What I'm Reading

When I was in school I believed that science was mathematics. That science was truth. And, ergo, that science was unimaginative and devoid of beauty. That’s what I believed from the textbooks I read, the lectures I sort of attended to, the lab exercises I performed, the statistics I applied to the data I gathered from my subjects [people].

Since I discovered science writing, my expectations have been turned on their heads – or, their molecular structure diagrams or their 1s and  0s. I’m reading the 2011 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and I’ll share the TOC in another post which -- by itself -- should be sufficient to entice you to learn more about the physical (and, not necessarily observable) worlds we inhabit.

What a difference good writing, an imagination, and curiosity can make.

One of this year’s contributors, Jill Sisson Quinn, notes the following in an essay for OnEarth Magazine:

This year, in my classroom at Stevens Point Area Senior High, in Wisconsin, I strategically hung a poster of "The Blue Marble" -- the first photo of Earth, fully illuminated and in color, from space -- beneath another poster bearing the Pledge of Allegiance. Below "The Blue Marble" hangs the American flag, its white stars on deep blue like the folded fabric of space beyond our planet. A colleague saw the photo and proposed I turn it so that Africa was upside down. "There is no north or south from space," she said. "No Africa." Once again I had been locked to my own perspective. I took her suggestion and have since discovered this was the photograph's original orientation. Every day my students view Earth as the astronauts did from space. I hope it jolts something in them -- as I was jolted while imagining myself turning toward the sun. I hope it makes them a little seasick, their state a star but the whole Earth a marble: the planet where they live small enough to fit in someone's hand, small enough to be lost, and fragile enough to crack, but more beautiful than one can imagine.