After almost two years of writing (and a few more years of planning on top), I finally submitted the draft for The Secret Science of Baby. I thought it would be a moment of pure elation, but instead it felt rather like an anticlimax. Maybe that is because all I did was press send on an e-mail and nothing really happened.
Most of the book was written during the pandemic, which brought its own set of challenges. Juggling homeschooling, the “day job” and then firing up enough brain cells in the evening once the kids had gone to bed to write coherent sentences was not easy (although it rarely is, to be fair).
On the other hand, doing something during the past year(s) that didn’t involve constantly watching dire news bulletins about COVID or doom scrolling on Twitter at least gave me something else to obsess about focus on.
I enjoyed (for the most) writing the book and hope that comes across in the final version once all the edits are complete. As the image above shows, it came in just shy of 82 000 words (93 000 including footnotes and references).
So, without giving too much away, below is a chapter outline of how it ended up.
Part 1 – Conception
Chapter 1: The egg and sperm race The fluid dynamics of how sperm manage to swim to the egg
Chapter 2: Forming a body plan How mechanical forces in the developing embryo shape who we are
First interlude: the chemistry of pregnancy tests
Part 2 – Pregnancy
Second interlude: the physics of ultrasound scans
Chapter 3: Baby bump The forces involved during pregnancy from fetal kicks to the weight of the growing bump
Chapter 4: Lights, camera, action potential! How the uterus is able to produce and synchronise contractions that can push out a four-kilogram baby
Chapter 5: Labor Day The mechanics of childbirth
Chapter 6: The tree of life How the life-sustaining placenta manages to transfer a wide range of gasses and other solutes to and from the fetus
Part 3 – Baby
Chapter 7: First breath How a newborn inflates millions of tiny alveoli in the lungs straight after birth to start breathing on their own
Chapter 8: The chaos of newborn cries The ‘special’ acoustic properties of the newborn cry that make it so annoying attention grabbing
Chapter 9: Tongue twister The mechanics of how infants breastfeed
Third interlude: the engineering of modern diapers
Chapter 10: Baby brain What a mathemaical analysis of the signals from the infant brain can tell us about sleep and neurological development
Chapter 11: On the move The mechanics and neuroscience of how infants crawl and walk
Chapter 12: Tower of Bab(y)el What physics says about how infants could acquire language
If all goes well, The Secret Science of Baby should be out later next year.
Dr Michael Banks 