Beauty and the beaker

Craig Smith | The New Mexican

4/17/2008 - 4/18/08

George Johnson knows his stuff, and his stuff is science. He regularly covers it for The New York Times. He is the author of eight successful books on scientific and sociological subjects. He has written for Scientific American, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, and Wired and is a co-founder of the annual Santa Fe Science-Writing Workshop. Beyond that, he maintains an informed, humorous, and often fiery online journal about Santa Fe's politics and happenings, The Santa Fe Review (www.santafereview.com).

Johnson does this daunting amount of work not just because he's good at it but because he wants to share his love of science with everyone. He has felt that way ever since he was a boy and first discovered the precise, ordered beauties of science's universal garden. Its infinite possibilities were just his thing.

"I was a Tom Swift fan," Johnson said with an impish grin as we sat in his Eastside office. "I was the little-boy scientist doing experiments with chemistry and electricity." But over time, he said, he found that what he liked about science was "the phenomena, not the quantifying. You can't be a scientist if you're not going to quantify. It's better to be a writer, where you can speak metaphorically."

Johnson's latest book, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf. Written in an accessible, humorous, yet exact style, it encapsulates what he considers to be the 10 most elegant experiments ever performed, both philosophically and scientifically. They cover varied fields and were undertaken by Galileo, William Harvey, Isaac Newton, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Luigi Galvani, Michael Faraday, James Joule, A.A. Michelson, Ivan Pavlov, and Robert Millikan.

Johnson's phone rang. It was a publicist calling about getting him on the popular cable TV comedy show The Colbert Report.

"The book is an attempt to get back to basics and find 10 experiments where an individual mind and an individual pair of hands confront the unknown with a beautiful experiment," he explained to the caller. "It's figuring out a nice, elegant way to pose a question to nature and receiving a crisp, elegant reply."

Johnson chose the particular experiments in the book, he added, because he wanted to concentrate on individual researchers, not masses of them. "Once you get far into the 20th century, it's not one pair of hands — it's teams of scientists."

He ended the call and returned to our talk. "They have me tentatively scheduled to be on ... May 7," he confirmed. "It may still fall through. My publicist said, 'I think we have some interest from The Colbert Report.' I thought, no way. It's kind of scary, TV is. I like radio, where they can't see you fidgeting!"

But Johnson doesn't mind talking to people in person. His upcoming book tour takes in Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; New York; Boston; the Bay Area; and Seattle. He reads and signs books at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 22, at the Otowi Station bookstore in Los Alamos; at 7 p.m. on May 13 at Bookworks in Albuquerque; and at 5:45 p.m. on May 21 at Collected Works in Santa Fe.

Johnson considered and discarded scores, if not hundreds, of experiments before settling on his 10. "I tried to distinguish between great discoveries and great experiments," he said. "That's why Darwin isn't there. He made a great discovery, but it was not an experiment. That ruled out things like Galileo spotting the moons of Jupiter." It also eliminated Marie Curie's discovery of radium. "It took years to separate uranium from pitchblende. It was brilliant work, but there was also a certain amount of serendipity."

Even then, it wasn't easy. "Every time I did a chapter, it was like starting from scratch," Johnson confessed ruefully. "It was like writing 10 books." On the other hand, he admitted, "I find the stuff so fascinating. I'm writing about the stuff that most interests me."

Johnson credits a physics class with helping push him into a career with words rather than experiments. "I was sure I wanted to be a scientist, but I was also interested in writing. When I went to the University of New Mexico, I was taking some physics classes, but I found it kind of frustrating. I wanted to find out about quantum mechanics, and they start you out with old Newtonian mechanics — and I was bad at doing all the problems!

"At the same time, I was editor of the school literary magazine. Then I wrote a column for the Lobo and started getting into writing. I worked at the Albuquerque Journal on the police beat. Eventually, as my career advanced, I started writing more feature stuff, and the stuff turned out to be about science."

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments is rooted in an article Johnson wrote in 2002 for The New York Times; Physics World magazine had asked readers to vote on the subject, and Johnson wrote about their list. "They ended up, predictably, being physics experiments," he said, but the survey got him thinking about other perfect experiments. When his book editor suggested it for a topic, he leapt at the chance.

"I thought it would be one of the things I could knock off in a year, and it took five years," Johnson said. But he enjoyed it immensely. "There's nothing better than that feeling of being completely absorbed in text, moving and tweaking. I love the long-term haul of a book.

"I had it in my mind it was going to be a short book, and each chapter couldn't be more than a few thousand words. Most of them came out pretty short when I wrote them, which is unusual for me. You want a clean narrative line for each experiment, and that also dictates what experiments you choose. It has to make a good story." Johnson paused a moment and smiled again. "You want a swashbuckling romance, an existential confrontation of the unknown" — not your typical description of science writing, and that's what makes Johnson's prose so tempting and accessible.

Johnson enjoyed finding out how the scientists themselves thought. "With these men, even the earliest, I had a feeling I was communicating with a familiar mind — consorting with a modern mind. Like reading Galileo. He was the first really great — and maybe the first — popular science writer. He was writing for a general audience with these things. When I'm reading Chaucer or another medieval writer, it's a different reality, a different way of seeing the world."

While he waits for his next book idea to jell, Johnson said he will continue to write for The Times and other publications. He's also looking forward to the next installment of the Science-Writing Workshop, which he and fellow science writer Sandra Blakeslee organized 12 years ago. In addition to Johnson and Blakeslee, this year's lecturers for the seminar, which runs May 19-24, includes Laura Helmuth of Smithsonian magazine; National Public Radio science correspondent David Kestenbaum; and Kenneth R. Weiss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

In the meantime, Johnson is keeping two of his Fe Santa Review Web cams focused on ridge-top building projects that have caused a lot of local furor: designer Tom Ford's Talaya Hill mansion and the immense home of investor Andrew Davis on Monte Verde. The two face each other from the top of their high peaks overlooking all of the city.

"I kind of figured if we all have to look at these things, everybody is going to," Johnson said. "So far it's looking pretty reasonable," he added, checking out the Ford construction site. "It looks to be pretty much nestled down in the hollow there. But talk about view — 360 degrees."



Books by George Johnson

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008

Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe, James Atlas Books/Norton, 2005

A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003; Vintage paperback, 2004

Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999; Vintage paperback, 2000

Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995; Vintage paperback, 1996

In the Palaces of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991; Vintage paperback, 1992

Machinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence, Times Books, 1986; Tempus/Microsoft paperback, 1987

Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics, Tarcher, 1983