Imaginations equal to the universe's infinities
The Planets
By Dava Sobel
Viking, 270 pp., illustrated, $24.95
Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character
By Richard P. Feynman
Norton, 511 pp., illustrated, with CD, $29.95
It's no secret that science is often perceived as confounding, difficult, and aloof. I'm sure more folks will read ''Doonesbury" in today's paper than this column. Science is the tower glimpsed through the brambles, fenced off, patrolled by calculator-toting sentries with equations drifting through their heads. What readers, intent on entering, don't want a warm, friendly hand to guide them through the thorns?
Here are some sentences from
''You will not be sorry you read this book. You will walk away a different person."
''This story will inspire readers to find their niche in today's world."
''Dava Sobel is better with words than anyone I have ever read."
Richard P. Feynman's '' 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' " was published 10 years before ''Longitude." It, too, was a huge bestseller. His online reader reviews are more numerous and fanatic than Sobel's:
''Don't let his Nobel Prize put you off."
''Physics is not just guys in lab coats." One likens Feynman to ''a cross between Goethe and Robin Williams." Another says, ''This book is by far the most entertaining that I have ever read."
And so on. Keep in mind that ''Longitude" is principally about the inventor of the chronometer. '' 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' " consists of the autobiographical anecdotes of a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his formulations in quantum electrodynamics. These are not, at face value, the kind of page turners on which editors are going to bet the publishing house.
So what is it? What makes these books beloved? What allows a certain science writer entrance into that wider realm of popular culture? I ask because Sobel has a new book out, ''The Planets," in which she devotes a themed chapter to each planet in the solar system, and because a new compendium of Feynman's self-deprecating tales has just been published, ''Classic Feynman." Both are -- no surprise -- immensely entertaining.
Why? One easy answer is that there isn't much science in these books. The narratives are human, first and foremost, and by minimizing that which might be perceived as difficult, the writers make texts that are, well, readable. Readable and accessible. In ''Classic Feynman" you'll learn more about bongo playing, censorship at Los Alamos, and hotels in Japan than you will about quantum electrodynamics. In ''The Planets" you'll learn as much about creation myths, Sobel's immigrant grandmother, and Caroline Herschel, the first woman to discover a comet, as you will about the frozen nitrogen on Pluto.
But to say Feynman and Sobel evade complex science is too easy. These books are engrossing partly because of their writers' imaginations. They make it seem like they aren't writing about science, because they write about science in ways readers are not used to encountering.
Sobel is at her best as a landscape painter, employing hypnotically clear vision to place us on Mercury, or Saturn, or in the distant, frozen Kuiper Belt. ''Day breaks over Mercury in a white heat," she writes. ''The nearby Sun lurches into the black sky and looms enormous there, nearly triple the diameter of the familiar orb we see from Earth."
Imagination is about seeing life from an exceptionally wide angle, about being able to place the day-to-day -- lunch dates and traffic tickets and laundry -- in the context of much larger systems. Feynman, in particular, excels at this. He sees water running out of a faucet, or the Cornell University logo spinning in the center of a plate, and is able, by ''playing with physics," to plumb the mysteries of the universe.
Sobel, in turn, never forgets that her readers are humans with Earth as our fixed reference point. ''By the time the Sun's light reaches Pluto," she writes, ''distance has dimmed it a thousand-fold, so that the Sunlit planet in daytime resembles a winter evening by Moonlight."
The more you read Sobel's careful portraits of other planets, the more you realize how arbitrary our planet is, with its protective atmosphere, its relatively gentle fluctuations in temperature, its water cycling between solid, liquid, and gas. Place us a bit closer to the sun, put some more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and the next thing you know, daytime temperatures are 800 degrees Fahrenheit and our nighttime vistas are of ''red-hot rocks, cooked halfway to their melting point."
So much of science -- astronomy and particle physics in particular -- embraces objects and distances so enormous or so infinitesimal that it hurts to wrap our minds around them. Only the writers -- and teachers, incidentally -- with enormous imagination can communicate them.
Feynman's other appeal is, of course, humor. He sums up the experience of winning the Nobel like this: ''It's nice that I got some money -- I was able to buy a beach house -- but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have won the Prize -- because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in any public situation."
His reminiscences are all about a persona, Feynman, the safe-cracking, prank-pulling, Portuguese-speaking character. Sobel, on the other hand, is at her best when she steps back from her text, a silent, articulate guide, escorting you into the wind-torn storms of Jupiter, or the seething tumult of the sun's photosphere.
But both writers bring a sense of wonder to their writing that makes them marvelous company -- a belief that the universe is utterly enthralling, worth investigating with every breath, before our brief time on Earth is up.
Anthony Doerr is the author of ''The Shell Collector" and ''About Grace." 
