Flesh and Stardust

When I was growing up in England, I didn’t have a chemistry set, but I did have a television set, and on that television set, once a week for what seemed like an age, a man called Johnny Ball would appear and tell me about all manner of science subjects, from geology to biology to physics and astronomy. A presenter of preternatural energy, Ball was a marvellous entertainer whose enthusiasm for his subject was obvious and whose ability to convey often complex ideas with the aid of eccentric and implausible gizmos remains, as far as I know, unsurpassed. He was, and indeed still is, regarded with enormous affection in the United Kingdom—an affection given extra depth for my generation of thirty-somethings by the fact that he had also presented Play School and thus seems, in a benign way, to have presided over whole childhoods. But the real reason for Ball’s popularity is that he managed to instil a love of science. A one-man Enlightenment, he kindled our interest.

And the flame continued to burn, for a while. It burned in the form of Mrs Maclaren, who took us for chemistry lessons at school. In fact, ‘burned’ is precisely the word. For Matches Maclaren could not go an hour without burning something, usually a little strip of magnesium, which, when held over a Bunsen flame, would flare up suddenly into a brilliant white nova. Or else she would take a small ball of sodium and place it in a water-filled dish, where it skipped and fizzed and whizzed around, slowly dissolving to nothing as it did so. I can’t recall the point of these experiments but I do remember loving them and being more than a little upset when Mrs Maclaren was pensioned off and replaced by a teacher whose name I forget but whose lugubrious demeanour and patchy beard made me feel strangely queasy.

Thus it was that I began, very slowly, to turn away from science subjects and towards the world of English literature. I have never regretted my choice of subject. Literature, and poetry in particular, has given my life a direction and meaning that I’m certain it would have lacked otherwise. But I do regret the comprehensiveness with which I turned my back on science, and sometimes this regret extends to a wish that my children will not make the same mistake, and may even take the road less travelled. The other day, our little boy was staring up at the lights in the kitchen with a faraway look in his eyes. Perhaps, I said, you’ll be an astronomer. Hearing this, and utterly frazzled from a day spent chasing this nascent Galileo from one scene of devastation to the next, my wife gave the only sensible response: ‘Perhaps he’ll be an electrician.’

In any case, in recent years I’ve tried to mend the holes in my knowledge, or at least slow the rate at which my ignorance is, like the universe, constantly expanding. Of course, I tend to come at the subject from a literary rather than a technical perspective and herein lies the problem as I see it. For notwithstanding excellent novels such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday, with its scalpel-like descriptions of brain surgery, literature that treats of scientific themes appears to be very thin on the ground. A theoretical physicist in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time articulates my frustration perfectly:

Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery. And they would have educated their audiences too. But you ‘arts’ people, you’re not only ignorant of these magnificent things, you’re rather proud of knowing nothing.

But for a bit of role reversal this would be called philistinism. And while I don’t believe for a minute that the ignorance is all one way, it does seem to me to be more pronounced on the literary than on the scientific side. ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists,’ wrote W.H. Auden in ‘Poet and the City’, ‘I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ But Auden was exceptional. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins swaps the costumes on this little play, suggesting that, more often than not, it’s the scientists who feel like shabby curates and the poets who are regarded as dukes.

Dawkins’ book began life as a lecture, delivered in 1997 in honour of the author C.P. Snow. And it so happens that last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Snow’s Rede Lecture for 1959, in which Snow identified a division between literary intellectuals on the one hand and scientists and engineers on the other. Delivered at Cambridge University and entitled ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, its effect was to ignite a widespread debate. It begins with a biographical passage in which Snow describes his growing sense of a sort of mutual indifference on the part of literary intellectuals and scientists. Snow, a scientist and a novelist, had friends on both sides of this divide and was keen to understand why it was that scientists spoke only to other scientists and literary intellectuals to other literary intellectuals. As he puts it:

I felt I was moving among two groups … who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.

Had Snow identified a genuine divide, or something temporary and peculiar to England? Certainly, it’s far more usual these days to hear of the conflict between science and religion than of the conflict between science and literature. But that Snow had put his finger on something, some mutual distrust or disregard, is surely not to be seriously doubted. Historically, science and literature just don’t get along as well as they might.

Nevertheless, there are certain commentators who think that Snow overstated the case. One such was the late great Stephen Jay Gould, who, in 1959, was an undergraduate at Antioch College, yet to establish himself as one of the greatest and subtlest science writers of all time. In The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox (2003), he takes up Snow’s own observation that ‘the number two is a very dangerous number’. As Gould puts it: ‘From the dawn of recorded human rumination, our best philosophers have noted, and usually lamented, our strong tendency to frame any complex issue as a battle between two opposing camps.’ Gould suspected that this predilection lay deep within our mental architecture, as an evolved property of the human brain. But whatever the reasons for this quirk, or glitch, Gould sees Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ lecture as evidence of the dangers of dichotomisation.

Gould’s thesis is that the animosity between literary intellectuals and scientists is essentially a ‘pseudo-conflict’ born of an understandable vigilance, or ‘scrappiness’, on science’s part, when it first began to emerge as a rival to other, older forms of knowledge. Early scientists such as Francis Bacon expressed ideas that inevitably clashed with ‘the hidebound traditions of humanistic scholarship’. But the conflict has become ‘unseemly and inappropriate’. Both science and literature, Gould suggests, should adopt the strategies of the fox and the hedgehog, which is to say that there will be times when it is useful for the two ‘magisteria’ to collaborate (as the fox is able to modify its tactics) and times when both must go their own way, adopting strategies peculiar to each (as the hedgehog invariably rolls itself into a spiky ball to put off predators).

Well, he’ll get no argument there. But to say that the conflict between science and literature has become ‘unseemly and inappropriate’ is not to say that it doesn’t exist. If there is a conflict, Snow was right to identify it and any unconscious parochialism on his part is ultimately beside the point. Moreover, Gould writes of ‘occasional strife’ between the humanities and the physical sciences. But the briefest foray into literary history reveals that the strife is far from occasional. On the contrary, it immediately strikes one as chronic.

Despite the metaphysical poets, who would sometimes include scientific discoveries in their intricate intellectual exercises, and despite Pope’s famous epitaph for Newton—‘Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, let Newton be! And all was Light’—literature, and poetry in particular, has shown a bizarre negativity towards science. For Edgar Allan Poe, science was a ‘Vulture, whose wings are dull realities’; for Keats, it ‘will clip an Angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries’ and ‘Unweave a rainbow’. And then there is my personal favourite: Walt Whitman stomping off from the astronomy lecture to gaze ‘in perfect silence at the stars’—a Romantic tantrum in a class of its own.

Even poets in sympathy with science don’t always do a brilliant job of conveying that sympathy to their readers. Shelley recognised a profoundly poetical element in science, though still thought facts and calculation served to dull the poetic spirit. And while it’s true that Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended lectures at the Royal Institution in order to renew his ‘stock of metaphors’, he, like Keats, had it in for Newton. Erasmus Darwin, whose The Botanic Garden anticipates the Big Bang theory of the universe, nevertheless sought to leaven his epic with gnomes, sylphs, nymphs and goddesses.

Of course, it isn’t only the poets who display a lack of love for science. Novelists, too, are guilty of coldness. As with poetry, the principal problem is really one of indifference, but that is not the whole story. Of the novels that do engage with science, many take a largely negative view. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Honoré de Balzac’s Quest for the Absolute all warn against scientific excess. Models of hubris whose reckless curiosity has invariably set them on the road to ruin, the scientists who populate such works of fiction are less Promethean than Faustian.

So let us say that Snow was right and that literature is out of love with science. What, if anything, can we do about it? Indeed, what sort of relationship can exist between the two magisteria beyond the obvious and boring one of simply swapping bits of information? (‘I’ll quote Pope in the preface to my book if you write a poem comparing memory to a trilobite.’) Can literature adopt the techniques of science? Daft though it sounds, it has been tried. Think of the novels of Emile Zola, whose ‘naturalism’ was influenced by evolution and who saw heredity and environment as determining influences on human behaviour. Or think of William Carlos Williams’ ‘relatively stable’ poetic line—a nod to Einstein’s relativity, which also influenced the modernist poetry of Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson.

Perhaps the most ambitious book to deal with the divide between the sciences and the humanities is E.O. Wilson’s Consilience, in which Wilson argues that science’s role in respect of literature and the arts in general is (or should be) largely one of interpretation. Consilience means ‘a jumping together’—in this instance, a jumping together of facts and fact-based theories across the disciplines to create ‘a common groundwork of explanation’. But Wilson, who regards this jumping together as a consolidation of the Enlightenment project, leaves the reader in little doubt that it is to science and not to the humanities that the lion’s share of the work must fall when it comes to this ‘attempted linkage’. For example, he writes that:

Artistic inspiration common to everyone in varying degree rises from the artesian wells of human nature … It follows that even the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic rules that guided them.

Many writers and artists regarded this as a bridge too far and, indeed, as a road to nowhere. Stephen Jay Gould suggests that Wilson has misunderstood the meaning of consilience and suspects him of wanting to incorporate all knowledge into a single hierarchy, with science at the top. New Yorker critic Louis Menand put it less diplomatically. Consilience, he wrote, is a ‘bargain with the devil’.

Of course, the sciences have plenty to tell us about the nature and origins of literature and, indeed, of the arts generally. Quite apart from anything else, the products of the human mind cannot be treated in isolation. But this is not what Wilson is arguing for. He is arguing for a subsumation, a homogenisation based on the idea that human beings are naturally evolved creatures and that such works of art and culture as they’ve produced must therefore have a natural explanation. His approach has much in common with that of the so-called Literary Darwinists, whose stated aim is to bring the theory of evolution to bear on literature, largely as an interpretive tool. ‘Is narrative well-engineered to perform a fitness-promoting task?’ asks one of the contributors to The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. I don’t think it’s putting it too strongly to say that here an understandable bullishness on the part of the devotees of science has left a heap of bullshit in its wake.

Then again, the Literary Darwinists could claim to be fighting fire with fire, or at least to be fighting bullshit with bullshit. And indeed it is true that Literary Darwinism is in part a response to the ‘constructivist’ project to claim all knowledge in the name of culture, an undertaking that would make of science just another official ‘discourse’. In his 1998 essay ‘Oppressed by Evolution’ (Discover Magazine, March 1998) American anthropologist Matt Cartmill gives an excellent summary of this world view:

The postmodern critique of science runs something like this: There are no objective facts. All supposed ‘facts’ are contaminated with theories, and all theories are infested with moral and political doctrines. Because different theories express different perceptions of the world, there’s no neutral yardstick for measuring one against another. The choice between competing theories is always a political choice. Therefore, when some guy in a lab coat tells you that such and such is an objective fact—say, that there isn’t any firmament, or that people are related to wolves and hyenas—he must have a political agenda up his starched white sleeve.

If the guiding principle of Wilson’s consilience is that everything can be known through science, a principle of postmodern cultural studies is that nothing at all can be known through science, or indeed through any other form of knowledge. This view was most famously satirised by the physics professor Alan Sokal, who claimed to have seen the postmodern light and conned the journal Social Text, one of whose editors was Frederic Jameson, into printing an essay entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, which, among other points just as ludicrous, called for an ‘emancipatory mathematics’.

Needless to say, these minor scuffles in the strip-lit halls of academe are a sideshow to the main event, which is literature’s apparent inability meaningfully to engage with scientific subjects. But they do allow us to begin to think of the limits imposed on any engagement by the irreducible differences that obtain between the disciplines. Indeed, one tenet of post-structuralist theory—that language, or ‘discourse’, is essentially unstable—cannot be underestimated. Words are not passive, univocal counters; they do not suffer reality, but are constantly engaged in re-creating it. The language of physics is mathematics. Its characters, as Galileo said, are numbers and geometrical figures. The language of literature is, well, language. And while language can do a lot of things, there are lots of things it cannot do.

Primo Levi understood this well. An industrial chemist as well as a writer, he was aware that science and literature cannot exist in a frictionless relationship. The final chapter of The Periodic Table, ‘The Story of a Carbon Atom’, is a matchless piece of science writing but is drenched in an awareness of the limits of language. Then there is the title story in his posthumous collection, A Tranquil Star, which begins with a wonderful demonstration of the fact that language has ‘our dimensions’:

Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written ‘very far’, ‘big’, ‘hot’, ‘enormous’: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.

The ‘trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail’, writes Levi in The Periodic Table. Both the science of the very big and the science of the very small reveal the limits of human perception and intuition unaided by mathematics.

This hasn’t stopped scientists attempting to put scientific data into terms the non-scientist can understand. To this end, they have adopted various strategies designed to appeal to readers unused to scientific thinking. One such is the importation of figures and narratives from literature. Indeed, it is striking how many science books allude to literary works in their titles: The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins; The Nothing that Is, by Robert Kaplan; The Goldilocks Enigma, by Paul Davies; Six Impossible Things before Breakfast, by Lewis Wolpert. However, it is science writing itself that must be regarded as an exciting new branch of the humanistic literary tradition. According to Gould, such popular writers are regarded by many in the scientific community as pedlars of gee-whiz simplification—an irrelevant caste to be treated with disdain. Most scientists, he suggests, take a kind of pride in their own lack of stylistic acumen, immersing themselves in technical jargon that is so much white noise to those reading for pleasure. And yet the popularisers, taken as a group, strike me as profoundly exciting. Many display a stylistic aptitude that would be the envy of certain novelists. There is even a prize, the Lewis Thomas Prize, awarded for popular science writing that provides ‘not merely new information but cause for reflection, even revelation, as in a poem’.

The best science writing, it seems to me, combines two senses of the verb ‘to wonder’: to wonder about—to speculate—and to wonder at—to be amazed. The great science writer opens up our world in ways we could never have anticipated. One of my favourite science writers is the celebrated J.B.S. Haldane, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist whose ‘On Being the Right Size’ (1927) must be accounted one of the great scientific essays. In it, Haldane demonstrates that all animals have an optimum size and that observations such as the common one that if a flea were as big as a human being it could jump a thousand feet in the air are unscientific nonsense. Haldane begins with an illustration from John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. Here, he considers the feasibility of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan:

These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross-sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step.

He goes on in this vein, debunking, demystifying, always with a view to showing how facts can often be more interesting than fiction. Indeed, it is on the greatest fiction, the fiction that a creator-God intervenes in the affairs of human beings, that he turns his gaze most penetratingly. A little further on, he writes: ‘An angel whose muscles developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economise its weight, its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts.’

Of course, too much stylistic facility can work against the material. Good science writers, in my experience, are far less likely to mix a metaphor or engage in elegant variation than most so-called creative writers. Probably this is helped by the fact that the content is sometimes so astonishing it doesn’t need to be dressed up. ‘In a sense human flesh is made of stardust,’ writes Nigel Calder in The Key to the Universe. To try to express that thought by analogy would be like drenching a truffle in ketchup.

To generalise massively, one could say that while science partakes of the techniques of literature, literature partakes of the content of science. A novel can contain an explanation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But the Second Law of Thermodynamics can obviously not contain a novel.

Nevertheless, and despite its ability to move across different disciplines, literature that seeks to incorporate science has high hurdles to clear. For example, there’s its attachment to metaphor, the effect of which is to turn phenomena into indicators for something else. John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is not an attempt to understand nightingales but rather a poem of lyric crisis. Similarly, Hardy’s darkling thrush is not a real thrush at all but the beruffled emblem of beleaguered hope. This is a problem, if it is a problem, that tests relations between science and literature, as the first looks outwards to objective phenomena and the second tends to focus inwards.

Sometimes, however, a metaphor comes along that no sane writer can resist adopting. One such is the world of quantum mechanics, which is to say the baffling world of subatomic particles, where nothing seems to move as it should and in which Newton’s laws don’t appear to apply. And indeed it is this that so appeals to the literary imagination—a perfect metaphor for human behaviour, volatile and unpredictable as it is. Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, a work that manages to convey the excitement of modern scientific enquiry, is exemplary in this regard.

But quantum mechanics and human relationships, even as they stand in for each other, cannot be accorded equal status in a literary work of art. It is saying nothing original to note that scientific knowledge and literary ‘knowledge’ differ intrinsically, that many of the questions posed by one discipline cannot, in principle, be answered by the other. Strangely, there is often confusion on this point. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, wrote Keats in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, a line that one finds time and again on the lips of scientists and mathematicians eager to be seen in the poet’s company. But the truth and beauty available to science are not the same as the truth and beauty available to literary works of art. When, in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Yeats writes, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress’, he isn’t putting forward an objective truth: not even Yeats is daft enough to think that a life is less important than art. But we recognise these magnificent lines as true at the emotional level, for we have all felt something like that, have we not? Conversely, that energy is equivalent to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared is objectively true and true for all time. It is also ‘beautiful’, as Einstein saw, but not in the way that Yeats is beautiful. Still, we are not to be blamed for wishing that William had at least acknowledged Albert.

The immediate object of art is us. By contrast, the human element, or angle, can only get science and scientists so far. It is fun to reflect that a glass of Evian contains at least one water molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. And it is good to remember the human drama that so often attends scientific discovery. It is this with which Brecht is concerned in his play Galileo, and indeed it is a thrilling story that attaches to the father of modern astronomy. Ultimately, however, it’s the astronomy that matters. Before long, the human element recedes and the reader is faced with the movement of the planets—with the science and the mathematics. That is all I mean when I say that science and literature differ intrinsically. Jacob Bronowski—a poet, historian, teacher, inventor, mathematician, literary critic and philosopher of science—put it well in a New Yorker profile: ‘One of the theorems in Euclid is that an angle cannot be trisected with the ordinary tools—a compass and a ruler. But King Lear was not written to tell us that you cannot trisect a kingdom.’

However, there is a kind of writing that seems to me to point the way to a healthy and mutually respectful relationship between the physical sciences and literature. This kind of writing does not have a name, but one finds it in novels as well as in poems, in popular science and (especially) in nature writing. Perhaps it is better described as an attitude than as a literary style or mode of approach. In any case, its guiding principle, if it has one, is observation of the world as it is—a due respect for what is in front of you as opposed to, or as well as, what is inside you. A good example can be found in a book of almost excruciating beauty: Nature Cure, by Richard Mabey. The book, a memoir of depression and recovery, begins as the author is leaving the one state and tentatively entering upon the other. This passage comes close to the start of the book. Mabey is describing a fledgling swift, which he has discovered ‘beached’ in his attic. He releases it from his attic window and imagines the journey that lies ahead of it:

It would be flying the 6,000 miles entirely on its own, on a course mapped out—or at least sketched out—deep in its central nervous system. Every one of its senses would be helping to guide it, checking its progress against genetic memories, generating who knows what astonishing experiences of consciousness. Maybe, like many seabirds, it would be picking up subtle changes in air-borne particles as it passed over seas and aromatic shrubland and the dusty thermals above African townships. It might be riding a magnetic trail detected by iron-rich cells in its forebrain. It would almost certainly be using, as navigation aids, landmarks whose shapes fitted templates in its genetic memories, and the sun too, and, on clear nights, the big constellations—which, half-way through its journey, would be replaced by a quite different set in the night sky of the southern hemisphere.

Note how the facts do not detract from, indeed enhance, the poetry of this passage. Note, too, how they act as a kind of ballast to the bird’s plainly metaphorical status. The beached swift metaphorically figures the slough in which the author finds himself, or rather has found himself up to this point, just as its flight metaphorically figures the trembling first steps on the road to recovery. But the bird is so obviously more than a metaphor. The facts—those breathtaking facts—set it free. In one sense, it becomes a metaphor for its own non-metaphorical existence.

Writing in 1959, in the year Snow gave his ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, Vladimir Nabokov, a talented lepidopterist, wrote, ‘I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.’ I can’t think of a better summary of the kind of writing I’m trying to describe. It is a kind of writing in which, I think, analogy must edge out metaphor, as the poet or writer tries to puncture the anaesthetic of familiarity without trying to turn the thing described into a signpost or counter for something else. ‘Does sense so stale that it must needs derange / The world to know it?’ asks Richard Wilbur. Well ‘yes’ is my answer, but not too much; not as much as Keats and the nightingale, though of course I wouldn’t be without them.

This kind of writing is far from new. Indeed, it has an illustrious history. Elisabeth Bishop, in a letter to Anne Stevenson:

reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

It is fitting, perhaps, that it should fall to a poet describing the prose of our greatest scientist to end this little mental adventure. But let me add one final thought. It happens that 2009 also marked the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth in 1809. It would, I think, be a fitting tribute if the literary world could begin to consider the ways in which literature can better do justice to the natural richness that he helped to explain. And, indeed, to the fact that this richness began as nothing more than stardust.