Science writing that challenges departmental parochialism

One of the things I tell the students in my introductory astronomy classes is that the universe is not obliged to pay attention to our discipline boxes. Science is intrinsically interdisciplinary. The carving of science into disciplines (and subdisciplines, and sub-subdisciplines) is a fairly recent practice in many respects. It resulted from the enormous success of scientists at describing and explaining so many of the detailed manifestations of the universe. As our accumulated scientific knowledge became too large for a single person to know or master everything known, the compromise was made to define subject areas in which a single person could be an expert. As a result, the old natural philosopher devolved into a physicist, or a chemist, or a geologist. The problem is that we scientists now have a difficult time talking to each other.

That problem was recently driven home for me by a discussion I’ve been having with one of my cousins. He’s a climate scientist who recently retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In his new-found free time, he decided to start reading papers based on data from NASA’s Kepler mission to discover habitable extrasolar planets. My cousin asked me to recommend an introductory astrophysics text because he realized he lacked the technical background to jump right into the Astrophysical Journal. I recommended one, and he got a copy. But recently he said to me, ‘As I suspected, it is going slow. One big problem is that you guys write equations that I am very familiar with in a very different form, and I think, ‘That is the hydrostatic equation,’ and then puzzle over the form you use in astronomy.’ So my cousin, a professional climate scientist, is stumped by semantics and nomenclature involving physics that he used throughout his entire career.

What my cousin is trying to do—attempting to read and understand high-level papers in a field outside his training—is unusual. Most people looking for scientific writing outside their areas of expertise read so-called science popularizations that are aimed at educated and interested outsiders. And there, perhaps, we are doing a better job of breaking through the discipline boxes. (Of course, a popularization need not be interdisciplinary to be good or successful. One obvious example is Stephen Hawking’s excellent bestseller A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes [Bantam Books, 1988], which makes no attempt to be anything but a book about cosmology and relativity.) But, as an astrophysicist who interacts a lot with the public, I find myself having to discuss matters that require knowledge and insight from fields far from the core physics curriculum. Astrophysicists pride themselves on their interdisciplinary instincts, because the subject really does require a broad knowledge of physics. In particular, it is in the field of planetary science that we are forced to confront the true meaning of the word ‘interdisciplinary.’ Back when I was an undergraduate several years ago, That field was becoming as much a part of geology as of astronomy. It now includes stellar astrophysics, astrometry, astrochemistry, plasma physics, geology, and geochemistry.

Planetary science has also come to require biology, as was made clear in Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (Copernicus/Springer, 2003), the groundbreaking popularization by paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee. Rare Earth introduced the general public to the scientific basis of modern astrobiology. Now we really do know enough to begin framing sensible questions and arguments about the search for extraterrestrial life. And, to do so, we have to unlearn our departmental parochialism and return to the old notion of the natural philosopher.

That is what I most appreciate about a book that a friend recently sent me. A Matter of Wonder: What Biology Reveals About Us, Our World, and Our Dreams (S. Karger, 2011) is a collection of popular essays written by biochemist Gottfried Schatz. In the book, Schatz has a great deal to say about evolutionary microbiology. But he also has a fair amount to say about chemistry, physics, geology, and astrophysics, all of which are germane to the subjects of his essays.

One lovely example of Schatz’s interdisciplinary instincts comes from the essay on mitochondria entitled ‘Strangers within me,’ which contains the tidbit, ‘Brain cells respire faster than all other body cells and, relative to their weight, produce ten thousand times more energy per second than the sun.’ Another splendid bit of interdisciplinary synthesis is a discussion of the physics underlying the anatomy of human hearing. Schatz gets some things wrong: For example, he incorrectly describes the mechanism for iron enrichment in the interstellar medium, and he makes a few mistakes when discussing cosmology. But those are minor quibbles for writing that reveals the common problems associated with studying protein structure and galaxy morphology. Here’s a biochemist trying to wrap his head around the importance of modern physics to biology in the same way that astronomers in the exoplanet era are having to understand the importance of biology to astrophysics.

A Matter of Wonder, much like Rare Earth, is a testament to interdisciplinary thinking. Both place the study of life in the context of physics. And both demand that we unlearn our departmental parochialism and return to the old notion of the natural philosopher.

Paul B. Eskridge is a professor of astronomy in the department of physics and astronomy at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He received his bachelor’s and PhD degrees from Caltech and the University of Washington, respectively.

Additional interdisciplinary popularizations

• Robert Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (Viking, 2012).
• Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam Books, 2010).
• Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, eds., Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
• Charles Seife, Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes (Penguin Books, 2007).
• Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (Riverhead Books, 2006).