My Children Opened My Eyes to the Wonders of the World……………

In my fusty all-girls’ school, in the backwaters of Cornwall, over thirty years ago, science was definitely the poor relation: a subject to be endured but not enjoyed (one compulsory O level – I chose physics). Even the word brings back the smells of the dank and dismal old laboratories - biology of pickled gherkins and furniture polish, chemistry of baking soda and toilet cleaner. I remember holding a test tube over a bunsen burner, watching light refract through a prism, staring into murky tanks at newts and frogs which I dreaded having to dissect. There were strings of formulas - SO4, CAC03, 2Fe - a language with no attraction for me, not like the French and Latin I eagerly lapped up. If only it had been Hogwarts and we’d made cupid crystals and befuddlement potion.

My ancient teachers, quietly stagnating amongst the sea of mud brown and yellow uniforms – which earned us the insult “brass knobs” from our rival school - made little effort to capture our imagination. When the physics master – surely reincarnated as Grantly Budgen on Waterloo Road – retired a year before my exam his new, younger successor was appalled at how little he had actually taught us. I scraped a C, breathed a sigh of relief and moved into the sixth form and the comforting embrace of the arts.

And so I have continued untroubled. I read novels, quote poets, write grammatically correct prose and spell in my sleep. David Starkey beats Eastenders. My favourite book is a thesaurus. I love to feast on the words as I roll them over playfully in my mind before committing them to paper. The quick crossword is my morning fix, the cryptic one a sporadic pleasure. I know where I am with the humanities; words are my bread and butter.

So of course my children would love them too. It started so well. Proudly, at primary school parents’ evenings I listened to Jack’s teacher praise his story writing, his painting and his project on the London blitz. He played the piano and the violin – and with polar bears in his imaginary games. For two whole weeks one summer he dressed as a mouse. At bedtime we rattled through the Narnia novels, Doctor Doolittle, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. His sister Morwenna wrote a book called Little Cat, with seven pages. Childish art covered the walls. No hint of trouble.

Yet ten years on my son has been lured to a degree in chemistry, my daughter to A Levels in chemistry, physics and maths. They read New Scientist and Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. No love of metaphors, Matisse, The Culture Show or Sylvia Plath. They’re hooked on positrons, covalent bonding, string theory, quarks. I have Shakespeare, they have Schrodinger – with and without his cat. They have Einstein, I have McEwan. C is a letter: to them it is the speed of light. When did I go wrong?

They laugh when I tentatively ask if there is gravity on Mars (Yes, but not quite as strong as on Earth). Are there elements in the solar system which have not yet been discovered? (Definitely not) Isn’t the Large Hadron Collider just a very big boys’ toy, an excuse to propel things very fast towards each other and then watch them collide? Eat your heart out Richard Hammond. I call myself educated yet there is a vast gaping hole in my essential knowledge of the world. My ignorance is no longer good enough. Time for a bit of self-improvement.

It seems I’m not alone. Suddenly “popular” science seems to be where it’s at – in bookshops, in documentaries, in magazines. So I’m curled up on the sofa, watching a man on my television who claims to be a particle physicist but looks more like a member of a minor rock band. That’s because he was, in his early days, on keyboards for D:Ream. Yes, Professor Brian Cox – complete with OBE (Overwhelming Boyish Enthusiasm) – is science’s first pin up. Okay, Einstein coined the archetypal mad scientist look but he was hardly hot. Brian – I already feel I can call him that - is young, has cool hair and likes fast military jets (I’ve just watched him go up in one to the thin blue line, the edge of earth’s border with outer space, 18 km almost vertically straight up and it’s stunning.)

He’s very excited - in an over-exuberant puppy sort of way. I fancy bringing him home, giving him a cuddle, feeding him up. But he’s far too busy eulogising about the laws of physics and the solar system. As is Jim Al-Khalili, as he makes a diamond disappear into a cloud of gas. So who said they were forever? (“Chemistry: A Volatile History”). Or the Egyptologist who pushes an endoscope up a two and a half thousand year old mummy’s nose (“The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion”). This no longer feels the enigma it used to be. It’s just what stuff is and what stuff does. And it’s all around me.

I’m growing to love the periodic table in all its brilliant beauty – and not just for its names, though I must admit that antimony, lutetium and titanium sit elegantly on the page. I’ve learnt the second law of thermodynamics: that left to their own devices hot things get colder and not vice versa. Like my cup of tea. That entropy (science’s posh word for chaos) will always catch up with us in the end; my daughter’s bedroom is proof of that. I can now balance a chemical equation and explain electron sharing. A reaction is not just a scowl on a teenager’s face, a mole not only a furry mammal. Precipitate is not to hurry. I know an angstrom from an isotope, my loops from my buckyballs. Neon is a cocky, noble gas. Cosmic rays are real not a fiction. It’s not so hard.

My family are impressed. I still get stuck on the space-time horizon and the uncertainty principle, never mind the gluons. Hawking lost me at the six flavours of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom. Is he kidding? For now I’ll pass on Planck’s quantum hypothesis, the singularity theorem and red shift. But I’ll hold my own in the dinner party conversations about black holes and all that missing anti-matter. (Just put a mother on to it – believe me, we find things all the time!)

And have I enjoyed it? I can honestly say yes. My children have given me a story just as gripping, magnificent and magical as the ones I read to them. Only this one’s true. And that Large Collider and its quest for the elusive particle, the mythical Higgs Boson? I can hardly wait - bring it on!




Annie Hitch
oliver@ohitch.eclipse.co.uk