Annalee Newitz of io9: Why I Like Science

Annalee Newitz has written about science and pop culture for Wired, Popular Science, New Scientist, the Washington Post and many others. She’s the editor-in-chief of io9.com (a must-read for any science and/or science fiction fan) and is currently working on a book about how humans will survive the next mass extinction, to be published by Doubleday.

It started with monsters and ended with taxonomies. When I was a kid, my parents took me to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, where reeking ponds of bubbling tar had mired unwary mammoths, perfectly preserving their bones. You could walk right up to a chain link fence and gawk at the still-simmering tar, where museum curators had set up a tableau of a woolly mammoth family trying to rescue one of its members, who was slowly sinking into oblivion. I loved the giant bones you could see in the museum nearby and became a fierce dinosaur enthusiast, learning the names of all the mega-monsters who had come before the mammoths. I built a model of a stegosaurus and put it next to my bed.

In elementary school, I came to understand that any program or book labeled “science” would turn out to be awesome. I devoured books about biology, anthropology, outer space and evolution. I spent a lot of time pondering the poster in my school library showing the evolutionary stages between Australopithicus and Homo sapiens. I liked how scientists took the messiness of the world and organized it into classifications, categories and comprehensible chunks. At the same time, science opened up a yawning chasm of the unknown inside ordinary objects. A wooden table wasn’t just a piece of furniture–it was a blob of swarming atoms, constantly decaying and changing.

Even when I took a detour into the humanities and social sciences in graduate school, I carried my love of scientific categories with me. I studied narrative genres because that allowed me to place movies and books into recognizable categories (even if those categories included “uncategorized” or “wacky”). And in my dissertation, I analyzed the way pop culture stories about monsters evolved over time. Even in the absence of science, I had my taxonomies and evolutionary theories. And, of course, my monsters.

For the past decade, I’ve written almost exclusively about science. I’ve returned to my roots as a science geek, but now I understand that every scientific discovery always takes place within a story. I don’t mean that there are no truths–one of the things I love best about scientific thought is that it allows evidence to prove facts more or less definitively, which is frustratingly never possible in the humanities and social sciences. But science is nevertheless a story about the world, a way of explaining how everything functions. Best of all, science is a story with an open ending. Every discovery ends with more questions. And every line of scientific questioning ends with, “I don’t know, but I’m designing an experiment to find out.”

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Sarah Zielinski is an award-winning science writer and editor. She is a contributing writer in science for Smithsonian.com and blogs at Wild Things, which appears on Science News.