Harmon & Gross Books

The Many Voices of Modern Physics: Written Communication Practices of Key Discoveries

With afterword by Randy Allen Harris: University of Pittsburgh Press (2023)

The Many Voices of Modern Physics follows a revolution that began in 1905 when Albert Einstein published papers on special relativity and quantum theory. Unlike Newtonian physics, this new physics often departs wildly from common sense, a radical divorce that presents a unique communicative challenge to physicists when writing for other physicists or for the general public, and to journalists and popular science writers as well. In their two long careers, Joseph Harmon and the late Alan Gross have explored how scientists communicate with each other and with the general public. Here, they focus not on the history of modern physics but on its communication. In their survey of physics communications and related persuasive practices, they move from peak to peak of scientific achievement, recalling how physicists use the communicative tools available—in particular, thought experiments, analogies, visuals, and equations—to convince others that what they say is not only true but significant, that it must be incorporated into the body of scientific and general knowledge. Each chapter includes a chorus of voices, from the many celebrated physicists who devoted considerable time and ingenuity to communicating their discoveries, to the science journalists who made those discoveries accessible to the public, and even to philosophers, sociologists, historians, an opera composer, and a patent lawyer. With their final collaboration, Harmon and Gross offer a tribute to the communicative practices of the physicists who convinced their peers and the general public that the universe is a far more bizarre and interesting place than their nineteenth-century predecessors imagined.

"Literary framing, engaging narratives, and careful analysis of communication artifacts come together to offer a tale that will pull the reader in and keep them along for the journey, even when—forget the complex equations—the very ideas seem so alien to the world we all apprehend. Indeed, the material is challenging, and the authors have masterfully handled the subject to provide nonphysicists with a vantage to observe this fascinating rhetorical world. Their engaging and enjoyable book makes a highly important contribution to fields of communication studies."

—Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, University of Waterloo

"While in-depth scientific knowledge is not required, the book is best targeted at readers who are familiar with the basics of physics and who want to gain new perspectives on some of the most important breakthroughs during the past century and beyond. Indeed, by casting well-known texts in a communication context, the book offers analogies and explanations that can be used by anyone involved in public engagement."

—Sanje Fenkart, CERN Courier

Science from Sight to Insight: How Scientists Illustrate Meaning

University of Chicago Press (2013). 

John Dalton’s molecular structures. Scatter plots and geometric diagrams. Watson and Crick’s double helix. The way in which scientists understand the world—and the key concepts that explain it—is undeniably bound up in not only words, but images. Moreover, from PowerPoint presentations to articles in academic journals, scientific communication routinely relies on the relationship between words and pictures. In Science from Sight to Insight, Alan G. Gross  and Joseph E. Harmon present a short history of the scientific visual, and then formulate a theory about the interaction between the visual and textual. With great insight and admirable rigor, the authors argue that scientific meaning itself comes from the complex interplay between the verbal and the visual in the form of graphs, diagrams, maps, drawings, and photographs. The authors use a variety of tools to probe the nature of scientific images, from Heidegger’s philosophy of science to Peirce’s semiotics of visual communication. Their synthesis of these elements offers readers an examination of scientific visuals at a much deeper and more meaningful level than ever before.  

"Gross and Harmon tackle a subject of great importance to scholars of scientific discourse across disciplinary boundaries: the role of visuals in scientific arguments. One of this book's major contributions to the field is tis advancement of a theory of verbal-visual interaction to account for how scientific meaning is communicated...Those who study scientific communication and who are interested in the role of visualizations in scientific arguments will have much to gain from reading Gross and Harmon's new book."

—Rhetoric Society Quarterly

The Craft of Scientific Communication

University of Chicago Press (2010). Chinese translation to be published in 2023 by Xinhua Publishing (中文译本将于 2023 年夏季由新华出版社出版).

The ability to communicate in print and person is essential to the life of a successful scientist. But since writing is often secondary in scientific education and teaching, there remains a significant need for guides that teach scientists how best to convey their research to general and professional audiences. The Craft of Scientific Communication will teach science students and scientists alike how to improve the clarity, cogency, and communicative power of their words and images.

In this remarkable guide, Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross have combined their many years of experience in the art of science writing to analyze published examples of how the best scientists communicate. Organized topically with information on the structural elements and the style of scientific communications, each chapter draws on models of past successes and failures to show students and practitioners how best to negotiate the world of print, online publication, and oral presentation.

"This work would be an important manual for any scientist who wishes to publish articles that generate significant impact. Because scientific communication improves through practices, this volume would also be a useful tool to introduce science writing to students or for principal investigators to guide budding scientists."

—Quarterly Review of Biology

The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour

University of Chicago Press (2007)

The scientific article has been a hallmark of the career of every important western scientist since the seventeenth century. Yet its role in the history of science has not been fully explored. Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross remedy this oversight with The Scientific Literature, a collection of writings—excerpts from scientific articles, letters, memoirs, proceedings, transactions, and magazines—that illustrates the origin of the scientific article in 1665 and its evolution over the next three and a half centuries.

Featuring articles—as well as sixty tables and illustrations, tools vital to scientific communication—that represent the broad sweep of modern science, The Scientific Literature is a historical tour through both the rhetorical strategies that scientists employ to share their discoveries and the methods that scientists use to argue claims of new knowledge. Commentaries that explain each excerpt’s scientific and historical context and analyze its communication strategy accompany each entry.

A unique anthology, The Scientific Literature will allow both the scholar and the general reader to experience first hand the development of modern science.

"There are now many historical and sociological studies of scientific communication. Joseph Harmon and Alan Gross's book, The Scientific Literature, is something different--neither a research monograph nor a straightforward compilation of excerpts...It includes 125 examples of scientific writing taken from papers, books, reviews and Nobel speeches, and covers materials from the seventeenth century up to the announcement of the rough draft of the human genome in 2001...These scientific snippets are embedded in strands of editorial commentary describing, highlighting and interpreting. The tone is genial: the 'guided tour' doesn't threaten arduous intellectual adventure. Rhetorical terms are explained, scientific authors are identified, and pertinent contexts are introduced."

—Nature

Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present

Oxford University Press (2002) and Parlor Press (2009)

The problem tackled in this book is: how did science get from passages like this:

The 21st of April, 1665, about eight in the morning, I bored a hole in the body of a fair and large Birch, and put in a Cork with a Quill in the middle; after a Moment or two it [a sap] began to drop, but yet very softly: Some three Hours after I returned ̧ and it had filled a Pint Glass, and then it droped exceeding fast, viz. every Pulse a Drop: This Liquor is not unpleasant to the Taste, and not thick or troubled; yet it looks as though some few drops of Milk were split in a Bason of Fountain Water (Lister, 1697).

to this:

A plateau appears as a mass ratio of sRNA to DNA of 0.025 per cent. Thus, only a very small portion of the DNA is able to accept an sRNA molecule in hybrid formation. Furthermore, these results show that the preparation does not contain ribosomal RNA, since DNA-ribosomal RNA hybrids contain six times more RNA. If cold ribosomal RNA is added to the annealing mixture, it does not compete with the bonding of sRNA, thereby suggesting that the ribosomal RNA sites are different from the sRNA sites. The genome in E. coli contains a DNA molecular weight equivalent of 4 x 109 (Goodman and Rich, 1962).

In Communicating Science, Gross, Harmon, and Reidy analyzed thousands of randomly selected texts from hundreds of scientific journals in French, English, and German published between 1665 and 2000. What emerged from their study was the first ever quantitatively based picture of the changes that have occurred in the writing style, presentational features (such as section headings and method of integrating illustrations into the text), and the argumentative structure of scientific articles over four centuries in the three main languages of Western science. They also explained the forces behind those changes by drawing on a selection theory for conceptual evolution developed separately by philosophers Stephen Toulmin, David Hull, and others.

“[Communicating Science] offers a moment of coalescence in the rhetoric of science as a model of rigorous research, not likely to be duplicated soon. It will be a staple introductory text in science studies courses and a stimulant for better scholarship in the field.”  —Rhetoric Society Quarterly

“Communicating Science is a substantial contribution to the literature mapping out the changing language and rhetoric of the scientific article from 1665 to the present.” —Isis

“Gross, Harmon, and Reidy have set a new and higher standard for methodological and presentational rigor in scientific communication content analysis.” —Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

“The book will be an essential starting point for future discussion of the history of scientific writing.” —Diversity and Distributions

“A book to buy, to read, and to think about.” —European Science Editing