When I first heard the expression "popular science" I took it to be an oxymoron of "military intelligence" proportions. The notion that science might be considered marketable as something popular seemed to me both ridiculous and, ironically, quite unscientific. Surely science was still some some kind of elaborate, tortuous and drawn-out dissection of my illogical brain - a public demonstration of my ignorance as the learned fellow pupils with all the coloured pens take notes about my startling inability and sadly shake their heads. Chemistry, biology and physics were the evil sons of Satan who manifested himself to me in those days as mathematics. If two ducks cost two pounds, how much is one duck?
I was at first quite happy to find out about science. I often made things from squeezy bottles and coat-hangers and these I proudly referred to as "inventions". I was attempting, I think, to create the supreme water pistol and, at the age of nine, this certainly amounted to a serious and noble pursuit. Even so, my studies and experiments in primitive hydraulics and hydrology counted for nothing in the big boys' school where water pistols were banned and my inventions cruelly condemned. I felt like Galileo - the man in the Queen song.
The chemistry set was of no consequence either. I had no interest in doing any of the prescribed experiments; only the learned fellows with all the coloured pens would be bothered with that. I simply wanted to experiment in the way I now cook - throw all manner of mysterious ingredients in no particular measures into a pot and heat thoroughly. I simply aimed to create something that had a certain smell and all the time the mother would worry that I would either blow up the street or put somebody's eye out.
At school, apart from the times we did something smelly with sulphur or threw mercury on the floor, real chemistry turned out to be a disappointment. Mind you, Bunsen burners could be converted into effective water pistols.
Biology was a cinch in first year and then everything went wobbly. All of a sudden it no longer seemed to matter that I knew the names of trees or that I was practically on speaking terms with the local wildlife. At first it was all that reproduction stuff and after that I needed to be a genius at maths and own lots of coloured pens. Physics too was a total mystery as mathematics moved in and I moved out, an expert in nothing apart from my own particular density and a few bits and pieces about water finding its own level. And I didn't have to go to school to learn that. I knew that from when I was no height, out in the backyard with my wet "inventions".
And so some authoritarian voice said that I was "good at languages" and even though I was not at all good at languages, my scientific days were done. No more stink bombs and water pistols, no more inventions. The coloured-pen brigade struck out into the worlds of differentiation and integration and hung around under the stairs in a loose grouping called the Chess Club. I was condemned to Shakespeare, the delights of Irish grammar and a career of playing records on the wireless.
So what, my old teachers might wonder, am I doing in the popular science section of a well-known bookshop? Who do I think I am, sitting up at night reading Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins? Why are two of my favourite books Faber Book Of Science by John Carey and Great Essays In Science by Martin Gardners? Would I not be better off reading something in Latin? Certainly much of the attraction is to do with the fact that unlike schoolbooks, many of the popular science books are very well written and quite intelligible. But the real reason is that it's fascinating stuff and probably always was. The only difference is that now I'm beginning to understand why I want to know why a dung beetle does what it does (see Jean Henri Fabre), why a woman is beautiful (see Havelock Ellis) and what exactly a bird brain is (see Julian Huxley).
They say that science wasn't always the preserve of the ones with the coloured pens. I look back to the days when scientists were philosophers, alchemists, poets and crazies; the days when a hard day's work could be spent in the laboratory trying to conjure an angel or in the ghetto of Prague where Rabbi Low moulded the Golem from the clay of the Vtlava River - the days when people seemed to be both mistaken and wise, who have bequeathed us a sense that we have been denied much of their knowledge. In those venerable days I might not have been shut out of the party because I couldn't work out the answer to one of those "it takes six ducks three months to dig half a hole" questions.
I'm sure scientists are scoffing up the sleeves of their white coats and having a good smirk at those of us who dip into the odd popular science book. They probably think we are the science world's equivalent of Michael Bolton fans - pathetic, misguided, ill-advised and sadly unaware of the real thing. Even so, how else am I going to find out what causes the tide to come in and out, or what that star is I see every night from my window, or why a man has nipples? I should of course have been taught these things at school but I wasn't. I was probably away at a choir lesson or something.
D.H. Lawrence described the world of science as "the dry and sterile world the abstracted mind inhabits". Even so, and surprising as it may seem, popular science books are doing extremely well in the shops; something to do with the millennium they say, and that may be so. But I suspect that a lot of people like me are simply fed up not knowing things that we really ought to know by now - not necessarily spectacular things but commonplace things that remain mysteries because they have, up until recently, been explained by people who may well know their onions (Allium cepa) but simply cannot communicate them. And how else am I to perfect that water pistol?
I must tell you about the dung beetle sometime, too - over dinner perhaps.
John Kelly is a writer and broadcaster.