Sharp eye yields cheerful rhymes

What a delightful way to read about science: a collection of 137 (why that number, you’ll find out as a reader) short and slightly longer ‘rhymes’ that illuminate current science news in an original way. But with that self-chosen term, author and science journalist Marlies ter Voorde, editor at engineering magazine De Ingenieur, sells herself short. Because when I think of rhymes, I think more of the level of clunky Sinterklaas poems than of the sparkling and witty verses/limericks/sonnets she has compiled in His Name Was One-Three-Seven.

Pseudonym

Leafing through the collection, you leap from news about young volcanoes, (near-)colliding satellites and foul-mouthed parrots to CO₂ capture, breweries in ancient Egypt and the ADHD diagnosis of Leonardo da Vinci. Anyone who thinks these are precisely the media-friendly topics you encounter under the heading ‘science news’ is absolutely right. That is indeed how it all began in 2017 with @wetenschapsrijm, an account that Ter Voorde launched on — then still — Twitter. Under the pseudonym Wetenschapsrijmpjes, she published poems that responded to current science news in the mainstream media. With considerable success: the now-defunct account had nearly 2,000 followers.

Familiar trends

Ter Voorde stepped out of anonymity and wrote verses under her own name for the science supplement of NRC and for the social media channels of NEMO Kennislink. And now she has, self-published, compiled a selection from her body of work. In her own words, ‘a motley collection of short rhymes accompanying scientifically unimportant but publicly appealing news items’. His Name Was One-Three-Seven is therefore emphatically not a survey of the most significant recent developments in science, but rather offers a fine reflection of the kind of news we are served when it comes to science. And there we see the familiar trends: fossils, astronomical phenomena, (un)healthy food, ‘spectacular’ archaeological discoveries and animals that turn out to exhibit ‘human’ behaviour. Climate change, coronavirus and the wolf are naturally not absent. But Ter Voorde looks further afield, also shedding light on less obvious subjects such as the Navier-Stokes equation or the philosophical quest for truth.

This naturally yields an extremely varied book through which any science enthusiast will browse with pleasure. But what makes the book above all a treat for the reader is Ter Voorde’s ability to combine a light-hearted and amusing tone with a remarkably sharp eye — not only for science news, but also, or rather: especially, for how we as human beings look at the world around us. That is extraordinarily impressive and demonstrates that Ter Voorde not only understands the underlying science well, but has at least as keen an understanding of the people who pursue and describe that science.