Madame Bovary on a beam of light

I’ve been rereading ‘Madame Bovary’ and am struck, all over again, at how Flaubert lets us draw our own conclusions about Emma Bovary’s actions, without forcing any ‘morals’ down our throats.
Flaubert was one of a set of nineteenth century writers, along with others such as Zola, who were very influenced by the rise in science and who saw himself as a sort of human and/or social experimenter. Many other writers have also consciously seen themselves in this way. Brecht commented that he conducted experiments on audiences with his dramas and spoke of turning the theatre into a laboratory.

‘Copenhagen’ by Michael Frayn can be seen as an experiment in the way it repeats variations of the real-life conversation between Heisenberg and Bohr in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen, in a repeated attempt to understand what really happened at this meeting. But, literature isn’t really the same as an experiment? In ‘Copenhagen’ the audience is presented with different versions of the events but we never get to understand what really happened, and why. But that’s not the aim of this particular experiment. What we’re left with is an understanding that it is fundamentally impossible to know what happened that night in Copenhagen, despite all the written records.
That understanding is a satisfactory result of this dramatic experiment. It doesn’t matter that this experiment cannot really happen, that it’s only acted out for us. It’s actually a perfect example of a thought experiment.

Thought experiments have a long pedigree in science. They’re best characterised as hypothetical experiments which we can imagine, but which we’re not able to perform. They allow us to set up a scenario and think through the repercussions. Einstein, influenced by the philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach, was a whiz at developing thought experiments. Some of the best ones (such as imagining a person riding on a beam of light) show how his theories developed from considering everyday objects such as clocks and rulers. They also provide the most accessible illustrations of the ramifications of his theories, without having to wade through all the maths.

As twentieth century physics became more esoteric and abstruse, physicists became more and more reliant on thought experiments to illustrate the implications of their work.
The most famous of these thought experiments; Schrodinger’s cat, was developed as a reductio ad absurdam by Schrodinger to criticise the bizarre, and clearly to him wrong headed, ‘standard’ interpretation of quantum physics. In this experiment a cat is locked in a box with a vial of poison. After a fixed amount of time, depending on a random process, the cat will either be killed by the poison, or not. But according to quantum physics, until we open the box, observe the cat, and therefore measure the outcome of the experiment; the cat is in a superposition of quantum states and is both dead and alive.

This experiment is not about to be performed in any laboratory soon. It doesn’t need to be. Thought experiments are a beautiful use of imagination in science. They allow the scientist to imagine ‘what if?’ This is precisely the question that fiction writers ask. Just because the results aren't scientifically provable doesn't mean they're not true.

Time takes a cigarette...

The concept of time in science is problematic. It’s everywhere, yet elusive. The one-way flow of time from the ‘past’ (i.e. what we remember), to the ‘future’ (what we cannot yet recall) is the ghost in the machinery of physics. Newton’s laws on motion, quantum mechanics, general relativity; all these theories are symmetrical with respect to time. They don’t invoke or explain its passage. As is well known, the only equation in physics that does directly invoke the passage of time is the second law of thermodynamics, which says that things tend from an ordered state (low entropy) to a disordered state (high entropy). One way of explaining time’s flow from past to future is to say that the universe started off in a very low state of entropy, which is subsequently increasing.
So, does biology fare any better? DNA can work as a natural ‘clock’ in the way that it accumulates mutations. We can compare DNA from different organisms and estimate when these organisms diverged. I suppose this is similar to using the decay of carbon 14 to date organic matter.
This gives the study of DNA a natural rhythm, perhaps.

Time flows naturally in fiction. I can’t think of any novel that is set in one ‘present’ moment. There are novels that are set in the present but that present does move on. Perhaps by their very length, novels preclude the examination of the single moment, in a way that short poetry or short stories can. But novels (or epic poetry such as the Iliad) can play with time, make it double back on itself, even run backwards (e.g. Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis), and examine moments in time over and over again from different perspectives. Plays can do this too; Michael Frayn’s play, ‘Copenhagen’ consists of conversations between Bohr, his wife, Margrethe, and Heisenberg[1]. Within each conversation, time flows ordinarily, but the whole play is set in the afterlife, and all three characters are dead. As such they are unable to move or develop, they are curiously static in time, and the play itself does not move forward. It succeeds, brilliantly, because it takes a single point in time (the real-life conversation between Bohr and Heisenberg) and unfolds it to expose all the complexities that exist in that moment, like hidden extra dimensions suggested in string theory.
But what do we mean by the ‘present’? The moment that we exist in is always hemmed in by the past and the future. We walk a knife-edge between what we remember and what we anticipate. Is it just a trick of the consciousness, that we think we ‘are’ at any given point in time?
A novel, poem or short story is a system of words that relies on relationships between them to function. And yet they are always read sequentially. We are taught to read by moving from one word to the next in an ordered way. We can possibly read a short sentence at once by glancing at it, but no more than that. So our ‘present’ corresponds to a short block of text, and poets can explicitly take advantage of this in the way they present their work on the page. Is a line of poetry equivalent to a present moment? And how does this relate to breathing? And music? When we listen to music we hear a phrase, the aural equivalent to a line of poetry. The phrase is there in our head, but it continuously gets superseded. If our perception of the present were any different, e.g. if it were shorter than it is, would poetry or music ‘work’ in the same way?
The sequential nature of literature and music has a nice analogy in the structure of DNA, with its rows of neatly ordered bases. And yet, like literature or music, there is something in the ‘wholeness’ of DNA that is not present in its parts. Different genes may be responsible for different functions in the parent organism, but they affect each other, they don’t work independently of each other. A novel is like that too. Whilst we can only retain in our short term memory a small proportion of what we are reading when we read a novel, we also retain an overall structure. The sentences we read accumulate in our memory to create an impression of the overall work.
[1] I’ve referred to this play before, see my third blog. It’s being performed at the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum this April.

What do 'scientists' do?

I have been observing what people do at the Forum. Many people here describe themselves as social scientists. The snobby physicist part of me (and physicists can be terribly snobby about other scientists) says that any profession which feels the need to add the word ‘scientist’ to its name wants some sort of validation. Is this word used simply to add value and convey authority? What does the word ‘scientist’ actually mean?

When this word was first invented in the 1830s, it was used to express commonality between people who were groping their way towards an understanding of their surroundings. So, it could be seen as an identifying badge, to enable people to exchange information about processes as well as results.

But now it’s over-used, particularly by the media, with the result that it’s become a sort of monolithic entity that can shut out non-‘scientists’ because it conveys little understanding of the nature of the work done. For example (and these are all taken from the BBC website);

“Scientists probe matter at atomic level”

“Scientists discover the body of Copernicus”

“Scientists clone from frozen mice”

“Scientists try to track hedgehogs”

“Scientists meet for alien summit”

This overuse of the word covers up what people actually do. All these ‘scientists’ may (or may not) use a common methodology to do their job, but by lumping physicists in with economists, biologists, astronomers, archaeologists etc. we render invisible the very aspects of their jobs that are interesting and unique. And hardly anyone actually describes themselves as a ‘scientist’. The word doesn’t convey enough information.

This imprecision is irritating to me as an ex-astronomer, but also as a writer.

Fiction likes to use precise terms for its exploration. Good fiction feels more real and concrete than bad fiction. It tends to use more specific details and examples of external reality, and the reader can ‘see’ the end results better. But – there are differences in the way that ‘scientists’ and fiction writers use words. Fiction isn’t bothered about, in fact it revels in, the different pictures that different readers make with an author’s words. For all his forensically realist writing, Flaubert can only do so much to define Emma Bovary. My image of her is different to yours. The fictional process relies on the reader and is only completed in the reader’s head; an unread novel does not fully exist.

In contrast, when ‘scientists’ write, they aim to convey their experiments or theories with minimal imprecision so that anyone reading their descriptions should be able to share the same view of reality. So, is there always going to be a tension when writing about science in fiction when the processes of reading science and reading fiction are quite different?

Or does science writing always fail at some level? Does the person reading a scientific paper ever share the reality of the author? And does it even matter? Look at the debate over the meaning of the wave function in quantum mechanics. People argue over how much physical reality that function actually has. Is it real or just a mathematical device? It doesn’t stop people from solving the relevant equation and applying the results to ‘real’ life.

The uncertainty over the interpretation of quantum mechanics is cleverly exploited in ‘Copenhagen’ by Michael Frayn, a play which dramatises the (in)famous meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Here the play gives multiple views of that meeting but never claims to offer the ‘truth’. It can’t. It’s a nice irony that Heisenberg and Bohr, two of the main architects of quantum mechanics, could not agree on the point of that meeting. Had Heisenberg gone there to tell Bohr about the Nazis’ plans to develop an atomic bomb? Or to get information from Bohr on the Allies’ plans?

It’s a much better fictional telling than ‘Einstein and Eddington’ (see my first blog entry) of how war and science impact on each other.