At the University of Chicago I also was lucky enough to go through a general education programme devised by Robert M. Hutchins, where science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge. It was considered unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski and Freud – among many others. In an introductory science class, Ptolemy’s view that the Sun revolved around the Earth was presented so compellingly that some students found themselves re-evaluating their commitment to Copernicus. The status of the teachers in the Hutchins curriculum had almost nothing to do with their research; perversely – unlike the American university standard of today -teachers were valued for their teaching, their ability to inform and inspire the next generation.
In this heady atmosphere, I was able to fill in some of the many gaps in my education. Much that had been deeply mysterious, and not just in science, became clearer. I also witnessed at first hand the joy felt by those whose privilege it is to uncover a little about how the Universe works.
I’ve always been grateful to my mentors of the 1950s, and tried to make sure that each of them knew my appreciation. But as I look back, it seems clear to me that I learned the most essential things not from my school teachers, nor even from my university professors, but from my parents, who knew nothing at all about science, in that single far-off year of 1939.
1
The Most Precious Thing
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
As I got off the plane, he was waiting for me, holding up a scrap of cardboard with my name scribbled on it. I was on my way to a conference of scientists and TV broadcasters devoted to the seemingly hopeless prospect of improving the presentation of science on commercial television. The organizers had kindly sent a driver.
‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ he said as we waited for my bag.
No, I didn’t mind.
‘Isn’t it confusing to have the same name as that scientist guy?’
It took me a moment to understand. Was he pulling my leg? Finally, it dawned on me.
‘I am that scientist guy,’ I answered.
He paused and then smiled. ‘Sorry. That’s my problem. I thought it was yours too.’
He put out his hand. ‘My name is William F. Buckley.’ (Well, he wasn’t exactly William F. Buckley, but he did bear the name of a contentious and well-known TV interviewer, for which he doubtless took a lot of good-natured ribbing.)
As we settled into the car for the long drive, the windshield
wipers rhythmically thwacking, he told me he was glad I was ‘that scientist guy’ – he had so many questions to ask about science. Would I mind?
No, I didn’t mind.
And so we got to talking. But not, as it turned out, about science. He wanted to talk about frozen extraterrestrials languishing in an Air Force base near San Antonio, ‘channelling’ (a way to hear what’s on the minds of dead people – not much, it turns out), crystals, the prophecies of Nostradamus, astrology, the shroud of Turin . . . He introduced each portentous subject with buoyant enthusiasm. Each time I had to disappoint him:
‘The evidence is crummy,’ I kept saying. ‘There’s a much simpler explanation.’
He was, in a way, widely read. He knew the various speculative nuances on, let’s say, the ‘sunken continents’ of Atlantis and Lemuria. He had at his fingertips what underwater expeditions were supposedly just setting out to find the tumbled columns and broken minarets of a once-great civilization whose remains were now visited only by deep sea luminescent fish and giant kraken. Except . . . while the ocean keeps many secrets, I knew that there isn’t a trace of oceanographic or geophysical support for Atlantis and Lemuria. As far as science can tell, they never existed. By now a little reluctantly, I told him so.
As we drove through the rain, I could see him getting glummer and glummer. I was dismissing not just some errant doctrine, but a precious facet of his inner life.
And yet there’s so much in real science that’s equally exciting, more mysterious, a greater intellectual challenge – as well as being a lot closer to the truth. Did he know about the molecular building blocks of life sitting out there in the cold, tenuous gas between the stars? Had he heard of the footprints of our ancestors found in 4-million-year-old volcanic ash? What about the raising of the Himalayas when India went crashing into Asia? Or how viruses, built like hypodermic syringes, slip their DNA past the host organism’s defences and subvert the reproductive machinery of cells; or the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence; or the newly discovered ancient civilization of Ebla that advertised the virtues of Ebla beer? No, he hadn’t heard. Nor did he know, even vaguely, about quantum indeterminacy, and he recognized DNA only as three frequently linked capital letters.
Mr ‘Buckley’ – well-spoken, intelligent, curious – had heard virtually nothing of modern science. He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It’s just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media had failed this man. What society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretence and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works.
There are hundreds of books about Atlantis – the mythical continent that is said to have existed something like 10,000 years ago in the Atlantic Ocean. (Or somewhere. A recent book locates it in Antarctica.) The story goes back to Plato, who reported it as hearsay coming down to him from remote ages. Recent books authoritatively describe the high level of Atlantean technology, morals and spirituality, and the great tragedy of an entire populated continent sinking beneath the waves. There is a ‘New Age’ Atlantis, ‘the legendary civilization of advanced sciences,’ chiefly devoted to the ‘science’ of crystals. In a trilogy called Crystal Enlightenment by Katrina Raphaell – the books mainly responsible for the crystal craze in America – Atlantean crystals read minds, transmit thoughts, are the repositories of ancient history and the model and source of the pyramids of Egypt. Nothing approximating evidence is offered to support these assertions. (A resurgence of crystal mania may follow the recent finding by the real science of seismology that the inner core of the Earth may be composed of a single, huge, nearly perfect crystal – of iron.)
A few books – Dorothy Vitaliano’s Legends of the Earth, for example – sympathetically interpret the original Atlantis legends in terms of a small island in the Mediterranean that was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, or an ancient city that slid into the Gulf of Corinth after an earthquake. This, for all we know, may be the source of the legend, but it is a far cry from the destruction of a continent on which had sprung forth a preternaturally advanced technical and mystical civilization.
What we almost never find – in public libraries or newsstand
magazines or prime-time television programmes – is the evidence from sea floor spreading and plate tectonics, and from mapping the ocean floor which shows quite unmistakably that there could have been no continent between Europe and the Americas on anything like the timescale proposed.
Spurious accounts that snare, the gullible are readily available. Sceptical treatments are much harder to find. Scepticism does not sell well. A bright and curious person who relies entirely on popular culture to be informed about something like Atlantis is hundreds or thousands of times more likely to come upon a fable treated uncritically than a sober and balanced assessment.
Maybe Mr Buckley should know to be more sceptical about what’s dished out to him by popular culture. But apart from that, it’s hard to see how it’s his fault. He simply accepted what the most widely available and accessible sources of information claimed was true. For his naivete, he was systematically misled and bamboozled.
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudo-science. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.
All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbour a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 per cent of Americans are ‘scientifically illiterate’. That’s just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War – when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there’s a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 per cent illiteracy is extremely serious.