A tale of two cultures

The writing of popular science has improved immensely in recent decades. Writers such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Feynman, Peter Medawar, Stephen Hawking, Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins have transformed the genre, combining expert knowledge with an urge to be understood which bridges the intelligibility gap to delight and instruct huge readerships. In the process, they have created a new kind of late 20th century literature which demands to be recognised as a separate genre, distinct from the old literary forms, and conveying pleasures and triumphs of its own.

True, these writers had predecessors in the 19th century-TH Huxley or Charles Darwin himself-who also strove to reach the general reading public. But in the mid-19th century the general reading public was a much smaller and more select group than it is now. The popular science books that succeed today represent achievements of a remarkable and unprecedented kind. Nor is it clear on what grounds they can be reckoned inferior to novels, poems and other representatives of the older genres. In what respect, for example, is a masterpiece like Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker imaginatively inferior to a distinguished work of fiction such as Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters (or the hundreds of lesser novels which jam the publishers' lists each year)? Both are clearly the products of brilliant minds; both are highly imaginative; and Amis is more excited by scientific ideas than most contemporary writers. Nevertheless, the essential distinction between them seems to be that between knowledge and ignorance. From the viewpoint of late 20th century thought, Dawkins's book represents the instructed, Amis's the uninstructed imagination.

When I pointed this out recently in the introduction to my Faber Book of Science (1995), I was attacked by Bryan Appleyard in the Independent, who took issue not only with my preference of Dawkins to Amis, but, more fundamentally, with my claim that science writing exists as a separate genre. The desperation evident in Appleyard's arguments should, however, hearten all those who find his persistent antagonism to science misconceived. I have (so he says) failed to appreciate that all writers write about science and have been doing so for the last 400 years. Flaubert and Blake, John Ashbery and Samuel Beckett-all are science-writers, by Appleyard's standards. To substantiate this curious proposal he explains that all writers "write about the world as they find it, and what they find is a world in which the dominant power and faith is science." You might as well argue that all writers write about sport or fashion or sex, because those are also powerful influences in our world. Besides, even if Appleyard were right in supposing that all writing, from acrostics to zen, must in some mystical Appleyardian sense be "about" science, it would not affect the obvious fact that a separate genre of science-writing exists that deals with science directly and expertly.



Appleyard's contorted arguments lead him, eventually, to a redefinition of knowledge. Martin Amis, he tells us, "knows as much about science" as Richard Dawkins. Since Amis's degree was in English literature, and Dawkins is a Reader in Zoology at Oxford, this statement can surmount its inherent improbability only by using the verb "know" in some special and enfeebled way-and that is how Appleyard uses it. Amis "knows" about science, he explains, in that he knows it is "a potent complex force in the world and in the imagination." By the same token we could all claim to know about economic theory or Chinese civilisation, because these too are potent, complex and stimulating to the imagination. However, the usual and correct name for this vague kind of knowledge is ignorance.

Ignorance of the sort cherished by Appleyard is, of course, precisely what science-writing seeks to dispel-hence his fear and hatred of it. Not much has been written about it as a genre, so some description seems appropriate. Broadly speaking it tends towards one of two modes, the mind-stretching and the explanatory. In practice, any particular piece of science-writing will combine the two in various degrees. Still, they seem to be the extremes between which science-writing happens. The mind-stretching aims to arouse wonder, and corresponds to the Sublime in traditional literary categories. Consider this proposition: although a planet of the earth's size and temperature is a comparatively rare event in the universe, it is estimated that at least 100,000 planets like the earth exist in our galaxy alone, and since some 100 million galaxies lie within the range of our most powerful telescopes, it follows that throughout observable space we can count on the existence of at least 10 million million planets more or less like ours. The mind-stretching mode can indeed be profound in its implications.

But my preference has been, and is, for the other mode, the explanatory. What I most value in science-writing is the feeling of enlightenment that comes with a piece of evidence being correctly interpreted, or a problem being ingeniously solved, or a scientific principle being exposed and clarified.

When Galileo looked at the moon through his telescope, he and everyone else thought it was a perfect sphere. He was astonished, he tells us, to see bright points within its darkened part, which gradually increased in size and brightness till they joined up with its bright part. It occurred to him that they were just like mountain tops on earth, which are touched by the sun's morning rays while the lower ground is still in shadow. So he deduced correctly that the moon's surface was not smooth after all, but mountainous. To follow Galileo as he explains his observations step by step is to share an experience of enlightenment that fiction and poetry, for all their powers, cannot give, because they can never be so authentically engaged with actuality and discovery.

Darwin supplies a beautiful example of the second process, the ingenious solution of a problem, when he is faced with the need to explain how species of freshwater plants could spread to remote oceanic islands without being separately created by God. It occurs to him that the seeds might be carried on the muddy feet of wading birds that frequent the edges of ponds. But that raises the question of whether pond mud contains seeds in sufficient quantities. So Darwin takes three tablespoonfuls of mud from the edge of his pond in February-enough to fill a breakfast cup-and keeps it covered in his study for six months, pulling up and counting each plant as it grows. Five hundred and thirty-seven plants grow, of many different species, so that he is able to conclude that it would be an "inexplicable circumstance" if wading birds did not transport the seeds of freshwater plants, as he had suspected. Once again, fiction could not compete with the impact of this, because the force of Darwin's account depends precisely on its not being fiction but fact.

JBS Haldane's famous essay "On Being the Right Size" exemplifies the third process-the exposition of a scientific principle. Restricting himself to simple arithmetic, and keeping in mind the need for powerful examples, Haldane demonstrates, unforgettably, by the end of his second paragraph, that the 60-foot-high giants Pope and Pagan in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress could not have existed, because they would have broken their thighs every time they walked. The example is purposefully chosen: out goes, with Bunyan, the whole world of (as Haldane saw it) religious mumbo-jumbo that Bunyan stood for.

But if the explanatory mode is science-writing's breath of life, the problem for science-writers is how to explain. How can science be made intelligible to non-scientists? The least hopeful answer is that it cannot. Giving an inkling of what modern science means to readers who cannot manage higher mathematics is, Richard Feynman has proposed, like explaining music to the deaf. This would be a desolating conclusion if Feynman were not himself among the most brilliant of explainers. His success depends upon his genius for making his material human. He freely imports a kind of animism into his experimental accounts-discussing, for example, how an individual photon "makes up its mind" which of a number of possible paths to follow.

Ruskin uses animism, too, when-in his masterly tribute to rust-he writes that iron "breathes" and "takes oxygen from the atmosphere as eagerly as we do." Miroslav Holub is animistic when he imagines the adrenalin and the stress hormones in the spilt blood of a dead muskrat still sending out their alarms, and the white blood cells still busily trying to perform their accustomed tasks, bewildered by the unusual temperature outside the muskrat's body. In fact, Feynman-Ruskin-Holub-type animism is a persistent ally in the popular science-writer's struggle to engage the reader's understanding.

To a scientist, this might seem ridiculous. Lewis Carroll rubbished the whole idea in The Dynamics of a Particle: "It was a lovely Autumn evening, and the glorious effects of chromatic aberration were beginning to show themselves in the atmosphere as the earth revolved away from the great western luminary, when two lines might have been observed wending their weary way across a plane superficies. The elder of the two had by long practice acquired the art, so painful to young and impulsive loci, of lying evenly between his extreme points; but the younger in her girlish impetuosity, was ever longing to diverge and become a hyperbola or some such romantic and boundless curve..."

However, it is not clear that animism is as daft as Carroll makes it appear. All science is inevitably drenched in our human presumptions, designs and conceptions. We cannot get outside the human shapes of our brains. Our observation inevitably alters what it observes. This perception is usually associated with Werner Heisenberg. But it was already evident to Francis Bacon at the start of the 17th century, who saw that perfect, pure objective science was impossible, not only because we are forced to use language, or some kind of numerical notation, which does not "naturally" belong to the objects we name or number, but also because we seek patterns, shapes and symmetries in nature which correspond to our own preconceptions, not to anything that is "really" there. From this viewpoint, to say that iron "breathes" is no more absurd than to say that it is called "iron," or that its chemical symbol is Fe. In each case, we add something human to its remote, alien, unknowable nature.

Given the boundless human implications of science, it seems strange that poets and novelists have not used it more. There are a few distinguished exceptions-John Updike, Lavinia Greenlaw-but generally speaking science has had a bad effect on poets, inciting them to bombast (of the "O thou terrestrial ball" variety) or to drivelling regrets that science has banished "faery lore." Perhaps it is assumed that the poetic imagination is superior to the scientific, so poets simply need not bother with science. This used to be a favourite idea. "I believe the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton," pronounced Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Convictions of this kind still linger, especially among those who know nothing about Sir Isaac Newton. Yet Coleridge's credo does not, when you inspect it, mean much. Presumably he relates soul size to imaginative power-and obviously poets do use their imagination differently from scientists. But there seem no grounds for deciding they use it better.

The difference can be seen right at the start of the modern scientific era if we glance, for example, at the way Shakespeare and Bacon write about clocks. For Shakespeare a clock is something that tells the time. "When I do count the clock that tells the time," is the beginning of one of his sonnets. But for Bacon a clock is a machine which, because he understands it scientifically, he can put to various uses. Thinking about weight and gravitation, he wondered if the weight of an object would increase and decrease according to whether it was nearer to or further from the centre of the earth. You cannot discover this by weighing the object at various heights, because the weights themselves will also have got heavier or lighter, like the object. What you do, Bacon decides, is take two clocks, one worked by weights, the other by a spring. You adjust them so they run at the same speed, then you take them up a mountain and down a mine. Up the mountain the clock with weights will go slower, because they have become lighter. Down the mine it will go faster.

He was almost right. Up the mountain, the clock with weights would go slower. But because the earth's weight is not concentrated at its centre, the clock going down the mine would leave progressively more of the earth's mass above it, so it would go slower too. The point, though, is not Bacon's rightness or wrongness, but the way he thinks about clocks compared to Shakespeare. For Shakespeare the idea of a clock has shrunk to something that tells the time. For Bacon, the clock is a machine which can be engineered in various ways, and which has an experimental potential independent of the time-telling role ordinary language had allocated to it. It seems rather unfair to call Bacon less imaginative than Shakespeare in this instance. The poet remains satisfied with the conventional attributes of clocks, whereas the scientist's exploratory mind takes him to a wholly new function for a clock, which reveals something unexpected about the universe.

Of course this example is grossly slanted in Bacon's favour, and it would be ridiculous to disparage Shakespeare on the strength of it. Shakespeare's sonnet is no less a great poem because it is uninterested in gravitation. I have risked the comparison with Bacon because it shows us already, at the start of the 17th century, a scientist needing to rid himself of language's normal constraints (the usual functions language assigns to "clock"), in order to think. From this historical moment on, scientists increasingly found that they had to develop their own special language, esoteric and forbidding to outsiders, but valuable to scientists because of its freedom from the huge cloud of associations, nuances and ambiguities that ordinary language carries along with it, and on which poets depend.

To poets, the new technical language seemed a sterile sea of jargon in which the imagination would freeze and drown. John Donne was the first and last English poet not to feel like this about scientific language. He was lucky, being born at just the right time (1572), after the beginning of modern science but before its specialized technical vocabularies had really taken off. So for him, scientific language could still be warm, mysterious and sonorous, like poetry. He could think of love, and the scientific methods used for establishing latitude and longitude, as perfectly compatible and mutually enriching subjects:

How great love is, presence best trial makes

But absence tries how long this love will be;

To take a latitude

Sun, or stars, are fitliest viewed

At their brightest, but to conclude

Of longitudes, what other way have we,

But to mark when, and where, the dark eclipses be?

Not much more than 50 years later, Milton took an altogether different view of scientists and scientific language, deriding astronomers who:

Gird the sphere

With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er,

Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.

Comparing the two examples, we can see science, in the space of a half-century (the same half-century that saw the foundation of the Royal Society), beginning to become a hated alternative to poetry-barbaric, ugly, offensive to cultured ears. By the early 20th century the process had developed so far that the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, in the Revolt of the Masses, could select science (together with democracy) as the key cause of modern "barbarism." He regretted that "while there are more scientists than ever before, there are far fewer cultured men."

Wordsworth believed that science should and would become a subject for poetry. But this has not happened; or not yet. Perhaps, as more scientists follow the trend of the writers I have mentioned, and make science available to general readers, it will permeate the culture and Wordsworth's prophecy will come true. As things stand, however, modern poets avoid science, and, it seems, because they feel inferior to it, not (like Coleridge) superior. WH Auden expresses the general loss of confidence: "When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes."

Resistance to science among "cultured men" has been strengthened by the objection that science is godless and amoral. Both charges need some qualification. It is perfectly possible for a scientist to believe in God, and even to find scientific evidence for God's existence. To sceptics this might suggest a rather nutty combination of laboratory-bore and Jesus-freak. But when a scientist of James Clerk Maxwell's eminence uses molecular structure as an argument for the existence of God, few will feel qualified to laugh. Of course, atheistical scientists are plentiful too. Richard Dawkins has voiced the suspicion that all religions are self-perpetuating mental viruses. But since everything science discovers can, by resolute believers, be claimed as part of God's design, science cannot be regarded as inherently anti-religious.

On the contrary, its aims seem identical with those of theology, in that they both seek to discover the truth. Science seeks the truth about the physical universe; theology about God. But these are not essentially distinct objectives, for theologians (or Christian theologians) believe God created the universe, so may be contacted through it. Admittedly, many scientists insist that science and religion are irreconcilable. The neuropsychologist Richard Gregory said: "The attitudes of science and religion are essentially different, and opposed, as science questions everything rather than accepts traditional beliefs." This does less than justice to religion's capacity for change. The whole Reformation movement in Europe, for example, was about not accepting traditional beliefs. It might be objected that science depends on evidence, while religion depends on revealed truth, and that this constitutes an insuperable difference. But for the religious, revealed truth is evidence. Theology might, without any paradox, be regarded as a science, committed to persistently questioning and reinterpreting the available evidence about God. True, by calling itself "theology" it appears to take for granted that God (theos) exists, which, scientifically speaking, is rather a careless usage. But there is no reason why theological research should not lead the researcher to atheism, and no doubt it often has, just as (as we have seen) scientific research has led some researchers to God.

The real antithesis of science seems to be not theology but politics. Whereas science is a sphere of knowledge, politics is a sphere of opinion. Politics is constructed out of preferences, which it strives to elevate to the status of truths. Politics depends on personalities and rhetoric; social class, race and nationality are elemental to it. All of these are irrelevant to science. Moreover, politics relies for its very existence upon conflict. It presupposes an enemy. It is essentially oppositional, built on warring prejudices. If this oppositional structure were to collapse, politics could not survive. Science, by contrast, is a co-operative not an oppositional venture. Of course, the history of science resounds with ferocious argument and the elaboration and destruction of rival theories. But when consensus is reached science does not collapse, it advances. Another crucial difference is that politics aims to coerce people. It is concerned with the exercise of power. Science has no such designs. It seeks knowledge. The consequence of this difference is that politics can and frequently does use violence (war, genocide, terrorism) to secure its ends. Science cannot. It would be ludicrous to go to war to decide upon the truth or otherwise of the second law of thermodynamics.

The ideal state I have described, in which science is free from and antithetical to politics, is not one that survives in the real world, where politics invades and contaminates science as it does everything else. But the warlike and destructive uses to which science has been put have nothing essentially to do with science; they are the responsibility of politics. Science's apolitical nature is worth stressing, because it helps us to defuse the charge that it is amoral. It allows us to see science's amorality not as a defect but as a condition of its strength and purity. Politics, of course, is inseparable from morality. It battens on morality, or on moralising, like a tapeworm on the gut. Consequently science could not free itself from politics except by being amoral.

Approaches to life that are, in moral terms, cold, clinical and inhuman, are sometimes labelled "scientific." But this is a misunderstanding, arising from the simple-minded transference of scientific method to moral attitudes. Science endorses no such transference, and no moral attitudes, cold or otherwise. In different minds, the same set of scientific propositions can prompt quite contrary moral responses.

Scientists themselves may have moral or immoral reasons for pursuing their research. But these leave no mark on their findings, which are right or wrong, to whatever degree, irrespective of their discoverer's motives. David Bodanis, in his book Web of Words (1988), may be right to trace a link between Pasteur's loathing of mass humanity and his connection of disease with bacteria. The scientific credentials of the connection are, however, neither strengthened nor weakened by Pasteur's misanthropy.

Why should we bother to know about science if it cannot help to resolve moral or religious questions? The best answer is that science is, simply, what is known, and the only alternative to it is ignorance. As science has grown, so, inevitably, has the ignorance of those who do not know about it. Within the mind of anyone educated exclusively in the arts, the area of darkness has spread enormously during the later 20th century, blotting out most of modern knowledge. A new species of educated but benighted being has come into existence-a creature unprecedented in the history of learning, where education has usually aimed to eradicate ignorance. "Exclusion from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age is bound to be experienced as a wound to our intellectual self-esteem," lamented the distinguished American literary critic Lionel Trilling.

More recently, however, ignorance of science has acquired a degree of political correctness. The Green movement, blaming science for global pollution, has contributed to this. So has feminism, which has demonized science as the embodiment of the male will-to-power. Even supposing these attacks were justified they would not constitute reasons for relinquishing science; rather the reverse. Countering the pollution that political misdirection of science has caused can only be achieved by scientific means. Even at its most basic level, the monitoring, protection and conservation of endangered plant and animal species is inevitably a scientific endeavour. Nor does the feminist complaint that science is dominated by male aims and attitudes justify the neglect or rejection of science by women. On the contrary, it makes urgently desirable the increased involvement of women in scientific education and research. This is the view put forward by one of the most cogent of the feminist critics, Evelyn Fox Keller, in her book Reflections on Gender and Science (1984). Herself a mathematical biophysicist, Keller sees scientific knowledge as "a universal goal," rather than the expression of destructive male drives.

The rejection of science extends to the young. The annual hordes competing for places on arts courses in British universities, and the trickle of science applicants, testify to that. Though most academics are wary of saying it straight out, the consensus seems to be that arts courses are popular because they are easier, and that most arts students would simply not be up to the demands of a science course. On this issue Sir Peter Medawar is worth quoting, since he is well qualified to judge, and he disagrees. Commenting on the career of James Watson, the young American who became world famous in 1953 when, with Crick, Wilkins and Franklin, he discovered the molecular structure of DNA, he says: "In England a schoolboy of Watson's precocity and style of genius would probably have been steered towards literary studies. It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English schools of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability-much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about. This is an advantage which scientists enjoy over most other people engaged in intellectual pursuits, and they enjoy it at all levels of capability. To be a first-rate scientist it is not necessary to be extremely clever, anyhow in a pyrotechnic sense. One of the great social revolutions brought about by scientific research has been the democratisation of learning. Anyone who combines strong common sense with an ordinary degree of imaginativeness can become a creative scientist, and a happy one besides, in so far as happiness depends upon being able to develop to the limit of one's abilities."

Medawar's remarks caused a considerable rumpus-especially his claim that scientists had something to be clever about, whereas arts students had not. Surely, he was asked, he did not intend to imply that Shakespeare and Tolstoy were not proper subjects for cleverness? Less attention was paid to his claim that science could bring happiness, and not only to geniuses but to people of ordinary ability. Yet that was surely the vital part of his message. If young people are to be wooed back to science, it will not be done by telling them that if they continue to spurn it, Britain will face economic decline (true as that may be). But if scientists demonstrate by their writing that Medawar's promises of happiness and self-fulfilment are true, they will not lack recruits.

Happiness-the happiness that comes from the knowledge that you are doing fruitful and worthwhile work-is a condition that breeds courtesy and consideration for others. The scientists I pestered when compiling The Faber Book of Science invariably showed these qualities. By contrast many inmates of university arts departments are, in my experience, fretful and bitter people, inclined to consider themselves undervalued in today's world, and prone to petty hatreds. The Cambridge literary critic FR Leavis was, of course, just such a type. His famous controversy with CP Snow over the "two cultures" in 1959 is sometimes referred to as if it had issued in victory for Leavis. Yet, as anyone who goes back to the documents will find, he succeeded only in being more gratuitously offensive than Snow either was or tried to be. The recent biography of Leavis by Ian MacKillop tells how, after he had delivered his insulting lecture, calling Snow "as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be," the Spectator wanted to publish it. Lawyers warned, however, that it was libellous. So a messenger-a friend of Snow's-was sent to obtain permission. As Snow was suffering from detached retina he could not read it himself, but his wife read it to him and, although evidently hurt, he immediately said it should be printed in full. What he displayed on this occasion was magnanimity, a virtue unknown to Leavis, and one which, if their two personalities are any guide, is fostered by science far more effectively than by the arts.