How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (24 page)

Speaking of chemists, I’m reminded of that other great Russian genius, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. After taking a degree in mathematics at Rostov University, he taught physics and chemistry before turning his hand to writing the novels that made him famous. And why should the eastern Europeans have all the credit when Britain has its
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own C. P. Snow, who, despite the disadvantage of having been a research physicist at Cambridge and, later, scientific adviser to the British government, went on to establish an enviable reputation as a novelist during the 1940s and 1950s.

Nor need we look so far back in time to find eminent scientists at work in the literary and artistic domains. Many will know that the astronomer Patrick Moore was an accomplished performer on the xylophone, an instrument for which he also composed.

On the literary side, we have zoologist John Treherne who, after publishing two successful books of historical biography (one on the iconic American gangsters Bonnie and Clyde), went on to produce a couple of well-received novels. His last novel,
Dangerous Precincts
, was an historical study of ecclesiastical intrigue and scandal set in the 1920s. And what about Richard Feynman (of
Surely
You’re Joking, Mr Feynman?
fame): wit, raconteur, sometime poet – oh, and yes, Nobel laureate in physics too. Not to mention, of course, a long line of widely acclaimed writers of science fiction from Isaac Asimov to Arthur C. Clark. And then there is the reproductive biologist and TV personality Robert Winston: early in his career, he dropped out of science for a few years and became a theatre director, winning in the process the National Directors’ Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969.

Come to think of it, even among my own inevitably limited circle of professional acquaintances I can think of at least half a dozen scientists who perform regularly in music groups – two in chamber orchestras, one in a consort of viols, another in a madrigals ensemble, while the fourth, a clarinettist, is in constant demand for local jazz
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bands. Three others earn a pound or two as artists or illustrators (one now professionally). And they all manage to do this while working as academic scientists.

But perhaps it is only fitting that the final honour should belong to physicists. In 1987, the prestigious Cleveland Orchestra under its then principal conductor Christoph von Dohnányi gave the world premiere of the latest work by the American minimalist composer Philip Glass. It was a piece entitled
The Light
and had been commissioned to celebrate the achievement of two local boys, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, exactly one hundred years before. Now known to every physics student as the Michelson–Morley experiments, their work had finally put paid to the then received wisdom that space is filled with an ether through which celestial bodies and such phenomena as light travel, so paving the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity just two decades later. When science itself commissions art, it surely ceases to be philistine.

So it seems to me that Renaissance Man is very much alive and well. But if you want to find him or her, you probably shouldn’t go looking in the nearest humanities department. Just try looking across the laboratory bench right across from you.

We don’t often associate poets with science, but it seems to me that what distinguishes a great poet from a mere rhymer is much the same as what distinguishes a good scientist from the merely mediocre – an acute power of observation and that capacity for introspection that underpins human culture in all its forms. Take Robert Burns,
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that greatest of all Scots poets – whose two hundred and fiftieth anniversary we also celebrated in 2009, as it happens. To be sure, Burns was incredibly well read, especially for a ‘humble ploughman’. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that he gained much by way of an education in even the rudimentary sciences of the mid-eighteenth century under the tutelage of his early teacher, John Murdoch. Nor, when Burnes senior (he changed the spelling of the family name when his children were born) took over his sons’ education after Murdoch moved on to financially more rewarding things, would he have gained all that much from such books as William Derham’s
Physico-Theology
and
Astro-Theology
which Burnes Senior borrowed from the local branch of the Ayr Book Society.

Indeed, Burns was notoriously unimpressed by the educated kirkmen of his day, with their book learning and lack of commonsense. As he remarked,

What’s a’ your jargon o’ your Schools,

Your Latin names for horns an’ stools?

If honest Nature made you fools,

What sairs [says] your grammars?

Ye’d better taen [taken] up spades and shools,

Or knappin-hammers.

In other words, get a proper job and do some farming or navvying. Or, on the virtues of two giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, the economist Adam Smith and the philosopher Thomas Reid:

Philosophers have fought and wrangled,

An’ meikle [much] Greek an’ Latin mangled,
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Till, wi’ their logic-jargon tir’d,

And in the depth of science mir’d,

To common sense they now appeal –

What wives and wabsters [weavers] see and feel!

All this intellectual effort, and you just tell what every fishwife already knows from folklore.

Burns may not have speculated deeply on the planetary spheres, the nature of light or the transmutation of metals, but he did give us some scintillatingly acute observations on psychology. Forget his ‘To a Louse’
–
you need look no further than his wonderful narrative poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’ to find what, to my mind, are two of the most perceptive lines ever penned. As the poem opens, Tam sits ‘bousing’ in the alehouse with his friends, squandering his meagre takings from market day on booze. Meanwhile, back at home:

. . . sits our sulky sullen dame [Tam’s wife],

Gathering her brows like the gathering storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

One can point to observations that, while undoubtedly coloured by an element of self-interest on Burns’s part, turn out to be solid science:

Let not women e’er complain

Fickle man is apt to rove!

Look abroad thro’ Nature’s range,

Nature’s mighty law is change.

It is one of the cornerstones of contemporary evolutionary biology that, because of the way mammalian repro-
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ductive biology is organised, male mammals are naturally predisposed to polygyny. Only in those cases where males can invest directly in the business of rearing offspring do they opt for monogamy. Consequently, monogamy is rare in mammals outside the dog family: ninety-five per cent of mammalian species mate polygamously.

Worse luck for Burns, perhaps, humans happen to be one of the exceptions, mainly because, in our case, the business of rearing extends far beyond the moment of weaning, allowing males to invest in the processes of socialisation as well as through the inheritance of accumulated family wealth. Of course, human monogamy is not the kind of eternal, unswerving commitment that we often associate with swans and many birds. In contrast to mammals, ninety per cent of bird species have a monogamous breeding system, as Burns himself notes:

Among her nestlings sits the thrush:

Her faithfu’ mate will share her toil...

Mind, to be fair to Burns, the wonders of modern molecular genetics have revealed that, even among supposedly monogamous birds, extra-pair matings are surprisingly common. Indeed, it is by no means impossible for every egg in a clutch to have been fertilised by a different male, even in pair-forming species. It turns out that a female bird can store sperm from different males, and selectively draw on it to fertilise her eggs when she is ready to lay them.

But there are a couple of remarks that Burns makes which are especially striking, not least because they make claims that have been explicitly demonstrated to be true
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only within the last decade. One is the fact that we can only sustain a limited number of friendships at any one time (see Chapter 3). Burns alludes to this in his ‘Epistle to J. Lapraik’:

Now, sir, if ye hae [have] friends enow [enough],

Tho’ real friends I b’lieve are few;

Yet, if your catalogue be fow [full],

I’se no insist [on being included].

The second is little short of remarkable. We have only come to appreciate in the last decade that the core difference between humans and other animals is the fact that humans can stand back from the world as we experience it and ask how it might be in the future. Animals cannot, for their noses, as it were, are thrust so firmly up against the grindstone of experience that they can never wonder whether the world could have been other than it is or why the world has to be the way we find it – the two questions that make both science and literature possible. The last stanza of ‘To a Mouse’ says it all:

Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But och! I backward cast my e’e [eye],

On prospects drear!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,

I guess and fear!

The mouse takes the world as it comes, but we can reflect on the past and anticipate the future, and spend hours in angst and fear because of it. I rest my case.
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It has long been fashionable to decry the continued survival of Latin and Greek in the curriculum at some (usually rather posh) schools. It may seem odd to raise this in the context of a book on science, but as probably one of the few scientists around who can lay claim to an A Level in Latin, I feel I should rise to its defence.

I shall not dwell on the intrinsic interest of Latin as a language, nor on the window that its literature offers us on one of the most powerful and enduring cultures in the western world – despite the fact that its heritage colours much of our own language and a large proportion of our western European culture. Nor shall I comment on the fact that a significant proportion of the words we use have Latin roots, so that a knowledge of this supposedly ‘dead’ language can help us to understand the meanings of the words we use every day.

Instead, let me digress and begin with that eminent his-torian and raconteur, and sometime Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, A. J. P. Taylor. At a celebrated prize-giving one year at my rural grammar school, he caused near apoplexy among the staff (and not a few titters from the body of the hall) by advising us to ignore our lessons in favour of learning something
really
useful. And the most useful thing he had ever learned, he advised us in his inimitably avuncular way, was the complete list of all the sultans of Turkey.

Now, I never learned the list of the Turkish sultans, but I was, at the age of eight or nine, obliged to learn the rhyme for the kings and queens of England from 1066 onwards. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s very
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simple and here it is:

Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste
*
;

Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three;

One, two, three Neds, Richard Two;

Henries Four, Five, Six, then who?

Edwards Four, Five, Dick the Bad;

Harries twain and Ned the lad;

Mary, Bessie, James the vain;

Charlie, Charlie, James again;

William and Mary, Anna Gloria;

Four Georges, William and Victoria.

*
Stephen

Now, apart from the fact that I have never been lost in discussions of the political history of England, its main contribution to my intellectual growth was, I am absolutely convinced, the training of my memory.

We all of us, in the final analysis, depend on our memories for a great deal of what we do. Sheer intuitive in-genuity is never enough for science to advance. Like any discipline, it depends on what in the humanities is sometimes referred to as scholarship – which is just a polite way of saying the ability to remember things. Advances in science, as in all forms of knowledge, come from being able to relate different events or things in new ways. Without the ability to remember the fine details of how the world actually is, no amount of intuition will allow even the proverbial genius down the hall to produce a new idea wholly independently of any remembered facts. Even mathematicians depend on memory to be able to
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recognise which of several possible ways of solving a mathematical problem is the most appropriate.

Recent developments in neuroanatomy seem relevant here. Current thinking on the development of the brain is coming round to the view that neurons initially lay down connections with each other at random and in immense numbers, but that these connections are whit-tled down by a process akin to natural selection during the first few years of childhood. Connections that are rarely used wither away and are lost; those that are regularly used are strengthened and increase in efficiency.

I hazard the guess that rote learning plays an important role in developing an individual’s capacity to memo-rise and that much of this capacity is laid down at quite an early stage by this process of neural reinforcement. It is not for nothing, after all, that we teach nursery rhymes to children: their rhythmicity makes them particularly easy to learn and the story lines make them sufficiently interesting and fun to be worth the effort.

Which brings me back to Latin, for nowhere else was rote learning traditionally quite so important as in the morass of regular and irregular verbs of that language, and in the declensions and conjugations of its convoluted grammar. But what makes Latin different from both nursery rhymes and most other languages as a basis for training the mind is its great precision and its systematic structure (the very features that attracted bureaucrats to it long after Rome’s decline). It provides a training not just in memorising, but in precisely those modes of thought that underpin everything we do as scientists. It is the perfect counterpoint to English, whose fluidity, lack of structure and enormous vocabulary are its very strengths as a
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literary language.