by John Carey
J. B. S. Haldane’s famous essay ‘On Being the Right Size’ superbly exemplifies the third process – the exposition of a scientific principle. Restricting his mathematics to simple arithmetic, and keeping in mind the need for powerful, graphic examples, Haldane is able to demonstrate, unforgettably, by the end of his second paragraph, that the 60-foot-high Giants Pope and Pagan in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress could never have existed, because they would have broken their thighs every time they walked. The example is, of course, purposefully chosen, for out goes, with Bunyan, the whole world of (as Haldane saw it) religious mumbo-jumbo that Bunyan stood for, and the light of pure reason comes flooding in instead.
But if the explanatory mode is science-writing’s breath of life – its armoury, palette and climate – the problem for science-writers is how to explain. How can science be made intelligible to non-scientists? The least hopeful answer is that it cannot. Giving an inkling of what modern science means to readers who cannot manage higher mathematics is, Richard Feynman has proposed, like explaining music to the deaf. This would be a desolating conclusion if Feynman were not himself among the most brilliant of explainers. His success depends upon his genius for making his material human. He saturates his writing with his individual style and personality. But, more than that, he freely imports a kind of animism into his experimental accounts – discussing, for example, how an individual photon ‘makes up its mind’ which of a number of possible paths to follow.
Ruskin uses animism, too, when – in his masterly tribute to rust – he tells his readers that iron ‘breathes’, and ‘takes oxygen from the atmosphere as eagerly as we do’. Miroslav Holub is animistic when (in perhaps the most mind-expanding piece in the whole anthology) he imagines the adrenalin and the stress hormones in the spilt blood of a dead muskrat still sending out their alarms, and the white blood cells still busily trying to perform their accustomed tasks, bewildered by the unusual temperature outside the muskrat’s body. In fact, Feynman-Ruskin-Holub-type animism is a persistent ally in the popular science-writer’s struggle to engage the reader’s understanding.
To a scientist, this might seem ridiculous. Lewis Carroll rubbished the whole idea in The Dynamics of a Particle:
It was a lovely Autumn evening, and the glorious effects of chromatic aberration were beginning to show themselves in the atmosphere as the earth revolved away from the great western luminary, when two lines might have been observed wending their weary way across a plane superficies. The elder of the two had by long practice acquired the art, so painful to young and impulsive loci, of lying evenly between his extreme points; but the younger, in her girlish impetuosity, was ever longing to diverge and become a hyperbola or some such romantic and boundless curve …
However, it is not clear that animism is as daft as Carroll makes it appear. All science is inevitably drenched in our human presumptions, designs and conceptions. We cannot get outside the human shapes of our brains. Our observation inevitably alters what it observes. This perception is usually associated with Heisenberg. But it was already evident to Francis Bacon at the start of the seventeenth century, who saw that perfect, pure objective science was impossible, not only because we are forced to use language, or some kind of numerical notation, which does not ‘naturally’ belong to the objects we name or number, but also because we seek patterns, shapes and symmetries in nature which correspond to our own preconceptions, not to anything that is ‘really’ there. From this viewpoint, to say that iron ‘breathes’ is no more absurd than to say that it is called ‘iron’, or that its chemical symbol is Fe. In each case, we add something human to its remote, alien, unknowable nature – a nature that has nothing to do with human thought, and is therefore altered the instant we think about it.
Whatever reservations the reader may have about this line of argument, it remains true that animism is extraordinarily useful to science-writers, as many pieces in this book testify. To preserve a personal element I have also tried, as often as I could, to present scientists talking about themselves at the moment of discovery. Nothing can match the immediacy of such accounts. Francis Jehl’s description of the feverish months of trial and error that preceded the development of the world’s first electric light bulb in Edison’s laboratory, or Ronald Ross’s memory of the sweltering afternoon in Secunderabad when he saw, through his microscope, the secret of malaria, or William Beebe exclaiming at the astonishing blueness of the sea 700 feet beneath the ocean, so intense that it drives even the thought of any other colour out of his head – if I could have found enough of them, I should have been tempted to make my whole anthology out of pieces like this.
Given the boundless human implications of science, it seems strange that poets have not used it more. One of my disappointments in editing this anthology was to find so little poetry – or so little that was not embarrassingly bad. Lifting the embargo on ancient science would have helped a bit, because I could have included some Lucretius – but it would have been too high a price. Among English poets, even Shelley, who knew more about science than most, does not really write scientific poetry. To treat ‘The Cloud’, say, as a poem about meteorology (though it is that) would be to ignore most of its meaning. Generally speaking, science has had a bad effect on poets, inciting them to bombast (of the ‘O thou terrestrial ball’ variety) or to drivelling regrets that science has banished ‘faery lore’.
Science’s dominant position in contemporary culture might surely have been expected to breed some modern scientific poets. Yet most poets remain science-blind. There are a few distinguished exceptions, as the reader will find: John Updike, Lavinia Greenlaw, John Frederick Nims. But neglect is the norm. Why?
Perhaps because it is assumed that the poetic imagination is superior to the scientific, so poets simply need not bother with science. Certainly this used to be a favourite idea. ‘I believe the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton,’ pronounced Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Convictions of this kind still linger, especially among those who know nothing about Sir Isaac Newton. Yet Coleridge’s credo does not, when you inspect it, mean much. Presumably he relates soul-size to imaginative power – and obviously poets do use their imagination differently from scientists. But there seem no grounds for deciding they use it better – or worse.
The difference can be seen right at the start of the modern scientific era if we glance, for example, at the way Shakespeare and Bacon write about clocks. For Shakespeare a clock is something that tells the time. ‘When I do count the clock that tells the time,’ one of his sonnets starts. But for Bacon a clock is a machine which, because he understands it scientifically, he can put to various uses. Thinking about weight and gravitation, he wondered if the weight of an object would increase and decrease according to whether it was nearer to or further from the centre of the earth. Obviously you cannot discover this by weighing the object at various heights, because the weights themselves will also have got heavier or lighter, like the object. What you do, Bacon decides, is take two clocks, one worked by weights, the other by a spring. You adjust them so they are running at the same speed, then you take them up a mountain and down a mine. Up the mountain the clock with weights will go slower, because they have become lighter. Down the mine it will go faster.
He was almost right. The clock with weights would go slower up the mountain. But since the earth’s weight is not concentrated at its centre, the clock going down the mine would leave progressively more of the earth’s mass above it, so it would go slower too. The point, though, is not Bacon’s Tightness or wrongness, but the way he thinks about clocks compared to Shakespeare. For Shakespeare the idea of a clock has shrunk to something that tells the time. For Bacon, the clock is a machine, which can be engineered in various ways, and which has an experimental potential independent of the time-telling role ordinary language has allocated to it. It seems rather unfair to call Bacon less imaginative than Shakespeare in this instance. The poet remains satisfied with the convent
ional attributes of clocks, whereas the scientist’s exploratory mind takes him to a wholly new function for a clock, which reveals something unexpected about the universe.
Of course this example is grossly slanted in Bacon’s favour, and it would be ridiculous to disparage Shakespeare on the strength of it. Shakespeare’s sonnet is no less a great poem because it is uninterested in gravitation. I have risked the comparison with Bacon because it shows us already, at the start of the seventeenth century, a scientist needing to rid himself of language’s normal constraints (the usual functions language assigns to ‘clock’), in order to think. From this historical moment on, scientists increasingly found that they had to develop their own special language, esoteric and forbidding to outsiders, but valuable to scientists because of its freedom from the vast cloud of associations, nuances and ambiguities that ordinary language carries along with it, and on which poets depend.
To poets, the new technical language seemed a sterile sea of jargon, in which the imagination would freeze and drown. John Donne was the first and last English poet not to feel like this about scientific language. He was lucky, being born at just the right time (1572), after the beginning of modern science but before its specialized technical vocabularies had really taken off. So for him, scientific language could still be warm, mysterious and sonorous, like poetry. He could think of love, and the scientific methods used for establishing latitude and longitude, as perfectly compatible and mutually enriching subjects:
How great love is, presence best trial makes
But absence tries how long this love will be;
To take a latitude
Sun, or stars, are fitliest viewed
At their brightest, but to conclude
Of longitudes, what other way have we,
But to mark when, and where, the dark eclipses be?
Not much more than fifty years later, Milton took an altogether different and alienated view of scientists and scientific language, deriding astronomers who:
Gird the sphere
With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.
Comparing the two examples we can see science, in the space of a half-century (the same half-century that saw the foundation of the Royal Society), beginning to become a hated alternative to poetry, barbaric, ugly, offensive to cultured ears. By the early twentieth century the process had developed so far that the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses, could select science (along with democracy) as a key cause of modern ‘primitivism and barbarism’. He regretted that ‘while there are more scientists than ever before, there are far fewer cultured men.’
Wordsworth, roughly halfway between Donne and us, prophesied that things would not turn out like this. He believed that science should and would become a subject for poetry. In 1800 he wrote:
If the labours of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at present, he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed.
But Wordsworth was wrong. This has not happened; or not yet. Perhaps, as more scientists follow the trend of the writers I have mentioned, and make science available to general readers, it will permeate the culture and Wordsworth’s prophecy will come true. As things are, however, modern poets avoid science, and, it seems, because they feel inferior to it, not (like Coleridge) superior. W. H. Auden expresses the general loss of confidence: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’
Resistance to science among what Ortega y Gasset calls ‘cultured men’ has sometimes been strengthened by the objection that science is godless and amoral. Both charges need some qualification. It is perfectly possible for a scientist to believe in God, and even to find scientific evidence for God’s existence. To sceptics this might suggest a rather nutty combination of laboratory-bore and Jesus-freak. But when a scientist of James Clerk Maxwell’s eminence uses molecular structure as an argument for the existence of God, few will feel qualified to laugh. Of course, atheistical scientists are plentiful too. The zoologist Richard Dawkins has voiced the suspicion that all religions are self-perpetuating mental viruses. But since everything science discovers can, by sufficiently resolute believers, be claimed as religious knowledge, because it must be part of God’s design, science cannot be regarded as inherently anti-religious.
On the contrary, its aims seem identical with those of theology, in that they both seek to discover the truth. Science seeks the truth about the physical universe; theology, about God. But these are not essentially distinct objectives, for theologians (or at any rate Christian theologians) believe God created the universe, so may be contacted through it. Admittedly, many scientists insist that science and religion are irreconcilable. The neuropsychologist Richard Gregory has declared: ‘The attitudes of science and religion are essentially different, and opposed, as science questions everything rather than accepts traditional beliefs.’ This does less than justice to religion’s capacity for change. The whole Reformation movement in Europe, for example, was about not accepting traditional beliefs. It might be objected that science depends on evidence, while religion depends on revealed truth, and that this constitutes an insuperable difference. But for the religious, revealed truth is evidence. Theology might, without any paradox, be regarded as a science, committed to persistently questioning and reinterpreting the available evidence about God. True, by calling itself ‘theology’ it appears to take it for granted that God (theos) exists, which, scientifically speaking, is rather a careless usage. However, there is no reason why theological research should not lead the researcher to atheism, and no doubt it often has, just as (as we have seen) scientific research has led some researchers to God.
The real antithesis of science seems to be not theology but politics. Whereas science is a sphere of knowledge, politics is a sphere of opinion. Politics is constructed out of preferences, which it strives to elevate, by the mere multiplication of words, to the status of truths. Politics depends on personalities and rhetoric; social class, race and nationality are elemental to it. All of these are irrelevant to science. Further, politics relies, for its very existence, upon conflict. It presupposes an enemy. It is essentially oppositional, built on warring prejudices. If this oppositional structure were to collapse, politics could not survive. There could be no politics in a world of total consensus. Science, by contrast, is a co-operative not an oppositional venture. Of course, the history of science resounds with ferocious argument and the elaboration and destruction of rival theories. But when consensus is reached science does not collapse, it advances. Another crucial difference is that politics aims to coerce people. It is concerned with the exercise of power. Science has no such designs. It seeks knowledge. The consequence of this difference is that politics can and frequently does use violence (war, genocide, terrorism) to secure its ends. Science cannot. It would be ludicrous to go to war to decide upon the truth or otherwise of the second law of thermodynamics.
Needless to say, the ideal state I have described, in which science is free from and antithetical to politics, is not one that survives in the real world, where politics invades and contaminates science as it does everything else. But the warlike and destructive uses to which science has been put have nothing essentially to do with science: they are the responsibility of politics. Science’s apolitical nature is worth stressing, because it helps us to defuse the charge that it is amoral. It allows us to see science’s amorality not as a defect but as a condition of its strength and purity. Politics, of course, is inseparable fr
om morality. It battens on morality, or on moralizing, like a tapeworm on the gut. Consequently science could not free itself from politics except by being amoral.
Approaches to life that are, in moral terms, cold, clinical and inhuman, are sometimes labelled ‘scientific’, but this is a misunderstanding, arising from the simple-minded transference of scientific method to moral attitudes. Science endorses no such transference, and no moral attitudes, cold or otherwise. In different minds, the same set of scientific propositions can prompt quite contrary moral responses. Darwin’s theory of evolution, relating humans to apes, seemed – and seems – degrading to many humans. But Bruce Frederick Cummings accepts it with gusto:
As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea-jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?