Has science won the argument?
Horace Freeland Judson
Science is this century's art. Bacon wrote that knowledge is power, but he was not a scientist: his slogan was coined, and has ever since been useful, to extort research grants from other non-scientists. The slogan has been an amusing hand-puppet, too, a Mr Punch with which to terrify the preAristotelians whose visions of an ordered' age, back when, are disturbed by the increase and redistribution of power and by the obligation to grasp it. (I note that Mr Christopher Booker, in these pages, calls for a return to Pythagoras as an antidote to overweening pride.) Bacon's slogan hardly penetrates to the thing that moves most scientists. Science has several rewards, but the greatest is that it is the most interesting, difficult, pitiless, exhilarating, and beautiful pursuit that we have yet found. Booker raps Professor Stuart Hampshire, rightly, for the silliness of saying that the deficiencies of science can be complemented by increased grants to the arts: but they both miss the point. Science is this century's art.
The takeover can be dated more precisely than the beginnings Of most eras: Friday, 30 June 1905 will do, when Einstein submitted a thirty-one-page paper, `Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper; to Anna/en der Physik. No poem, no play, no piece of music written since then comes near the theory of relativity in its power, as one strains to apprehend it, to make the mind tremble with delight. Consider also the molecular structure of the stuff of the gene, the celebrated double helix of deoxyribonucleic acid. This is two repetitive strands, one winding up, the other down, but hooked together, across the tube of space between them, by a sequence of pairs of chemical entities — just four sorts of these entities, making just two kinds Of pairs, with exactly ten pairs to a full turn of the helix. It's a piece of sculpture. But observe how form and function are one. That sequence possesses a unique duality: one way, it allows the strands to part and each to assemble on itself, by the pairing rules, a duplicate of the complementary strand; the other way, the sequence enciphers, in a four-letter alphabet, the entire specification for the substance of -the organism. The structure thus encompasses both heredity and embryological growth, the passing-on of potential and 'nits expression. The structure's elucidation, in March 1973, was an event of such qiurpassing explanatory power that . it will, reverberate through whatever time mankind has got remaining. The structure is also perfectly economical and splendidly elegant. There is no sculpture made this century that is so entrancing. If to write about science this way seems — in the last quarter of the century — to understate what science does, at least partly that must be because we now expect art to do so little. The creative faculty, I think, operates in the same mode when the strange-particle physicist is engaged in reasoning or experiment, when the poet is writing a page, or when the playwright and the director collaborate at a rehearsal, and that is by the argument between invention and disposition, between the voice over one shoulder urging try this, then, and the voice over the other shoulder whispering not quite right yet. 'Scientific reasoning', Sir Peter Medawar said in a lecture bpfore the American Philosophical Society some years ago, 'is a constant interplay or interaction between hypotheses and the logical expectations they give rise to: there is a restless to-and-fro motion of thought, the formulation and rectification of hypotheses, until we arrive at a hypothesis which, to the best of our prevailing knowledge, will satisfactorily meet the case.' Thus far, change only the term 'hypothesis' and Medawar described well the experience the painter or the poet has of his own work. (He knows this, no doubt, but tactfully left the point for his hearers to fill in.) 'Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case,' Medawar said a moment later — and there the difference lies. The scientist enjoys that harsher discipline of what is and is not the case. It is he, rather than the painter or the poet in this century, who pursues in its stringent form the imitation of nature. The artists have reduced themselves to pursuing the imitation of scientists — even to conceptual art, which is to ihe Gedankenexperiment like my four-year-old son pretending to shave with my cut-throat. The social system of science, from collaboration at the bench or blackboard to formal publication, among its several functions is a means to enlarge the interplay between imagination and judgment from a private into a public activity.
Writing about music is not the same thing as composing it or performing it — and in just that trivial way, writing about science, talking about science, explaining science, is not science. But is the intellectual pleasure taken in science by the non-scientist therefore illegitimate? Listening to music with an instructed ear and the aid of a score is certainly a musical activity — and in just that self-evident way, along the continuum from dummy to savant there is a point p at which reading about science with an instructed mind and with reference to origi nal research becomes a scientific activity. If that were not so, no physicist, for example, could switch to biology as so many have done in the past forty years. Books about science, supposedly for the general reader, abound. Most are unreadable. Very rare is the book that does for one of the sciences something similar to the job done by an occasional good book about one or another of the arts, and that is to show the serious hut non-specialist reader what the pleasures may be of understanding that science in the context of its creation. In rilY youth, the first book that made a difference to the way I looked at paintings and statues was Heinrich Wolfflin's Principles of Art History (in a reprint edition part of whose magic' was that the plates were as open to the imagination as Rorschach's inkblots); much later I read Ernst Gombrich. Unexceptionable, main-line instances, I suppose —yet they suggest what a book about science might reach for. Serious embrace of the real matter, for one thing, and not the fabrication of a' simplified simulacrum; and the placing of that matter within the full vision of its day, so that one enjoys the tension 0f holding what one thought was familiar in an unfamiliar mental conformation. That surely, is as fundamental to comprehending the process of scientific as of artistic (in the conventional sense) achievement; from that should flow the feeling of the compelling current of Change, interacting with the detail of who discovered (painted, wrote) what, but lying beneath that detail so deeP, and strong that it twists the oar in your han° when you reach ‘to it. Again, a courtesy t° the general reader that bans jargon hal offers those terms that make new kinds thoughts possible. Then, a sure sense tn beauty. The eye, the perfect pitch, the taste, are as indispensable for the critic of science as for any other critic. What scientists themselves call elegance is very nearly a kind of proof, always seductive. When a scientist spoke to me a while ago of a certain, piece of work, not known to the genera' world, as 'the most beautiful experiment I.11 biology,' I had to think about that experi: ment in a way that made me see much bette' what it meant. There are several Ways it might be do5 — One model — but I like it less and less hde been the short popular monograph by' th, right man on a single theme, Re/ativity.f°' the Layman or The Architecture of Matter or. The Language of Life or Viruses and 110,11„ These are worthy, English, originacV, Pelican, and as good as they happen in vidually to be. All, however tactfully, 0°11"r descend. They convey little of the splend°he of the thing discovered, nothing of the of of the discovery. Seeking clarify, they mystify. The impulse of the early best of such books has run int°" ,1 sands of formula. But haven't we all turne_:: over on the bookstalls the arty equivalen'ne Composing fbr the Layman., Language of Painting, or the A rchtectore 00.1 Modern Music or Vorticism and Man 'hat sciences or in arts, books are rare t"
achieve such simple virtues as those of Kenneth Clark's long-ago essay on the nude in art.
What's missing, what's wanted, is the high individualism that not simply presents a subject but makes a strong and particular case: that makes us see anew. A book that ought to work is Fred Hoyle's Astronomy Today, brought out not long ago by Heinemann. In 1955, Hoyle's Frontiers of Astronomy was splendidly exciting, because he was intent on persuading the reader, almost as though he were urging a colleague, to think about the new discoveries in astronomy his way. Hoyle's central idea was indeed one of the most beautiful Physical theories ever proposed, and simple too: the steady-state model of the universe, Which held that there was never a unique moment of creation, but rather that the universe has always been, and has always been expanding, its growth exactly balanced by the continual creation, everywhere, of matter, hydrogen atom by hydrogen atom, as though the stretching of the universe itself were pulling the new matter into being. He held that idea — and loathed the notion of a 'universal singularity' or unique creation — with a cool passion that seemed to carry a more than scientific, in fact a specifically anti-religious, animus of a kind that has inspired more great science than it7s fashionable to recognise. That was exciting, too. But Hoyle's new book is troubled by three problems. The science is twenty-two years harder — and not Just that, but more routine. The steady-state model turns out to be almost impossible to maintain in the face of the evidence, so that the special pleading that Hoyle attempts — for his animus mill burns — is demeaning. The third problem is one of bookmaking: Astronomy' Today is a cut-down version of an American college textbook. History of art has produced the occasional masterpiece; history of science at best a few good books. One curious contributing reason may be that history of Science, a younger, later discipline, has risen at a time when it is fashionable to decry notions of historical progress: science has, for scientists, such a built-in whiggishness that for the historian too deliberately to avoid playing the marching tune of truth must all but paralyse narrative at the same time that it divorces him from the audience 1.1_,e must satisfy first, namely those who are 'cling the thing he writes • about. A comP,lementary reason is that scientists learn tend to be non-historical: they learn from analytical textbooks, rarely reread old research and certainly not old errors, and prefer to ride the cutting edge of their subject. Painters look at old masters, Composers have hi-fi sets and conduct Bach: What physicist for recreation would set up a sheet of gold foil near a sample of radium to Measure the deflection of alpha particles in oirder to demonstrate —as Rutherford did in 1910 — that atoms have nuclei? Yet that was a beautiful experiment.
That said, one recent book that does for a
science something near to Wolfflin's Principles of Art History, in its power to put order into an historical succession of ways of seeing, is by one of the greatest living, and still practising, scientists. The Logic of Living Systems, by Francois Jacob, was unfairly overshadowed by the book by his close friend and colleague that came out at the same time, Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity — overshadowed by Monod's great popular success in France and Germany, and in Britain and the United States by the fact that Monod's critics were lying in ambush. Jacob's book is an historical meditation on the resolving power of ruling ideas in science, in particular the science of heredity (and heredity's other face, embryological development). He pursues these from the first clarifications of the idea of species, the end of the millennia of myths of monsters, through the introduction of time and so of evolution into biology, then down through the cell to the gene and the molecule. The book is like one of those grand fireworks that only the Japanese know how to make, that-go off in the night sky in a cascade of illuminations, chrysanthemum into willow tree into shower of arrows, each as it fades flowering into the next. One outgrows a book like this, as one outgrows Wolfflin or Burckhardt, only by getting closer to the details, the exceptions, the individualartists and works, which this grand putting-inorder prepares.
No one in the arts, not Gombrich, has engaged the sympathetic imagination on behalf of the creator as have two short books about mathematics that I have read
and come back to, this past six months. G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, though I found it late, was first published in 1940 and has been in print for ten years, in its present edition with a biographical foreword by C. P. Snow. Hardy, in ninety pages of small format, creates in the reader the particular sensations of thinking mathematically, so that one leaves the book startlingly clear-headed, knowing directly what this kind of beauty consists in. Hardy has transcended popularisation: this is the thing itself, even if not in all its full dimensions. Snow's memoir, nearly as long, is another sort of surprise, deft and loving.
ProofS and Re/illations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, by Imre Lakatos, out last year (Cambridge again) is a book of astonishing originality. I can see no way to describe it without making it seem dauntingly difficult: in fact, although it enlists your close attention, it is entirely accessible to any serious reader, a thoroughly, deliberately open .book of a hundred and fifty pages. Now the daunting description. Pro() IS and Re Intations is a Platonic dialogue in three important senses. Its subject is the met hod of mathematics as displayed in the two-hundred-year histor of a particular, simply visualisable problem in solid geometry, _namely the relationship of the number of edges in a regular threedimensional figure to the number of its faces and corners. In other words, in the first place the book is about the Platonic solids.
The method is also Platonic: the book proceeds as an imaginary dialogue among a number of Pupils and a Teacher who holds the ring while they discover that the problem, generalised beyond the Platonic solids, is more vexatious than at first it looked. The dialogue is slam-bang Socratic stuff. -witty and vivid. But it is paralleled by a series of footnotes that show how each position taken up in the idealised dialogue had its historical original, which is cited and quoted at what length is necessary. Dialogue and notes, read together, induce exactly and at sustained, tense length the 'constant interplay or interaction between hypotheses and the logical expectations they give rise to' that Medawar described. 'The dialogue between the possible and the actual' — the peculiar power of the book is that its aim is congruent with the intellectual effect it produces, since Lakatos was a follower and ally of Karl Popper, and intended to demonstrate that mathematics is an empirical, so to speak experimental, distipline that develops not formalistically but very much in the manner that Popper (and Medawar) had described in other sciences. This, in turn, is the fundamental reason — well. together with Lakatos's erudition and clarity —why the book is-so open. Proo ft and Re/illations in the final sense is an antiPlatonic dialogue. I cannot think of another work of criticism that is .so exciting on so many levels: reading it, one is, say, taking a master-class in conducting 'Mozart, taught by Pierre Boulez.
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