Scientist as Author.

Consideration of every scientist as a professional author, since the results of scientific theory and experiment are mainly disseminated to the scientific community by publication in journals. In the highly specialized form of the research paper, scientists write for their peers within a narrowly defined mode, a form of expository writing that carries stringent constraints: limited length (because many scientific journals re uest a subsidy in the form of page charges to publish a paper, or because the volume of submission is so great that length must be limited!" a defined order of presentation# introduction, methods, results, analysis and interpretation, and conclusions" a stylistic preference for clear and unadorned writing, exclusion of subjective elements, and inclusion of sufficient detail for other researchers to reproduce the result" the use of vocabulary, abbreviations, and idioms peculiar to the particular area" and dependence on tabular, graphical, or mathematical material in addition to text.

Contemporary scientists also write extensively in another specialized form, the grant or contract proposal, meant to justify to a scientific agency (usually a federal organization such as the $ational Institutes of %ealth, the $ational &cience 'oundation, or an arm of the (epartment of (efense! a re uest for funding by describing the research achievements expected to come as a result of the re uested support. )he style used in a proposal shares elements with the specialized research article but also re uires a projection of future possibilities and a presentation of the author*s scientific credentials and past achievements to demonstrate that the re uested support is li+ely to be well used. )he case must be made to a board of reviewers, often scientific peers but sometimes administrators. 'or this reason, the writing of proposals is best described as ,writing to persuade., The Scientist As General Author -part from these specialized forms of authorship, and more relevant to interactions between literature and science, there are scientists who convey scientific

ideas or present their lives in science within standard literary modes such as biography and the personal essay, often for nonspecialist readers. &uch writings can be seen as a return to older forms of science writing that prevailed into the early nineteenth century, when science began to develop into a profession with a specified style for the research article. .efore that consolidation, scientific research was carried out by amateurs who wrote of their findings for a few peers and for the educated general reader. &uch writing often attains a simplicity and a directness and displays a sense of enthusiasm and engagement with a problem, &cientist as -uthor /01 which are now absent in professional publications. )he writing is often in the first person, as in Isaac $ewton*s (see $ewtonianism! letters of the late seventeenth century to the Royal Society and to various correspondents describing his wor+ on a new type of telescope and on the meaning of light. )hese present his experiments in full scientific detail, more than ade uate for others to evaluate

them" and yet also convey a sense of $ewton wor+ing with his optical e uipment, grappling with the meaning of what he observes, and deciding what line of investigation to pursue next. 'urther, papers written at the dawn of new scientific ideas were often less abstract and less mathematical than later wor+s when science had grown more sophisticated. )he early forms of scientific concepts were easier to convey to nonspecialists. 2odem scientists who write for a general readership fre uently find that their greatest tas+ lies in extracting the nub of the idea from the accretions of analysis, meaning, and jargon that surround it in the professional literature#in short, to give enough detail but not too much, a process that has been called ,lying to tell the tmth,, a comment ascribed to the contemporary physicist 3ictor 4eiss+opf. )he accessible style of early science writing for a general audience can be seen in the famous nineteenth5century piece ,)he Chemical %istory of a Candle, by Michael Faraday, the greatest experimental scientist of his time, who discovered

fundamental electromagnetic phenomena. %e carried out his research at the 6oyal Institution in 7ondon, where he also presented 'riday 8vening (iscourses, lectures for general audiences. ,)he Chemical %istory of a Candle, was originally presented to a group of children. 'araday*s discussion of the composition and manufacture of candles, their applications, and the intricacies of their flames reads with straightforward lucidity. It carries a personal element as 'araday relates his own experiments with candles and tells of different forms of flame and candle he has seen in the streets of 7ondon. )he contrast between accessibility and specialization is not the only difference between general and professional writing by scientists. )he $obel 9rize5winning physicist Richard Feynman commented that professional research papers leave an impression of a direct ascension to scientific tmth, whereas the reality is that unfmitful turnings, intuitive jumps, and dead ends are an inherent part of research. (- similar criticism is often also leveled at science texts.! )he open style

of early science writing gives a clearer image of science as a human activity, an outcome still seen in contemporary general wor+s by scientists. James Watson's memoir The Double Helix (:;<=! gives a broad picture of the successful search for the molecular stmcture of ($-. -s 4atson describes the science, he also points out the conflicting interpretations of the data, which had to be resolved. -nd in depicting the ploys used to get research funding, as well as the intense competition among scientists to find the answer, he goes even further to picture the scientific enterprise. In The Hubble Wars (:;;/!, the astronomer 8ric Chaisson clearly presents the scientific rationale for the %ubble space telescope, how it wor+s, and what it tells us about the cosmos. )o this he adds /0< &cientist as -uthor extensive discussion about concerns over its >0 billion cost and about the tension that arose when the telescope was found to be faulty once it was in orbit. %owever, not every scientist who writes about a scientific idea presents it in

a style that sets it within a larger context or shows a personal element. 9artly that is determined by the particular scientific area. In some sciences, the researcher can interact directly with what is under study. In his essay ,)o &ee or $ot to &ee,, the neurologist Oliver Sac s writes the tme account of a man who regained his sight in middle age, after forty5five years of blindness, and found he could not understand what his restored vision showed. &ac+s conveys the details of the disease that caused the blindness and explains the role of interpretation in vision. %e does this both as a medical scientist and as someone who spends time with the man and observes the serious and depressing difficulties that come from his restored sight. )he result is a powerful weaving of the personal and the scientific. ?ther areas of science are more distant from what they observe. )hey examine nature in the la!oratory or through instruments, because that is the only way to perceive the very small or the very distant. In such investigations, the scientist

is hard5pressed to present any direct interaction with the subject of study. In The Double Helix, 4atson does not deal directly with a ($- molecule, or even see it" its scientific perception comes through intricate methods of "#ray analysis, and the heart of the discovery of its stmcture lies in gathering and interpreting data only remotely lin+ed to direct sense experience. %owever, once the stmcture is +nown, it can be described in words (and with drawings and models! that appeal to ordinary perception. -t an even higher level of abstraction lies scientific thought that seems disconnected from the reality around us, or from our perceptions of reality. 2athematics and some reaches of theoretical physics fall into this category. 'eynman, a central figure in the modem understanding of the $uantum physics of light and matter, has related its meaning in his boo+ QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (:;=1" the title abbreviates the name of the theory, uantum electrodynamics!. In explaining @8(, he is presenting a theory whose premises

seem contradictory and whose effects appear on the submicroscopic level and do not affect daily human experience. 'or all his penetrating understanding, 'eynman cannot viscerally engage the fundamental entities of light and matter or the paradoxical uantum5mechanical duality of waves and particles. -lthough he explains the theory simply and transparently for nonspecialists, he cannot attain the immediacy of ?liver &ac+s showing us a suffering individual while explaining why he is suffering. )here are, of course, rhetorical methods and choices of style that help scientists write clearly about high abstraction or extremely complex ideas. ?ne approach is for the scientist5author to include the wor+ of other scientists, illustrating different facets of the concept to help the reader. In Taming the tom: The Emergen!e of the "isible Mi!ro#orld (:;;0!, the theoretical physicist %ans Christian von .aeyer discusses the modem uantum physics of matter. -long &cientists inAand &ociety /0B with its philosophical and theoretical meanings, he presents the measurements

of experimental physicists to show what the uantum means in the laboratory and in technical application. In Eye, $rain, and "ision (:;==!, the neurobiologist (avid %ubel places his own $obel 9rize5winning exploration of the visual cortex within the framewor+ set by the research of many others, to illuminate the intricate system that senses and analyzes light. %istorical development is another important tool. In Wrin%les in Time (:;;C!, the astrophysicist Deorge &moot leads up to his wor+ in measuring the light left over from the .ig .ang by reviewing cosmology bac+ to the time of the Dree+s. -nd the powerful tools of analogy, metaphor, example, and comparison are invaluable to convey scale and meaning in science. )hese aspects of writing by scientists for nonexperts point to one inescapable fact: )he greatest scientists are not always the best authors for general audiences, for the remar+able ability to create brea+through scientific ideas is not necessarily the same as the ability to convey their essence to nonspecialists. -lbert

8instein*s &elati'ity: The S(e!ial and the )eneral Theory (:;<:! is nominally written for the general reader. )he boo+ is laudably straightforward and compact, and it presents the concepts of relativity in the se uence in which they originated. It does, however, include many mathematical e uations#simple ones perhaps, but no matter how simple, each e uation added may well lose half the remaining readership, the mle of thumb stated by the theoretical physicist &tephen %aw+ing (author of $rief History of Time, :;==!. -nd its compactness does not leave room for illuminating comparisons that help the reader interpret the strange phenomena of relativity in terms of the common world. )he combination of deep scientific understanding and the ability to cast that understanding into a form that is tme to the concept and yet easily grasped by others may be as rare as the insight that leads to new science.