Chapter 3
Popular Science: Fictional
and Non-Fictional Dimensions
Asghar Qadir
Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan and
Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical
Physics, Trieste, Italy
Perhaps
my most memorable encounter with popular science (PS) writing occurred when I
was asked to write a review of The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose.
Despite being on the best seller list in notable newspapers around the world,
the book did not appear to have been read
as a “popular” treatise. Indeed, cursory conversations with some of the owners
of this book revealed to me that very
few people had actually read the full book -- cover to cover. Of those who
attempted to read the book, probably even fewer followed all of it. Perhaps, I
had a head start, having been a student of Professor Penrose.
It has become fashionable to keep such books on
the shelf as a mark of intellectual awareness, without really putting them to
use. This is particularly disturbing in this day and age when there is much more
popular science available -- often written by experts in the field. There has
been an increasing trend for practicing scientists to write science fiction
(SF) and PS. For example, the famous astronomer and astrophysicist, Sir Fred
Hoyle, wrote some remarkable SF and the physics Nobel Laureate, Steve Weinberg,
wrote a PS best seller. Stephen Hawking’s A
Brief History of Time (1988) is probably one of the most popular unread
books. At one time such activities on the part of serious scientists would have
been viewed askance. How much and why has this attitude changed over recent
times? For that matter, why did they arise in the first place?
1. What Is Science?
There may be minor differences of opinion about what
science is but, by and large, Sir Karl Popper’s definition[1]
can be used for our purposes. Science is the activity of formulating and
testing scientific theories. A “scientific theory” is a set of assumptions that
lead to (in principle) falsifiable predictions. Thus the claim that “the Earth
is round”, is a scientific theory. It could, in principle, be proved false by
going off the Earth and looking at it. When we find that it is round, the theory is proved. (Of
course, this theory is of very limited generality, but that is not relevant for
the present purpose.) The claim that “2 + 2 = 4” is not a scientific theory, as it can never be proved false (even in
principle), being true by definition. Scientific theories of greater generality
require a greater background of concepts to be understood. Even for the round
Earth, there is the concept of “roundness” to be properly formulated. (How
“round” must the Earth be, for the theory to be found correct?) For more
profound theories, of greater applicability, there will be higher levels of
abstraction required. For example, for mechanical theories we have the concept
of “force”, which is abstract but more easily apprehended than the concept of
“energy”, as that is more abstract. Still more abstract is the thermodynamic
concept of “entropy”. Quantum concepts are even more esoteric. The further
removed the concept is from ordinary experience, the more abstruse it appears
to those not familiar with it. Einstein pointed out[2]
that the development of scientific theory is, perforce, from the more concrete
to the more abstract.
This abstractness of modern
science becomes a problem for the non-scientist who wants to understand what
the new theories are all about. A separate problem associated with science is
that its practitioners tend to get “bogged down” with the details and lose
sight of the “broad picture”. The non-scientists, faced with the outpourings of
such scientists, find themselves floundering in a sea of jargon whose relevance
continues to elude them. Yet another problem is the tendency of some scientists
to mystify their work in an attempt
to make it seem more profound, rather than clarifying
it to make it more intelligible. Unfortunately, many lay people like to praise
such works, because they feel that they gain reflected glory by “comprehending
the incomprehensible”. All these problems are relevant for our later discussion
of the attitude of scientists to their colleagues writing SF.
Since the attitude of the practitioners of science to SF and PS depends on the nature of the scientific discussion in the work, it becomes necessary to categorise the science used in SF, or explained in PS. There can be various categorisations. I will choose only those relevant for my discussion here.
2.
Categorization of Science
There is the most common, currently accepted, division of sciences into natural and social. The former is what was regarded as “science” from the Renaissance to the first half of the twentieth century. (As with all historical statements of this type, it must be taken with caution. In this context dates cannot be exact and must be taken only as giving rough estimates.) It was assumed that there are “natural laws” (which can not be doubted) waiting to be “discovered”. There is obviously no room in this view for social sciences. During Greek and Muslim times that was not the view of “science”. Matters pertaining to human behaviour were very much part of “science”. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the “science” dealing with collective human behaviour was developed along the lines of what had become accepted as “science” in modern times and again entered the purview of “science” under the title of “social sciences”. Natural sciences can be further divided into the physical sciences and the life sciences. At the border between natural and social sciences lie medical science and psychology, which deal with individual human beings and groups of human beings. The former of these subjects deals with humans as biological organisms, which are studied more thoroughly because of our special interest in them. The latter is complicated by the fact that it deals with consciousness. This complication is fundamental because it changes our concept of scientific laws. The usual assumption that stating a scientific law cannot change the subject of that law, no longer applies. In this case, as with human laws, there will be changes in the behaviour of the subject of the “laws”. To the extent that we deal with humans as living organisms, to be studied as such, these subjects can be regarded as branches of the natural sciences. To the extent that we have to take account of their ethical and moral aspects, they become branches of the social sciences. These aspects are obvious for psychology but are also relevant for medicine. For example, we can perform experiments on animals with only minor twinges of conscience, but would be stopped by law from doing so on human beings, even if our consciences were dormant[3]. (Ethical problems can arise even with natural sciences where testing a theory may have serious consequences for people or for animals. There are some interesting SF stories that explore such possibilities.)
At the base of both varieties of science is philosophy, which deals with the basic reasoning process used in science. Of course, philosophy itself needs to use psychology and other branches of science. It is often identified with unnecessary hair-splitting. This is because of the tendency of philosophers to get bogged down in details. As providing a perspective for understanding, however, it is most important for science. Another area not so easily classifiable is mathematics. As would be clear from the earlier discussion, it does not satisfy Popper’s definition of “science”. It is, nevertheless, essential as a language for science. It is usually taken as synonymous with definiteness. That is a misapprehension. It is a precise and a quantitative language, but the claim that “in mathematics, every statement can be proved to be either true or false” is not valid. One can construct arithmetical languages by providing an alphabet (as a set of symbols) and rules of syntax for putting the alphabet together in the form of words. Axioms (statements taken to be true, a priori) can then be made in those words. Kurt Godel[4] proved that, in a given finite arithmetical language (i.e. with a finite alphabet), statements can always be made which are not derivable from any finite set of axioms. More or less as a consequence of this theorem, one finds that Aristotle’s “law of the excluded middle” does not hold. In fact, there are multi-valued logic systems, which allow for possibilities beyond a statement being either “true” or “false”. There is worse to come, one can not even prove, in general, that the arithmetical system is internally consistent.
There is another common misapprehension about science, namely that it is totally objective. With the advent of quantum theory, we began to realise that there may be an inherent subjectivity at the base of science. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum formalism[5], the very nature of the fundamental quantum entities depends on how we choose to observe them. An electron may be a wave or a particle, depending on the experiment performed, in which it is detected. The total objectivity in science is further suspect because of the fact that the science of a time and a place bears a strong cultural imprint. It has been realised that science is a matter of describing nature, not of finding “immutable laws” for it. The description is culture dependent, as is the choice of phenomena being studied. There is a strong influence of economic needs on this choice, which is determined in its turn by social and cultural considerations[6]. Of course, there is the reverse impact of science on the culture of the time. My point is not that one is prior to the other but that we can not divorce one from the other, as was commonly believed in the Victorian view of science.
Another commonly used classification is of the hard sciences in contradistinction to the soft sciences. This is often taken to imply a value judgement, the “hard sciences” being regarded as “superior”, in some sense, to the “soft sciences”. It is necessary to dispel this common misapprehension. Where the level of abstraction is high, and consequently the subject matter gets further removed from common experience, the science becomes “hard” for the non-practitioner. Where there is not so much abstraction involved, the subject is more easily accessible to all and the science may be regarded as “soft”. It is well to remember that what the “hard” sciences gain in depth they lose in breadth. With the increasing modern trend towards inter-disciplinary studies, which need greater breadth, there is an increasing need for the “soft” sciences. However, there is an unfortunate tendency of workers in the “soft” sciences to avoid rigour in their discussions. (There is no inherent necessity for work in the soft sciences to be non-rigorous and the lack of rigour weakens the standing of the “soft” sciences.)
3. What Is Science Fiction?
Let us revert to the question of what SF is. Science can
come into a story as a means of escaping the limited and well-charted Earth. In
earlier times, stories could be set in strange lands and provide believable
adventures. Even in the early twentieth century, Edgar Rice-Burroughs could set
Tarzan in the African jungles without stretching credulity too far. Further, he
could still follow Jules Verne into the “center of the Earth”. None of these
areas of the Earth are available to the modern SF author. Alternatively, his
hero, John Carter, could simply wish
himself on Mars[7]. That,
again, stretches modern credulity. To escape from the dreary Earth, one simply
takes a space ship off the Earth and then proceeds to introduce strange
creatures with strange habits, piracy on the “space-ways”, etc. on a grand
scale, as is done by Rice-Burroughs in his John Carson of Venus[8].
This is what has come to be known as “space opera”. The science content is
negligible and unbelievable, merely providing a gloss of realism to escapist
fantasies. There are, however, more serious SF attempts. Nevertheless, one must
remember that SF is fiction and the
main purpose of fiction is to entertain
and not to instruct.
It is difficult to decide exactly when SF started. There
have been fantasy (fairy) stories since time immemorial. These have involved
demons and magic and strange beasts and people. The strange beasts and people
are known to come from distorted tales of imperfectly understood observations.
Thus the centaur originated in times
when people who did not ride horses saw invaders riding horses, from a
distance. The unicorn comes from
stories of the rhinoceros seen by African travelers. Headless men carrying their heads in their arms are the Indonesian
orangutans and so on. In all probability the stories of magic can be traced to
people coming into contact with a relatively advanced civilization. Thus there
is probably a grain of truth in many of these stories, folk-tales, myths and
legends. Quite often it is an imperfectly understood science which lies at the
base of the stories. Who can say that the current understanding of science is
“correct”, much less “perfect”? From the point of view of some future observer,
should our SF also be regarded as fantasy? Clearly not. Nevertheless, those
myths do not qualify as SF.
The point is that there was
no intention of being “scientific” in those earlier stories. In the Greek story
of Daedalus and Icarus[9]
there is a definite attempt to provide a method for a human being to fly.
Daedalus fashions wings for flying and attaches them to his son, Icarus, with
wax. In the euphoria of flight, Icarus soars too close to the Sun, and the wax
melts. Though the world-view is hopelessly flawed, it would be unfair to
exclude this story from SF, as it is a serious attempt to provide a
scientific and technological development and its consequences in a story. There
was a later attempt to get a man to the Moon by goose-power. However weak the
science content, it is SF.
More clearly recognizable SF comes from the time of Edgar
Allan Poe. He regarded working scientists as mere tinkerers with “details” and
his “broad view” as genuine science. By disregarding all scientific facts as
“mere details”, he was ready to deem any of his ideas to be workable and
“scientific”. Thus, in The Unparalleled
Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, he had a flight to the Moon in a balloon[10],
despite the fact that the science of the time already knew that this was not
possible. In fact, he spent some effort in trying to reconcile his idea with
known science. It is this attempt that makes the story undoubtedly SF (however
much his attitude to science may irritate a working scientist). Much of his SF
is, as may be expected, fantasy and horror, such as The Colloquy of Monos and Una (1841) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1845). However, his insistence that
his is the truly scientific view and the working scientist’s view is sheer
prejudice, coupled with some reasoning to justify his ideas (however
unreasonable that “reasoning” may be) makes its classification as SF
acceptable.
The later SF of Jules Verne[11]
and H.G. Wells[12] is, again,
based on misconceptions --- we know that the Earth is not hollow and there are no blood-sucking
Martians --- but is perfectly acceptable as SF, as it is consistent with
the scientific views of the time. At this point, one can appreciate that it is
not necessary that the scientific theory on which the story is based be
generally accepted. So long as there is some
scientific theory on which the story is based, it is perfectly acceptable SF.
Thus, “Atlantis stories”[13]
can be perfectly good SF, as the idea of Atlantis comes from a scientific
theory based on the similarity of flora and fauna on both sides of the
Atlantic, explaining it as due to their transportation across the ocean via
Atlantis.
In SF a technological change, or a change in natural
conditions, may be postulated, and its social and cultural consequences be
explored. The changes may be beneficial or, more often, harmful. SF stories are
frequently based on natural calamities. Again, alien visitations are a
recurrent theme. Alternatively, human visits off the Earth are also an SF
staple. In the more serious SF, there is an attempt made to provide a
believable scientific base for these changes, or these visits. In view of the
distances involved and the speed of light limit, visits normally remain
restricted to the Solar system. With our present knowledge, there can be no
serious claim of aliens coming from within
the Solar system. This fact limits the range of speculation enormously. To
avoid this limitation, some way around the known limitations is postulated.
This procedure presents a problem to the serious SF writer. Once one gives up
realistic limits there are no holds barred. To avoid this dilemma, Asimov
proposed the criterion that one known
scientific error be permitted --- an “SFic license” analogous to the well-known
“poetic license”. This license provides the flexibility required to make the
fiction interesting, while retaining some limitations and a semblance of
realism.
It may happen that some SF
is almost indistinguishable from “fantasy”. For example, Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road (1963) or Philip Jose
Farmer’s series, The Gates of Creation
(1964), The Makers of Universes (1966)
and A Private Cosmos (1968), are at
the border between the two. In fact, one may often find SF bracketed with
“fantasy” in libraries and bookstores. Why? The reason for this “unification”
of the two branches of fiction may stem from the claim of Arthur C. Clarke[14]
that a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.
Thus, an author who wants to write fantasy that is believable, only has to
assume that there is (or has been) a sufficiently advanced technology
developed, which provides validity to the use of magic. From there on the story
can go ahead as a “justified fantasy”. If this fiction is not to be of the
space opera variety (which it generally is), it tries to concentrate on
exploring ethical, moral and philosophical issues. Most of all, it tries to
push the ideas of “good” and “evil”, and of “ultimate goals”, to their limits.
In this type of SF, human interest has to be stressed. Of course, to make any
fiction attractive there is need to have human interest, but that need not be
the major thrust of the story in general.
We broadly see, then, the kind of issues SF deals with and the type of science that would be involved in such fiction. There must be some science content, and the primary purpose of the story (apart from entertainment) is the exploration of issues raised by the science or associated technology, not the development of plots or characters, as in other kinds of fiction. It is necessary to look at each type of SF separately to examine the principal questions raised at the beginning of this article.
4. Scientists’ Attitude to
Science Fiction
Initially, it may be useful to address attitudes that are less prevalent now than they were when SF was less respectable, and the views of hard scientists were more rigid. This will bring into clearer focus the changes in attitudes that have already occurred and the scope for further improvement in them.
The view of authors such as Poe probably has a lot to do with the negative attitude that scientists developed towards SF and SF authors. Without caring to learn about the details they so casually dismiss, such writers proclaim their understanding of the “inner workings of science”. They continue to maintain untenable views by insisting that they not be “confused by facts”. Such a closed mind and bigoted attitude is sure to alienate persons with even a modicum of understanding of science. Whereas dilettantes may be tolerated, when they condemn the workers in the field as bigoted, by being totally bigoted themselves, they bring their more reasonable colleagues into disrepute as well.
As mentioned earlier, there is a tendency among many scientists to try to make their study more abstruse than necessary. There is a feeling that this makes their work seem more profound. They purport to be all the wiser for comprehending matters that appear beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. This tendency has particularly pervaded mathematics. Teachers of this subject tend to make it appear so difficult that it discourages most students. Often scholars, who like mathematics, do so because it puts them in a “superior” category. Those who are unable to attain this superior category suffer from what is generally termed “math anxiety”. The same attitude has marked academics in earlier times. When this is the motivation of a scientist, any action that reduces the mystery of his subject will, naturally, be resented. (This is not to say that all scientists have this motivation.)
Another factor is that some scientists resent people being able to pick up easily, what they had learned with so much difficulty. Having invested years in learning about some topic, it may begin to seem futile when a lay person at a party, can sound as knowledgeable as an expert. This does not trouble the soft scientist so much, as the width required there is not so easily acquired, and the matter can be simply explained. The hard scientist is more committed to his terminology and, unless previously exposed to the popular presentation of the subject, finds it more difficult to explain it in simple terms accessible to lay people. As such, the lay person may even sound more knowledgeable than the expert. That hurts the scientist.
Even with the best motivation possible, scientists may still resent lay-people dabbling in their concerns. Not only does this dabbling tend to “trivialize” their study, the major worries of the scientists are ignored. Matters that need care in presentation are presented superficially, so that the deeper points are lost. The problem here is that what is a matter of interest and excitement for the scientists, would leave the non-specialist cold. The scientists do not want to miss out, what they regard as, “the most interesting part”. When the SF writer, or the PS author, manages to get people interested in the subject without “the most interesting part”, the scientists feel frustrated at not being able to do so. The lay presentation seems a sham, and the scientists feel that if they were ready to dispense with the scruples of intellectual integrity, they could do a better job.
The problem is enhanced when the authors of the popular work, or fiction, are members of the scientific community. According to conservative working scientists they become “traitors to science”, who have “sold out” and “prostituted the subject”. The added factor of professional jealousy creeps in. Such authors are perceived as “having the best of both worlds”, using their scientific standing to gain “cheap popularity”. As a scientist myself, I have to be constantly on my guard against developing the same attitudes. Trying to formulate objective criteria to assess the worth of any work --- SF or PS --- helps in this struggle.
The scientist must bear in mind that modern education has brought science to a much wider audience in any case. Subjects that were considered fit only for “the highest level of studies”, like quantum mechanics and relativity, are now included in school and under-graduate curricula. It is not only in modern times that abstruse subjects have been trivialized. There was a time when multiplication and division were taught as advanced techniques of calculation. With the development of the so-called “Arabic numerals” in India, it became possible for children to learn how to perform these computations.
5. Scientists Versus Lay SF Authors
It is by no means clear that practicing scientists should necessarily be better SF writers. While one may expect that they would be more accurate in their SF, that may not be so either. Serious scientists can still make serious mistakes. An example is E. E. “Doc” Smith. He was an engineer by profession. In his Skylark series (published in the 1920s and 30s), his hero discovers some rays that have a speed equal to the square of the speed of light. That is nonsense! Speeds can not be equated with squares of speeds. Thus, if we measure speed in kilometers per second, the speed of light is 300,000 and its square 90,000,000,000. The incompatibility shows up clearly if we choose to measure speed in “billiometers” (million-kilometers) per second. In these units, the speed of light is 0.3, and its square is 0.09, i.e. less than the speed of light. Thus saying that a speed is equal to the speed of light squared can mean that it is greater than as well as less than the speed of light!
It must be admitted however that, by and large, scientists will be more accurate in their science than lay people. Authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke are famous examples of scientists who write hard SF. Others, like Sir Fred Hoyle and Robert L. Forward are less well known as SF authors, though more famous as scientists. In the case of Arthur C. Clarke, his area of specialization was his main theme of SF --- space travel. In the case of Isaac Asimov that is not so. Though his Ph.D. was in Biochemistry, none of his SF dealt with developments in that area. One might have expected that his stories would be about cloning and genetic engineering developments. However, his major contributions in hard SF were in the areas of robotics, artificial intelligence and space travel. Despite the vast quantities he wrote, and the great variety of subjects he covered in his writing, none of his fiction dealt with his field of specialization. (His PS writings will be mentioned in section 9.)
Hoyle is a famous astronomer with major contributions in that field. He was also one of the main proponents of the Steady State theory of Cosmology. With the observation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), that theory essentially died. Hoyle tried to resuscitate it by arguing that the CMBR was due to small iron needles that pervade space. Where did these needles come from? Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have argued[15], in their book Evolution From Space, that there is sentient life somewhere, sending seeds of life to other planets in these iron needles. In a further flight of fancy, they propose that not only primitive and simple life forms are being sent, but even insects in larval form. They go on to claim that these repeated invasions have driven evolution! (This is not his SF but his science!) Most of his SF is very realistic by comparison[16]. No part of most of his SF is beyond the bounds of possibility. There is a somewhat weird SF by Hoyle, entitled The First of October is Too Late (1966), but that is the exception to prove he rule. Even that is used to present some of his more speculative philosophical-scientific ideas. Forward is a theoretical physicist, working primarily in Relativity theory (my own major field of specialization). His is definitely hard SF. To me much of his science seems more speculative than his SF. Though the SF does take some assumptions that are not valid, they are clearly taken under SFic license.
A very famous example of a strong reaction by scientists to a dilettante is their response to Immanuel Velikovsky. He was originally a psychologist and hence something of a scientist already. As a dilettante he studied Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry and Egyptology on his own. This led to a series of books: Worlds in Collision (1950); Ages in Chaos (1952); Earth in Upheaval (1955), and Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960). His starting point is that the planet Venus was ejected out of the planet Jupiter as a comet and then settled into its present orbit. In the process, it passed near Mars and the Earth repeatedly. These occurrences led to the Greek myths about the goddess Venus being born out of the head of the god Jupiter, the Greek and Roman myths about the god of war, Mars, etc. He further claims to “explain” the miraculous occurrences recounted in the Old Testament of the Bible (which originates with the Jews). In particular, he postulates a major near-collision of the comet Venus with Earth during the Jewish captivity in Egypt, which led to the various plagues, the parting of the sea and the manna that fell from the sky. He claims to support this reconstruction by writings from ancient Egypt. He further argues that the accepted chronology of ancient Egypt is erroneous, and that his reconstruction clears up the major confusion of the Egyptologists. When astronomers and physicists protest that his claim of a “comet Venus” are clearly fallacious, he points to his successful explanation of manna by his chemistry and clarification of the historical confusion by his Egyptology, and charges the physicists and astronomers with prejudice and bigotry. The chemists and Egyptologists protested in vain about his mauling of the facts related to their subjects, because he proclaims his successes in explaining astronomical and physical facts, again with accusations of prejudice and bigotry. As pointed out in the book[17] Scientists Confront Velikovsky, edited by Donald Goldsmith, Velikovsky starts with an acceptance of all the Biblical stories as gospel, and proceeds to try to make all other branches of knowledge consistent with them. When it can not be managed, he is ready to mangle the science and twist it to come out in support of his reconstruction of the story. Before this book by SF and PS writers, scientists had continued to deride his theories but lay people were impressed. It was only when sufficiently broad-minded scientists, who had been involved with the popularization of science and SF, such as Isaac Asimov, David Morrison and Carl Sagan, came out clearly in opposition to Velikovsky, that his theories could finally be laid to rest.
The lesson to be learned from the
story of Velikovsky is that the general public can be confused by
self-proclaimed scientists, because the general run of regular scientists are
too rigid in their resistance to novel ideas. Incidentally, Chandrasekhar had
provided his explanation for white dwarf stars in the early 1930’s, but the
establishment, consisting of Sir Arthur Eddington and A. E. Milne, would not
accept it. As such, he and Fowler were awarded the Nobel Prize 50 years after
the work was done! How can the public know when the scientists are being
bigoted and hide-bound, and when they are validly rejecting ridiculous ideas?
The answer is that they will trust those who can make the critique intelligible
to them. This can only be done by the
scientist who is a PS author and the scientist who is an SF author. Thus
they have an important role to play in society. While the scientists are
rejecting their colleagues who bring science to the public, they should bear in
mind the valuable role that these colleagues play.
Another writer whose claims have caught the public imagination, but scientists reject, is Erich Von Daniken. He has written a series of books[18], following on his Chariots of the Gods (1970), purporting to provide evidence that the myths of gods, from various areas, were based on some early extra-terrestrials. It appears that they resembled the humans present on Earth enough for them to be regarded as superior humans. They seem to have tried numerous experiments in developing and modifying humans in whimsical ways. Von Daniken uses any new ideas that he can get to “explain” myths. For example, he claims that they had black holes in which they threw criminals, which led to the idea of Hell. Though fun to read, it is difficult to take at all seriously. There is always the fascination with what Carl Sagan calls “pseudo-science”[19] that people who desire to delude themselves seem to have. This, and the fact that it is fun, explains the popularity that such books enjoy.
6. The Impact of SF on Popular and “Academic” Science
One major impact of SF on science is that many young people have been attracted into working in science because of an early interest in SF. Of course, many of the enthusiasts of SF have found that serious science was not for them. However, the initial resistance to science of the pre-SF era, has disappeared.
SF has contributed to the development of hard-core science in many ways. It has occasionally provided a goal. For SF purposes, there is need to go faster than light (FTL). Scientists who have been reading SF start thinking about possibilities for FTL travel. They come up with tachyons. Other scientists criticize the idea. The original proponents try to find errors in the critique, or ways around it. Finally, the idea is killed but has led to the development of a better understanding of why the speed of light limit applies. Then some one comes up with the idea of hyperspace. Again, the process of progress occurs. Though the idea of hyperspace, per se, does not work out, it weakens the fixed view of three space and one time dimensions. The old suggestion of Kaluza and Klein, for a five dimensional theory gets revived with still higher dimensions. It became such an accepted part of theory that Jim Hartle, a relativist, started his talk at the Sixth Marcel Grossmann Meeting in Kyoto, Japan, in July 1992, with the statement “I am going to make a very daring proposal[20]. I am going to suggest that we live in a four-dimensional world!” Though said facetiously, it does represent the present thinking among a large section of theoretical physicists.
Or again, take the idea of wormholes in the Universe. They arise from considerations about black holes (regions of such strong gravitational fields that even light can not escape from them). Relativity explains the change of the path of an object, from a straight line to a curve, as being due to “the curvature of the space” instead of a “force”. To make the theory of general relativity consistent, it is necessary to postulate a copy of the Universe with a “mirror image” of the black hole in it. The two copies are joined by the so-called “Einstein-Rosen bridge”. We can think of two regions of a curved Universe connected together as analogous to two antipodal parts of an apple. (The apple comes into the picture because it gave Newton the idea of gravity, so Wheeler recalls the apple whenever gravity is involved.) The Einstein-Rosen bridge gets stretched out to a path connecting the two regions, such as would be created by a worm eating through from one part to the other. An ant wanting to go from one end to the other could, now, take the short-cut through the wormhole, as Wheeler called it, and arrive faster than an ant going around the long way. As such it would be able to beat the “ant speed” limit on the apple. This idea certainly gained currency due to its SF utility, by providing a way around the light speed limit.
Yet again, SF themes require unlimited energy. Robert L. Forward provides a vacuum energy battery. The paper is published in the prestigious Physical Reviews. I am not convinced that it is sound science. However, neither I, nor any one else that I know of, have proved the idea wrong. When it is proved wrong, science will have progressed (of course, if it turns out to be right and I am wrong in my expectations, science would have progressed even more).
Another SF contribution to the development of science is the use of scenarios for developing scientific theories. This is extensively used in the new ideas on cosmology with, what is called inflation theory. The consequences of a theory in a complicated situation are explored by taking typical choices, where a range of possibilities appears. By constructing various possibilities one gets an idea of a likely, if not definite, outcomes are anticipated.
7. Popular Science
I now come to PS. It is
obviously not SF but it provides many
of the same functions that SF does and used to carry the same stigma for the
author. I do not know when it started. Perhaps there was no need for it in the
days before science became too abstract, and books more common. Certainly,
Plato’s Dialogues can be thought of
as popular philosophy and Galileo’s Dialogues[21]
as PS. However, the first attempt to popularize the study of science that I
am aware of, rather than the author’s own particular view in his subject, is by
the great logician and mathematician, Bertrand Russell[22],
during the period 1923 to 1925.
Of course, truth is stranger than fiction. Whereas human imagination is bounded by experience, experience is not bounded by human imagination. A proper comprehension of that experience may have to wait for the imagination to catch up, but there will inevitably be surprises in store for us, in that occurrences will not always match our expectations (however rationally based). In earlier days, the pace of change in scientific concepts was so slow that there was ample time for expectation to catch up with observation. It was only a matter of intellectual inertia on account of religious dogma that created problems. From the time of Sir Isaac Newton, the level of abstraction went beyond common observation, and there was need for re-adjustment. However, except for a very few, there was rapid acceptance of Newtonian physics. The physics of James Clerk Maxwell was considerably more abstruse. While Newton’s “action at a distance” could be swept under the rug, having been proposed much earlier by Al Kindi, Maxwellian “action at a distance” rubbed one’s nose in it. The force could be directly seen. Close a switch here and a needle moves there. Here we had “magic without magic” (with due acknowledgement of the J. A. Wheeler Festschrift title[23]). Truth had become at least as strange as fiction! With the even more abstruse general relativity of Einstein and the downright spooky observed non-local quantum effects, truth has totally outstripped fiction. So many of the modern facts and theoretical expectations are totally counter-intuitive. These later developments have brought about the need for PS writing.
As mentioned before, one of the earliest popularizers of science was Lord Bertrand Russell. His hallmark was the extreme lucidity of his writings, be they on philosophy, science or social and ethical matters. He is one of the people primarily responsible for bringing the social sciences into the purview of science on account of his extensive writings on subjects that would nowadays be so called. However, it is not clear that he should be regarded as a scientist himself. Most other people who wrote about scientific subjects took a more historical tack. These were seldom scientists themselves, but were more likely to be popularizers and historians of science.
One of the earliest scientists
who wrote PS, that I am aware of, was George Gamow, who was a nuclear physicist
to start with and later developed an understanding of stellar evolution. He
went on to formulate the so-called “hot big bang” model of the Universe, which
is the standard model at present. Though he was a “serious scientist” in that
he did provide serious and significant contributions to science, he was a “non-serious
scientist” in another sense. He had a tremendous sense of humor. Having written
a paper with a student named Alpher, he inserted the name of another student,
Hans Bethe, so that the authorship should read Alpher, Bethe, Gamow. This paper[24],
as he had intended, became famous as the Alpha-Beta-Gamma
paper. He had strong disagreements with Hoyle about the theory of the Universe.
Whereas Hoyle supported the Steady State Theory (according to which the
Universe is eternal), Gamow was a proponent of the Big Bang Theory (according
to which the Universe started at an instant of time, not with a whimper but
with a bang.) He had pointed to the observed abundance of primordial elements
as evidence for his theory. When Hoyle refused to accept the argument, he wrote
a “New Genesis” in which he made fun of Hoyle’s theory. In it he wrote “And God
said `Let there be Hoyle.’ And there was Hoyle. And God looked at Hoyle … and
told him to make elements in any way he pleased.” He went on with “And so, with
the help of God, Hoyle made heavy elements in this way, but it was so
complicated that nowadays neither Hoyle nor God, nor anybody else can figure
out how it was done.” Gamow’s PS was genuinely fun to read. [25] Much of his
PS was of an astronomical nature, though he also wrote one of my favorite
popular mathematics / general science books: One, Two, Three, Infinity (1947).
One of the earliest famous popularizers of science was
Sir Lancelot Hogben, who wrote a series of books for adults and children. Among
them are, Science for the Citizen
(1940) and Mathematics for the Million
(1936) for adults and Mathematics in the
Making (1960), Man Must Measure (1955) and Men, Missiles and Machines (1957) for children. The first two books
took England (and its colonies) by storm, so that all non-scientists with
pretensions to intellectualism took the former two books as required reading.
They did much towards developing public interest in the subject. However, this
was merely the dawn of the age of PS. It is worth mentioning here that this and
some other similar works, have been undertaken with a view to improving the
understanding of the lay public. Unfortunately, there are far too many other PS
attempts which try to glorify the works of the scientists rather than to inform
the reader about the subject.
It was when the SF authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C.
Clarke entered the PS field that it really got started .[26]
In fact, it is not clear whether Asimov should be regarded as essentially an SF
or a PS writer. Though he started as an SF writer, even before he became a
scientist, the bulk of his writings are on PS.) With them it was no longer a
matter of dabbling in it, but of
using it as a moneymaking proposition. The earlier attempts were all of amateurs while their work was professional. However one might decry
commercialism entering into academic pursuits, it is the commercial (and only
the commercial) demand that can bring professionals into the field. And it is
only the professional who will really do the job. Later, scientists like Carl
Sagan (who also wrote such SF classics as Contact,
1985) entered the field as semi-professionals in popular science.
(Incidentally, Sagan’s PS books such as Broca’s
Brain (1979) or The Dragons of Eden (for
which he won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize), are less well known than his TV series
for popularizing science Cosmos.)
Meanwhile full-time professional PS writers also came forward.
The next major development was that some of the best
serious scientists started writing popular expositions of the subject that they
had been working on. The first PS “best seller” that I know of was The First Three Minutes (in 1977) by
Stephen Weinberg[27], who later
shared the Nobel Prize for his work on the Unification of the Weak Nuclear with
the Electromagnetic force. This book told the story of the birth of the
Universe, explaining how we get to know about it, and to what extent we can be
sure of what we know. Like Asimov and Clarke, he clarified the subject instead of mystifying it (as so many PS
writers have done). However, he seemed to be apologetic about having “deserted”
the serious science field and entered the popular arena. He talked about
“returning to the pages of The Physical
Review”, where he “felt more comfortable”. However, he returned repeatedly
to PS writing, as will be discussed later.
The next that comes to mind is Stephen W. Hawking’s Brief History of Time in 1985. It deals
with the same subject as The First Three
Minutes, but goes into speculations about a still earlier time. It does not
distinguish clearly between speculation and that which is more definitely
known. It is based on Hawking’s ideas. Some of them (like radiation from black holes due to quantum effects) are more
generally accepted, some are less widely believed (like quantum cosmology) and
some (like the “no-boundary boundary condition” of Hartle and Hawking, in the
Euclideanised version of space-time) are still more speculative. There is
nothing that can be regarded as established. He ended up with a suggestion that
the Universe might be thought of as having no beginning and no end, through the
mathematical trick of Euclideanisation, without
further clarification of how it should be understood. Although this work was
widely acclaimed, I feel that it did not
make the ideas more comprehensible. Instead, it made the reader feel that
Hawking had deep and profound thoughts that were beyond the reader. This fact
may be apparent if you think of the above terms presented with little more
explanation. However, he was not
apologetic about entering the popular arena. This is a major difference in
attitudes that has developed recently. In the decade between the two PS books
mentioned, academia adopted a more flexible attitude to PS. Even SF-writing
became much more acceptable. He then wrote a sequel entitled Black Holes and Baby Universes (which is
a collection of essays published in 1993, similar in style and content to his
first book).
Then my one-time Ph.D. supervisor, Sir Roger Penrose,
wrote his attempt at a PS book, entitled The
Emperor’s New Mind (1989). I may be biased, but I think that it is much clearer than Hawking’s PS book..
However, it is not a book that can be taken as casual reading. Though all
concepts discussed are explained in the book, it is certainly not light reading
for those unfamiliar with the mathematics and science discussed there. It deals
with the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) has, or can, be
achieved. In the process he appeals to various results from the foundations of
mathematics and physics, from Godel’s theorem to general relativity and quantum
theory; to various aspects of biology, physiology and psychology; and then
tries to develop a theory of consciousness. He arrives at the conclusion that,
not only has AI not been achieved, it can not really be achieved, in that the
AI will only have a semblance of intelligence but can never be the real thing. His problem is not of trying to mystify the subject. He
does explain everything. However, there is a level of maturity required in all
the subjects, which is not likely to have been reached by most of his readers.
As such, he is likely to lose the reader’s interest. From my discussions with
most lay readers, I find that they have tended to skip much of the material and
skim through the book. This applies even to many experts in one or two of the
fields used in his tour de force.
Roger Penrose has, since, written a sequel to his book,
which will be discussed later. The fact that sequels to “best sellers” have
appeared, and been “best sellers”, demonstrates the enormous increase in
acceptability of PS and semi-PS writing. Does the fact that there have not been
so many SFs written by the best scientists mean that it is less acceptable? In my view the answer in “No.” It is not that
scientist-SF writers are currently facing so much resistance, as, that there
have not been so many top scientists who have tried SF writing seriously. The
few working scientists who have, have done well enough in both fields.
One of the areas of Physics that has generated a lot of
recent PS is the quantum theory and
its applications to understanding the fundamental constituents of matter and
the forces acting between them. The reason for the enormous outpourings on the
subject is that it is one of the theories most misunderstood by the public (and
most popularizers of science), and one least understood by the experts. The
problem with it is that it is weird!
Let me try to explain why.
Quantum theory started with Max Planck’s explanation of
the laws of radiation by assuming that it is absorbed by matter in discrete quanta. Albert Einstein explained how
light caused currents to flow in metals by taking the postulate more seriously
and treating light as consisting of
discrete quanta. Then Niels Bohr used the same idea to explain how an atom
can be stable despite the fact that it contains electrons that must be
accelerated, while they would have been expected to spiral into the nucleus as
they radiated away energy. These general ideas were formalized more fully by
Erwin Schrodinger and Wehrner Heisenberg, in two apparently opposite ways.
There were a number of questions raised by the formalism. It seemed to say that
objects were to be described by a “wave function” but on the other hand that
the wave function only gave the probability of finding the object at some
place. How could one, then, deal with
individual objects? Probability, after all, only applies to collections of
objects. Again, it seemed to require that both the position and the momentum of
a particle could not be simultaneously known. Should this be taken as a limit of our knowledge, of the nature of
particles or of “knowability”? There were endless debates on this matter
between Einstein and Bohr, which ended with the vast majority of working
scientists in agreement with Bohr. Later Paul Dirac showed that Schrodinger’s
and Heisenberg’s descriptions are in fact equivalent. If any single scientist
is to be credited with inventing quantum theory, it would have to be Dirac.
Two of the strange conclusions that Einstein objected to
were, that objects only exist to the extent that they are observed and that
there is an inherent randomness in the laws of Nature. It is in this context
that Einstein made his oft-quoted aphorisms: “I can not believe that the Moon
will change because a mouse looks at it”; and “I do not believe that God plays
dice with the world”. With Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he tried to
demonstrate that the ideas of Bohr would lead to the unacceptable conclusion
that signals could be sent faster than light, in contradiction to his special
theory of relativity. They claimed that quantum theory is an incomplete
description of nature. Bohr’s attempt to refute this argument led David Bohm to
suggest a way to show that Bohr was wrong. In itself, the idea was not
testable. However, John Bell formulated it in a way that could be
experimentally verified. The test, performed by Aspect and by Fry, led to the
vindication of the predictions of quantum mechanics. It turned out that it is
not necessary to suppose that signals travel faster than light but one must
give up the idea that quantum objects can be regarded as particles with no
spatial extent. Instead, they have to be thought of as extended (non-local) objects.
More recently there has been a fresh development that,
again, caught the public imagination: the so- called theory of “chaos”. It
shows that while, in principle, classical physics is fully predictable, in
practice that predictability has no relevance. The point is, that with very
minor changes in the situation at a given time, there can be drastic changes in
the outcome. Since one can never know the situation at a given time precisely,
one is unable to meaningfully predict subsequent events. The classic example of
this limitation is the weather. As they say, if a butterfly flaps its wings
anywhere in the world, the prediction could change from “calm” to a “hurricane”
at the antipodal point in three days.
Of course science is limited. There are many things worth
knowing, discussing and enjoying, that have no scientific content. Aesthetics
is an example of a relevant non-scientific field. Of more relevance for our
purposes is the fact that it often fails to make predictions. This fact appeals
to the mystics, who like to use it to argue that science is useless. Many
popularizers of science like to further mystify science through quantum theory
and chaos, so as achieve greater popularity. I will ignore this vast majority
of works on quantum theory and concentrate on the PS writings of the serious
scientists.
Penrose’s The Emperor’s
New Mind dealt to a large extent with his view of how general relativity
can solve one of the mysteries of quantum theory --- namely non-locality. The
problem is that an individual quantum object can be spread over meters, and
even kilometers. Then, when a measurement is made on it, it suddenly collapses
to a point. There is, at present, no understanding of what makes this collapse
possible and how to know when it will occur. Also, at present, there is no
valid theory that incorporates both general relativity and quantum theory. It
should be borne in mind that these two theories have been found to be
incredibly precise in their respective domains of applicability. So far there
have been no situations where both would be expected to give significantly different
predictions from classical theory. However, we can visualize such situations
(and in fact know that at some stage in the history of the Universe they did
prevail). Penrose’s view is that there will exist some theory different from
both, which gives both as an approximation. Most quantum theorists take it for
granted that it will be general relativity, and not quantum theory, that will
be modified. To me it seems that this “quantum chauvinism” is unjustified.
Penrose returns to this theme in his Shadows
of the Mind and The large, the Small
and the Human Mind. As before, his explanations are very clear. In fact, he
seems to have adapted to the requirements of PS better. He has certainly
refined his arguments in the light of various criticisms of his first book (and
the second).
Weinberg also returned to PS writing, this time in
connection with application of quantum theory to understanding the fundamental
constituents of matter and the forces acting between them. Some of the work was
expository, but some of it was directed to building public support for the
enormous financial outlay required for building a particle accelerator which
would achieve much greater energies than could have been expected before. The
new technology to be used was of superconducting wires that could produce much
more powerful electromagnets. In his Dreams
of a Final Theory (1994) he declared this goal. Despite its popularity
(though not equal to his best seller), the US Congress decided to drop the
project. I felt that this book lacked the precision and focus of The First Three Minutes. Perhaps partly
because it had an element of advertising in it.
Another book that acquired some fame is David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality (1998, revised
edition). Deutsch was the originator of the idea of quantum computers. He is a firm believer in the so-called many worlds interpretation of the
quantum formalism. The original idea was put forward by Hugh Everett Junior
III. It tries to resolve the problem of the collapse of the quantum wave
function. Bohr had declared that the wave function collapsed only when an
“observation” was made. It is in this collapse process that randomness enters
into the quantum description of phenomena. If two outcomes of a quantum process
are equally likely, they will occur equally often when the experiment is run
repeatedly. According to the Nobel Laureate, Eugene Wigner, it is necessary for
the information to enter some intelligence. To bring out the problem with, this
requirement, Schrodinger developed a thought
experiment, relating the outcome of a quantum process to the death of a cat
in a box. Since the quantum process can only predict probabilistically and
things that are not observed can not be taken to have occurred, till some one
opens the box and sees the cat, it would be neither dead nor alive. Once the
observation is made, it will either be dead or not. Everett pointed out that
each person could doubt that another person qualified as an “intelligence”. As
such, the problem of observation would end up with an endless regress. Everett’s suggestion was that
at each collapse of a wave function, the universe splits into many copies, in
some of which one outcome becomes real, while in others the other does. Thus,
in half the universes produced Schrodinger’s cat is dead and in the other half
it is alive. We thus avoid the embarrassment of a “neither live nor dead” cat.
In his book Deutsch tries to explain, and explore the
consequences of, this idea. When I met him in 1986, I had just been studying
this interpretation and had felt that there was a very unsatisfactory aspect of
this theory. One was going on producing universes with no eye to the cost. Who pays the energy bill for all these
universes? I had put this point to him and added that it would no longer be
a “universe” but a “multiverse”. On
picking up his book I was astonished to see this term used by him, not as a
critique of the idea but as supporting its validity. It may be my personal
prejudice against the theory espoused by Deutsch, but I felt that the book did
not explain the ideas involved well, often mystifying instead of clarifying.
One of the reasons for my reservations about the book is that it seemed more
like an advertising brochure (for the chosen point of view) than an exposition.
The one point that was extremely well
explained, had to do with quantum computers. They could, if we knew how to
construct them, perform calculations in a totally different way from ordinary
computers, as they would follow a totally different logic. Deutsch claims that
they would be very much faster for very large computations. (It may be
mentioned here that Penrose regards the human brain as a quantum computer,
possibly linked to an ordinary computer.)
Nowadays PS writing is not only acceptable but has become
decidedly fashionable, specially
among authors who would like to claim a certain standing. It may be that it has
become a symbol of “having arrived”. There are innumerable PS books by famous
scientists such as Dyson, Gell-mann, Oppenheimer, Pauli, Polkinghorne[28],
etc. The days when there was a stigma attached to it are definitely over! There
is much more PS, in other fields, that should have been discussed but is
omitted because of my lack of competence to do justice to it[29].
There is, of course, one very direct impact of PS on
science. As with SF, more young people get attracted into the field. In fact,
those that get attracted by SF, and have the potential for science, are likely
to start reading PS fairly early. Thus, it also acts as a filter for those who
will not go on to become scientists.
Another effect, deriving from the change in attitude to
PS, is that many more scientists have started reading it, and have thus
improved the presentation of their work. This change is particularly apparent
in physics and least apparent in mathematics. Associated with this
acceptability has come a tendency of regular scientists to be more speculative
in their work. They are more likely to publish, and seriously consider, outré suggestions than they used to be.
Part of the reason may have nothing to do with PS, but with developments in
science and the “publish or perish” culture that has arisen in academia. With
the acceptance of special and general relativity and of quantum theory, it is
no longer clear what should be regarded as conservative and what as outré. Thus there has been much work
done on black holes, wormholes and baby
universes. At one time this would have been regarded as extremely far out, even for SF! Again,
there is a serious debate about the violation of causality. Until recently,
causality could only have been questioned in SF. It is much easier to be
speculative than to stick to what is well known to be true and yet be original.
Speculation, therefore, often provides easier
publication than solid science does. Nevertheless, I am sure that PS has played
a major role in developing more speculative ideas concretely in science. This
is particularly true in the fields of cosmology and relativity.
An example of my claim above is provided by an instance
from my student days with Roger Penrose. He, too, was a reader of SF. Having
been interested, through his SF reading, in the need of some sufficiently
technologically advanced society for endless supplies of energy, he pondered on
the possibility of using black holes as an energy source. (This was before Hawking-radiation was proposed.)
His first idea was of filling up a box with thermal radiation and lowering it
by means of a spring into a black hole. On releasing the radiation into the
black hole, the string could store some energy in it, corresponding to the
unusable thermal radiation. This idea became much more concrete with
Hawking-radiation, and has led to a lot of solid work in relativity on “mining
energy from black holes”. He went on to consider whether energy could be
similarly obtained from rotating (Kerr) black holes. This led to his famous
work with Roger Floyd on energy extraction from Kerr black holes, which lies at
the base of Hawking radiation. The original work was entirely SF and PS based.
Another consequence of PS writing is that there is a
greater demand for it. People want
more serious explanations of recent developments in science. They want to know more about the validity of
SF, or SF-like, ideas for technological developments. There is more scope for
working scientists to enter into the field of PS writing, as there is now a
market for it. One can write “best
sellers” in PS. This trend is likely to continue. Already, there has been a
marked change of attitude in academia, in favor of SF and PS writing. Academia
will need to adjust further to this trend. Science is benefiting from these
fields and there is a demand for them. Credit will have to be given for this
work. When Asimov started as a scientist, he faced problems on account of his
SF writing. Even his PS writing would not have counted to his credit at the
University. By the end of his career, his School regarded his association with
them as an asset. Nevertheless, his SF/PS writing did not lead to his
appointment as full Professor. His PS has been useful for me in writing
textbooks and research papers. The International Astronomer’s Union has given
him credit for some of his work. Should that not have been enough to get him a
professorship? There is a problem with that, which I would like to expand on in
the next section.
In my discussion, I have tended to concentrate on SF
novels and PS books. There have been many other very significant vehicles for
these two fields. The SF short story may even be more significant than the novel. Magazines for both certainly reach
a larger audience. The magazines used to be the main vehicle for SF in the
early days. However, most of the good SF from the magazines has appeared in
anthologies --- quite often in different anthologies. Nowadays there are PS
magazines at different levels. There are the more technical ones, such as Physics Today, the somewhat less
technical ones, such as Scientific
American, and popular ones such as Omni.
Even the SF magazines, such as Asimov’s,
tend to have PS articles. Films, on the big screen and the small, must surely
be even more effective in bringing science to the masses. To the best of my
knowledge, PS is limited to the TV with occasional programs, such as Cosmos, and long running series, such as
Tomorrow’s World. There can be no
need for me to dwell on the SF films. They are endless.
What should be the attitude of academia to scientists who
are SF and PS writers? Should they be discouraged, tolerated or actively
encouraged? Despite the foregoing discussion, this is not a simple matter. Let
us consider it in more detail.
I do feel that it was unwise of academic institutions to discourage SF and PS writing. So long as
the scientists are working at what is required of them, there can surely be no
objection to their writing on other topics. Would there ever have been any objection to a scientist who wrote poetry? We
know that the Persian Astronomer-Mathematician, Omar Khayyam, also wrote poetry.
(In fact, he may currently be more famous on account of his Rubaiyat than for
his solution of the cubic and quartic equations, or for his remarkably accurate
calendar.) Why should SF or PS carry a stigma not shared by poetry or music,
for example? The reason for this attitude was that there was no remuneration for that work, while there
is for SF and PS. This attitude, against “commercialism’, dates back to the
time when science was in the purview of “gentlemen” and not “tradesmen”. There
should be no “smell of the shop” in their work. With the obsolescence of that
attitude, the associated objection to SF and PS writing should have disappeared
long ago. Even now, there may be those conservative elements that remain stuck
to the traditional values in academics. They need to reconsider their view.
Agreeing that, at
least, PS and SF writing should be tolerated, the question arises about
encouragement. For this purpose we need to distinguish between the two.
Clearly, SF should be regarded as a branch of literature. To the extent that a
scientist should be given credit for dabbling in literature, there can be no
harm in giving the same credit for SF. However, unless the contribution to
literature is serious, one would not feel tempted to give much credit for it.
For sufficiently significant work in any other field than the main one, the
general procedure is to give joint appointments. That could, and should, be
done in my opinion.
If work in PS is encouraged, it may lead to a major shift
in emphasis of the scientists. All said and done, serious science is hard. It would be much easier to
reproduce what others have done. Would this be a bad idea? Though it may well
not do any damage, such a major change needs to be approached with caution. We
do not want to introduce a change that could become a real disaster. Care is
required. Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for such changes to be tried out
in some schools, and their impact assessed. If work in PS is encouraged, it may
lead to a major shift in emphasis of the scientists. A gung ho approach in this matter should be avoided.
Another question to be considered is the nature of the
encouragement to be given. The author already has a direct monetary incentive in the payment of royalties etc. Of course, the
same consideration applies to science (text) books by scientists. They get
royalties for them as well. The point is that one wants a “healthy mix” of
science-for- scientists and science-for-lay people. It may be useful for
scientists to learn to present their work in sufficiently simple terms, not
only because of the reasons mentioned above, but also because it may improve
their science. My father used to say, “if you can not explain some thing you
have not understood it”. I found the truth of this saying when working with
John Archibald Wheeler who says, “If I want to learn a subject I teach
it. He insists on finding “the poor man’s way” of seeing any new principles,
even the profoundest of them. One does not realize all that is contained in the
principle till one follows Wheeler through his re-presentations of it. By the
end of his working through it, one sees why he insisted on pursuing those
simplifications and re-expressions. Mind you, he is not a PS writer in the
usual sense, but he certainly does make regular science “popular”. (He is the
man who invented the terms “black hole”, “wormhole” and “big crunch”.) That
capability needs to be cultivated ---
it needs to be encouraged. The way to
encourage it might be to require some popular, and some regular, science
publication by faculty at the time of promotion or tenure appointment.
There will surely be as many views as there are people to
express them. There will be many ideas on whether SF and PS should, or should
not, be tolerated or encouraged. Even for encouragement, there will be many
differences about how to do so. I
have given my suggestions. One needs
to develop an informed consensus on the matter. The purpose of this chapter
will have been served if it has provided guidelines of the type of considerations
that need to be taken into account.
I am most grateful to Rahila Durrani, Ali
Qadir, Basharat Qadir and Rabiya Qadir for very helpful comments and
suggestions. Any errors remaining are very much my own.
[1] This subject is discussed in any modern text on the philosophy of science. A more easily accessible source is J. Passmore, J. (1994). A Hundred Years of Philosophy. London UK: Penguin.
[2] See Einstein, A. and L. Infeld (1947), The Evolution of Physics. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. .
[3] The term “science” means different things to different people. Further, the general consensus on what it is to mean, has been changing over time. There is extensive literature available on this subject. A short article giving my views on the matter is available in Qadir, A. (1978), “Modern Scientific Thought in Perspective”, in History of Science in Central Asia, ed. A. Qadir, Quaid-i-Azam University Press.. Again the philosophy of science is a well-developed branch of philosophy.
[4] The original paper, Godel, K. (1931), Monatshefte fur Mathematik und Physik 38, 173-178, is not very readable. The essential point made is available at various levels of popularization. Perhaps one of the simplest to follow is the explanation given in Penrose, Roger (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind. New York NY: Oxford University Press.
[5] The two main branches of modern physics are surprisingly different. While special relativity came more or less complete in Einstein’s paper of 1905; Einstein, Albert (1905), Ann. Phys., 17, 891-921, quantum theory has remained riddled with problems and continues to be a subject of research at the fundamental level. Though it provides rules in excellent agreement with experiment, there is strong disagreement about what the formalism should be taken to mean. This is the interpretation problem. A good account of the earlier debates is available in Jammer, M. (1989). The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics. New York NY: American Institute of Physics.
[6] As expounded in Kuhn, Thomas (1972). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
[7] See Edgar Rice-Burroughs’ Mars series books including: A Princess of Mars (1917), The Gods of Mars (1918), The Warlord of Mars (1919), Thuvia Maid of Mars (1920).
[8] See Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Venus series books including: Pirates of Venus (1934), Lost on Venus (1935), John Carson of Venus (1939).
[9] The reference to this myth may be found in any anthology of Greek mythology or in “dictionaries for classical literature, such as Warrington, J. (1978). Everyman’s Classical Dictionary. London UK:J.M. Dent and Sons.
[10] See Poe, A. E. (1985-reprinted anthology). The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, London UK: Penguin Books.
[11] See, for example, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (originally published in French in 1864, translated into English in 1874).
[12] See, for example, H. G. Wells’s: A War of the Worlds (1898), The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
[13] For example, there is Lin Carter’s Thongor series about a land that is lost: Carter, Lin (1). Thongor.. This was taken to be even prior to Atlantis, called Gondwanaland. Atlantis itself comes from the authority of Plato, who refers to it, but possibly as a myth. The current belief, which has substantial scientific support through experiments and observations, is that due to tectonic plate movements, continents have been forming and breaking up. At some stage there may have been only one continent which broke up to provide all the present continents.
[14] This is quoted at various places by many people, including Isaac Asimov, but I have not seen the original A. C. Clarke statement.
[15] See Hoyle, F. and Wickramasinghe, C. (1981). Evolution From Space, New York NY: Touchstone.
[16] Among Hoyle’s most memorable science fiction works are The Black Cloud (1957) and ‘A’ For Andromeda (1962)
[17] See Goldsmith, D. ed. (1977), Scientists Confront Velikovsky, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
[18] See for example, the first of the series, Von Daniken, E. (1970). Chariots of the Gods. New York NY: Plenum (First published in German as Erinnerungen an die Zukunft in 1968).
[19] Sagan, Carl (1994). The Demon-haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York NY: Random House.
[20] This quotation does not appear in his paper in the proceedings of the conference, Sato, H. and Nakamura, T. (eds.), 1992, Proceedings of the Sixth Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity, World Scientific. Perhaps since it is not the type of statement to be found in serious papers (unfortunately). However, it is by no means uncommon for scientists to display humor (and sarcasm, I might add) in serious talks.
[21] See Galileo’s dialogues, originally published in 1632: Galileo Galilei (1967 reprinted), Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, Translated by Stillman Drake. Berkeley CA: University of California Press and (1954- reprinted) Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. Translated by Henry Crew and Alonso de Salvio, Dover Press.
[22] There are innumerable books and essays on various topics of natural and social sciences on which Bertrand Russell has written. In Our Knowledge of the External World (1926) and Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1962), he attempted to explain all factual knowledge as constructed out of immediate experiences. Among his other books are The ABC of Relativity (1925), Education and the Social Order (1932), A History of Western Philosophy (1945), The Impact of Science upon Society (1952), My Philosophical Development (1959), War Crimes in Vietnam (1967).
[23] A book was put together in honor of the 60th birthday of John Archibald Wheeler, entitled Magic Without Magic, edited by ?. See also Wheeler, J. A. and Zurek, W.H. (19). Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princton NJ:Princeton University Press.
[24] See Alpher, A., Bethe, H. and Gamow, G. (1946). Phys. Rev. 25, p. 783.
[25]
Some of Gamow’s most memorable works include: Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland (1940) and Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom (1945), both published in the UK by
Cambridge University Press, and One,
Two, Three, Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (1952). New York
NY: Bantam Books.
[26]
Asimov dedicated one of his books “from the second best science fiction writer
to the second best science writer” referring to “the Asimov-Clarke
agreement”. Some of Asimov’s most
notable fictional works are: I, Robot (1950); The Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953), to
which he wrote a sequel thirty years later Foundations
Edge (1982). His science writings include Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1964; revised
1982) and Asimov's New Guide to Science
(1984). Asimov published over 400 books – a remarkable achievemnt by any
standards. Arthur C. Clarke, has also published in both fictional and
non-fictional domains. His most notable fictional works are: Childhood’s End (1953), The City and the Stars (1956), Rendezvous with Rama (1973), and The Fountains of Paradise (1979). His
most notable non-fictional work is Profiles
of the Future (1962).
[27] See Weinberg, Steven (1976). The First Three Minutes. New York NY: Penguin. He also wrote a textbook on General Relativity and Cosmology, by that name.
[28] Some had not written these as popular books but as separate articles, which were later collected together and published in book form. This demonstrates that the time was ripe for PS when these books appeared --- all in the late 1980’s!
[29] I am, nevertheless, unable to resist mentioning my favorite author on Biology, S.J. Gould, whose clear exposition of what the theory of evolution really means, as opposed to the common understanding of the phrase “survival of the fittest”, really helped to reshape my thinking.