Making The New Writer

Oscar Wilde  said “ No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” Science writers are now artists rather than journalists for the most part, so perhaps this applies. This is also the reason that one of my favorite science writers is so artistically good. The first thing I read this morning was that the writer Jonah Lehrer had resigned from the New Yorker due to false quotes about Bob Dylan and others that he had put in his book “Imagine”.  I have several feelings about this, all of which seem strangely personal. The first is that I quote Lehrer many times in my blogs, and now feel that perhaps my own writing has been compromised. Secondly I feel bad for Jonah. I sympathize with him. He is young, and ascended rather quickly as an important writer of science based books, a blog and as a journalist for the New Yorker and Wired. While that is an enviable position, it is also hard to keep up with expectations. This is unfortunately a modern day pressure for popular success in almost any intellectual field. The polymath is touted, and not merely for the polymathic abilities he possesses but for the ability to communicate those ideas clearly to a mass public who in general are not so intellectual themselves. Finally though Jonah is representative of something that seems to be just appearing in the public consciousness, which is that few people know as much as they claim.

Before I even read the news of Jonah’s fall from the Mount Olympus of science popularization (that was my attempt to sound smart by blending pseudo knowledge of ancient Greece, with bland witticism for example) , I was listening to a new Podcast called “You Are Not So Smart”. The podcast is exactly the counter to the Jonah Lehrer problem, which is to point out that while even product descriptions use insane techno babble, most everyone can’t actually do much of anything anymore, or even explain how things are done. Who understands the way a microwave works for instance? Or how an airplane flies? On a side note my friend Paul Roossin pointed out to me that even though I thought I knew why a plane has lift I was wrong. It is the wing design that makes up most of the lift not the fabled  Bernoulli principle  So even though I am a physics professor I didn’t know the basic physics of aviation. What about making things? How many of us who work in the computer industry could assemble a computer? In the 1980s we all could.

But I refuse to be a cynical old man, and luckily I don’t need to. We are starting to see the reemergence of a time where doing is cooler than babbling. There are large movements such as the maker movement, which is as it sounds. It is exemplified by a series of Maker Faires where inventors and small companies show crafted devices made with new tools such as 3D printers and  micro controllers called  Arduino which allows for control of everything from motors to LEDS. This movement extends to biology, where companies such as Genspace have a make shift lab doing important research that even pharma and biotech are not doing. Actually if you look at an old building in Brooklyn called 33 Flatbush, the entire place is made up of doers such as roboticists, urban farmers, filmmakers and architects.  My company Nanotronics is full of makers, and most encouragingly some young ones including Dylan Fashbaugh who started early in life as a rocket builder and moved through differential equations at rocket speed , and now makes things for us including controllers. And he is still in college with us as an co-op.

I am sentimental towards the maker as my dad is a classic maker, having built a testing lab with his uncle, cousin and parents from used parts. I am also sentimental towards the intellectual, as I am not a good maker. I read and write, and rarely get my hands dirty. I am not proud of this, but it is the sad truth. Lucky for me I think that we are in a time where even a clumsy guy like me can build things. I can write code. I can program and I can use a 3D printer. If I do these things with my background .maybe I and so many others like me can actually write articles and books without the need to make up stories, because instead of stories we have made designs and products.