The Age of Wonder (79 page)

Before the Great Moon Discovery story was blown, a mid-West preacher was collecting subscriptions to send a crate of Bibles to the poor benighted lunar men, and Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore was considering the possibilities of a whole new genre of fiction: the science fiction hoax (he would launch it with a vivid-but entirely fictitious-account of the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic the following year).
⁷⁹
Herschel privately dismissed the whole affair as ‘incoherent ravings’, and calmly refuted it in an Olympian open letter to the Parisian astronomer François Arago, published in the
Athenaeum.
⁸⁰

But Margaret Herschel was more amused. She called the story ‘a very clever piece of imagination’, and wrote appreciatively to Caroline. ‘The whole description is so well
clenched
with minute details of workmanship…that the New Yorkists were not to be blamed for actually believing it as they did for 48 hours.-It is only a pity that it
is not true:
but if grandsons stride on as grandfathers have done,
as wonderful things may yet be accomplished.
’
⁸¹

John Herschel’s time in South Africa, as significant in its own way as Charles Darwin’s
Beagle
voyage, confirmed him as the greatest astronomer and general scientist of his generation. On his return to England in May 1838 he was made a baronet in time to attend Queen Victoria’s coronation in Westminster Abbey. Sir John Herschel was elected President of the Royal Society, awarded a second Copley Medal, and by the 1850s was recognised as the leading public scientist of mid-Victorian England. His kindly face, encircled by a sunlike corona of white hair, was famously photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, using a process that he himself had partly invented.
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10

The great forty-foot was eventually dismantled at Slough on New Year’s Eve, 1840. It had become the relic of a past age, and besides, it shook dangerously and moaned as the winter wind blew through its ancient timbers and rigging, like a ship heading out into a stormy sea.

Sir John Herschel did not forget all the hopes it had symbolised, the great names it had attracted, and the celebrations it had inspired. Having had the scaffolding safely removed, he laid the huge, battered old tube out on the frosty grass, and held a last party inside it, with drinks and toasts and candlelight.
⁸²

He marked its departure not with an elegant mathematical calculation, but with a boisterous chant, ‘Elegy for the Old Forty-Foot’:

In the old Telescope’s Tube we sit
And the shades of the Past around us flit!
His Requiem sing we with shout and din
While the Old Year goes out and the New comes in.
Merrily, merrily, let us all sing
And make the Old Telescope rattle and ring!

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The troubling image of a shy, reluctant, persecuted female Nature who is crudely questioned and even physically assaulted by an exclusively male Science now begins to appear. It slowly replaces the older Romantic image of a mysterious and seductive Nature, at least a goddess, who is infinitely more powerful than her merely human petitioners and questioners. The rhetoric of assault, molestation, penetration and even rape of Nature by ‘Science’ develops, though partly unconsciously, throughout the nineteenth century, and was keenly identified by twentieth-century feminist criticism. See for example Anne K. Mellor, ‘A Feminist Critique of Science’ (1988). It was also popularised, as well as vulgarised, in various other art forms, as for example in the sculpture of the
fin-de-siècle
French artist Louis Ernest Barrias. His pair of metre-high bronze statues,
Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science
(1890), one partly shrouded and the other completely nude, won the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle for 1905.

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Unlike Harrison’s chronometer, Herschel’s telescope or Davy’s voltaic battery, Babbage’s ‘computer’ had no immediate application that officialdom could see or even imagine, though Babbage claimed correctly that it would transform the calculations for logarithms, astronomical tables, engineering construction models, map-making and marine data. Coleridge once said that radically new poetry ‘must create the taste whereby it is appreciated’. Perhaps Babbage believed the equivalent of radically new science. See Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford,
Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention
(1996).

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The identification of Joseph Fraunhofer’s lines-similar to a supermarket barcode-was the first stage towards spectography, the method by which astrophysicists would eventually analyse the chemical composition of the stars. Particular elements-e.g. hydrogen-occupy particular places in the spectrum of starlight, and can thereby be identified across enormous distances in space; in fact across the entire visible universe. The implications of spectography are beautifully explored in the ‘Barcodes in the Stars’ chapter of Richard Dawkins’
Unweaving the Rainbow
(1998), which ends with a long quotation from James Thomson’s poem ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ (1727).

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Goethe’s
Treatise on Colour
(1810), which criticised Newton’s ‘mechanical’ analysis of the rainbow spectrum, remained a totem of German
Naturphilosophie,
though it caused increasing irritation in empirical British scientific circles. Yet Goethe explored such suggestive ideas as ‘the sensory-moral effects of colour’, the ‘spiral tendency in vegetation’, and the effect of weather (clouds, sunlight, changing barometric pressure) on mental states and moods. Goethe was wonderfully perceptive about what he insisted was the unity of the scientific and artistic sensibility. He wrote an outstanding short essay on the delicate balance between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ observation of data: ‘Empirical Observation and Science’ (1798). ‘The observer never sees the pure phenomenon with his own eyes; rather, much depends on his mood, the state of his senses, the light, the air, the weather, the physical object, how it is handled, and a thousand other circumstances.’ See Goethe,
Collected Works,
vol 12:
Scientific Studies
(1988). Humboldt also praised him: ‘Goethe, whom the great creations of the poetic Fancy have not prevented from penetrating the arcana of Nature’ (Berlin Academy conference, 1828).

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There was a premonition in an anonymous ‘evolutionary’ book,
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,
which caused a sensation in 1844. But Darwin had worked by John Herschel’s rules of pure induction: assembling a mass of precise data (e.g. the evolution of finches’ beaks) until the simplest and most convincing hypothesis emerged. Consequently the great mainstay of so many scientists-Natural Theology and the Argument by Design-was worse than untrue: it was unnecessary. The spiritual upheavals this caused devout Victorian scientists were famously described by Edmund Gosse in
Father and Son
(1908). But it was the earlier, preliminary impact of geology, on ordinary thinking men and women, which was recorded by Tennyson in several sections (56 and 102) of
In Memoriam
(1833-50). The subject and inspiration of this poem was his Cambridge friend Arthur Hallam, who died in exactly this year of the third BAAS meeting.

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go…’

           (
In Memoriam,
Section 56)

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Entire books have been dedicated to following through the minatory influence of Frankenstein’s Creature over the last 190 years, especially through films and popular journalism. We may expect a minor earthquake on the bicentenary of publication in 2018. Suffice it to note here that the current discussion of GM crops-undoubtedly vital to sustain global harvests and reduce dependency on crop-spraying-often refers to them as ‘Frankenstein foods’ (for example, the leading article from
Country Life,
April 2008); and that the
Guardian
’s excellent column ‘Bad Science’ has an image of Frankenstein’s Monster as its logo.

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The romantic tale of Paulina Jermyn, the beautiful seventeen-year-old botanist who fell in love at the 1832 British Association meeting at Oxford, perhaps deserves wider currency. See David Wooster,
Paula Trevelyan
(1879).

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This benign and eccentric image defined the Victorian ideal of the scientist, just as the later faintly surreal images of Albert Einstein-riding a bicycle or putting his tongue out-defined the twentieth-century one. The current images of Stephen Hawking, brilliant but paralysed and gargoyle-like in his wheelchair, perhaps better express the uncertainty of contemporary attitudes to science. The wheelchair itself takes us back to Dr Strangelove, but also eventually returns us to Sir Joseph Banks, rolling briskly into one of his scientific breakfasts in Soho Square, keen to meet his next young protégé and launch a new project ‘for the Benefit of all mankind’.

Epilogue

I was fifty-four when I gave my first lecture at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street. It was a formal Friday Night Discourse, with an invited audience in evening dress, and I was asked to put on an unaccustomed dinner jacket and bow tie. My announced subject was ‘The Coleridge Experiment’. The aim was to explore that particularly controversial meeting between science and poetry when Humphry Davy, shortly after starting the Bakerian Lectures in 1808, had gallantly risked his reputation by bringing Coleridge-then in the depth of opium addiction and a fierce marital crisis-to give an extended series of fourteen lectures on the Imagination, before a distinguished invited scientific audience at the Royal Institution. My own lecture was intended to describe the utter chaos that had ensued, but also the few wonderful visionary moments that had been sparked by Coleridge, and which had subsequently shaped much of the modern concept of creativity, and the notion of the imaginative leap.
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Just before starting, I stood behind the closed double doors to the historic lecture theatre, trembling slightly as I heard the solemn growl of the audience on the other side. I was very conscious that I was about to step out onto the very dais where Davy, Faraday and Coleridge himself had once lectured. The Director, standing quietly by my elbow, whispered encouragingly to me. He also wondered, in passing, if I had been told about
the atomic clock
? No, I had not been told about the atomic clock.

The Director explained that there was an atomic clock which buzzed loudly in the lecture theatre after exactly fifty minutes. Lecturers were expected to end their talks on this signal. With the first stirrings of real panic, I murmured that this could presumably be treated as a sort of early-warning system for prolix speakers. Well, yes, indeed it could; but it was rather more a question of
desirable scientific precision.
Indeed, the tradition was that the speaker should fit his lecture to
exactly fifty minutes,
no longer and no shorter, and should immediately wind up his talk when the buzzer sounded.

The Director now looked rather quizzically at my loose bundle of lecture notes. I wondered if the memory of Coleridge’s notorious prolixity had never been quite erased from the Institute’s collective consciousness. He added reassuringly that in his experience most of his distinguished scientific lecturers had contrived to be saying their
very last sentence
at exactly the moment when the atomic clock went off. It was all rather elegant:
Talk-Buzz-Stop-Applause.
And of course there would be applause. With that, the Director stepped briskly forward and threw open the large double doors, to reveal the steep tiers of bench seats, crowded with expectant faces, and the growing silence of an atomic clock, noiselessly ticking away…

Indeed, there is a particular problem with finding endings in science. Where do these science stories really finish? Science is truly a relay race, with each discovery handed on to the next generation. Even as one door is closing, another door is already being thrown open. So it is with this book. The great period of Victorian science is about to begin. The new stories are passed into the hands of Michael Faraday, John Herschel, Charles Darwin…and the world of modern science begins to rush towards us.

But science is now also continually reshaping its history retrospectively. It is starting to look back and rediscover its beginnings, its earlier traditions and triumphs; but also its debates, its uncertainties and its errors. No general science history would now be considered complete without a sense of the science achieved centuries ago by the Greeks, the Arabs, the Chinese, the Babylonians. It is no coincidence that the last few years have seen the foundation, in numerous universities across Europe, Australia and America, of newly conceived ‘Departments of the History and Philosophy of Science’. The earliest pioneering ones began at Cambridge (UK), and Berkeley (California), with others quickly following at Paris X (Nanterre), Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto, Indiana, Caltech and Budapest (1994). Similarly, it seems to me impossible to understand fully the contemporary debates about the environment, or climate change, or genetic engineering, or alternative medicine, or extraterrestrial life, or the nature of consciousness, or even the existence of God, without knowing how these arose from the hopes and anxieties of the Romantic generation.

But perhaps most important, right now, is a changing appreciation of how scientists themselves fit into society as a whole, and the nature of the particular creativity they bring to it. We need to consider how they are increasingly vital to any culture of progressive knowledge, to the education of young people (and the not so young), and to our understanding of the planet and its future. For this, I believe science needs to be presented and explored in a new way. We need not only a new history of science, but a more enlarged and imaginative biographical writing about individual scientists. (I make some suggestions in the Bibliography that follows, under the heading ‘The Bigger Picture’.) Here the perennially cited difficulties with the ‘two cultures’, and specifically with mathematics, can no longer be accepted as a valid limitation.
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We need to understand how science is actually made; how scientists themselves think and feel and speculate. We need to explore what makes scientists creative, as well as poets or painters, or musicians. That is how this book began.

The old, rigid debates and boundaries-science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics-are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but
questing
belief in a future for the globe. And that is how this book might possibly end.

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My account may be found in
The Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain,
Vol. 69, 1998.

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I am encouraged to see that my old teacher and early mentor Professor George Steiner, starting from an entirely different premise, has recently come to a similar conclusion: ‘Hence my conviction that even advanced mathematical concepts can be made imaginatively compelling and demonstrable when they are presented
historically…
It is via these great voyages and adventures of the human mind, so often charged with personal rivalries, passions and frustrations-the Argosy founders, or gets trapped in the ice of the insoluble-that we non-mathematicians can look into a sovereign and decisive realm…Locate this quest…and you will have flung open doors on “seas of thought” deeper, more richly stocked than any on the globe.’ See ‘School Terms’, in
My Unwritten Books
(2008). The imagery behind this splendid passage comes, of course, from Romanticism: Wordsworth on Newton from
The Prelude,
and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of 1825,
The Sea of Ice,
in which the explorer’s tiny, gallant ship is foundering amidst enormous polar ice-floes-but, hope against hope, may yet survive.