Millennial fever has been spreading through the scientific societies. The primary symptom is a fad among society journals to survey readers with the question: who was the greatest scientist of the millennium?
Anyone with sense must know that this is a question without an answer, so I am surprised that scientists, trained to ask questions with answers, have indulged it. Yet they have, in large numbers. Indeed, it occurs to me that there are now more scientists thinking about this than at any other time in history.
Despite my reservations, then, not wanting to miss out on any great movement of human thought, I have decided to offer my own contribution to the "greatest scientist" debate. And the first thing that I want to establish is my antipathy to the three favourites-Newton, Darwin and Einstein.
I am totally against Isaac Newton, and not only because he was an alchemist and a theologian. The truth is that he was a bad-tempered, paranoid, megalomaniacal woman-hater who, in his spare time as a physicist, just happened to have a bit of luck with his principia thing. Although even that is of dubious merit. What use are the laws of motion to the man in the street? What good is the law of gravity when what the world needs is a bit more levity?
Newton was a mere hobbyist, a crank whose life was mainly directed at lumbering school students with calculus. Calculus schmalculus! He should have taken his flexions and his forces, and bottled and buried them.
Charles Darwin isn't much better. I always thought it highly suspect that he married his first cousin and had ten children, as though driven by his own theory to procreate with an anti-Malthusian abandon. But even laying aside the man (as his cousin did), I think we could have done just as well without his poppycock theory, too. Natural selection was an inspiration for Nazis and evolutionary pop psychologists alike. It seems to bring out the worst in people, intellectually, while at the same time not leaving us the gratification of hubris. Darwin unrepentantly reduced us all to the status of apes. He has undermined the possibility of any sort of comfort from a belief in the literal truth of the Bible. And his damnable idea has subverted any possibility that we should view ourselves as central figures in the universe. I think we can leave him out.
Ditto with Albert Einstein. Phoney and peace-loving in his later life, he was always a closet militarist. His most famous formula, E=mc2, is no less than a recipe for annihilation; his letter to Franklin Roosevelt, pleading with him to make an atom bomb, has all the hallmarks of a boy who loved fireworks and never really grew up.
Besides, I am reluctant to bestow yet another award on a man whose reputation for intellectual brilliance has already left the rest of humanity with an inferiority complex. "I'm no Einstein," most of us find ourselves saying from time to time. And with good reason. What did he do anyway? The man is more famous for his hairstyle than his great works. And it's worth noting-because I always thought this was a bit funny-that like Darwin, Einstein, too, married his first cousin (a form of special relativity?) and fathered a bastard (promoting a form of general relativity?).
If we cannot have these three, whom else can we choose as our beacon of scientific greatness? The people's favourite scientists (as distinct from the scientists' scientist) are almost certainly two people: James Watson and Francis Crick, of which one (Watson) looms larger in the popular consciousness than the other. But can we give our prize to a man famed as much for his high jinks, love of scientific espionage, and bitchy memoirs as for the piddlingly straightforward kindergarten-style model-building of DNA he completed in between holidays in his late 20s? If there is one thing that can be said about Watson, it is that he has a flair for public relations (a flair he may have lost-I recently saw him give a talk with his fly undone). But regardless of his merits or otherwise, it seems unreasonable to give a millennial greatness prize to a living person whose flaws and frailties have not yet been smoothed over by the manufacture of a marble mausoleum bust or a flagstone in Westminster Abbey.
So who else is there? Someone who didn't know any better might choose Alexander Fleming, who once admitted that he didn't deserve his Nobel prize for the discovery of penicillin. A witty pacifist might pick BF Skinner, the American psychologist who showed that pigeons could be taught to direct guided missiles.
After about a week of careful deliberation and close reading of more than 1,000 biographies, I have finally made my choice: Alfred Kinsey. By the time he died, Alfred Kinsey had the largest collection of gall moths in the US, and had made the largest number of human penis measurements in the world. Here is a man whose life's work could stand. In my opinion, this is the kind of candidate a contest such as this deserves. n
