It's all about me.

After reading the pieces for today I believe I'm starting to form some sort of science writing hypothesis (to use scientific terminology). That is "it's all about me." As humans, we tend to live in our very tiny microcosm of direct interactions. My cup of coffee, my blanket, my laptop - all within reach. Even the distance put between me and the world by the morning newspaper, where I attempt to reach beyond my tiny town of Bozeman, is delivered to me so that I don't have to walk much further than the front door.

So it makes sense that many of these pieces, even when they are about something as universal as change, eventually relate back to human contexts. Why is that? In some ways it seems that science was tailor-made for humans to unravel. Our mind seems to be able to wrap itself around concepts as complex as DNA synthesizing and a catalog of over a million insect species. But what is it about our tendency to always explain nature in terms of human nature? Is that the key to science writing? Is it really just all about us?

If so, is creating all those similes in terms of civilization in the Atkins piece a superior way to convey scientific information to humans? Or is using mathematics, as Schrodinger does, a more concrete way to explain our world to the lay scientist?

In a way, I think we're all scientists. We all perform our own social science experiments, experiments with the a box of pasta and boiling water, or tolerance to cold, or even the limits of alcohol our blood will hold. As humans we are naturally curious about both our nature and the nature that surrounds us. But how to describe it? What is the "best way" to describe it?

I suppose the experiment has started. I'd love it if anyone could add any data to my little writing laboratory. I suppose that's also the nature of writing. You write and analyze, write more and experiment and see what sticks to the wall. Sometimes you may even invoke God or the lack of him/her - whatever it takes to figure out "why." As Crick stated, "knowing why is more important than knowing what" (30).