Nevertheless, she persisted

One of the things I loved most about our August book of the month, Lost in Curiosity, was how patient it is. 

Yes, we all know that science can take a long time. Studying a topic with deep nuance is a commitment; doctorates take years to complete; there’s room for only so many research projects in a career. Stories about science, conversely, often speed through all this and skip straight to the end. What are the findings? What knowledge can we glean from the results?

Likewise, we understand that books generally take a long time to write, and an even longer time to come to life—and the space between conception and publication can be very extensive. (Alexis Madrigal, for example, told us The Pacific Circuit was a 10-year odyssey). But the reality is that many books still feel a little rushed at their core. And that’s especially true of episodic books covering things like science that collect many stories together, where it’s really a series of sprints rather than a single, extended thought with other threads wrapped around it.

But in Lost in Curiosity, Roberta Kwok’s dedication to the long game seems quite remarkable.

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We meet scientists in all kinds of situations, from the magical to the mundane. There are Navajo chemists in remote desert greenhouses studying the effect of metal contamination on medicinal plants; there are environmental scientists plunging measuring devices deep into Greenlandic glaciers. And there are physicists crumpling up pieces of paper and flattening them out again, over and over and over.

And all through these scenes, Kwok really shows her working, demonstrating how she enters her relationship with these researchers with an open mind—not working backwards from the findings, but riding along with the scientists as they try new things out, talking to the people who are trying to understand the data, all regardless of where their studies are going to end up.

The benefit of this was all summed up beautifully in an Instagram video by one of the scientists featured in the book.

Madelyn Leembruggen was a theoretical physics PhD student at Harvard when Kwok started tracking her work back in the early 2020s. Chapter six, called “Paper Labyrinth,” covers Leembruggen and her colleagues as they attempt to understand the mathematics of those scrumpled sheets of paper I mentioned before. It’s one of those almost-mundane areas of study that also seems bizarrely fascinating (if you’re of a certain mind.) Are there hidden rules about how a leaf gets screwed up? Is there some kind of order in what appears to be chaos?

Kwok tagged along with the group as they plugged away at these questions, and played it slow and steady—checking in on the research occasionally, spending time really talking to the scientists and understanding what they were thinking, how it changed, and what challenges they faced.

And in her video celebrating the release of the book, Leembruggen explains what took place and what it meant to her as a researcher.

“Pretty early on in my PhD, a journalist reached out to me on Twitter and asked if she could follow my dissertation research for a couple of years. And now, over five years later, the results are finally out,” she says.

“This was one of my favorite things I got to do in grad school. When you’re in the middle of one of those big, long projects, it is so easy to lose sight of the big picture. But every couple of months, I had a Zoom call with Roberta and she would ask me questions about the details and also the big picture. So at every stage of my PhD I got to think really hard about what I was doing, how to explain it clearly, and how it fit into the big picture. So, thank you to Roberta for making me articulate my research in a way that so few people ever get to do while they’re in it. Thank you for being brutally curious with me.”

This was more evidence to me supporting why I enjoyed Lost in Curiosity’s perspective and persistence. I thought it was so refreshing to read about research from this angle, rather than working back from the solution. And it seems as if Leembruggen did too.

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I’m definitely going to ask Roberta questions about this when I interview her in a few weeks. If Lost in Curiosity raises anything you’d like to know more about, then email me your question by replying to this message or pinging [email protected] and I’ll make sure we get into it.