by John Carey
Further acclaim for The Faber Book of Science:
‘As a book to pick up and dip into from time to time, this will be a compelling volume to artists and scientists alike.’ New Scientist
‘Professor Carey’s anthology had me gripped … The fruit of wide reading and impressive understanding.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘This is a delightful, enchanting book – the erudition of ages garlanded by Carey’s dry wit and infectious enthusiasm.’ Mail on Sunday
‘A series of fascinating essays in such diverse subjects as malaria, the first electric light bulbs, early photographs and Charles Lyell’s shocking revelations on the shifting of rocks. A must for all those, like me, who long to be educated, and fast.’ Beryl Bainbridge, Books of the Year, Independent
‘A big, beautiful, desirable book, including marvels like Ruskin in praise of the “russet velvet” of rust, or Nabokov waiting among the darkening lilacs to spot the “vibrational halo” of “an olive and pink Hummingbird moth”.’ Daily Telegraph
THE FABER BOOK OF
Science
edited by
JOHN CAREY
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Prelude: The Misfit from Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Going inside the Body
Andreas Vesalius
Galileo and the Telescope
Galileo Galilei
William Harvey and the Witches
Geoffrey Keynes
The Hunting Spider
Robert Hooke and John Evelyn
Early Blood Transfusion
Henry Oldenburg and Thomas Shadwell
Little Animals in Water
Antony van Leeuwenhoek
An Apple and Colours
Sir Isaac Newton and others
The Little Red Mouse and the Field Cricket
Gilbert White
Two Mice Discover Oxygen
Joseph Priestley
Discovering Uranus
Alfred Noyes
The Big Bang and Vegetable Love
Erasmus Darwin
Taming the Speckled Monster
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Edward Jenner
The Menace of Population
Thomas Malthus
How the Giraffe Got its Neck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
George Bernard Shaw and Richard Wilbur
Medical Studies, Paris 1821
Hector Berlioz
The Man with a Lid on his Stomach
William Beaumont
Those Dreadful Hammers: Lyell and the New Geology
Charles Lyell
The Discovery of Worrying
Adam Phillips
Pictures for the Million
Samuel F. B. Morse and Marc Antoine Gaudin
The Battle of the Ants
Henry David Thoreau
On a Candle
Michael Faraday
Heat Death
John Updike
Adam’s Navel
Stephen Jay Gould
Submarine Gardens of Eden: Devon, 1858–9
Edmund Gosse
In Praise of Rust
John Ruskin
The Devil’s Chaplain
Charles Darwin
The Discovery of Prehistory
Daniel J. Boorstin
Chains and Rings: Kekule’s Dreams
August Kekule
On a Piece of Chalk
T. H.Huxley
Siberia Breeds a Prophet
Bernard Jaffe
Socialism and Bacteria
David Bodanis
God and Molecules
James Clerk Maxwell
Inventing Electric Light
Francis Jehl
Bird’s Custard: The True Story
Nicholas Kurti
Birth Control: The Diaphragm
Angus McLaren
Headless Sex: The Praying Mantis
L. O. Howard
The World as Sculpture
William James
The Discovery of X-Rays
Wilhelm Roentgen, H.J.W. Dam, and others
No Sun in Paris
Henri Becquerel
The Colour of Radium
Eve Curie
The Innocence of Radium
Lavinia Greenlaw
The Secret of the Mosquito’s Stomach
Ronald Ross
The Poet and the Scientist
Hugh MacDiarmid
Wasps, Moths and Fossils
Jean-Henri Fabre
The Massacre of the Males
Maurice Maeterlinck
Freud on Perversion
Sigmund Freud and W. H. Auden
Kitty Hawk
Orville Wright
A Cuckoo in a Robin’s Nest
W. H. Hudson
Was the World Made for Man?
Mark Twain
Drawing the Nerves
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Discovering the Nucleus
C. P. Snow
Death of a Naturalist
W. N. P. Barbellion
Relating Relativity
Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell,
A. S. Eddington and others
Uncertainty and Other Worlds
F. W. Bridgman and others
Quantum Mechanics: Mines and Machine-Guns
Max Born
Why Light Travels in Straight Lines
Peter Atkins
Puzzle Interest
William Empson
Submarine Blue
William Beebe
Sea-Cucumbers
John Steinbeck
Telling the Workers about Science
J. B. S. Haldane
The Making of the Eye
Sir Charles Sherrington
Green Mould in the Wind
Sarah R. Reidman and Elton T. Gustafson
In the Black Squash Court:
The First Atomic Pile
Laura Fermi
A Death and the Bomb
Richard Feynman
The Story of a Carbon Atom
Primo Levi
Tides
Rachel Carson
The Hot, Mobile Earth
Charles Officer and Jake Page
The Poet and the Surgeon
James Kirkup and Dannie Abse
Enter Love and Enter Death
Joseph Wood Krutch
In the Primeval Swamp
Jacquetta Hawkes
Krakatau: The Aftermath
Edward O. Wilson
Gorillas
George Schaller
Toads
George Orwell
Russian Butterflies
Vladimir Nabokov
Discovering a Medieval Louse
John Steinbeck
The Gecko’s Belly
Italo Calvino
On The Moon
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
Gravity
John Frederick Nims
Otto Frisch Explains Atomic Particles
Otto Frisch, Murray Gell-Mann and John Updike
From Stardust to Flesh
Nigel Calder and Ted Hughes
Black Holes
Isaac Asimov
The Fall-Out Planet
J. E Lovelock
Galactic Diary of an Edwardian Lady
Edward Larrissy
The Light of Common Day
Arthur C. Clarke
Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Salt
Carl Sagan
Brain Size
Anthony Smith
On Not Discovering
Ruth Benedict
Negative Predictions
Sir Peter
Medawar
Clever Animals
Lewis Thomas
Great Fakes of Science
Martin Gardner
Unnatural Nature
Lewis Wolpert
Rags, Dolls and Teddy Bears
D. W. Winnicott
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
Oliver Sacks
Seeing the Atoms in Crystals
Lewis Wolpert and Dorothy Hodgkin
The Plan of Living Things
Francis Crick
Willow Seeds and the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Richard Dawkins
Shedding Life
Miroslav Holub
The Greenhouse Effect: An Alternative View
Freeman Dyson
Fractals, Chaos and Strange Attractors
Caroline Series and Paul Davies,
Tom Stoppard and Robert May
The Language of the Genes
Steve Jones
The Good Earth is Dying
Isaac Asimov
Acknowledgements
Index of Names
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Introduction
The aim of this book is to make science intelligible to non-scientists. Of course, like any anthology, it is meant to be entertaining, intriguing, lendable-to-friends and good-to-read as well, and the first question I asked about any piece I thought of including was, Is this so well written that I want to read it twice? If the answer was no, it was instantly scrapped. But alongside this question I asked, Does this supply, as it goes along, the scientific knowledge you need to understand it? Will it be clear to someone who is not mathematical, and has no extensive scientific education? Even if it was admirable in other ways, failure to qualify on these counts landed it on the reject pile.
Scientists themselves are not always good at judging intelligibility – and why should they be? They are specialists, paid to communicate with fellow specialists. Of course, they have to communicate, too, with industry, the government, grant-giving bodies and other institutions. But they can often assume a level of expertise in these negotiations which is well above that of the general public. Over the last five years I have read many books and articles by scientists, ostensibly for a popular readership, which start out intelligibly and fairly soon hit a quagmire of equations or a thicket of fuse-blowing technicalities, from which no non-scientist could emerge intact. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. A Popular Exposition, by Albert Einstein, Ph.D. (1920) is only a particularly distinguished example of a class of ‘popular expositions’, still being published, that could not conceivably be understood by more than a tiny fraction of any populace.
Fortunately for this anthology, however, popular science has improved immensely in the later twentieth century. Writers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Martin Gardner, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Peter Medawar, Stephen Hawking, Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins have transformed the genre, combining expert knowledge with an urge to be understood, and bridging the intelligibility gap to delight and instruct huge readerships. In the process, they have created a new kind of late twentieth-century literature, which demands to be recognized as a separate genre, distinct from the old literary forms, and conveying pleasures and triumphs quite distinct from theirs.
True, these writers had predecessors in the nineteenth century – T. H. Huxley, for example, or Charles Darwin himself, who also strove to reach the general reading public. But in the mid-nineteenth century the general reading public was a much smaller and more select thing than it is now. The challenge for a late twentieth-century writer of popular science is different and greater. The books that succeed represent achievements of a remarkable and unprecedented kind. Nor is it clear on what grounds they can be reckoned inferior to novels, poems and other representatives of the older genres. In what respect, for example, is a masterpiece like Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker imaginatively inferior to a distinguished work of fiction such as Martin Amis’s Einstein’s Monsters (or the hundreds of lesser novels that jam the publishers’ lists each year)? Both are clearly the products of brilliant minds; both are highly imaginative; and Amis is more excited by scientific ideas than most contemporary writers. Nevertheless, the essential distinction between them seems to be that between knowledge and ignorance. From the viewpoint of late twentieth-century thought, Dawkins’s book represents the instructed and Amis’s the uninstructed imagination.
Because I wanted the pieces I included to be seriously informative as well as enjoyable, I decided not to allow in science fiction (which would, in any case, need an anthology of its own), or those plentiful anecdotes about scientists’ private lives which show how droll or winning they were despite their erudition. The misty precursors of true science – alchemy, astrology – have also been left out, partly because they can now be classified as history not science, and partly because they tend to encourage in the reader an amused and superior response which is not the reaction I am looking for.
For similar reasons I decided, after some hesitation, not to include ancient science (Aristotle, Pliny, etc.). It is true, of course, that this sometimes foreshadows modern science. But even when it does it is often forbiddingly technical, in a way that no amount of jazzing-up in translation can overcome. After a good deal of searching, I concluded that there were virtually no examples of ancient science that would have anything more than curiosity value – if that – for a general reader today. So my anthology starts with the Renaissance, at a point where two sciences, anatomy and astronomy, take decisive steps towards the modern age, and find exponents who can still be read with pleasure.
A final kind of writing I decided (rather quickly) to exclude was the large body of opinionativeness that has gathered around such questions as whether science is a Good or a Bad Thing, and whether we would be better off if we did not know the earth went round the sun. Ignorance and prejudice seem to be the most prolific contributors to this branch of controversy, and I am not anxious to give either house-room.
In the main, then, I have tried to stick to serious science, though serious science softened up for general consumption. Scientists will object quite rightly that I have included technology as well as science. The pieces on the Wright brothers’ aeroplane or on Daguerre and the first photograph, for example, would not figure in a strictly scientific anthology. But I included them and others because, for the general reader, science and technology are intimately connected – as, indeed, they are for scientists. Photography and manned flight both became possible because of scientific perceptions, and technology has advanced scientific discovery from the time of Galileo’s telescope.
Choosing the passages to include was one thing: arranging them, another. Should I separate out the various sciences – all the biology pieces in one section; all the chemistry in another? Or would a roughly chronological arrangement be better? I decided it would, because jumping from science to science with each item makes for a livelier read, and the chronological framework turns the book into a story – a way of taking in the development of science over the last five centuries. Some of this story-telling is carried on in the introductions to each extract, and sometimes – as, for example, in the sections on Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle – I have drawn together material from several sources, including poets and novelists, to show how a particular scientific discovery did, or did not, enter the bloodstream of the culture.
Broadly speaking science-writing tends towards one of two modes, the mind-stretching and the explanatory. In practice, of course, any particular piece of science-writing will combine the two in various proportions. Still, they seem to be the extremes between which science-writing happens. The mind-stretching, also called the gee-whizz mode, aims to arouse wonder, and corresponds to the Sublime in traditional literary categories. When scientists tell us that if we could place in a row all the capillaries in a single human body they would reach ac
ross the Atlantic, or that the average man has 25 billion red blood corpuscles, or that the number of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex of the brain is twice the population of the globe, these are contributions to the mind-stretching mode – which does not mean, of course, that they are not serious and profound in their implications as well. A similarly amazing example, and less flattering to our self-esteem, is the proposition (from an essay by George Wald) that though a planet of the earth’s size and temperature is a comparatively rare event in the universe, it is estimated that at least 100,000 planets like the earth exist in our galaxy alone, and since some 100 million galaxies lie within the range of our most powerful telescopes, it follows that throughout observable space we can count on the existence of at least 10 million million planets more or less like ours.
As readers will find, I have included some examples of this mode in my anthology, because the peculiar thrill and spiritual charge of science would not be fairly represented without it. But my preference has been, and is, for the other mode, the explanatory. What I most value in-science-writing is the feeling of enlightenment that comes with a piece of evidence being correctly interpreted, or a problem being ingeniously solved, or a scientific principle being exposed and clarified. There are many instances of these three processes in the anthology, but if I had to choose one favourite example of each they would be from Galileo, Darwin and Haldane respectively.
When Galileo looked at the moon through his telescope, he and everyone else thought it was a perfect sphere. He was astonished, he tells us, to see bright points within its darkened part, which gradually increased in size and brightness till they joined up with its bright part. It occurred to him that they were just like mountain tops on earth, which are touched by the sun’s morning rays while the lower ground is still in shadow. So he deduced correctly that the moon’s surface was not smooth after all, but mountainous. To follow Galileo as he explains his observations step by step is to share an experience of scientific enlightenment that fiction and poetry, for all their powers, cannot give, since they can never be so authentically engaged with actuality and discovery.
Darwin supplies a beautiful example of the second process, the ingenious solution of a problem, when he is faced with the need to explain how species of freshwater plants could spread to remote oceanic islands without being separately created by God. It occurs to him that the seeds might be carried on the muddy feet of wading birds that frequent the edges of ponds. But that raises the question of whether pond mud contains seeds in sufficient quantities. So he takes three tablespoonfuls of mud from the edge of his pond in February – enough to fill a breakfast cup – and keeps it covered in his study for six months, pulling up and counting each plant as it grows. Five hundred and thirty-seven plants grow, of many different species, so that Darwin is able to conclude that it would be an ‘inexplicable circumstance’ if wading birds did not transport the seeds of freshwater plants, as he had suspected. Once again, fiction could not compete with the impact of this, since the force of Darwin’s account depends precisely on its not being fiction but fact.