:: Shekhar Bhatia

Ever wondered why a red rose is red? Read about it

Shekhar Bhatia

March.20 : Natalie Angier has a thing about her teeth. She knows that tooth enamel is the hardest substance in human body, and yet bacteria manage to penetrate it. Having suffered 22 cavities in her childhood, she obviously does not want to leave anything to chance.

Before she goes to bed at night, she "grimly wages war" against bacteria. First she uses floss — not one but three different kinds — to get into every nook and corner. Then she uses a plaque-removing, gum-massaging electronic toothbrush, followed by elaborate rinsing.

Angier understands science. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times, and uses this snippet to introduce you to molecular biology in her fascinating book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. In fact this is how she demystifies many complex scientific theories and concepts.

When I was young the world was divided into two types: those who studied science and the others who pursued humanities. This divide persists even today: One member of the family wants to see the Edward Hopper retrospective in the museum of art and the other would rather go to the science museum.

My guess on why many of us dislike science is that something was missing when we were in school: either the books were tediously matter of fact or there was no excitement of discovery in the way we were taught. Some years ago, I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Unlike Angier, who is a formidable science journalist, Bryson is as far away from science as the most distant planet is from the earth. He is an outstanding travel writer whose delightful books sell in millions.

Bryson was always curious about things around him but his text books were boring: "I grew up convinced that science was supremely dull, but suspecting that it needn’t be". Many years later he was on a plane and looking out of the window when, he says, it struck him that "I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on". The result is this simple, encyclopaedic journey that even someone with absolutely no interest in science will find an outstanding read.

Together, Bryson’s Short History and Angier’s The Canon answer, to use an old cliché, everything you always wanted to know about, well, everything. But while their canvas is similar, their approaches differ: Bryson is the quintessential traveller, going back in time and journeying inside a cell in the human body or to a distant planet; Angier is a science writer, and she is passionate about her subject. "Science is not a body of facts", she says in the book. "It is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world".

Angier draws on interviews with hundreds of scientists to explain the basics of astronomy, physics, evolutionary and molecular biology, geology and chemistry. And right from the first chapter where she talks about "thinking scientifically" and builds a case for it, her enthusiasm is apparent.

See how she handles numbers — small and big: A hummingbird flaps its wings up to 100 times a second. In comparison, the proverbial blink of an eye is a tenth of a second. A Mexican salamander that looks like a blade of grass can catch its prey in five-thousandths of a second.

Frankly, I did not know that there are names for "a trillionth of something" or even "a millionth of a billionth" of something. (The first is a pico, and second, femto.) Angier talks about numbers without putting you off because she knows that a lot of people — including many physicists, she says — dislike maths.

I think The Canon’s opening chapters on scientific thinking and probabilities are some of the finest — and convincing — essays on science and scientific literacy, on why we should notice the things happening around us, "the sun, the moon, the stars…" And all through she uses simple anecdotes and examples to illustrate her point. Even some Harvard students, when asked, could not answer why winters are cold and summers are hot.

She tells the story of a Texas University professor who goes to weddings and talks to other guests about the probability of divorce. He’s not insensitive; he just likes calculating odds. What are the odds of dying in an air crash? Less than 50 percent — unless you take a commercial flight every day for 18,000 years, says Angier. You can use probability to break a lot of popular myths, and explain why a coincidence is not a miracle.

Such is Angier’s depth of knowledge and her writing style that she even manages to make a dreadfully boring subject like chemistry interesting. (The "lead" in pencils is actually graphite). But the most fascinating are the chapters on biology: her poetic description of a cell ("Cells are the unit of life, and they preen about it, throb with it, in every pore and ruffle".) is the starting point for a dive into the intricacies of DNA.

I have just finished reading The Canon. I bought it for Rs 400, and it’s a small price for a book that’s a fount of knowledge.

And to answer the question about seasons, it’s not the earth’s elliptical orbit. It’s the tilt of the earth on its axis. But have you ever wondered why a red rose is red? Read the book.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com