SCIENCE MATTERS: ACHIEVING SCIENTIFIC LITERACY

Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy

Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy

Science Matters by Robert Hazen and James Trefil is, on the other hand, an actual guide to science literacy. Hazen is a research scientist at Virginia's George Mason University, and Trefil is a professor of physics there; both have written books on science before. Trefil was a coauthor of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, one of the volumes that initiated the literacy-book boomlet. Trefil can also be heard as a commentator on National Public Radio; he is, for my money, the best and most original legitimate scientist with a public voice today, as insightful as Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould, but without the affected image of the former or the grating egotism of the latter.

Hazen and Trefil's book is the one that someone longing for a basic grasp of science ought to buy. It begins with a clear explanation of the framework by which science attempts to fathom the natural world, then builds to thoughtful yet simple explanations of the principal theories and findings of the major disciplines. The text is ordered and accessible, never daunting, never jumping ahead of itself: a product of the book having been composed by two authors instead of 21. And while Science Matters lacks the rich reporting details of The New York Times Book of Science Literacy, the volume compensates by delivering what it promises. if you've always thought you could never understand science, Hazen and Trefil will show you you're wrong.

We are faced with an increasingly complicated, technological world. The media bombards us with stories about the threat of genetic engineering, the threat of cancer from food additives and electromagnetic fields, the threat of biological warfare.

And for many people, the educational system has failed to teach them the science they need to make basic decisions about health, much less grapple successfully with the complex scientific issues we read about in newspapers or on news sites each day.

The book Science Matters proposes to solve this problem by helping its readers achieve scientific literacy. This is an enormous goal to try to achieve in a single, short volume. Ultimately, the book fails in this lofty aim, but it is still a darned good basic science primer.

Since the book is relatively short, authors James Trefil and Robert M. Hazen obviously can't cover everything, and in fact they completely ignore the social sciences and deal only with natural science. On top of that, the book is focused primarily on physics and chemistry; geology and biology get a short shrift.

This is probably to be expected, since the authors are physical scientists: Trefil is a physicist and Hazen is a geophysicist. I have noticed that scientists tend to believe that their own fields are more important and interesting than other scientific fields. Then, too, when the authors were faced with their limited writing space, they may have chosen to focus on physical science because many people tend to shy away from taking physics in school because of ...