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.

A spark of life

I’ve been reading about the process of cloning. Some of this process seems conceptually simple, obvious even, yet is clearly very technically demanding. For example, part of the process requires removing the nucleus from a cell and inserting it into an egg which has had its own nucleus removed (a nucleus is the part of a cell which contains the DNA, and this in turn contains the genes needed to instruct a growing embryo what to do and how to grow).

Then, a small electric shock is applied across the egg and its new contents. This shock apparently has two purposes. One is to help the nucleus ‘fuse’ to the egg and the other is to ‘activate’ the cell division process (which is what happens when an egg is fertilised by a sperm), and help the egg on its way to becoming a new organism.

This process of applying an electric shock also seems simple in one way. But it’s not obvious why it should work, and I can’t find a proper explanation in any popular account of cloning. How can an electric shock mimic the natural process of fertilisation? Why did anyone think this would work?

I find this lack of information unsettling and it seems at odds with the rest of the detailed information about cells, nuclei and so on. The account that we do have brings to mind the scene in ‘Frankenstein’ in which the monster is brought to life by an electric shock. Is that why we’re not given more information about the process, because it’s assumed that we’re familiar with it already, through reading or watching ‘Frankenstein’?

To be fair, the idea that electricity is linked to life has been around for longer than ‘Frankenstein’. When she wrote the book, Mary Shelley was influenced by Galvani’s experiments in the late eighteenth century. Galvani found that when he applied an electric shock to dead frogs’ legs they twitched, leading him to think that electricity was the vis viva, a sort of life force.

This intertwining of science and stories about bringing inanimate objects to life goes back further. The Golem is a creature in Jewish culture made out of clay and dirt who is created to protect Jews. One of the best known versions of this story is set in Prague in the sixteenth century. The Rabbi of Prague makes the Golem in order to protect the Jews in the city from anti-Semitic attacks. Here, the creature is not activated with electricity, but by having the word ‘emet’ (Hebrew for ‘truth’) inscribed on his forehead (in some versions a piece of paper inscribed with this word is inserted into his mouth). He does as he’s told and he protects the Jews, but he gets increasingly violent himself, until the Rabbi is forced to deactivate him, and he does this by rubbing out the first letter of ‘emet’ leaving ‘met’, which means ‘death’.

The fact that words are used to bring the Golem to life, and then to kill him off again, is a nice metaphor for the power of language. It feels more precise than a flash of electricity; perhaps that's because there is more information in a word than in a spark.

What does illness mean?

Writers love disease. It fulfills all sorts of useful functions; it can be used to investigate fictional characters, and even give them a greater depth and nobility (e.g. ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Mann). It can act as a metaphor for societal problems (think of ‘The Plague’ by Camus). Illness is not allowed to be itself.

It’s not just writers who like this way of thinking. It seems to be ubiquitous. But this attachment of metaphor to illness is very pre-science. TB was thought to favour sensitive, artistic souls, until Koch’s discovery of the relevant bacterium[1]. Cancer doesn’t have a simple one-size-fits-all cause or cure, so people speculate that it can be associated with, or caused by, repressed feelings, and cured by having a positive attitude.

In her famous essay ‘Illness and its Metaphors’, Susan Sontag criticised the widespread use of military metaphors in the discussion of cancer. Implicit in many descriptions of life with cancer is the assumption that if you don’t battle against the disease you are surrendering, and must bear the blame if the disease wins. She pointed out that many major illnesses have their own set of distinct metaphors, and what these metaphors really tell us about is our attitude to the illness, not the illness itself.

The metaphors get more complicated when the boundaries of the illness itself get fuzzier. What if we discover we are carriers of an illness that hasn’t actually caused any symptoms – yet? What if an illness runs in our families but no one’s yet found any relevant gene that could be deemed to be a cause? Are we ‘ill’ in either of those circumstances?

Illness has an extra dimension now; the dimension of time. And a new grammar to describe it; the grammar of the possible, and the subjunctive.
The commonly used metaphor for genes’ potential to cause illness is a ‘timebomb’ waiting to go off; something external buried deep within ourselves that is primed to explode at an time unknown to us. This ‘timebomb’ is another use of the military metaphor, and as with cancer, externalises the cause of the illness in a way that is essentially incorrect. Genes are not external forces (although they may, or may not, act according to external forces). They are part of us, they help define us.

We can behave in ways that may lessen the probability of us developing an illness (note that I don’t use the word ‘protect’ – another metaphor from the battlefield) but we are our illnesses as well as our health. We can’t own one without the other.

We need to develop new metaphors.

[1] Actually, cause and effect get jumbled here. TB was also thought to make the sufferer more pre-disposed to an artistic temperament if they weren’t already so inclined.

Monkeys and Moons

You may have realised by now that this year is both the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth as well as the 150th anniversary of the first publication of ‘The Origin of Species’.

It’s also the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of the telescope. Why is this worth commemorating? In 1609, Galileo looked through his telescope and observed the moons of Jupiter for the first time. He saw that they were orbiting around Jupiter, so he realised that not everything in the sky moved around the Earth. This was experimental proof for Copernicus’ heliocentric model and it relegated us and our Earth away from the centre of our Universe.
This relegation has continued ever since, to the present day. We now know that we’re on a small planet orbiting around an average sized sun, in a rather large spiral galaxy, which is only one of many galaxies in the Local Group and one of several million (known) galaxies in the Universe.

Darwin’s work was necessarily more focussed on humanity than Galileo’s, but it helped to emphasise the links between humans and other living organisms at the expense of the uniqueness of humanity. Our place in the universe is not particularly special, and neither are we, compared to other species. (We can’t yet quantify how unique the combination of us on our planet is, compared to other similar Earth-like planets in the universe.)

It’s interesting that the anniversary of Darwin’s work seems to have a much higher profile than Galileo’s. Of course, that’s been helped by the double whammy of Darwin’s anniversaries falling in the same year. And this year is International Year of Astronomy, which was at least partly triggered by the Galileo anniversary. IYA is a big deal; there are lots of astronomical events going on all over the world to celebrate it.

Even so, I can’t see any commemoration of the wider implications of what Galileo found, outside of the scope of the actual science. (Of course, these implications were realised by the Church during Galileo’s lifetime, leading to his infamous trial and subsequent house arrest.)
In contrast, we’re possibly in danger of developing Darwin-fatigue. There is oodles of coverage on TV, radio, newspapers, books… and the impact of evolution on every other aspect of human endeavour hasn’t been missed.

I think this difference in emphasis has two possible causes. Darwin’s work is not finished. Evolution is endlessly being challenged by proponents of so-called Intelligent Design. These challenges are not trivial, they are affecting the way that children are educated. So there is a real reason to defend evolution and to continue to explain how it works. Also, Darwin as a person is accessible. We know how he lived, and we can read what he wrote without it needing to be filtered through intermediaries.

On the other hand, Galileo might have been the first modern scientist (in that he actually observed the world around him rather than rely on Aristotlian arguments to make his case) but he’s a remote figure. It’s difficult to imagine his world. What did he really think of the Church? His writing is direct and engaging (see his ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems’) but it’s difficult to relate it to the way we do science.

But we lose sight of Galileo at our peril. His trial was a test of what can and cannot be said. The journalist Simon Singh is currently being sued by the British Chiropractic Association over his criticism of the possible dangers of chiropractic therapy. This is totally inappropriate; science shouldn’t be constrained by legal devices. If the BCA think that Mr Singh is wrong, why don’t they produce the relevant scientific research?

The pro-am tournament

Science (of all descriptions) is usually done by scientists in universities or industries, and they get paid to do it. Science became a predominantly paid profession towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the growth of lectureships and PhD studies at universities. Until then, amateurs had played a key role. Victorian science is full of country parsons with microscopes in their dining rooms, and even Darwin wasn’t a professional scientist.

Until recently, astronomy was probably the only science still carried out by amateurs as well as professionals. Amateur astronomers do useful stuff like monitor the changes in light from variable stars. They also search the sky for supernovae (exploding stars), and other rare phenomena. They’re in a good position to do so, as they tend to have more access to telescopes (albeit much smaller telescopes than the ones professionals use).

But amateur astronomy is different to that done by professionals. Amateur astronomers have more in common with collectors of butterflies or fossils. In any science there’s a need to collect, classify, and categorise. Before you can explain different phenomena you need to have detailed descriptions of them, know how common they are and where they occur. Is a big red star a different type of star than a small white one? Or just the same type at a different stage of its life?

Amateurs document and describe what they find, but they’re less likely to investigate the underlying physics and provide explanations of what they see. Theirs is a more passive activity than professional astronomy. Perhaps it’s also more visually aesthetic because they spend more time actually looking at the sky.

Now, the edges are being blurred between amateur and professional astronomy as amateurs are able to get access to facilities like the 2 metre robotic Liverpool Telescope. Will this change what they do?

And now astronomy is no longer the only science in which amateurs participate. There is a growing trend for DIY biology, done by amateurs in their kitchens. This is seen by its practitioners as challenging the hegemony of ‘big science’ and making it more democratic so that genetically modified organisms aren’t just created for the purposes of making profit. This sort of amateur science is much more of a challenge to professionals than amateur astronomy. DIY biologists are doing what professionals are doing, just on a smaller scale, and the professional way of ensuring that scientific results meet a commonly agreed standard is through peer review. Will the DIYers bother with that? Perhapd they won’t need to, if they’re not applying for jobs or grants…

Of course, the blurring between amateur and professional activities happens because people get access to technology and information. Writers now publish on the internet. It may not be ‘professional’ and it may not make them any money, but it disseminates their work. But we still crave the kudos that comes from getting our work published in more traditional ways. Do we want this just because it’s so difficult to get?

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.