From `wow' to `a-ha'

In an age in which there's so much information flying about that scientists working in vast fields such as, say, oncology or nuclear physics, don't have time to read each other's papers, you begin to wonder: who has a grip on the bigger picture? And as for the great unwashed, are we being hornswoggled by so-called experts?

The standard trajectory for scientists is to publish their findings through a hierarchy of journals, from research papers to peer-review and trends-style journals; on up through, say, the Lancet or Nature, into - one hopes - the popular press and media. Fundamentally, the purpose is to catch the eye of governments and entrepreneurs, but there is also, of course, always the race to win over the popular imagination.

Scientists have long taken to popular publishing. Long before Freud and Darwin (both of whose books are still in high demand), Newton and Robert Hooke publicised their spats in the 1670s about whether light was made up of particles or waves - as had, earlier that century, Kepler and Galileo - arguing about whether there were seas on the moon.

These are just two examples in Galileo's Commandment (edited by Edmund Blair Bolles), a breezy new anthology of science writing. It's one of a plethora of high-profile new titles in the booming area of "popular science" which has colonised bookstores with a rather confusing range of ideas and polemics. Popular science may not always reflect what's happening in contemporary science, yet it obviously reflects public curiosity. But, from a scientific point of view, how do you explain the de Broglie wavelength or the Krebs cycle, without losing its finer points, to someone who hasn't the foggiest notion about particle physics or biochemistry?

Good science writing must often address the gaps in a reader's knowledge and, coming from a well-researched handle on the subject, work towards the clearest and most correct possible explanation. And while the English language can be a clumsy tool for manipulating delicate or counterintuitive concepts, the best science writing has always been literature in its own right - something acknowledged recently by the Royal Society of Literature in London, when it decided to invite scientists to become fellows.

The traditional approach to science writing has been to use a kind of "wow-factor", as characterised in the old days by Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan. But among today's tranche of writers there are many who can so successfully tease out the ramifications of a theory or discovery that they frequently induce what scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould has called a "eureka or a-ha! moment that inverts an old way of seeing, and renders both clear and co-ordinated something which had been muddy, inchoate, or unformulated". In other words, something that flips your understanding of the world inside out in a private puff of epiphany.

Under the popular science heading nowadays, the splurge of new book titles is predominantly divided between two subjects: brain/mind and the great evolution debate ("Dawkins and all that mob", as the woman in Waterstones bookshop characterised them). The two fields frequently cross but, apart from bedrock evolutionary theorists such as John Maynard Smith, and the ramifications of neo-Darwinism throughout many apparently unrelated fields, the debate has been dominated in the past two decades by Gould and his archrival, Richard Dawkins (the pair's high-profile trading of insults is documented in another amusing new book, The Darwin Wars). Gould is often regarded as the supreme essayist in the field, while Dawkins's needling intellect and godless humour easily compensate for his monumental, hectoring arrogance. He pumps out bestseller after bestseller, and his controversial The Selfish Gene of 1976 still sells respectably.

It's perhaps unsurprising that the brain/mind field is so popular, and apart from a huge amount of yap about the imponderables of consciousness, there are some great tomes out there. Gerald Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire is a popular classic; another is Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (about as arrogant a title, considering our limited current knowledge, as Dennett's Consciousness Explained or the Catholic magazine Reality) - although to my mind, it doesn't measure up to Pinker's The Language Instinct a few years back.

I would also single out Steven Rose's The Making of Memory, and for writing with deep penetration and compassion - again, true of all good literature - Oliver Sachs's neurological case-histories, a tradition he inherited from the great neurologist A. R. Luria.

Ian MacKenzie of Hodges Figgis bookshop agrees mind and evolution are the two key areas in popular science, but also singles out best-selling trends in maths, genetics, histories/anthologies, physics and a new, rather sceptical genre, characterised by astronomer John Barrow's Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits.

When it comes to physics, cosmology has long been a big seller - Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time and even James Gleick's Chaos still sell well. More recent titles include The Birth of Time, by the breathlessly prolific veteran science writer John Gribbin. And then there's one I'm creeping through at the moment, physicist Brian Greene's well-written The Elegant Universe, which sets out - mainly in prose - the much-vaunted superstring "Theory of Everything", which attempts to link the equations of quantum mechanics with those of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

Considering that most people's mathematical brains tend to rust rather badly after schooldays, it's surprising maths-related books are scoring big successes, although many authors take a bluntly anecdotal approach - such as that in, say, Dava Sobel's runaway bestseller storybook, Longitude or Simon Singh's excellent Fermat's Last Theorem, a mathematical detective yarn spanning four centuries.

Sadly, there is little popular science emerging from this country. What there is, is clustered around landscape and the naturalist tradition - one would have to single out the groundbreaking, multi-authored coffeetable megatome, Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, Frank Mitchell's Reading the Irish Landscape, and the far-reaching science-historical anthology, Nature in Ire- land, edited by John Foster. Then there's our own Michael Viney's lyrical nature writing, while David Cabot has just delivered Ireland: A Natural History,which is doing very well.

Brian Trench of DCU (and the Irish Science and Technology Journalists' Association) points up the old chestnut that despite a rich historical tradition of Irish science writing (Berkeley, Boyle, George Fitzgerald, Kelvin, J. D. Bernal, et al), the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing included no scientists at all. In his view, Irish Times writer and meteorologist "Brendan McWilliams would, by a long chalk, be the most prolific and engaging Irish essayist on science".

Another stream of Irish publishing is historical tracts on Irish science. One curious volume from a couple of years back is Stars, Shells and Bluebells, a series of affectionate potted biographies of overlooked Irish women scientists. And I am very much looking forward to Science and Colonialism in Ireland from Nicholas Whyte from Cork University Press, due out in October. Another man writing histories of Irish scientists is Charles Mollan, the compiler of the Irish Scientist Yearbook, an unprecedented annual snapshot of the range of work going on in Irish labs, North and South (or at least those willing to pay for the privilege of inclusion). Though an uncritical promotional device - basically in the form of technical abstracts - it documents some good, hard science, and is well worth muscling through for the curious punter.

Another good publication, 31 years in business, is Technology Ireland. Its co-editor, Mary Mulvihill, is now completing a 400-page "eclectic encyclopaedia" called Ireland Explored and Explained. She describes it as more "a guidebook to the interested Irish person rather than the tourist: everything from landscape and geology to the Birr telescope and

medicine; why the Dublin prawn is a fraud, and shamrocks are sham . . . all done as a county-by-county directory of places of interest".

Meanwhile, at the Office of Science and Technology at the Department of Enterprise and Employment (which funds the Irish Scientist as well as Forfas's Science, Technology and Innovation Awareness Programme), Eugene Forde is looking at pulling together a new Science and Technology Journalist's award scheme. This year's Young Science Writer Award - to second-level students, and run by the RDS - will be announced in early May.

FORDE is also heartened by RTE's fourpart Big Science TV documentary series last year. Although it attracted some criticism, "the decent audiences proved that public curiosity is there. Most crucially from our point of view, RTE is now looking more seriously at its science programming".

By way of reading aids, science dictionaries - no matter how chunky - rapidly pass their sellby date. Perhaps the best is

Hutchinson's illustrated Desk Reference to Science (including chronologies of different fields), although I muddle along with Chambers Dictionary of Science and Technology (1988), reprinted cheaply in the Wordsworth bargain series. And of course, if you want a bewildering read-out on anything these days, get ye to the Web, as most academics nowadays are on-line.

Magazines such as Scientific American are always worth a look, as is New Scientist. Rather than as anecdote-enhancer, scientific thinking is really about a spirit of constant curiosity and inquiry, and, through education, should justly belong to everyone, whether it be tackling daily issues such as food and child-rearing, or braking-power on the road, or more theoretical subjects.

Certainly the information is out there - and as for the grotesquely artificial division between the sciences and the humanities which novelist C. P. Snow so memorably outlined in the 1950s, as science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein once said, "specialisation is for insects".