I don’t think I’ve shared this publicly before, but late in the writing process, my third book, Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist got a massive structural overhaul. The core theme of scientific thinking in daily life didn’t change, but a lot of the implementation details did, for reasons of representation.
I tend to write books as discrete chapters, going through multiple drafts of each one before moving on to the next. This works reasonably well in that I only have to be deeply immersed in the details of one topic at a time, but does cause some problems in terms of seeing the bigger picture of the work as a whole. This usually takes the form of repeating jokes or anecdotes in multiple chapters (my copyeditors usually catch this, which is one of many reasons why copyeditors are awesome and you should be nice to them), but sometimes has more of a “losing the thread” sort of feel. One of the late steps in the drafting process is to put the whole thing together and read it through.
Eureka is pretty sprawling, so as I was going through that full read, I made a list of the scientific stories I told, including a kind of mini-index of the historical scientists I mentioned. When I looked at that list at the end of the combined draft, I had a horrible realization: every single scientist on it was a European man. This was not in any way intentional, it’s just a super easy trap to fall into when writing about the history of science, particularly physics. For the first pass, I had emphasized stories I already knew pretty well, and being that I’m a physicist, those skew very male. And since I was doing it a chapter at a time, it wasn’t until the late put-it-all-together stage that I noticed the pattern.
Happily, I did notice the pattern, and was able to fix it to make the collection of scientists cited more expansive and inclusive. I shifted the emphasis of multiple chapters to focus on women; the chapter about Vera Rubin came out well enough that I made it the center of one of the promotional videos for the book:
I also added a lot of smaller stories at the end of chapters, to increase the total number of scientists who got a paragraph or two, which allowed for much more representation. It’s a much stronger and better book for having gone through this, putting aside the heart-stopping panic of that initial realization.
(Though given how poorly that book sold, I’ve cynically joked that I would’ve been better off sticking with the all-male list, and leveraging the resulting negative reviews into a spot on the Jordan Peterson lecture circuit, raking in that sweet “anti-woke” cash… I don’t like money enough to compensate for people thinking I’m a gigantic asshole, though.)
The process here was made more difficult by the thematic idea of the book, which focused on the processes used to make discoveries. It wasn’t enough to just have a list of notable female scientists, I needed a procedural “hook” as well, something unique about how they did what they did that I could map onto the “Looking, Thinking, Testing, Telling” framework I used to organize the book. That’s really hard for a lot of even very major scientists— Emmy Noether, for example, is an all-time great, but there’s not a colorful hook to the story of how she made her discoveries. She was just super good at math; the world’s better for it, but it’s not a great story. The same thing happens with a lot of great male scientists, too— Enrico Fermi gets mentioned in Eureka only in passing despite being a towering figure in 20th century physics. As with Noether, the secret of his success is just that he was really, really smart and driven; he was a neat guy, but process-wise he just didn’t fit the book.
(Noether ended up getting a short section in the book, because of the way she overcame explicit discrimination— Hilbert’s “we are a university, not a bath house” is too good a story not to use. But that’s not really about her science, which just didn’t readily fit the framework of the book…)
I’ve had a related problem with A Brief History of Timekeeping, though for a slightly different reason. In this case, it’s not so much the lack of a procedural hook— that’s not an issue here, because anything relating to timekeeping can fit in— but the fact that we have no idea who the key figures were.
The oldest timekeeping technologies discussed in the book are truly ancient: sundials and solstice markers significantly pre-date written language, so there’s no record of who invented them. We can attach a name to a particular type of early water clock— an Egyptian official named Amenemhet bragged about inventing it in a tomb inscription circa 1500 BCE— but that’s pretty clearly a refinement of an already existing idea. Whoever first hit on using the draining of a leaky jar to mark the passage of time did so long enough ago that there’s no record of them.
A lot of the book deals with calendar systems— a calendar is just a really slow clock— and again, these mostly came in so long ago that they can’t be attributed to specific people. We have no idea who first instituted the Jewish calendar, or the multiple-cycle calendar of the Maya, let alone any of the systems used by cultures that didn’t keep written records. When we do have names to attach to a system, they’re generally for refinements to existing calendars, as with Julius Caesar’s reform of the Roman calendar, or the commission that designed the Gregorian calendar in the 1500’s.
This carries on through technologies that are surprisingly recent, like the sandglass and the mechanical clock, both of which seem to have been invented somewhere in the 1200-1300CE range. There’s no record of who, specifically built the first verge-and-foliot mechanical clock, though, or who first made a useful sandglass. (There’s a story about the latter being the work of a French monk in the time of Charlemagne, but that only pops up much later, and there’s a several-hundred-year gap between that supposed invention and the first incontrovertible reference to a sandglass in the early 1300’s, so it seems pretty implausible…) They just sort of… appear, already fully developed by the time that they’re first clearly described.
In a sense, this is an important reminder of how science and technology really advance. Progress ultimately isn’t due to the dramatic work of highly memorable individuals, but the slow accumulation of small improvements introduced by anonymous tinkerers. Even when we know the names of the people involved, the actual contributions they made are usually much better described as tinkering around the margins than leaps of genius.
I’m mostly putting science-y stuff, including book promotion, over on my Forbes blog, because the potential reach is a little bigger, but this is a little more in the process-related vein, so I’ll put it here. If you enjoy this sort of thing, you should check out the Forbes link, but also here are some buttons:
And I’ll leave the comments open.