Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes from Scientists' Adventures into the Unknown

Researchers spend most of their time mired in the “messy middle” of science, the opposite of a Eureka moment. It is these hidden stories that science journalist Roberta Kwok uncovers in Lost in Curiosity.

The word “science” often brings to mind the image of a lone genius struck with a brilliant idea: a flash of insight, a thunderclap of clarity. But the reality is far more muddled. Each chapter of this book follows scientists who were caught in the middle of their quests, many of them young graduate students or junior researchers who perform the day-to-day labor of science. Kwok joins them in the Arizona desert, at the edge of an abandoned uranium mine; at a wave laboratory in Oregon, wading in a pool of soggy, slightly smelly “tutus” intended to protect cities from storms; on a remote glacier in Greenland, flying over a massive crevasse that gashed the ice; and at a museum in Washington, watching the hair-raising (and also smelly) dissection of coyote carcasses.