In her foreword to Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020, series editor Jaime Green reflects on anthologies as time capsules, but also as "letters to future selves," compiled and editorialized well before the year they will be printed. Speaking from the past, then, this collection of two dozen selections curated by guest editor Michio Kaku brings readers back to before the world changed, and simultaneously, recollects all the ways it was already constantly changing.
Here are reflections on climate change, developments in neuroplasticity, postulations about new worlds to be discovered and other life waiting to be met and countless examples of how ideas of science and observation are subject to revisions that yield deeper understanding of what Kaku refers to as the universe's "simple and elegant principles and concepts." This collection displays the depths of human inquiry that might yet be brought to bear.
Though the essays collected here were all originally published in magazines ranging from Aeon to the New Yorker in 2019, reflecting on them in 2020 brings hope for all the possibilities that still exist to be studied in the sciences, and all the things that might yet be observed in the natural world. What rings truest perhaps, almost prophetically this year, are Washington Post climate reporter Sarah Kaplan's observations of humanity's relationship with the earth in the face of so much catastrophic change: "Only now... do humans have a chance to comprehend all that is about to be lost. What a profound responsibility that is. What a beautiful gift." --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer