First physics, then metaphysics
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 31: Ways of Seeing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jorge Sotirios
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Jorge Sotirios’ biography and other articles by this writer
THE earthquake that rocked the Mediterranean during the summer of 1999 was quick and devastating. Lasting thirty-seven seconds and measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, the consequences were far-reaching. In north western Turkey an unofficial estimate of up to 40,000 died instantly under rubble or were buried alive. Over 100,000 were left homeless. Mass graves became the norm with every morgue filled to overflowing. Civic authorities even commandeered ice-hockey rinks to refrigerate numerous corpses. Threats of disease of plague proportions threatened to inundate the country, yet this tragedy also brought out the best between Turks and their natural adversary, the Greeks. The two nations initiated ‘Earthquake Diplomacy’ exchanging first aid personnel and rescue teams, alongside financial support when seismic quakes affected suburban Athens a month later.
One notorious case was revealed in the investigation and characterised Turkey’s antiquated building laws that preserved its Byzantine legacy, and allowed conmen to take advantage of them. A builder was put on trial for lax building material used in his constructions, but sought to deflect blame by claiming he wasn’t a builder, ‘but a poet’. His defence was thrown out of court. A badly erected building can kill you. A badly composed poem – generally speaking - won’t.
The crude binaries evident in his defence should make us reflect, because that type of thinking is happening here too. It’s a mode of thinking of Manichean precision. The Australian’s concerted attempts to cast doubt on climate science recently quoted Tim Flannery. ‘The nation’s conscience reveals he is guided by literature rather than the scientific method’ the national newspaper reported in September 2010 with undisguised glee, before picking apart evidence of anthropogenic climate change. Prizing ‘science’ over ‘literature’ is a useful media ploy that prefers ‘hard facts’ to ‘creativity’. The image of the man of science reading Tolstoy in his bath to reach his eureka smears every bookish don trapped in the Ivory Tower, oblivious to the real world. Flannery on the release of his book Here on Earth (Text, 2010), was pointing to the limits of reductionist science, urging science to examine the wider ecological consequences novels are capable of portraying. The inter-connections literature knits together to form a narrative is an ideal metaphor of ‘the web of connections’ that Flannery highlights, a web that analytic science pulls apart. Making sense of ‘the complex theatre of life’ needs more than scientific theories, models and statistics. Humans, animals, insects, oceans and atmosphere are in Flannery’s view linked in a mysterious yet binding process – to separate them other isolates the fragment from the whole. Evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins agree. Science fits pieces together in a puzzle, fragments cohere to create the big picture.
The division between science and the humanities, the ‘builders’ and ‘poets’, has played itself out in the New South Wales HSC curriculum. Policy-makers and educators fear churning out narrow-minded students who specialise too early to know the difference between these two fields, strictly demarcated, and means we’ll end up with graduates inept in both fields. It seems nothing has changed since 1959 when CP Snow’s The Two Cultures was published.
Snow set up his polarities with Manichaean zeal. The educated mind should know his Shakespeare, Snow opines, as much as the Laws of Thermodynamics. Yet between the Bloomsbury bohemian and the Oxford nerd, there is a gulf of incomprehension, if not antipathy. Snow exemplified the west’s anxiety of being left behind in science, giving the USSR an edge whose pool of talent was greater due to the progressive inclusion of women in male-dominated domains: primarily engineering and rocket science. Snow wrote about a time when science was deemed universal, authoritarian and absolute. A book-infused culture before the global glut of media and information overload.
Believing the humanities failed to express the tenor of the times, Snow makes the outlandish assertion: ‘It is bizarre how very little of twentieth century science has been assimilated into twentieth century art.’ Snow posed his litmus test – what do these ‘natural Luddites’ known as the ‘literary intellectual’ know of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (And why did they hijack the word ‘intellectual’, rendering the scientist mere technician?)
SNOW MIGHT WELL have asked Samuel Beckett that question. Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1956) entrenched themselves as innovative dramas in Snow’s contested era, and could be viewed as brilliant distillations of entropy. Beckett wore his understanding of thermodynamics lightly. The world of appearances and things had to be used in order to reach hidden truths. It was more convincing to show the absurdity of existence through a pair of tramps, weathered boots, or the delay of a neat solution, than the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy (elaborate stagecraft was in fact the special effects of the ancient world). Beckett’s fastidious logic revealed truths behind the veneer of reality, one that exalts empiricism and positivism at the expense of inner states of being. ‘First physics, then metaphysics’ was the Irishman’s succinct methodology.
Regardless, Snow believed the sciences and the arts remained at arm’s length. ‘What is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ was Shakespeare’s rejoinder years before to the same dilemma. But is that divide true? Has there been a creative apartheid at work between these disciplines? Or are both mere Siamese twins boxing themselves to a pulp?
TO RE-ENGAGE WITH this debate, it’s worth stepping back to a less divisive time. In Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder (HarperCollins, 2008), the English historian who has written perceptively about the romantic poets, relates the fluid encounters between nineteenth century science and poetry. The template was forged in the meeting in Tuscany between the astronomer Galileo and the poet Milton in 1638, which inspired Milton to compose his epic Paradise Lost (1665). Milton integrated Galileo’s observation of ‘new lands seen in her spotty globe’, consolidating Galileo’s heretical idea that not everything revolved around the earth. If Jupiter’s moons revolved around Jupiter it was a direct challenge to the geocentric universe, promoted by Aristotle and the Catholic Church. A shift in consciousness occurred – the earth was pushed from a privileged position centre-stage in the cosmos.
Indeed Milton’s magisterial epic was an original because it integrated religious symbolism, classical mythology and scientific observation into a compelling drama. Its effect on the scientifically inclined was profound. Charles Darwin took it for reading on his voyage to the Galapagos. The poem would also inspire William Herschel to build bigger telescopes and minutely pinpoint craters, valleys and dormant seas on the moon. Herschel’s observations saw further than Galileo’s rudimentary lens, locating a distant planet at the outer edge of our solar system. Herschel dedicated this to his King but ‘Georgium Sidus’ was quickly replaced by Uranus. Herschel’s fitting epitaph was apt: ‘he o’er leapt the parapet of the stars’ peering into the then unknown.’ Physics became the path to metaphysics, no less.
As Holmes tells it in his superbly written book, Lord Byron was captivated by scientific discovery and therefore promptly paid Herschel a visit in 1811. Byron’s esteem for Newtonian science is an instance of the combined quest for scientist and poet alike, to better understand the workings of the universe free of dogma. Holmes asserts a baton of influence was therefore carried from generation to generation. From telescope to microscope, from stars to cells. Science was running a narrative of progress. Poetry, keen to incorporate its imagery, was by its side.
The Enlightenment came with a twin, ‘the dreaming inwardness of Romanticism’, whereby scientists and poets were both explorers journeying to the unknown of new continents. Joseph Banks cataloguing botany, tribes and customs in Tahiti alongside Darwin’s fascination for beetles, finches and tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, bookend this era. Scientific discoveries were not off-limits to the romantic poets. Nor were there territorial disputes guarding ‘truth’. Wonder, optimism, the quest for new truths that ditched obsolete thinking. Scientist and poet were in awe of new perceptions.
Contrast this to a round-table discussion that the Guardian ran last year titled ‘Do Great Minds Think Alike?‘ The four horsemen of contemporary science (Richard Dawkins, David Attenborough, Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox) were quizzed of their ideas. The naturalist David Attenborough confessed to a profound scientific conversion worthy of a religious experience when he dived as child into a coral reef. Attenborough beheld ‘a world of unrevealed complexity’ which set off a great career. Yet Attenborough felt the need to belittle literature with this sneer: ‘I don’t read fiction.’ What is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?
And it’s not clear what opinion theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking holds of fiction, but his reliance on substituting ‘God’ for the laws of physics suggests he’s read at least one book.
Snow’s Manichaeism signifies hostility between scientists and writers. Attenborough consolidates that animosity. Did the littérateur hijack the word ‘intellectual’ rendering the scientist mere technician? Or are scientists guilty of hubris for believing they could ‘o’er leap the parapet of the stars?’ Are there more things to heaven and earth than dreamt of in their philosophy? Psychology? Poetry? Art? Mystery? Where do they fit into the scientific framework?