A little bit of everything: The Short Story of Science

A little bit of everything: The Short Story of Science

A beautiful volume that gives you a taste of most of science’s key advances.

Diana Gitig – Feb 19, 2022 9:30 am | 70

A thing of beauty

First off, the book is beautiful, as befits its imprint. Each glossy page has a photo of scientists at work, their apparatus, or a depiction of their discoveries. For everything before the 20th century, there is a photo of an artwork instead; so you get a drawing, painting, or sculpture of the scientists being described. The Short Story of Science has the overall feel of those DK Eyewitness Travel guides, except instead of using it to plan your next trip, you can use Science to get a tour of “the breakthroughs that underpin our current understanding of the Universe.”

Like the other volumes in the Short Story of series, The Short Story of Science is organized into four sections. The art books are divided into “Movements,” “Works,” “Themes,” and “Techniques.” There are corresponding sections in this one. “Histories” starts with ancient astronomers circa 30,000 BCE and runs through string theory. “Experiments” is pretty obvious. “Theories” says, “we can only unlock hidden truths once we have imagined them.” Finally, there’s “Methods and Equipment,” since the materials available define and constrain the technologies we can make.

Each entry is cross-referenced with the relevant entries in the other sections. For example, the “Experiments” entry about germ theory, in which Louis Pasteur demonstrated in 1861 that pathogens are in the air rather than arising from rotting material as had been thought, is cross-referenced with the “Histories” entries called “Cell Theory,” “Public Health,” and “Science and the Public Good” as well as with “Microscopes” and “Clinical Trials” in the “Methods and Equipment” section.

Ideas before people

What none of the books has is a section dedicated to personages. Each “History,” “Theory,” and “Method” has a list of key scientists, and each “Experiment” has only one, with a short bio. Science is an obviously human endeavor, but this depiction implies that the creative theorists and diligent experimentalists who unearthed truths and pulled the rest of humanity along with their technological developments are secondary to the truths themselves. The Earth revolved around the Sun long before Copernicus told us it did; chromosomes recombined well before Barbara McClintock witnessed them doing so.

If the researchers in the book hadn’t discovered what they did when they did, human history would likely look different, but the facts of the discoveries themselves would be the same. It’s like an anti-great man theory of history applied to science.

This method of organization, like any other, has its flaws. The most notable one is that, if you want to find a certain scientist, you must check the index. This is actually not really such a big deal. Another is that—again, like any list—it begs explanation as to what was included and what was not. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment is in here; Jacob and Monod‘s work on how genes are regulated is not. Science skews toward physics and cosmology, but it covers chemistry, biology, and geology as well. And despite the page-long “Note on Context” at the front of the book, it skews very Western and male.

Each entry in “Histories,” “Experiments,” “Theories,” and “Methods” outlines in one or two paragraphs a topic that already had volumes upon volumes written about it. So the explanations in The Short Story of Science don’t even rise to the level of cursory. Having some background helps as reader; if you don’t already understand something about electricity, reading that Volta “used a chemical reaction to create a continuous flow of electric charge” isn’t really helpful. The book’s goal is just bringing these things to your attention so that if you’re interested you can read further elsewhere. And The Short Story of Science is certainly a very pretty vehicle for accomplishing that.

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