Gee Whiz Science Writing

A couple of years ago I learned something: I learned that black holes spin. And as they spin, they drag the fabric of space-time around with them, whirling it like a tornado. “Where have you been?” you ask. “That's a direct consequence of general relativity! Lense and Thirring predicted that more than 80 years ago.” It had escaped my notice. It made my day when I (sort of) understood it. I wanted to tell someone—and by a wonderful stroke of luck, I'm paid to do just that. Days like that are why I'm a science writer—a “gee whiz” science writer, if you like. A lot of my peers these days consider the gee whiz approach outdated, naive, even a little lap-doggish; investigative reporting is in. “Isn't the real story the process of how science and medicine work?” Shannon Brownlee said recently, upon receiving a well-deserved prize for her critical reporting on medicine. “I'm talking about the power structure. I'm talking about influence. I'm talking about money.” I'm not much interested in those things. I agree they're often important—more important, no doubt, in breast cancer than in black hole research, more important the more applied and less basic the research gets. One of the real stories about medical research may well be how it is sometimes corrupted by conflicts of interest. Power, influence, and money are constants in human affairs, like sex and violence; and sometimes a science writer is forced to write about them, just as a baseball writer may be forced with heavy heart to write about contract negotiations or a doping scandal. Yet just as the “real story” about baseball remains the game itself, the “real story” about science, to me, is what makes it different from other human affairs, not the same. I'm talking about ideas. I'm talking about experiments. I'm talking about truth, and beauty, too. Most of all, I'm talking about the little nuggets of joy and delight that draw all of us, scientists and science writers alike, to this business, when with our outsized IQs we could be somewhere else pursuing larger slices of power, influence, and money.