More than 25 years ago, I learned my trade as a science writer on Nature magazine, when John Maddox reigned as editor. I quickly learned that his advice was invaluable; by following it, I soon made progress in my chosen profession. But I also discovered that the boss was bad at following his own advice. Maddox was (and is) such a fluent writer, with such a broad grasp of science, that he came to believe that he could write anything about anything, without always checking the facts. He usually wrote tight up against a deadline, so that the first draft inevitably had to be the final one-an amazing feat, like high-wire walking without a safety net. Sometimes it showed. What he wrote was usually as good as anybody else on the magazine could write, and done in half the time-but it was not as good as it could have been, if he had had the time and the inclination. The most valuable lesson I learned during my time at Nature was to do as Maddox said (check everything), not as Maddox did.
What Remains to be Discovered is a quintessential Maddox book. It has been written as a riposte to the handful of writers and commentators who have been suggesting that science is coming to an end as we near the end of the 20th century, with nothing much more than a kind of crossing of the "t's" and dotting of the "i's" left to do. Exactly the same fin de si?cle nonsense was being touted at the end of the 19th century-just before the advent of relativity theory, quantum mechanics and the rediscovery of the genetic basis of heredity. That was not the first time this has happened-Maddox provides a good summary of the way in which each century since Galileo has seemed to provide the "last word" in science, but has promptly been superceded. Why should the 20th century be an exception?
So this book offers a welcome antidote to the gloom being purveyed by those who trumpet the end of science. And apart from his skill as a writer, Maddox brings to his task an extraordinary breadth of knowledge. After an introductory summary of how science has developed since Galileo, he looks at future prospects across a wide range of disciplines, under the headings "Matter" (which mainly means physics), "Life" (which means "biology") and "Our World" (which is a grab-bag for everything from machine intelligence to global warming). The casual reader will be left in no doubt that there is, indeed, a great deal that remains to be discovered. My own favourite analogy (not used by Maddox) is to liken scientific knowledge to the area of a circle. As the area of the circle gets bigger, so its circumference, marking the boundary between the known and the unknown, also gets bigger. So the more we know, the more we see how much more there is to know. There is no reason to think that the process need ever come to an end.
But there is, as I have already suggested, a downside to the Maddoxian approach. He is so self-assured that he does not always check his facts; and having retired from Nature, he is no longer always entirely up-to-date with the news. The habits of a lifetime are hard to break, even when the deadline looms months, rather than hours, away. I have a vision of him dictating his thoughts in an effortless flow of words, never pausing for the mundane tasks of looking up a number in a reference book, or telephoning an expert to check the latest state of play. It all flows so smoothly that it behoves the reviewer, more in sorrow than in anger, to point out some of the resulting infelicities.
Maddox's discussion of the early history of quantum physics is distressingly garbled; it commits the howler of saying that Max Planck proposed that radiation only existed as quanta. He did not; he merely suggested that radiation could only be emitted or absorbed by atoms in packages of a certain size. Among other things, the mistake greatly diminishes the apparent role of Albert Einstein in developing the idea of light quanta. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, we are told, "quickly became the guiding principle of biology in the closing decades of the 19th century." It did not; indeed, it was viewed with extreme suspicion until the first decade of the 20th century, when the Mendelian basics of inheritance were rediscovered. Darwin himself veered increasingly in a Lamarckian direction in later life, precisely because he had no mechanism of heredity to underpin his theory (which is why it is the first edition of the Origin of Species that is the definitive version; avoid all later "improvements"). Georges Lema?tre, the founder of Big Bang cosmology, is not mentioned at all, and all his ideas are ascribed to George Gamow (Gamow did develop Big Bang cosmology, but he did not invent it). We are told that "most of the elements, from carbon to uranium, are synthesised in stars like the Sun," which is untrue, because stars such as the Sun can only synthesise elements up to carbon. And he confuses the cosmological red shift with a reddening of light. Of course, Maddox knows the difference between red shift and reddening. What appears here is a kind of slip of the tongue-but it makes him look foolish.
Worst of all, Maddox makes much of the "problem" of the extragalactic distance scale, and the related difficulty of determining the age of the Universe. This is especially unfortunate because up to the middle of 1997, the enemies of science made great play of the fact that some estimates of the age of the Universe gave a number which seemed to be less than some estimates of the ages of the oldest stars. In fact, there never was a real conflict, if proper allowance was made for the acknowledged uncertainties in both calculations; over the past year improvements in the estimates of both numbers have brought them neatly into line with each other.
If I am particularly sensitive on this point, it is for two reasons. First, Maddox misses an opportunity to pull the rug out from under the people he ought to be pulling rugs from under. Second, I have been involved in some of the work which has now provided a very good estimate of the age of the Universe (about 13 billion years).
None the less, his survey should excite and intrigue the general reader. It provides a basic overview of a lot of science, and is, on balance, a good thing. But it is precisely because the general reader will not know where he is being led astray that the author has a duty to get everything as right as possible.
Perhaps, also, he misses an opportunity to make it clear that there is more to science than the exploring of new territory. To be sure, the great scientists tend to do it "because it's there." But what about us lesser mortals? What can we get from science without ever winning a Nobel prize? Why do we do science at all, and why should people who are never going to be scientists be exposed to it at school? It comes back to a kind of philosophy which has been best expressed in the writings of Richard Feynman (who, incidentally, also gave lectures that flowed effortlessly and seemed spontaneous, but which, in his case, were as meticulously crafted as the patter of any professional comedian).
The point about science is that it deals with doubt, not certainty. It is a way of thinking about the world, a way of distinguishing truth from fiction. It involves understanding the rules of evidence, the need to test things by observation and experiment, and-the point often made by Feynman-the fact that no matter how beautiful your theory, no matter how eminent the person who invented it, "if it disagrees with experiment, then it is wrong." Science only progresses by being scrupulously honest-with yourself as much as with anyone else-about how good your ideas are and how well they stand up to the tests of experiment and observation. Real scientists are aware of their fallibility, of the uncertainty implicit in even the best scientific models of the world; they can never be sure that they have found the last word on anything. There is a quote from Feynman which addresses these ideas; it would have been appropriate for a book which, after all, is really about how little we know:
"The scientist has a lot of experience with doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think... In order to progress we must recognise our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty-some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain."
That is why there is no end to science-in order to progress we must recognise our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Only the truly ignorant would think that an end to science was in sight, as Maddox makes clear. But just a little doubt and awareness of his own ignorance could have helped to make this an even better book.
What Remains to be Discovered
John Maddox
Macmillan 1998, ?20
