Imagination intuition and the art of storytelling are not the reasons most people give for picking up a book on physics. Hard facts, data, equations and a mystical lack of comprehension mixed with a large dose of fear would come closer to the widespread public attitude towards scientific writing. And yet, read carefully the work of scientists for a general audience or listen to their lectures and these terms - imagination, intuition, storytelling - crop up again and again.

“I view science as one of the most dramatic narratives our species can tell,” says the renowned physicist Brian Greene, author of the bestsellers The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos - “the story of our search to understand the Universe and ourselves. When that search is conveyed using the power of story - the story of discovery - we can all feel part of the journey.” And this journey unfolds not just via a string of impenetrable algebraic formulas, but also by using much more recognisable human characteristics.

“It is the consequence of an insatiable curiosity, a fabulous imagination, acute observation and ruthless logic,” writes the scientific author and journalist Simon Singh in the opening chapter of his recent book, Big Bang.

Relating the excitement and wonder of that story to a non-specialist audience, however, presents some challenges. Conveying the sheer sense of adventure demands that scientists not only use their imaginative and intuitive powers within their research, but that they communicate in ways their readership can understand.

“Putting some human element into it is very important,” says Leonard Susskind, Professor of Physics at Stanford University and author of The Black Hole War. “When I write, I always talk about science through stories.” Susskind, one of the originators of String Theory, probably the most difficult concept in modern physics for a lay person to understand, describes his thought process as one of imagination and explanation: “I think in terms of explaining to someone who doesn't know; to an outsider.”

Just as imagination and physics may seem an odd pairing, intuition is not a word that many people associate either with the research work of scientists or the translation into familiar language that popular science writing represents. It is, however, key to the process of both.

“Intuition is the lifeblood of science,” says Greene, Professor of Physics at Columbia University. “While mathematics is the language of theoretical research, I've always felt that if my understanding of a subject is based solely on maths, I don't have a complete grasp. Only when I can frame my understanding using readily accessible imagery and ideas - only when I can find an intuitive formulation of a mathematical explanation - do I feel I've truly absorbed it.

“The art of science writing is in the act of translating from the abstract to the intuitive - however unfamiliar the ideas being communicated may be.”

It hasn't always been this way. The profusion and scope of popular science books is a relatively new phenomenon, reflecting the concerted effort of modern scientists to bring their work to a general readership. With books from the fabulously titled Why Is Snot Green? by Glenn Murphy - an inventive and informative encyclopaedia of the difficult questions children ask - to the works of Dr Oliver Sacks, every field of modern science is represented in a user-friendly fashion.

It's been a long road, however, from Sir Isaac Newton to Why is Snot Green? Newton's great work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, certainly does not contain amusing anecdotes about being struck on the head by an apple. On the contrary, writing in Great Physicists, William H. Cropper calls it “The most inaccessible book ever written.” It wasn't until much later that scientists extended the reach of their writing to the general public.

“The modern popularisation of science has its origins in mid to late 19th-century work in France, Germany, and Britain,” Peter Galison, Harvard historian, physicist and the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, says. One avid reader of the work of scientists such as the French mathematician-physicist-philosopher Henri Poincaré, who wrote wildly successful bestsellers at the turn of the century, was Albert Einstein himself.

Einstein's imaginative ways of describing physical laws by using familiar objects such as elevators and speeding trains mean that he is often credited as the father of modern science writing. Galison, however, points out that in terms of writing, although not in terms of scientific discovery, Einstein was following a tradition rather than creating one.

“It is true that Einstein, like Freud, was a consummate stylist - and that his popularisations brought science to a much wider public,” Galison says. “But Einstein was building on an a genre that already existed.” Following on from Einstein, the science that this genre describes developed so rapidly that it threatened to leave the general public languishing in the dark.

“In the 20th century, as science explored realms ever farther from everyday experience - the realm of the very fast, the very small, or the very large - it becomes increasingly disconnected from the everyday public sphere,” Greene says. “Largely, this is not because the material isn't fascinating. It's because the language describing the results became ever more distant from everyday discourse.

“But when these results are described using analogies and metaphors that capture the essence while shedding the technical details, the material becomes widely accessible and, for many, a joy to apprehend.”

Rescuing physics from public obscurity in the late 20th century via the methods that Greene outlines took a big figure with a dramatic personality and little truck with the possibility of failure. And physics found just that in the towering shape of the American scientist Carl Sagan.

In the early 1980s, Sagan blazed a trail with Cosmos, the book of the eponymous 13-part television series. The TV series and the book set out to explain the saga of our universe in terms of “All that is, ever has been and ever will be”. Cosmos stayed on the bestseller list for 70 weeks, prompting the The New Yorker to comment: “Few scientists would have had the nerve to write a book like this, with all its possibilities for disaster”.

Possibilities for disaster were clearly on the mind of the publishers who offered my father Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a contract without an advance for his first popular book, A Brief History of Time. Published in the end by a different house, the book went on to defy all those who thought the public would not be interested in a work explaining the advances of modern physics in terms anyone could understand.

A Brief History of Time became a runaway bestseller in more than 40 languages, spent 224 weeks on the bestseller list and celebrates its 20th anniversary - still in print - this week. It is another great work in which a scientist's imagination has played a key role.

“Science proceeds by making a mental model of the world,” Hawking says. “The more imagination in building the model, the better it will work.”

George's Secret Key to the Universe by Lucy and Stephen Hawking is published by Doubleday
Buy the book here

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