A Scientific American Reflects On The Scientific Revolution

FLANAGAN’S VERSION: A Spectator’s Guide to Science on the Eve of the 21st Century Dennis Flanagan Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1988; 230 pages; $18.95 For 40 years and more, Dennis Flanagan has been struggling to popularize the scientific revolution that we are in. Now that is a long time. It’s about enough time, for example, for a northeastern maple to mature, be cut down with an amateur’s handsaw, sawn into lengths, split, stacked, dried, laid in the fireplace, and lighted to accompany a good story. It’s also about enough time for our synthetic view of man-kind, the earth, and the universe— the one that we build out of snippets of book learning, conversation, and journalism, to expand and change profoundly. In that view today, we see recent human evolution against a vast background of evolving forces, particles, galaxies, stars, planets, features on the surface of our own planet, and classes of the living things that might exist in millions of environments like ours. Our view is filled with vast cycles of birth and death, of stars releasing the stuff of which living things are made, of oceans and continents, of ice sheets and dinosaurs. The years since Flanagan became editor of the revived Scientific American in 1948 (he retired in 1984) have been the time of the double helix, genetic engineering, moving continents, hot spots, quarks, quasars, and black holes. It has been the time of mankind’s first escape from its birthplace, sending a few men to sojourn on the moon. And it’s been the time when humans first launched a flotilla of space robots to look back at the earth, to visit the moon and Mars and Venus, and to fly by Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and their moons. It also has been the time of man-made fertilizers, short-strawed food grains, antibiotics, birth control pills, blood pressure medications, world-wide vaccinations, nuclear power, jet flight, television, and computers, all under the threat of complete destruction by fission and fusion weapons of increasing number and accuracy. Our storehouse of new impressions is a jumble. It cries out for some regulation, some attempt at pulling all into a narrative that we can get by heart. Flanagan’s attempt at this has some of the steadying influence of a story like Ovid’s Metamorphisis, which is itself an attempt to form a jumble of myths into a coherent, poem that runs from the world’s beginning to our own days. The author’s point of view is not "philosophical," although Flanagan confesses over and over to an uncompromising rationalism that many today would dismiss as old-fashioned. Flanagan is not setting himself up as an original thinker. He aims at the clarity of a good reporter. Chapters on physics, astronomy, geology, and biology summarize current knowledge with briskness and accuracy. Closing chapters cover subjects ranging from technology to the influence of cranks—including societies arming themselves for ultimate destruction—in an age of science. The first four chapters, in particular, will give pleasure to those who follow the developments closely, and provide easy-to-take instruction to nonspecialists. These pieces are sketches, snap-shots, of the state of several branches of learning in the mid-1980s. Such an attempt at codification of what we know will not please the impatient, who dislike replaying the music of what already has been discovered. The rest of us, including science writers sharing Flanagan’s struggle to convey technical developments in everyday language, will benefit from pieces that serve as impressive examples of the special art of popularization. Victor H. McElheny is director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A Scientific American Reflects On The Scientific Revolution

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