The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction: On Tenderness

  False Idyll

  The Last Distinction?

  Talk to Me

  Beyond the Quantum Horizon

  Is Space Digital?

  The Sweet Spot in Time

  Machines of the Infinite

  Which Species Will Live?

  The Larch

  Shattered Genius

  The T-Cell Army

  The Artificial Leaf

  The Deadliest Virus

  Our Place in the Universe

  Out of the Wild

  Altered States

  Recall of the Wild

  Polar Express

  The Crisis of Big Science

  Autism Inc.

  The Life of Pi, and Other Infinities

  Super Humanity

  The Patient Scientist

  Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

  Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

  The Measured Man

  The Wisdom of Psychopaths

  Contributors’ Notes

  Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2012

  About the Editor

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2013 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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  The Best American Science and Nature Writing™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  ISSN 1530-1508

  ISBN 978-0-544-00343-9

  eISBN 978-0-544-00348-4

  v1.1013

  “The Life of Pi, and Other Infinities” by Natalie Angier. From the New York Times, December 31, 2012, copyright © 2012 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  “The Larch” by Rick Bass. First published in Orion, September/October 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Rick Bass.

  “The Measured Man” by Mark Bowden. First published in The Atlantic, July 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Mark Bowden. Reprinted by permission of Mark Bowden.

  “Autism Inc.” by Gareth Cook. First published in the New York Times Magazine, November 29, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by the New York Times. Reprinted by permission of Gareth Cook.

  “Beyond the Quantum Horizon” by David Deutsch and Artur Ekert. First published in Scientific American, September 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Scientific American. A Division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  “The Wisdom of Psychopaths” from The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton. First published in Scientific American, October 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Kevin Dutton. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Doubleday Canada.

  “The Sweet Spot in Time” by Sylvia A. Earle. First published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Sylvia A. Earle. Reprinted by permission of Sylvia A. Earle.

  “Shattered Genius” by Brett Forrest. First published in Playboy, September 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Brett Forrest. Reprinted by permission of Brett Forrest.

  “Polar Express” by Keith Gessen. First published in The New Yorker, December 24 and 31, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Keith Gessen. Reprinted by permission of Keith Gessen.

  “The T-Cell Army” by Jerome Groopman. First published in The New Yorker, April 23, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Jerome Groopman. Reprinted by permission of Jerome Groopman.

  “The Last Distinction?” by Benjamin Hale. First published in Harper’s Magazine, August 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Benjamin Hale. Reprinted by permission of Benjamin Hale.

  “The Patient Scientist” by Katherine Harmon. First published in Scientific American, January 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Scientific American. A Division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  “Recall of the Wild” by Elizabeth Kolbert. First published in The New Yorker, December 24 and 31, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Elizabeth Kolbert. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Kolbert.

  “Our Place in the Universe” by Alan Lightman. First published in Harper’s Magazine, December 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Alan Lightman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “False Idyll” by J.B. MacKinnon. First published in Orion, May/June 2012. Copyright © 2012 by J.B. MacKinnon. Reprinted by permission of J.B. MacKinnon.

  “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche. First published in The Atlantic, May 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Stephen Marche. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Is Space Digital?” by Michael Moyer. First published in Scientific American, February 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Scientific American. A Division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  “Which Species Will Live?” by Michelle Nijhuis. First published in Scientific American, August 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Scientific American. A Division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  “The Artificial Leaf” by David Owen. First published in The New Yorker, May 14, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by David Owen. Reprinted by permission of The New Yorker.

  “Machines of the Infinite” by John Pavlus. First published in Scientific American, September 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Scientific American. A Division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. English translation of Kurt Gödel’s letter to John von Neumann is reprinted by permission of Michael Sipser from his original paper “The History and Status of the P versus NP Question.”

  “Out of the Wild” by David Quammen, from Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen. Copyright © 2012 by David Quammen. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. First published in Popular Science, October 2012.

  “Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?” by Nathaniel Rich. First published in the New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2012. Reprinted by permission of Nathaniel Rich.

  “Altered States” by Oliver Sacks. Copyright © 2012 by Oliver Sacks. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc., for permission. First published in The New Yorker, August 27, 2012.

  “Super Humanity” by Robert M. Sapolsky. First published in Scientific American, September 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Scientific American. A Division
of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  “The Deadliest Virus” by Michael Specter. First published in The New Yorker, March 12, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Michael Specter. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Crisis of Big Science” by Steven Weinberg. First published in the New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Steven Weinberg. Reprinted by permission of Steven Weinberg.

  “Talk to Me” by Tim Zimmermann. First published in Outside, September 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Tim Zimmermann. Reprinted by permission of Tim Zimmermann.

  Foreword

  ON AN AUTUMN night 404 years ago, a struggling mathematics professor at the University of Padua aimed a crude, three-foot-long wood and leather telescope at the night sky. Galileo Galilei didn’t invent the telescope; a trio of Dutch eyeglass makers had done that a year before Galileo used one to observe the sky over Tuscany. Nor was he the first to turn a telescope toward the heavens—an Englishman named Thomas Harriot, who sketched the moon in July 1609, claimed that honor. But Galileo was the first to truly see what the heavens held.

  Unlike Harriot, whose drawings depicted the moon as two-dimensional, Galileo, who had had formal training as an artist, understood that the moon was not flat and smooth. By carefully studying the nightly changes in light and shadow on the lunar surface, Galileo realized that the moon had valleys, mountains, and plains not wholly unlike those on Earth. His remarkable sketches of the moon, published in 1610 in a pamphlet called Sidereus Nuncius, or “Starry Messenger,” showed a full-fledged world, pocked and imperfect. It was just one of many observations that contradicted centuries of dogma, which held the heavens to be unchanging and perfect, composed of a rarefied celestial element, quintessence, with the planets and stars embedded on a series of concentric invisible spheres. The booklet sold out within months of publication. Its forty pages also recounted Galileo’s discovery that Jupiter had four moons of its own, which completely overturned the notion that every object in the heavens orbited Earth. And the Milky Way was not the diffuse cloud it appeared to be but rather, in Galileo’s words, “a congeries of innumerable stars.”

  Not everyone welcomed—or even recognized—Galileo’s revelations. One critic, an astrologer named Francesco Sizzi, argued that the moons of Jupiter didn’t really exist, because “the satellites are invisible to the naked eye.” Even some who looked through telescopes and saw the moon’s imperfect surface refused to discard their old beliefs. Lodovico delle Colombe, a Florentine philosopher, argued that a perfect invisible sphere surrounded the moon. Galileo countered that perhaps the invisible sphere had invisible mountains as well.

  The failure to acknowledge or understand the discoveries of science was not unique to Galileo’s time. We have our own Sizzis and Delle Colombes today: politicians who deny the existence of global warming, even as glaciers shrink in Greenland and ice disappears from the Arctic (see Keith Gessen’s “Polar Express” for more on the state of the Arctic), and advocates of creationism, who would see pseudoscience taught in the nation’s schools, 164 years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Fortunately, we have many gifted writers—call them starry messengers—who gracefully communicate the most important stories of our time. Some of those writers, like Siddhartha Mukherjee, our guest editor, are scientists themselves, and they give us all an opportunity to peer through a lens, as it were, and see the world as it is, and not as we believe it to be.

  When we do gaze through that lens, we often find a world far more beautiful and strange than anything dreamt of by medieval philosophers. Surely not even Galileo could have anticipated the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. In “Beyond the Quantum Horizon,” two eminent physicists discuss, among other things, the meaning of the most confoundingly weird theory in the history of science. Nearly a century after the birth of quantum mechanics, physicists still can’t agree on what it says about the nature of reality.

  What would Galileo find most astounding about our time? Perhaps it would be the discovery of the enormous scale of the universe, and that it is expanding, which would have been problematic indeed for all those crystalline spheres that were once thought to hold the stars and planets. (See Alan Lightman’s “Our Place in the Universe” for a lively history of the evolution of our understanding of the size of the universe.) No doubt he would marvel at our ability to live beneath the sea for days on end, as the pioneering oceanographer Sylvia Earle has. In “The Sweet Spot in Time,” she shares a lifetime of insights gleaned from more than 7,000 hours underwater—nearly a year altogether. Despite all that we have inflicted on the oceans, her story in these pages shows that she still thrills to the sheer wonder of our existence on a planet unlike any other in the cosmos.

  I hope this short overview whets your appetite. Siddhartha Mukherjee has selected twenty-seven stories for this collection. They’re all compelling and wonderful, but I think his lyrical introduction is itself worth the price of admission. You won’t soon forget it. So if I were you, I’d skip ahead right now and be prepared, as some of Galileo’s contemporaries were not, to behold a field of stars.

  I hope too that readers, writers, and editors will nominate their favorite articles for next year’s anthology at http://timfolger.net/forums. The criteria for submissions and deadlines, and the address to which entries should be sent, can be found in the “news and announcements” forum on my website. Once again this year I’m offering an incentive to enlist readers to scour the nation in search of good science and nature writing: send me an article that I haven’t found, and if the article makes it into the anthology, I’ll mail you a free copy of next year’s edition. Perhaps I’ll manage to cajole Dr. Mukherjee into signing some copies. I also encourage readers to use the forums to leave feedback about the collection and to discuss all things scientific. The best way for publications to guarantee that their articles are considered for inclusion in the anthology is to place me on their subscription list, using the address posted in the “news and announcements” forum. Bribes and other inducements are, I’m afraid, frowned upon.

  One of the pleasures of my involvement with this anthology is the opportunity to work with today’s best writers. Dr. Mukherjee’s book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer should be at the top of many reading lists. Once again this year I’m indebted to Ashley Gilliam at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This year’s anthology is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Veronica. And as always, I’m grateful to my beauteous muse, Anne Nolan, and to her pals, M. and WFB.

  TIM FOLGER

  Introduction: On Tenderness

  IN THE SUMMER of 2012, I traveled to Brno, in the Czech Republic, to visit the monastery of Gregor Mendel. I knew the barest details of Mendel’s life—enough to generate an anatomical sketch but not much more. Originally from a farming family in Moravia, he had joined the Augustinian monastery in Brno in the 1830s. In 1864, working with peas in the garden of his monastery, he stumbled on arguably the most seminal discovery of modern biology: that hereditary information is transmitted from one generation to the next in the form of discrete particles of information—“genes.”

  The evening train from Vienna to Brno sliced its way through a spectacular landscape of farmlands and vineyards—one scintilla of green blending into another. Brno was a small town with an outsize train station. Formerly a major center of commerce, as the guidebook reminded me, protesting feebly, it had by now largely resigned itself to its fate as a way station between Vienna and Prague. In the lobby of the hotel, the concierge looked at me quizzically when I asked him about Mendel. Most of the other residents of the hotel were Russians attending a conference on oil manufacturing.

  The next morning, I walked about a mile downhill from the hotel to the monastery. The building—St. Thomas’s Abbey—is a plaster-and-concrete structure attached to the southern edge of an imposing church. It is as cold as a meat locker and as sparse as a prison. A faded poster of Mendel smiling mysteriously, like a rotund Mona Li
sa, hangs on the edge of the boundary walls.

  The walled garden in front of the abbey was overgrown and empty. The glass hothouse, where Mendel had artificially pollinated flowers with tiny forceps and a paintbrush, had been dismantled several years earlier. The rectangular plot of land next to the building—a 12-by-6-foot mini-garden where Mendel had grown his peas for his famous experiment—was now planted, incongruously, with rows of red and white gardenias.

  An auburn-haired woman was at the front desk.

  I told her that I had traveled from New York to Brno to visit Mendel’s monastery. “I am a geneticist,” I explained, and this was a pilgrimage of sorts. Might I visit the interior of the abbey? Were Mendel’s notebooks kept inside? Could I visit the room where he had tabulated his first pea hybrids or the library where he had encountered a copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species?

  She looked unconvinced. Apparently the abbey was closed that day. “To enter, you must send in an application,” she said in Czech, and then in halting English that I could barely understand. “In duplicate.”

  “But I am in town for only a single night. I’m sorry, I had no idea about the application,” I pleaded.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “You must send in an application,” she said again, with an air of finality.

  My desperation was mounting. “To whom must I apply?” I asked.

  “To me,” she said.

  I scrutinized her face. If there was even the faintest glimmer of irony, I had missed it. Well, two could play this game, I thought.

  “In that case, I am applying to you now,” I said. “I hereby present my application to visit Gregor Mendel’s monastery.” I restrained myself from executing a small bow.

  The woman considered the impasse carefully. A moment of understanding passed between us, like a tiny, malevolent bolt of electricity. She looked defeated.