Getting started…
Only three things are certain in human life: entropy, gravity, and the awkwardness of introductory blog posts.
I trust that the first two will be overcome some day. As to the third one… if nothing else, wordpress kindly allowed me to enter my personal info in a form – no need to strive hard for wit and originality to give my life’s story some flair. It’s all in the profile, if you care.
Why starting a science blog, then?
First off, because I like science as much as I like blogging, and the two combined make a pretty solid reason. Besides, having been into blogging for some years now, I felt it was high time for a change of pace. Science talk leaves little room for navel-o-scopy, angst and overindulging in the use of “I” (this post makes an obvious exception). Not that I’m going to aim for a 100% bias-free certificate: this is a blog, not a reference book. Most posts will obviosuly reflect my soft spots and my expertise (or gaps thereof). Some, however, will trespass into other fields too, if only to honour the blog’s name. In cardiology, an ectopy (or ectopic beat) is an anomalous heartbeat starting off at the wrong time and place – sometimes as a harmless glitch, sometimes as the onset of a fatal arrhythmia. I liked the way the concept matched the play-on-words with “topics”… you get the idea.
Moreover (and more selfishly), I need training. As a wannabe scientific writer, I badly need to broaden views. Standard academic writing, if uncut, is a potential communication-killer. Specialist jargon is sticky. Once you learn to master your specialty’s communication standards, it’s only too easy to get stuck at that if the only people you liaise with are peers and higher-level seniors. You may even start to think you can afford some obscurity, after all, as long as your readers are able to cope. Bad idea. Most likely, you’ll just find yourself at a loss when dealing with a lay audience, and plunge head down into the opposite error, i.e. treating them as dummies.
Neither end of the spectrum looks particularly appealing, so I’m starting this blog to build a niche in the middle – a comfy living space, and a sanctuary to return to after trespassing in either direction. Needless to say, criticism and feedback are not only welcome, but encouraged.
Then there are personal reasons too. To name one, I’ve been a sci-fi geek since I was ten. When not reading, I used to wander for hours looking out for insects. The variety of their shapes and habits stunned me to no end – every summer afternoon, it was as though the alien worlds from SF novels were becoming real, no farther than my parents’ house backyard. I still remember the first time I actually stumbled upon a bombardier beetle, years after reading about this small insect’s ability to scare off predators with a high-pressure, boiling-hot spray of toxic chemicals. I turned a stone upside down and there it was, running for shelter in a salvo of popping noises. I picked it up, let it stroll back and forth on my hand and watched my skin turn black wherever the critter fired its shot of caustic anthraquinones. I could barely move.
It was then it first dawned on me that everything is about connections, about questions pointing to questions pointing to questions, to no end. How can a fingernail-sized insect carry a scorching chemical furnace in its abdomen, and survive? Which evolutionary pathway lead to develop that through millions of years? How many failed trials? And then, why using hydrogen peroxide instead of, say, hydrochloric acid? And why does it stain the skin black?
Some of these questions flashed into mind then, some I elaborated later on after taking up a formal scientific education. Yet that feeling has never stopped haunting me to this day.
On a hindsight, the sense of wonder I looked for in SF novels has played a major role in making me choose a scientific career later. Science’s all about sense of wonder – though it’s hard to notice it in daily lab routine, the big picture’s always there in full splendour. Buckminster Fuller (if I recall right) used to point out how few people ever realize that we’re all astronauts on a planet-sized starship, speeding down a cosmic roundabout at about 30 kilometres per second. Quite true – few realise it, but all take it for granted. Sense of wonder only kicks in as soon as you take one minute to think about it. Science is about shaping the way we look at the world in unconceivable ways, then shaping it again and again, to no end. It’s science fiction in the process of losing the fiction layer one flake at a time. Back then, this process would take centuries. Then it would take decades, then years. As of now, we can measure its pace by months and by weeks. To (mis)quote Hunter S. Thompson, we’re riding the crest of a beautiful exponential curve – we can strike sparkles at every corner.
And we should, dammit. We’re all astronauts after all. And since we’re not allowed to leave the ship, the only tenable policy is to sit back and enjoy the trip. Acceleration may be uncomfortable, but hell – once you’ve had a taste of outer space, you can’t possibly want back to the plough.
That’s it. I can’t really paint myself as a teacher, so I’m not going to educate or lecture anyone. But if I’ll manage to bring out even a small glimpse of outer space, this blog will have been worth the hassle.
Does it make sense?
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