success of a transgenetic experiment is thrilling! The endless possibilities and the benefits we, as a society, can reap is equally amazing. The madness of it all is what frightens the general public. The question of “how far can you go for love of a person or an object or a passion?” is what surrounds the whole movie.

The most striking scientific revelation for me is when Dr. Ledgard justified using pig’s blood and in effect, genetic material. This is because pig’s skin is much sturdier and stronger than other skin making it the perfect layer for combating burns and insect bites, possibly eradicating insect-related diseases like malaria or dengue, something third-world countries can benefit from.