On Human Beings and Their Science

by

Gillian Polack

Sometimes scientists annoy me, even as I love their research and I love what they do to communicate that research. Sometimes their narratives delight me and I understand what they’re saying and remember why I fell in love with science as a child and read science fiction and biographies of famous scientists with an addict’s passion. I also collected rocks.

Brian Cox has been my personal epitome of the fascinatingly annoying end of science for a little. It’s not because he gets things way wrong: it’s because he almost gets them very right. I watch his television specials avidly, because I want to make sense of time (of course I want to make sense of time: I’m an historian*) and I criticise them the whole way through because the physics is astonishing and makes me happy, but the way he assumes non-scientists think is . . . troubling. When I had a chance to review two new popular science books (one of which he co-authored), I jumped up and down and clapped my hands. What’s annoying in a TV program would surely not worry me in a book. Ideas tangled impossibly with quite different ideas would not abound (I’m allowed them, by the way—because mine are intentional) and the sense that the cultural pasts of time and space are only relevant because pedestrian non-scientists hold them and need to shake them off would be . . . hang on, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The two books are Alfred A Posamentier’s The Pythagorean Theorem and Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw’s Why Does E=mc²? I'll look at Posamentier's book second. My excuse is because I’ve done more maths than science (which is both true and untrue), but the reality is that I opened up Cox and Forshaw and read the introduction and was immediately faced with a problem. Where does human understanding fit into things? How does the culture of a place and time shape scientific thought? And why does Cox write the way he talks on TV?

Cox and Forshaw call the massively complex interpretation of time and space we do ordinarily ‘intuition’ and then argue that we replace intuition with wonderful science. This doesn’t take into account cultural constructs and how they work. It doesn’t take into account that it’s not only intuition that shapes, but intelligence combined with experience. Intelligence and experience and cultural constructs that change and evolve and mutate. Put like that, it looks a bit like the way some scientists think. This is because it is. Scientists don’t think outside cultural and historical contexts. Their thought is not pure and unsullied by their environment and assumptions. Ask a question. Apply your training and work out what the parameters of the question are and how you’re going down to resolve it. Answer the question. Deal with the answers. Science fits right in there with other facets of modern culture.

And this is where I have problems with Cox and Forshaw. They’re good communicators overall (they find understandable ways of explaining most concepts) and they have important things to say, but they haven’t defined their parameters well and are a bit guilty of condescension. I don’t know how much of this is Forshaw and how much Cox. One TV program Cox spent the whole hour skirting round the basic (to me) knowledge that time is measured by humans and humans are restricted by their own vision (physically and other) and by their instruments of measurement (get better equipment and we can see more) and by cultural assumptions. He used much the same language and limitations of knowledge as are demonstrated in Why Does E=mc²?

Scientists are not free from the limits of their own culture? Their questions may be genuinely pure and perfect in the way they're asked and in the maths used to demonstrate the answer, but the choice of questions is culturally derived. Unfortunately, this is not addressed. Quite the opposite. There is an underlying assumption in the Cox/Forshaw book that, somehow, scientists see things more clearly. Yet Cox in his TV specials and with his co-author in this book says many of the same things as historians and other people who study the people-based sciences. For example, he says that one person's description of time is not the same as another's. That our capacity to measure time and interpret those measurements is liable to change. That, in fact, our understanding of time is relative.

At the same time as explaining the purity and elegance of those technical explanations that make generous use of the Greek alphabet, Cox and Forshaw add a whole different language: the English of physicists. It’s tied up with the history of the discipline and a set of jokes that I’ve seen used by other physicists. There’s a sub-culture with a dialect that's a mixture of maths, English and memory. This is where the condescension comes in: just because we don’t know the sub-culture and its dialect, doesn’t mean we’re as incapable of understanding the concepts as Cox and Forshaw often state.

Every few pages I met comments that reminded me why I became a feminist. For instance, on page 14 of Cox and Forshaw’s book, they summarise the discussion of an aspect of scientific method (this aspect in their own words, on page 12: “If there are no observable consequences of an idea, then the idea is not necessary to understand the workings of the universe, although it might have some sort of chimerical value in making us feel better.” Which begs the question of whether the observer is actually seeing consequences or if the cultural prejudgments we all carry around with us mean they’re looking in the wrong direction or using the wrong equipment.) with “This may all seem rather philosophical”—when I thought it was a very long, but not very complicated explanation of how scientists are supposed to think, in a perfect world. This sort of comment amounts to “There, there, dear, I know you're trying. We’ll do the thinking for you.” I think I spent more time analysing their odd cultural constructs than I spent thinking about the physics, not because the physics wasn’t fabulously interesting (which it was) but because the mindset explaining it was such a peculiar thing to see outside an undergraduate lecture.

So, in Why Does E=mc²? we’re told, from the beginning, how we probably envisage things. How we see the world around us. Straw men set up to lead us into a subject. Good teaching, if used judiciously—annoying when used and re-used. The annoying aspect is in making an assumption about how others think (different others, others who don’t yet understand and haven’t questioned the basis of their ‘intuition’) Cox and Forshaw are in danger of alienating all those readers who don’t think that way.

What’s important about this book is not that it says something new about science. It’s that it gives a primer for understanding how a certain type of scientist sees the universe. How they’re trying to find the elegant solution then the complexities that follow. Also, however, it’s important because it shows us how some scientists interact with non-scientists. The assumptions they make. In the term used by this book the ‘intuition, ‘common sense,’ ‘prejudice,’ that needs challenging.

This book shows us some wonderful things. It’s a neat explanation of important stuff. It even accepts that scientific approaches are not the only approaches. Cox and Forshaw point out that science is about questioning assumptions and dismantling prejudices and understanding reality for what it is, not what we interpret it as. Life is never that simple. We talk about these issues—about language about cultural relativity—in relation to religion and race and country of origin and disability and gender—so it was interesting to see that the same realisation of self doesn't apply to the understanding of non-scientists in this important book.

It is an important book. I didn’t say that, did I? Not for its novelty, but because Cox and Forshaw are a type of scientists we saw a lot of twenty to forty years ago and that are now claiming our attention again. In my childhood, their equivalent was Carl Sagan, or Professor Julius Sumner-Miller, an academic with a television program and Einstein-hair. “Why is this so?” he would ask all of us, and he’d take us through basic science, experiment by experiment. Science educators who have that popular appeal and who can talk across discipline boundaries are terribly important. They help us make sense of our world.

Cox is the media superstar of the new crop of those amazing science communicators who also do research. Because of that, this book is the book many people will read. Where they will get their understanding of science from in their rediscovery of it in this Brave New World. It’s where adults of my generation, for whom the word ‘quantum’ was purely Latin and had no relevance to the natural world—where we catch up with understanding and insight.

The Pythagorean Theorem, however, is a much better book for learning. Posamentier reminds of me of a wonderful maths teacher I once had: Mrs Tempest. Mrs Tempest didn't communicate maths through long and tedious explanations, but nor did she resort to flash ones. She took things one step at a time and when she was excited by something, she let us know. One step at a time, we learned to love quadratic equations and matrices and calculus.

Posamentier explains well. He doesn’t condescend, and he assumes that we’ll follow what he has to say because he explains it in such an order that it’s very hard not to follow. It’s not a mathematical textbook: it focuses on the theorem and nothing but the theorem but it covers history and music and a sampling of the hundreds of possible proofs. It ought to be dull, but it’s not: it’s fascinating. It reminded me of what I once knew and then gently led me into new areas. Posamentier is on the list of writers I’ll watch for, because I know now that if he writes about a subject then I will end up understanding it.

It didn’t explore the dangerous new territory covered in Cox and Forshaw’s book, though. Because it covered one thing and one thing only, the closest it got was fractals. I want to turn fractals into embroidery patterns and own a cushion that shows the beauty of the Pythagorean theorem—this is Posamentier's influence at work, I fear. It provides a very solid grounding, however.

We need that grounding, we non-scientists, non-mathematicians. My mother taught biology at school. She had to entirely relearn everything, because she did her undergraduate studies before DNA was even known, much less understood, and she started teaching after that amazing breakthrough. We’re in another decade like that. We need to understand. We need to learn science and keep learning science. We need the content of the brains of all three scientists who wrote these books in front of us, in digestible form, so that we can deal with some of the complexities of life in the twenty-first century.

An understanding of the world around us is increasingly important to be able to traverse that world. Popular science. Short books with cool cover art, written by ultra-cool authors with impeccable academic credentials: these give a lot more than TV specials. We can interrogate the text more easily, for one thing, find out why we get angry with particular statements, but we can also visit and revisit an idea until we sort it out.

Science and maths need sorting out. Passive understanding isn’t enough. Of the two approaches, however, Posamentier’s wins hands-down for bringing readers in and giving them not only the understanding, but the power to carry that understanding away and to integrate it into their knowledge and use it elsewhere.

Having said all that, I’ll still watch documentaries by Brian Cox. I like arguing with him in my head. I enjoy saying “You’re talking about relativity and ways of measuring time, but you’ve left out cultural and historical dimensions. How could you do that—it makes your whole argument invalid.” I can't imagine arguing with him face to face. That’s the other wonder of science education through books and media. You get to say things to the scientists that you’d never say if you met them. It means that understanding science becomes part of our lives, very happily.

Books mentioned in this column:
Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Da Capo Press, 2009)
The Pythagorean Theorem. The Story of its Power and Beauty by Alfred S. Posamentier (Prometheus Books, 2010)

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.