Some actual science I learned from fiction

I make this joke a lot: “Everything I know about physics I learned from Michael Crichton.” Sure, time travel isn’t (probably) possible, but Timeline was my first exposure to quantum physics. Crichton made the concepts make sense to me in a way that textbooks or even Wikipedia articles fail to do. My brain is apparently wired for story. Numbers don’t stick in my head the way that words do. It’s a wonder I learned anything in my required science courses at all.

Michael Critchon also taught me about DNA through, you guessed it, Jurassic Park. And Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, taught me about the miraculous migrations of monarch butterflies and their reliance on milkweed species, a group of plants that most people rip out when they find them growing in their yards.

I was thinking about this as I read The Weeds recently. I learned so much about botany from that book. In between chapters, I hopped onto the internet to look up species, old paintings of the Colosseum during the nineteenth century, and botanical surveys. In that book, one of the unnamed narrators records folk lore, remedies, and stories along with sketches and Latin names. I don’t know all of the plants the narrators identified, but I can remember London rocket, which got its common English name because it bloomed all over London after the Great Fire of 1666. Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things taught me even more about botany, though narrator Alma Whittaker was more focused on lichens.

Being a fan of mysteries, I’m on somewhat less shaky ground with chemistry. One of my favorite series, Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce books, features all kinds of chemical reactions and odd details about the science. Most of my knowledge is limited to poisons and I couldn’t balance an equation to save my life. (I dropped a chemistry class after a semester in high school because I could not figure out how it worked. All I knew at the time was that magnesium makes an amazing light if you lit it on fire.) But I’ve also gleaned chemistry knowledge from books like Christopher Moore’s dementedly funny historical fantasy, Sacré Bleu, taught me the history of how lapis lazuli was used to create the stunning pigment ultramarine. Sacré Bleu sent me to the internet so that I could see images of Renaissance and Impressionist period paintings that used ultramarine. Now, when I look at Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, I know where that blue came from.

Learning real science from fiction is far from a perfect system. Yes, of course authors are going to bend reality to make their stories work. But I have access to an entire university library to set me straight. Another wrinkle—at least for me—is my love of historical fiction featuring natural philosophy and pre-peer-review science, like Hermione Eyre’s magnificent novel, Viper Wine. I love learning about the early days of various sciences because they’re full of scientists creating stories like spontaneous generation or miasma theory, when they’re not bring in ideas from alchemy and straight up magic. I wouldn’t want to embarrass myself by nattering on about ideas that are three to four hundred years old before I got a chance to get up to date on the current science.

Thinking about those early days of what we now know as the hard sciences, though, maybe I’m not so humanities-addled in my thinking about stories and science after all. I have fond memories of my dad in the late 1980s and early 1990s trying to teach me about atoms by telling me stories about Jimmy the Neutron. I have a strong suspicion that I would remember a lot more science if my dry textbooks had been full of narratives.