The two cultures and how they met
A beautiful piece (thanks to Allen Esterson for sending me the link). Studded with gems.
[Natalie] Angier’s book is called The Canon, and subtitled ‘A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science’. It is not a long book and it contains, as the title suggests, a breathless Baedeker of the fundamental scientific knowledge Angier believes is the minimum requirement of an educated person…The result is the kind of science book you wish someone had placed in front of you at school – full of aphorisms that help everything fall into place. For geology: ‘This is what our world is about: there is heat inside and it wants to get out.’ For physics: ‘Almost everything we’ve come to understand about the universe we have learned by studying light.’…’Entropy,’ Angier writes, ‘is like a taxi passing you on a rainy night with its NOT IN SERVICE lights ablaze, or a chair in a museum with a rope draped from arm to arm, or a teenager.’ Entropy, unusable energy, leads to the law that states that everything in time must wear out, become chaotic, die. ‘The darkest readings of the Second Law suggest that even the universe has a morphine drip in its vein,’ Angier suggests, ‘a slow smothering of all spangle, all spiral, all possibility.’ No wonder CP Snow thought we should know about it.
One wants to rush straight out the door to find the nearest copy of that book, doesn’t one.
‘Science is rather a state of mind,’ Angier argues and, as such, it should inform everything. ‘It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing for granted.’ It would be hard to argue that this state of mind was advancing across the globe…Numbers of students still studying science at 18 are falling in Britain and America, perhaps because we are becoming generally less motivated to address difficulty. As a culture, we allow ourselves too many excuses. ‘Western parents are quite comfortable saying their children have a predilection for art or for writing or whatever, and allow them just to pursue that. In the Asian education system, if you are not good at something, it’s because you are lazy and you just have to work harder at it. Just because things are hard does not mean they are not worth doing.’
I did that. When I was in school, I did exactly that – I just decided early on that I was a literary type, and that settled the matter. A very stupid way to think. I was determinedly stupid in that way for years and years. I wish I could go back in time and kick myself really hard.
That idea of difficulty, I suggest, cannot really be helped in the States in particular, when all of the presidential candidates of one party stand up in televised debate and say they believe in ‘intelligent design’ and suggest that the world could well have been created by a bearded God a few thousand years ago. Angier laughs, somewhat bleakly. ‘I see all that as a macho kind of posturing. It’s like, I can believe the impossible: look, I can lift a tree! It is a Republican initiation ritual, like having a hook pulled through your cheek and not flinching.’ But no, she concedes, it doesn’t help much.
That’s good – believing the impossible as a kind of macho posturing; I like that.
[John] Brockman perceived a third way. ‘Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists,’ he suggested. ‘Scientists are communicating directly with the general public….Third Culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavour to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.’ Brockman’s cross-fertilising club, the most rarefied of chatrooms, has its premises on his website www.edge.org. Eavesdropping is fun. Ian McEwan, one of the few novelists who has contributed to Edge’s ongoing debates, suggests that the project is not so far removed from the ‘old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge, when biologists and economists draw on each other’s concepts and molecular biologists stray into the poorly defended territory of chemists and physicists’.
Why one of the few novelists? Because most novelists go on thinking of themselves as literary types and refusing to take any interest in the other stuff. Chumps.
I wonder why there are still so few literary contributors to Edge, which has remained a predominantly scientific and philosophical forum. Is there not some evidence there that the divide persists? Brockman explains how Edge evolved out of a group called the Reality Club that held actual meetings with scientists, artists, architects, musicians. Ten of the leading novelists in America were invited to participate. Not one accepted.
Stupid. If someone invited me to participate in an actual meeting like that I’d be there so fast the chairs wouldn’t be set up yet. And that refusal is probably why most novels bore me rigid these days; why I give up on them after a few pages. I’ve gotten truly deeply bored with minute descriptions of daily life, and all literary novels are stuffed and clogged with details of Jennifer’s Mood As She Sorts The Socks. Life is short, there’s a lot to learn, and I just don’t care about Jennifer’s mood, I think she should get over herself and go learn some geology or something.
James Watson ends on a hilarious note.
‘I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there!’ he said, with an enormous measure of retrospective sexual frustration. ‘There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn’t have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don’t bother.’ Watson raised an eyebrow, fixed me again with a look. ‘What you have instead are characters out of Nick Hornby’s very funny books, who channel their intellect in pop culture. The hopeless male.’
You know, if you combined Nick Hornby and Ian McEwan, you’d really have something.
Oh, hear hear. Hear hear hear, even. I chose to do Greek at O-level which meant I could only do very limited science. I more or less entirely by accident ended up getting into genetics because of my undergraduate degree, which was lucky, but now I am very belatedly trying to educate myself in all sorts of others bits of science (inlcuding geology!) by way of the Open University (not that I actually no exams or anything). And I hardly ever read novels any more, and even then mostly old favourites.
I have just ordered the NA book.
A side note on novels — I’m participating in the local library’s summer reading program for adults, and as I’ve leafed through the notes on what other people have read, what stands out for me is how many adults are reading young adult novels. And these aren’t necessarily sub-par readers; some of the same people are checking out sophisticated nonfiction books. The librarian agreed with me: in young adult fiction, you can pretty well count on something actually happening beyond a character having deep feelings while sorting socks.
A neighbor of mine, a scientist, is on the faculty of an interdisciplinary sciences-and-arts program. Last time I talked with him, he sounded deeply frustrated with the literary types. Even the ones in that program, apparently, just won’t engage with the science. At most they want to take a few facts, garbled or otherwise, and paste them willy-nilly into their art. They don’t understand the connections between facts, and apparently they don’t particularly want to. It’s maddening.
Listen up, literary novelists. It sounds as if you have a problem here.
“even then mostly old favourites”
Yeh; they’re the exception. Moody sock novels pall in three pages; Austen doesn’t pall on no matter how many readings.
A mate of mine is an aspiring (he’s finished it, just ‘polishing’ now, so who knows?) sci-fantasy novelist – think Viking raiders in Zeppelins (!) – and the amount of high-quality research he’s put himself through to attain scientific/physical veracity is most impressive.
But then he started out studying engineering, went and got a history degree & masters, then went for a programming msc, and currently works as a technical author for a software company…
Mind you, he probably won’t be in the running for the Whitbread anytime soon!
Test on knowledge of quantum mechanics:
Heard the one about the time Werner Heisenberg was scheduled to give a lecture at MIT, but was running late and speeding through Cambridge in his rental car? A cop pulls him over, and says, “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”
“No,” Heisenberg replies, “but I know where I am!”
Natalie Angier: Introduction to *The Canon*: http://tinyurl.com/329khn
[Question: is this funny, or do scientific types laugh because it shows they know something about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? Personally, I think it is funny.]
I think it’s funny, and I figure pretty much everyone knows enough via reviews of Michael Frayn plays etc to get it, so the show-off value has to be minimal.
Anyway, I’m still surprised enough that Susan Greenfield thought the earth was 60 billion years old that – um – what was it? Oh, that I figure nobody knows anything outside the specialty so nobody should bother showing off because nobody else knows enough to be impressed. Something like that.
The book sounds excellent. If only I didn’t already have so many unread books on my shelves.
I’m glad I always had at least one natural science course per quarter or semester while in college.
Regarding some of the Republican presidential candidates’ saying that they didn’t believe in evolution, and calling that “macho posturing,” does anyone believe that a female Republican candidate would be more likely to say that she accepted the truth of it? I daresay she would probably be *more* likely to spout some sort of religious nonsense. It’s pretty well established that a higher proportion of women are religious than are men. And any woman, due to anti-female bias, would probably be more eager to please the ignorant Republican base. I suspect that if there were several female Republican presidential candidates, we’d see plenty of “hembra” posturing with regard to believing in completely unfounded religious ideas.
I was just thinking recently that the following seems rather odd: science is (to simplify somewhat) a more rigorous and extended application of the same empirical approach we all use in daily life to find our way around in the world, and yet so many quite intelligent people become totally flummoxed about Science with a capital S.
Partly, I suppose, it is because only a minority of people have a talent for following abstract chains of reasoning for any great distance, and partly because so many people get the idea that they don’t have any talent for it at all.
But it also has to do with the fear of what accepting scientific knowledge will do to their cherished religious, etc., beliefs. And to a great extent the last factor is due to what Dewey called the “quest for certainty”: people just can’t accept the fact that real knowledge is always uncertain, because it may be superseded tomorrow. They want absolute certainty right now, so the mantra becomes: “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.”
I don’t think that the candidates are supporting ID because of macho posturing – quite the opposite. I think they’re doing it because they don’t want to be seen as godless, amoral unbelievers.
A presidential candidate who said, “Screw the bible; I’m with Dawkins,” that would be macho – in an unusually welcome way.
Doug its not just the G.O.P. that go in for that sort of twoddle,Hillary was recently going on about her faith helping her through the Monica afair,I agree it is silly but it is just pandering.
There is an underlying issue here, which I shall illustrate with a personal anecdote. Twenty years ago, my dad and I rebuilt the engine of my first car from scratch [well, to be honest, he did most of the hard work, but I could follow along]. It was a mechanical system, functioning via the interaction of moving parts that could be touched, cleaned, mended….
My new car [four years old] has an orange light on the dash that comes on when ‘something’ is wrong, then you take it to the garage, where a mechanic plugs in a computer and has it tell him what’s wrong. Without the computer, even he doesn’t know where to start…
We have created a world of everyday ignorance, where trying to figure out how most of the things we use to get through the day actually work would take up so much time we wouldn’t get anything done. But we just have to hope the whole system keeps going along, because if it doesn’t, we wouldn’t know how to fix it…
“Cam” said: “They don’t understand the connections between facts, and apparently they don’t particularly want to.”
Yup. That’s one of the reasons the US religious candidates (and not a few brainwashed over here) don’t “buy” evolution.
They can’t, or more likely won’t look at the connections.
Because science requires careful, rational thought – and that can be hard work.
Here’s another ‘bridging’ of the humanities and the sciences, by way of Shuggy’s blog :
http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2007-06-10–the-new-physics.html
“One wants to rush straight out the door to find the nearest copy of that book, doesn’t one.”
And quite possibly throw a street party too – invite all the kids and give them copies.
I think Dave is right (about it all having got too complicated), but there is also the related problem of whether more-or-less random scientific facts are actually useful for anything, and if they aren’t, why should the man on the Clapham omnibus know them, as opposed to all the other facts he might know?
For instance, how many people reading this know the main constituent of the air they breathe?* It sounds fundamental, doesn’t it? But, unless you are working in certain narrow scientific fields, what good does knowing that information do you? (And if you were working etc, it still wouldn’t do you any good unless combined with a lot more complex and detailed information).
My instinctive reaction is something to do with, people should know more science, people should have basic scientific “literacy”, science should be better taught so it doesn’t come across as boring. But that reaction is harder to justify logically than it might at first seem. There is so much stuff in the world to know about, that it’s not obvious that facts that are never going to be of any practical use should be that high up the list.
*Nitrogen, in case you didn’t know. And even now you do know, what do you know? The fact by itself is almost meaningless (“stamp-collecting”) without knowing something about the properties of nitrogen compared with other gases, for instance.
And thank-you for “moody sock novels”. When engaged on the front line of the constant struggle to compress my library into the space available, I shall sternly use it as a benchmark.
There is an allied issue, which is that our growing functional ignorance [as I shall dub the ‘orange light on the dash’ phenomenon] carries with it the risk not merely of not knowing cool stuff, but of coming to prefer non-rational explanations. Good ol’ Arthur C Clarke once said [approx.] ‘any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic’. We may well be approaching that point in everyday life. And when we do, what’s to stop most people treating it as if it were magic? You might as well offer up a prayer to get your internet connection restarted, because nothing else you do will work. [Customer service line? Hah!]
Given that we are [probably] evolutionarily predisposed to see agency in inanimate objects, and invest randomness with meaning, increasing loss of real concrete [and short] explanations for how stuff works can only encourage this trend, and see it reinforced in those areas where it was always strong.
As our resident woo-woo hippie, let me also suggest that, in addition to careful rational thought, an appreciation for science requires a little courage and something like love. Courage, to follow the consequences of a line of thought no matter where it may lead; love for the world as it is outside the stories in our heads, no matter how “deep” or “profound” or “wise” those stories may feel.
I think there’s more than laziness at work. I think there’s a kind of fear.
I know a writer who has occasionally tried to inject a little science into her art. It never takes. Where she has seemed to me to fail is in the departments of courage and love. Science has a certain glamor, which she has attempted to apply to her work, but she misses the heart of it. She doesn’t let the science lead her anywhere, and as far as I can tell, she doesn’t give a damn about what the universe is like outside her head. The physical universe, she once told me, isn’t “where we live.” (Speak for yourself.)
So, she takes the same stuff she’s always writing and decoupages some half-grasped scientific terminology onto it. You go that way, you wind up with crap like this:
“Jennifer dug deep into the sedimentary layers of laundry, where socks nestled like garnets in the tumbled schistlike layers of shirts and towels. A faint breeze made her pause. Somewhere, her sister was sleeping. Her hands trembled. Dust motes sparkled like mica. How could they be so much alike, and yet so different? ‘Like calcite and apatite,’ thought Jennifer, ‘like teeth and pearls.'”
As for the macho posturing, I note that a church down the street once put out flyers about how easy it was to believe in evolution, sneer sneer. Now I wish I’d kept one. Macho posturing indeed.
Hee hee hee – brilliant pastiche.
“love for the world as it is outside the stories in our heads, no matter how “deep” or “profound” or “wise” those stories may feel.”
Yeah. Hence my thinking Jennifer should get over herself and go learn some geology. Along with literary novels I’ve become thoroughly fed up with introspection – with self-absorbtion in general. I think one of the most urgent things for people to do is realize there is a world outside their own heads, and to engage with it.
That’s why I hate moody sock novels really – they’re like introspection to the power of ten. They make it seem as if noticing every tiny feeling or thought is all that’s needed for a proper adult thoughtful life – as if that’s what being a thoughtful person is. As if that’s what Socrates meant about the examined life, when in fact Socrates was talking about real thought about matters outside our own heads; he didn’t mean inflating our random moods and daydreams into cosmic blather.
Dave wrote:
>There is an underlying issue here, which I shall illustrate with a personal anecdote. Twenty years ago, my dad and I rebuilt the engine of my first car from scratch [well, to be honest, he did most of the hard work, but I could follow along]. It was a mechanical system, functioning via the interaction of moving parts that could be touched, cleaned, mended….
>My new car [four years old] has an orange light on the dash that comes on when ‘something’ is wrong, then you take it to the garage, where a mechanic plugs in a computer and has it tell him what’s wrong. Without the computer, even he doesn’t know where to start…[…]< I’d say this is more to do with the nature of modern *technology* than with science as such.
My instinctive reaction is something to do with, people should know more science, people should have basic scientific “literacy”, science should be better taught so it doesn’t come across as boring. But that reaction is harder to justify logically than it might at first seem. There is so much stuff in the world to know about, that it’s not obvious that facts that are never going to be of any practical use should be that high up the list.
But we live in a tremendously (and increasingly) science-based world. Anyone who doesn’t know the basics of science is poorly placed to make a non-negative contribution to society as a member of a democracy. Evolution; global warming; MMR vaccines; cellphone towers/wifi; genetically modified food; cloning; stem-cell research; alternative medicine, etc. are all very important topics about which the vast majority of citizens are unqualified to have an opinion. But they do have opinions, they act on those opinions and often also feel justified in forcing these opinions onto everyone else.
So this ignorance is a problem.
There’s also the broader point that science teaches critical, logical thinking. It’s also not like some other subjects where many opinions are possible and all are equally valid. People don’t like that; hence accusations of arrogance and microfacism.
One did. Then one got engrossed in conversation with an epidemiologist in the next seat and left the damn book on the airplane.
I’ve become thoroughly fed up with introspection – with self-absorbtion in general.
Which is why I’m bored witless by most contemporary art. But that’s another story.
Numbers of students still studying science at 18 are falling in Britain and America, perhaps because we are becoming generally less motivated to address difficulty. As a culture, we allow ourselves too many excuses. ‘Western parents are quite comfortable saying their children have a predilection for art or for writing or whatever, and allow them just to pursue that. In the Asian education system, if you are not good at something, it’s because you are lazy and you just have to work harder at it. Just because things are hard does not mean they are not worth doing.’
The implication that the arts are relatively easy is contemptible, and likely the observation of one who has no experience of their serious practice. I would grant you that too many artists and arts aficionados are terribly ignorant of science. I would grant you that much of the techne of the arts is easier than science. After that, it is difficult.
Ninety percent, and that is no exaggeration, of arts students find themselves slaughtered by the difficulty of practicing the arts within ten years of graduation and simply stop.
What’s needed is a change in the good ol’ American anti-intellectual attitude and its selfishness towards funding education, its blindness towards impractical things enhancing the quality of life. Oh, and they do need to know what the second law of thermodynamics is.
Steve,
You might not be defining “Arts” courses quite the same way some other folk are?
Media studies, English lit., Art History, etc,etc – not exactly as burdensome as gaining a degree in biochemistry, for instance…
I certainly remember which students were able to while away their daytime hours chatting in the coffee bars, and which ones looked permanently harrassed (and smelled a bit odd from time to time…)
But then I was a “social scientist”, so looked down on from both sides!
I’ve also been a pro musician in me time, so I know how hard it is to get by in that sphere…
Ian McEwan would be improved by a commingling with Nick Hornby? I think not.
“Oh, and they do need to know what the second law of thermodynamics is”.
Heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body?
10/10, Marie-Therese. But only 5/10 for the Guardian’s answer on why NaCl dissolves in water. It fails to explain why AgCl doesn’t. Those Na+ ions are small and sexy, and the water molecules just LURV clustering round them, not like those stuck-up Ag+ ions, which are much harder to get to know.
I take it you have all read If Minds Had Toes, by Lucy Eyre? The heroine Lila is obviously modelled on OB.
And the greatest English novel of all did science too:
(Chapter 15)
I don’t have glossy dark hair!
:- )
This is a case of like dissolves like.
Salt and pepper disolves very well and makes for very tasty dinner?
;~)
<> “Salt and pepper goes very well together. When sprinkled on dinner it is very tasty? <> Should have read. <>
“It fails to explain why AgCl doesn’t”.
See:
“Chapter 5: Properties of Solutions I: Aqueous Solutions”
Ian B Gibson – definitely, people should be taught what science is and how science is done and how one might go about discriminating between opposing claims about scientific issues.
But that’s different from actually learning science, in detail; and that’s the bit I’m questioning.
The National Curriculum in the UK is showing some signs of moving from the second to the first, and I was reading a furious complaint from a physics teacher the other day that what he is now being asked to teach is not physics. I felt sympathetic to the idea that that was a Bad Thing, but I’m now trying to decide whether I am right to feel sympathetic, or whether it actually more important that the average child gets some sort of hazy idea about the set of things in the first paragraph even if he or she never learns that air is mostly nitrogen. (For him or her to learn enough science to be able to make up his or her own mind based on science on even one of those issues you list is, IMHO, a pipedream).
And Cam, “the metamorphic layers of laundry” surely, or was that part of the pastiche? I had to ask!
“Ian McEwan would be improved by a commingling with Nick Hornby? I think not.”
Well, I think he would. McEwan does too much of the moody sock stuff himself at times. He does it well, but…it’s still moody sock stuff. And if he had a little more Hornby maybe he would stop with the eruptions of violence into calm middle class life routine. The last few hours of Saturday were really grotesquely silly. A little Hornbyan shallowness might be all to the good.
About the only thing that was good about Saturday was the fish soup recipe.
“A little Hornbyan shallowness might be all to the good.”
No, a lightness of phrasing or even a little more of the quotidian might be all to the good; but not Nick Hornby’s dreadful smug laddishness; not that masculine equivalence to Bridgette Jones. Please?
Hm, I think he’s a little better than that. I think he’s a lot better than Bridget Jones. (Maybe that’s because I think BJ is a disgrace to women, and you think NH’s stuff is a disgrace to men. Interesting…) Have you read How to be Good?
Anyway I think I like him the way Watson seems to: as a chronicler of shallowness.
“smug laddishness” is unfair. High Fidelity is very melancholy on the whole – and seemed to me fairly accurate at least about some men that I know in that the music shop owner decides to stick to Laura as he hates being alone and that’s the price you pay. It’s not smug at all. Rob is NME, not Loaded, serious rather than laddish. There’s no wish fulfilment in it. And it is a novel that deals with the importance of music to almost any British male born since the fifties. That’s something that never appears in Martin Amis at all, which is something that makes his books seems so unobservant. (And I had a boyfriend who in our early days together made me some excellent compilation tapes.) How to be Good is melancholy as well, about how life is a compromise. It’s not great literature but it’s not sock writing -there’s observation of characters and manners and so on. I find McEwan fairly airless on the whole.