Citizen Science No. 8 by Jamie Zvirzdin

Science Is a Word Game

A very generous friend from Maryland gave me his entire collection of Isaac Asimov books, and I was shocked to discover how many nonfiction books Asimov wrote beyond his science fiction. My favorite so far is “Words of Science and the History Behind Them,” published in 1959.

What Asimov writes at the beginning of “Words of Science” is spot-on: “Entering the world of mathematics and science turns into a meeting with a whole realm of new words: words that look and sound odd; words that are long and hard to pronounce; words that the ordinary person never meets with in ordinary life. It is as though scientists were protecting their mysteries from the prying eyes of ordinary mortals by an enveloping shroud of forbidding syllables.”