The best nonfiction to throw you headlong into the mystery and chaos of scientific inquiry

On the surface, this seems a dry treatise on the process of scientific change, but as you get into it, you encounter again and again the stories of hardheaded researchers convinced that the world explained by current theory just doesn’t make sense and shows how they were driven, often reluctantly, to make sense of things. Priestley’s and Lavoisier’s experiments are included with many others but always set within the framework of a discipline in a “crisis” that needs to be resolved.

The personal costs are not neglected–ridicule, isolation from the accepted “establishment,” sometimes far worse. Scientific progress is often portrayed as a triumph of individual imagination confirmed by wider testing and collaboration. Kuhn’s work took that self-serving myth and tossed it out the window.

Though not a volume pertaining to “hard science,” Mackay’s book is an early and essential inquiry into “group psychology” long before the phrase was coined. I used this and Kuhn’s books as background when writing World on Fire.

Why do perfectly respectable people act against their own self-interests, often violently, I wondered, when drawn into the seductive folds of a crowd? Mackay wrote his first edition in 1841, just a few decades after the convulsions that swallowed up Priestley and Lavoisier, then updated it in 1852: he chronicled the spreading group madness of such historical phenomena as the South Sea Bubble, “alchymists,” the Crusades, witch manias, and the “popular admiration of great thieves.”

Mackay’s 1852 preface crystallized his theme with the question: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly and one by one.”

I love this book, which starts out as the childhood memoir of the celebrated Nobel Laureate in animal behaviorism. As a boy growing up in pre-WWII Austria, Lorenz was fascinated by the behavior of several family dogs, especially the unanswerable persistence of the canine/human bond.

But what distinguishes this book from the great mass of pet tales is the depth of Lorenz’s observations and his ability to record detail. He may not understand why his Chow Stasi acts in such a manner, yet he chronicles the surrounding circumstances and later fits it into a pattern he observes over time. You see this ability maturing in Lorenz even as we scroll through a succession of dogs and their idiosyncracies; this power of observation is probably the essential trait of all great scientists and certainly led to his later classics, King Solomon’s Ring and On Aggression.

This slim volume, first published in 1995, possibly jump-started the current genre of science narratives–I was certainly well aware of it when World on Fire was published in 2005. The tale begins in 1707 when the English fleet crashed into the Scilly Isles twenty miles southwest of England; two thousand men drowned, all because navigators had misgauged longitude.

The desperate quest for a solution becomes a well-funded race to make sure this never happens again. Sobel chronicles how it was solved by a simple clockmaker, and the obstacles thrown in his path by the more respected members of the era’s scientific establishment. It helps to read Kuhn’s work first, or in tandem: for all the accolades heaped upon success, both works make clear the hard road and lonely life traveled by the outsider.

I love this book, too, but this time for its sheer poetry. This is the flip side of science writing, focusing less on direct cause and effect and more on a prismatic sense of wonder. DeBlieu’s celebration of the wind does all that but is different, for in addition to the physics of airflow and secrets of meteorology, the effects of the wind on biology, geology, and time, her writing drifts and flows like the breeze itself through history, literature, psychology, myth, and past and future dreams.

It’s really quite hypnotic, a seemingly effortless structure intended to mimic its invisible subject, but as a writer, you know how much craft was needed to create the effect. I often thought I wished I’d written that as I happily went along for the ride.