In his muy excellente The Theoretical Biologists's Toolbox, Marc Mangel encourages every scientist to become a student of the short story. Why? Because it will immeasurably improve your writing. For what is a research article if not a work of fiction that happens to be true? A good article has much in common with good literature, and just because your protagonists are DNA or neutrinos doesn't mean you shouldn't tell a good story.
And what could be more important in telling a good story -- other than grammar, spelling, and a big advance -- than that very first sentence? Here is your moment to shine. The opening. The hook. The opportunity to grasp the reader fully by the throat. See the child. The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit. Where is it written that nonfiction is not similarly obligated?
As Princess Irulan reminds us, beginnings are delicate things.
Alas, it's hard to master the short story when your "be a student-of" list is crammed full of things like renormalizable gauge theory and in-situ hybridization. Maybe this is why more and more research papers are such a chore to read. It's humbling to consider that the two most elite scientific journals -- Nature and Science-- started life as an outlet for scientists to share their discoveries with the world-at-large. Good luck understanding anything in them these days you didn't go to graduate school for. Most of the articles are an esoteric slog that would be right at home on Fear Factor or Jackass. Next up: Johnny Knoxville reads the announcement of the Higgs boson while lobsters hang from his eyelids!
Thus are we inspired to comb back through the nerd literature to see how the big shots did it. The sparkling gems, the shining stars. Here are papers whose importance could be appreciated not just by some eggheads on a tenure review committee, but also by the punter on the bar stool next to you. Papers that announced great discoveries. Papers that were the stuff of Nobel dreams. Papers that changed the world and our place in it. Swingin' the typewriter of the Gods, to borrow a line from the Zeppelin fanatics.
Are the openings great? Do they portend the import in the pages to come? Do they stack up against great works of fiction? Or are they just typing? Uninspired prose harried to page in a rush to beat the competition to press? Only you can decide.
Here they are, right from the horse's mouth (or hooves, as it were): Famous First Words -- Opening Lines from Historic Scientific Papers. A new recurring feature here at the LabKitty.
Our inaugural FFW selection demonstrates the importance of being Ernest. Ernest Rutherford, that is! (Little joke there for our English-major friends.)
Rutherford was a physics giant, rising from humble New Zealand beginnings to go onto Oxford, Manchester, and later McGill University. Often called the Father of Nuclear Physics, Rutherford trained some of the biggest names in the field, including Niels Bohr, Hans Geiger, Otto Hahn, and James Chadwick. Of course, he also made substantial original contributions. Case in point: the discovery of the nucleus.
Here's the gist. In the early 20th century, the physics community is thinking atoms are a collection of positive and negative charges, present in equal numbers so that overall the atom is electrically neutral. However, there is disagreement on how these charges are distributed. The leading idea is the "plum pudding" model, in which positive and negative charges are uniformly distributed, much like plums in pudding (ergo: name).
Rutherford tests this idea by shooting alpha particles at atoms (details can be found in YouTube vid below). If the plum pudding model is correct, the alphas should "bounce off" an atom and be scattered at all angles. Rutherford's detectors tell a very different tale. Most alphas pass right through the atom. Only some bounce off, and occasionally some bounce right back at the source. Analysis of the data shows that the positive and negative charges are not mixed together in the atom; rather the positive charge is concentrated in a tiny area. The atom was less of a plum pudding and more of a hot dog in a hallway.
Rutherford had discovered the nucleus. If I remember my nerd lore, the first announcement was at a Manchester lecture series open to the public and the speaker who went on before Rutherford talked about an unusual spider he had found in a box of bananas.
Here is how the print announcement of the nucleus begins:
And what could be more important in telling a good story -- other than grammar, spelling, and a big advance -- than that very first sentence? Here is your moment to shine. The opening. The hook. The opportunity to grasp the reader fully by the throat. See the child. The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit. Where is it written that nonfiction is not similarly obligated?
As Princess Irulan reminds us, beginnings are delicate things.
Alas, it's hard to master the short story when your "be a student-of" list is crammed full of things like renormalizable gauge theory and in-situ hybridization. Maybe this is why more and more research papers are such a chore to read. It's humbling to consider that the two most elite scientific journals -- Nature and Science-- started life as an outlet for scientists to share their discoveries with the world-at-large. Good luck understanding anything in them these days you didn't go to graduate school for. Most of the articles are an esoteric slog that would be right at home on Fear Factor or Jackass. Next up: Johnny Knoxville reads the announcement of the Higgs boson while lobsters hang from his eyelids!
Thus are we inspired to comb back through the nerd literature to see how the big shots did it. The sparkling gems, the shining stars. Here are papers whose importance could be appreciated not just by some eggheads on a tenure review committee, but also by the punter on the bar stool next to you. Papers that announced great discoveries. Papers that were the stuff of Nobel dreams. Papers that changed the world and our place in it. Swingin' the typewriter of the Gods, to borrow a line from the Zeppelin fanatics.
Are the openings great? Do they portend the import in the pages to come? Do they stack up against great works of fiction? Or are they just typing? Uninspired prose harried to page in a rush to beat the competition to press? Only you can decide.
Here they are, right from the horse's mouth (or hooves, as it were): Famous First Words -- Opening Lines from Historic Scientific Papers. A new recurring feature here at the LabKitty.
Our inaugural FFW selection demonstrates the importance of being Ernest. Ernest Rutherford, that is! (Little joke there for our English-major friends.)
Rutherford was a physics giant, rising from humble New Zealand beginnings to go onto Oxford, Manchester, and later McGill University. Often called the Father of Nuclear Physics, Rutherford trained some of the biggest names in the field, including Niels Bohr, Hans Geiger, Otto Hahn, and James Chadwick. Of course, he also made substantial original contributions. Case in point: the discovery of the nucleus.
Here's the gist. In the early 20th century, the physics community is thinking atoms are a collection of positive and negative charges, present in equal numbers so that overall the atom is electrically neutral. However, there is disagreement on how these charges are distributed. The leading idea is the "plum pudding" model, in which positive and negative charges are uniformly distributed, much like plums in pudding (ergo: name).
Rutherford tests this idea by shooting alpha particles at atoms (details can be found in YouTube vid below). If the plum pudding model is correct, the alphas should "bounce off" an atom and be scattered at all angles. Rutherford's detectors tell a very different tale. Most alphas pass right through the atom. Only some bounce off, and occasionally some bounce right back at the source. Analysis of the data shows that the positive and negative charges are not mixed together in the atom; rather the positive charge is concentrated in a tiny area. The atom was less of a plum pudding and more of a hot dog in a hallway.
Rutherford had discovered the nucleus. If I remember my nerd lore, the first announcement was at a Manchester lecture series open to the public and the speaker who went on before Rutherford talked about an unusual spider he had found in a box of bananas.
Here is how the print announcement of the nucleus begins:
The scattering of the α and β particles
by matter and the structure of the atom
E. Rutherford Phil. Mag. 21:669 (1911)
by matter and the structure of the atom
E. Rutherford Phil. Mag. 21:669 (1911)
It is well known that the α and β particles suffer deflexions from their rectilinear paths by encounters with atoms of matter.
Image Credits: Rutherford's scattering experiment by Kurzon and appears under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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