Imagining accuracy

How important is accuracy in fiction? If you’re writing about something ‘real’ based on real information, experiences, or events do you have to stick to the facts?

If I spot a mistake in the use of science in fiction, it can throw me off course. I feel that the universe set up by the writer is flawed. If the writer can make one mistake, then perhaps others have been made too. Should I continue to believe in this universe?
And I’m more likely to be on the hunt for mistakes if I suspect that the author is using science for reasons other than telling a story.
For example, some authors appear to use science to bolster their authority. Ian McEwan does this in ‘Enduring Love’ with his use of quasi-medical papers to give a scientific ‘explanation’ for the way that one of the characters behaves. Others use science to provide pretty-sounding metaphors. Quantum physics and relativity seem to be particularly popular. The first line of ‘Cat’s Eye’ by Margaret Atwood is
‘Time is not a line but a dimension…’
After I read this oxymoron (a line does have a dimension), I very nearly didn’t read on.

And yet. A desire for accuracy can shade into pedantry. The narrator of ‘Cat’s Eye’ is an artist. She’s not likely to understand the finer points of general relativity, and more importantly, she doesn’t need to for the story to work. All she, and therefore the reader, needs to know is that her brother has become a physicist and is removed from the hum-drumness of daily life (This depiction of an egg-head scientist seems somewhat clichéd but that’s another matter).

Too close a reading of the text in an effort to check its accuracy can stop the reader from appreciating the multiple interpretations that are always possible. When I first read the following lines from the poem ‘Carnal Knowledge’ by Rebecca Elson;
‘Performed the calculus
Of the imaginary i…’
I took the ‘imaginary i’ to refer to the square root of minus 1, which is depicted as i in maths and is the foundation of all so-called imaginary numbers. It took several re-readings of the poem for me to realise that this imaginary i could also be a person, a body. (I don’t know why it took me so long, the whole poem is about bodies…)
My knowledge of maths perhaps led me to assume that there was only one meaning of this phrase, and this actually prevented me from getting a wider appreciation of what the poem could offer. I might also have made this assumption because I knew that Elson herself was an astronomer and much of her writing is about astronomy, and science.

So I think there is a danger of being too proprietorial about knowledge. It shouldn’t be off-limits. If writers make mistakes which the vast majority of their readers won’t spot, then what does it matter? They have at least stretched their language to encompass new ideas.

Petals and particles

Popular (and unpopular) science frequently relies on the use of metaphor in explanations. Metaphors have occasionally even been responsible for scientific discovery; in 1865 August Kekulé dreamt of a snake biting its own tale. He said this was the inspiration to his figuring out the structure of benzene.

The description of the expanding universe as a balloon being pumped up is ubiquitous in cosmology. But this ubiquity can be a problem; too often the metaphor ‘becomes’ the thing you are describing, and nothing is ever exactly the same as anything else. Any description of reality is limited in its accuracy by its reliance on words.

In quantum physics, light can either be thought of as particles or as waves, depending on how you observe it (the same is true of sub-atomic particles, i.e. they can equally well be thought of as sub-atomic waves). Thomas Young’s famous experiment at the beginning of the nineteenth century showed that light makes diffraction patterns when travelling through parallel slits. Diffraction is a property of waves. Conversely, Einstein’s early work showed that the photo-electric effect, in which light strikes a metal surface and liberates electrons, can only be explained if you treat light as a particle. So, clearly, our everyday concepts of ‘particles’ or ‘waves’, which are complementary, are inadequate to explain the true nature of light.

But physicists never let mere paradoxes stop them and this drawback was elevated to ‘the complementarity principle’ by Niels Bohr. He stated that something can be both one thing and its opposite, and that it didn’t matter, because physics can only be concerned with what you observe and not with the true underlying nature of reality. ‘There is nothing outside the experiment.’ (A nice counterpoint to Derrida’s ‘there is nothing outside the text’.) Different experiments show different aspects of reality, but there is no reason to suppose that you can have an experiment which shows all aspects.

The complementarity principle is an interesting riposte to those people who accuse scientists of having one-track minds, unable to see the subtleties inherent in reality. Keats claimed that Newton ‘unweaved the rainbow’ by explaining the physics behind this phenomenon. On the contrary, Newton deepens our perception of the rainbow through his description of light being diffracted by water droplets in the atmosphere.

Ezra Pound’s famous poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ runs (in its entirety)
‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.’

The two images in this poem are so finely balanced that they mirror each other and it is never clear which is the metaphor and which is the reality. Dangerous for science, but prescient in its complementarity. Pound wrote this in 1913, when Bohr was developing his model of the atom.

Which comes first, style or content?

When I write, I worry about both style and content. I want my sentences to be pleasing aesthetically, but also meaningful.

Perhaps I am displaying my scientific roots by always making aesthetics play handmaiden to the characters and the story - the actual 'facts'. And yet – there is a powerful appreciation of aesthetics running through science, as well as maths. There is always the search for ‘an elegant solution’ to the problem in hand. What is meant by elegance here? I think it’s something to do with simplicity and conciseness, and perhaps novelty.

Aesthetically pleasing science makes apparently complex phenomena simple. Why are there so many different species of finches on the Galapagos – all with different habits? Darwin said that they’ve each evolved to fit a precise environmental niche.

It can relate disparate phenomena by revealing the underlying laws. Newton showed the movements of orbiting planets and falling apples can be explained by a universal force called gravity. Maxwell’s equations brought together all the different observations of changing electric and magnetic fields to show that each is a transformation of the other.

It leads to new areas and gives big bang for your bucks. (It’s no good having a good-looking theory if you can’t do much with it.) Einstein’s concept of light as a particle led to a whole new understanding of the structure of the atom.

It can decide between different ideas. Penzias and Wilson’s discovery that the thermal noise they detected at Bell laboratory was the remnant of an early stage in the evolution of the universe (and not pigeon droppings which was their initial assumption), ruled out the steady state model in favour of the big bang one.

It may even be visually pleasing in some way. Crick and Watson’s analysis of DNA revealing its double helix structure, has created an image now embedded in our collective consciousness.

Behind many of these aspects of aesthetics lies simplicity. Simplicity is a powerful driver in creating science. Occam’s razor says that we should not ‘multiply entities’ unnecessarily; so if you’re fitting a mathematical model to your data, you choose the one with the fewest parameters. And a new scientific theory should have as few arbitrary factors as possible. But in judging competing scientific theories, it’s not always obvious which one best obeys Occam’s razor.

For example, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics says that a wave function is attached to each possible outcome of an event. Once a particular outcome is measured, the wave functions corresponding to all the other outcomes collapse. Until that happens everything related to the event is in a sort of probability ‘fuzz’ (for example, the cat in the box is both dead and alive, until you open the box and discover its fate). But what exactly is a measurement? By definition, it has to be a non-quantum event, otherwise you just get more fuzz. So, the interpretation fundamentally limits what quantum mechanics can describe, by saying there always needs to be something outside its description!

The Many Worlds Interpretation avoids this in-built limitation, but only at the expense of having to start up a new universe each time an event happens. This seems to be multiplying entities to an extreme degree; and quite wasteful.

So which is the ‘simpler’ explanation of quantum reality? They clearly both have their problems, and not ones which can easily be resolved by examining their aesthetics.

The ghosts in the human genome machine

The purpose of the Human Genome Project was to map all the individual bases that make up our DNA. There are four types of these bases, adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, and they combine to form genes.

Now that the project has achieved its main goal and finished the sequencing, the next step is to identify the actual genes as distinct from the majority of the material, the so-called ‘junk DNA’. (Only a tiny proportion of the overall DNA actually consists of genes.)

Humans share 99.9% of their genes, and so the information discovered through the HGP is relevant to all of us. As we have about 20,000-25,000 genes, only a handful are unique to any one of us. But whose DNA was actually sequenced? The project used samples from anonymous donors. Neither the scientists nor the donors know whose samples actually ended up being sequenced, but it is clear that more than one person’s was used, i.e. the information we have is an amalgamation from different donors. Because the ‘map’ created by the HGP is actually linear – a sequence of letters corresponding to the order of bases, at any one point in the sequence, the information we have corresponds to just one unknown donor, but we don’t know who.

This deliberate uncertainty interests me. Scientists (whatever their discipline) spend so much time battling uncertainty, trying to quantify or eliminate it from their work. Much of this uncertainty is caused by random fluctuations or systematic biases in what they are trying to measure. Both need to be understood and accounted for, if you’re trying to make sense of your external world. And more fundamental uncertainties exist in quantum physics, which are not simply due to errors or limitations in the way that we measure things.

So it seems counter-intuitive to increase the amount of uncertainty in this major experiment. But clearly it has several purposes. Uncertainty about knowledge of the donors can protect them from the consequences of having their genome sequenced. For example, subsequent identification of genes relating to disease can’t be attributed back to a particular donor. Also, by banishing information on the particular donors, the experiment is able to interest everyone. It encourages us all to feel that that map has a direct relevance to each and every one of us. As a result, the project is allowed to gain a certain amount of authority.

But you could just as easily say that the project is relevant to no one. What does it mean to sequence a genome of a person that doesn’t actually exist?

This partial information is an excellent example of synecdoche, a type of metaphor in which part of a thing is used to stand in for its entirety. We don’t yet have DNA sequences for all humans, and we don’t yet know which parts of the sequence we do have are shared by all humans. So ‘The Human Genome Project’ is a misnomer.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too harsh. In practice, it’s actually impossible to communicate without using synecdoche. Fiction writers know that they can’t get across the entirety of their fictional characters. They write about aspects of these characters, and the reader uses these a bit like dried milk, to reconstitute them and make up their own pictures.

Or you can say ‘there is nothing outside the text’, and therefore the human genome is just a sequence of bases, and we are free to give it as much or as little significance as we wish.

Free will with every packet of cornflakes

Yesterday I spent all day writing. What I produced was rubbish, all 2000 words of it. The words were flat and lifeless with no energy at all. In contrast, last week I was working on short story and the words zinged across the screen. I didn’t know where those words came from, I hadn’t planned them in advance. They just appeared.

Every fiction writer knows the excitement of setting up a situation and then being surprised at what happens next. Your characters can behave in ways that surprise you. Are they exhibiting free will? Even when you consciously plot out your characters’ stories, you have to be sensitive to what feels right and what doesn’t. If you force your characters to do something for the sake of the overall story, they may turn into puppets. They lose their ‘divine spark’ and the story can feel over-engineered. (Interestingly, this may only be true in literature. In Kleist’s famous essay on marionettes, he pointed out that they can be more graceful and more likely to achieve ‘perfection’ in their movements than humans, precisely because they lack human’s self-consciousness which, according to him, inhibits a complete understanding of the universe.)

Nowadays, free will is elusive. It suffered a fatal blow in the seventeenth century from Newton’s discovery of universal physical laws. The corresponding vision of a wholly predictable and mechanistic universe which only needs to be set going before it simply carries on for ever, doesn’t seem to need free will.

A universe that allows time travel (ours doesn’t appear to rule it out) must also impinge upon free will in some way, if only to prevent logical paradoxes (think of ‘Back to the Future’).

Is there any space for free will in quantum physics? After all, it (re)introduces uncertainty into physical systems, albeit on atomic scales. But this uncertainty (in the ability to know simultaneously an object’s position and momentum) is random. And when we exhibit free will, we don’t think we behave randomly.

Geneticists don’t have much time for free will, either. We’re creatures ruled by genes and all our behaviour can be explained by those genes’ desire to replicate themselves. Even apparent altruism to other people only seems to exist because we share practically all of our genetic material (99.9%).

So perhaps we enjoy reading about characters in novels who appear to exercise choice because that choice is a mirage in our real lives. Do our fictional characters have more free will than we do?

In thee (author) I trust?

I’m currently reading a historical novel, Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, which tells the story of the machinations of the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century and the row between Newton and Leibniz over who first invented the calculus. The book is a mixture of real and imaginary characters and it’s narrated by the latter. I think it’s these imaginary characters that move this book firmly into the realm of fiction, without them the reader would be more likely to wonder if what we were being told about Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, Charles II et al. were ‘real’. The addition of the fictional makes us feel secure that to a large extent all the interactions, even those between the real characters, are made up. (To that extent they’re not real characters at all).

The relationship between the reader and the author needs trust on several levels, overtly in the case of scientific narratives, less so for fiction. The most general trust requirement that the reader has, is that what they are about to read is interesting and worth spending their time (and perhaps money) on. In fiction, the reader needs to trust the author to invent a coherent universe, one that operates according to some specific laws (even if the author is the only one that knows those laws). If something happens in the story that seems to violate its fabric, then the reader stops trusting or caring. (See John Gardner’s excellent book ‘The Art of Fiction for a more detailed discussion of this point).

Of course, you don’t need to trust the narrator who may be unreliable and whose vision of events may be completely skewed. For example, Pip in ‘Great Expectations’ assumes that his mysterious benefactor is Miss Havisham and initially there is no reason to doubt this. The interest in the novel partly lies in exploring how this error affects Pip’s development. Barbara in ‘Notes on a Scandal’ tells us she only has Sheba’s best interests at heart. By the end of the novel, this is patently untrue.

Part of the fun in reading novels with unreliable narrators is working out the reasons for this unreliability. And even here, I think there needs to be some initial trust in the narrator. Someone, who from the very first page is clearly lying, is going to have to be incredibly engaging to keep the reader involved, because it will be so much more hard work just to figure out how this universe works.

Novels with unreliable narrators tend to be written in the first person, so are all first person narrators inherently unreliable due to their necessarily restricted and partial outlook?

Trust in scientific papers operates at various levels, some of them more explicit than others. Most obviously, the reader has to trust the authors’ integrity and believe that what is reported in the work actually happened. If this is violated it can have a huge far-reaching impact on the science. For example, one infamous case of scientific fraud is that of Paul Kammerer and the midwife toads in the twenties. Kammerer said he’d shown that the Lamarckian version of evolution was correct, in that an organism’s environment can directly affect how it develops and the attributes that it passes onto offspring (in violation of Darwinian natural selection which holds that genes mutate randomly and those organisms which are better adapted to their environment – by chance – are more likely to survive and mate and produce offspring, thereby ensuring that their genes are passed on.)

Male toads, from toad species which mate in water, have nuptial pads on their feet to enable them to hold onto their females. Toad species which mate on land don’t need, and therefore don’t have these pads. Kammerer claimed that by forcing the landlubbers to mate in water, he’d got them to develop nuptial pads in only a couple of generations. This caused a furore until it was shown that the nuptial pads on one of his specimens had been faked, and were caused by injections of ink. Kammerer committed suicide shortly afterwards.

This discredited Lamarckian ideas. And yet, how can a fake result be used to disprove a theory? Just because it doesn’t disprove Darwinian ideas, it doesn’t mean that the alternative is wrong. But this is what happened – bad science has been used to discredit Lamarckianism. (Alongside good science which favours Darwin, of course).

Fraud is (presumably) rarer than inadvertent mistakes. Science is difficult to do, mistakes happen. So how does the reader know whether to trust that the author hasn’t messed up?
Popper argued that science should be falsifiable i.e. you should be able to refute a theory if you get an experimental result that disagrees with it. In practice because of the possibility of mistakes there is more caution than this implies, and scientists are unlikely to chuck away an entire framework on the basis of a single result, simply because that result could be wrong.

More insidiously, scientists can be skewed towards a specific reading of their results based on their prejudices. So, trust is required to assume that the author has been open-minded and considered all options.

Of course another factor that influences the reading of a scientific paper is the authors’ reputations. If you know the authors, and accept their previous work, you are more likely to believe their current work. Is this true in fiction? Are you more likely to read a book based on the author’s reputation? Can the book ever stand alone?

You also have to trust what you are not being told. In fiction, much of the art lies not in writing but in editing, the cutting out of extraneous words to leave only the essentials. You have to trust that what has been left out is inessential. In science this is more problematic. Many experiments go unreported, because they don’t give interesting results. This is a particular problem in medicine with the testing of new drugs. If the results are inconclusive or unfavourable, they are more likely to go unreported than if they appear to support the hypothesis that the drug ‘works’.

From A to B

Writing fiction presents the writer with a near-infinite list of choices, not only on the subject matter, but also on the style and the process. For example, most stories are written in the past tense, but not all. Sometimes, I find that when I write in the present tense, my writing becomes more immediate and more fluid. I can ‘see’ my characters better as I can understand what they are doing right now. I don’t have to interpret their past actions for my readers.

However, this sort of writing can go badly wrong, and you can tell when it does because the characters in the story get stuck in a sort of realisation of Zeno’s paradox, in which an infinite number of steps are needed to get anywhere. The characters stop being able to do anything, because every single action occupies all of the present. When you’re concentrating on the present and not the future or the past, the present can seem like eternity. The writer chops the present down into finer and finer slices until time stops completely. This is probably a good thing if you’re meditating. It’s not a good thing if you want to write interesting fiction.

Of course, the antidote is to know which of the present moments are the important ones and leap from one to the next, leaving out all the others. A story never really flows continuously and smoothly from one moment to the next, and consequently the space-time in the story becomes rather lumpy and quantised. If the writer is good, the reader doesn’t notice these invisible joins.
The use of the past tense in literature is a method of telling the reader that the narrator has seen these events happen in the past and is relaying them to the reader. Using the present tense does away with this artifice, and replaces it with another. The reader is now ‘watching’ the events unfold before his or her eyes; this is the literary equivalent of watching a film. Was this method of writing influenced by the rise of film in the early twentieth century?

In scientific narratives (i.e. papers published in scientific journals), there is also a subtle editing of time and space. In these sorts of writings, you never read about the nights spent at the telescope waiting for the cloud to go away and the cabin fever brought on by spending two weeks alone at 10,000 feet observing the same star night after night. You never usually read about the things that go wrong, the wrong star observed, the wrong chemicals mixed, the endless debugging of the computer program. These things are not supposed to be relevant to the experiment.

The actual work reported in scientific papers is summarised in the past tense, although the results are reported in the present. So the work occupies a specific moment in time, but its outcome should stand for all eternity, even after the invisible narrator is long gone. And the passive voice is always used, to indicate that the presence of the author did not impact on the results. In fact, the scientist is the ghost in the machine. Events unfold with a certain inevitability, the stars were observed, the gases were mixed, the temperature was taken, the theory was developed, but who did all this?