Reading :: Listening to Beauty

 Listening to Beauty: Rhetorics of Science in Sea and Sound

By Megan Poole

We hired Megan in my department a couple of years ago, and I’m really happy we did. This year, she published this book on beauty in science — specifically, how “encounters with beauty advance scientific discovery,” as the back of the book puts it. 

Megan takes deep dives into different cases via interviews and experiences. In Chapter 2, she interviews Katy Payne about her discovery that humpback whales were singing. In Chapter 3, she takes up Payne’s discovery that elephants communicate infrasonically, interviewing the head scientists of the Elephant Listening Project. In Chapter 4, she interviews marine biologists Laura May-Collado and Michelle Fournet about how human noise (boat motors, offshore drilling) stresses marine mammals. 

Through each of these evocatively written case studies, she argues for the value of listening, and for attending to beauty, in the sciences. This is a welcome addition to the rhetoric-of-science literature. If you read this literature, or even if you just appreciate the beauty of nature, I highly recommend it.