The Literature of Science

Doesn’t it strike you as just a little bit odd that publishers, booksellers, librarians and reviews editors tend to classify books into ‘fiction versus non-fiction’? Why not ‘cookery versus non-cookery’? ‘Gardening versus non-gardening’? ‘Assyrian woodwind instruments versus Everything Else’? Fiction is stories about events that never happened to people who never lived. Non-fiction is everything else. It includes biography, autobiography and history – events that really happened to real people in real places. It includes science, which is stories about “All that is or ever was or ever will be”: everything from quarks to galaxies, fossils to Fibonacci series, dinosaurs to bacteria, habilis to sapiens. As if that wasn’t enough, non-fiction includes art, music, cathedrals, fashion photography, flower arranging and everything else. Everything – except things that never happened, which is the province of fiction.

We zoologists are familiar with unbalanced divisions of the world that nevertheless seem to work: ‘humans versus animals’, where humans actually are animals and constitute only one tiny twig buried somewhere in the massively branched tree of ten million species; ‘vertebrates versus invertebrates’, where vertebrates are only a sub-phylum within the phylum Chordata, and Chordata is only one among some thirty animal phyla. And of course it makes sense that the book-trade scales should be weighted towards books that people want to buy, titles that reward publishers. If there are books on Assyrian woodwind instruments they don’t overburden our hypothetical balance – or the library shelf. So, assuming booksellers and publishers know their business, we are left with the undeniable fact that we all love fiction, and the not uninteresting question of why. Why do we love to read about people who never lived, what they never said to each other, and things that never happened to them? That question belongs in critical territory where angels fear to tread, however tempted this fool may be. For I too adore fiction, and I often wonder why. Dodging the question, I shall turn to science books and why everyone should read them. As well as fiction.

Science is why you exist, in the only meaning of ‘why’ that ultimately makes sense. It’s how you got here: about the very meaning of ‘how’; about where ‘here’ is, and how it got to be the way it is. And the ‘you’ in my sentence means every you that has ever breathed, including Shakespeare and Schubert, the postman and the president 100 years hence, the dog next door, and an anonymous mosasaur hunting the Mediterranean. Except that the Med wasn’t there in the Mesozoic. It was part of the larger Tethys Sea. The map of the world was different in those days, and that too is a fascinating story. Want to run the shifting world map 100 million years on when, sadly, there’ll be nobody around to chart it? On those continents of the long hence, there’ll be nobody to read a sonnet, no eye for a Rembrandt, no ear for a Paganini or a Liszt. But let us still exult in our ability to foresee their shape-shifted geography.

Reluctant to believe we’ll all be gone? Sorry, but 100 million years is a powerful long time. We can’t fathom geological time, accustomed as we are to the tinpot timescale of human history. As Brahms rightly said of a symphony, geological time is no joke. There’ll be plenty of time to go extinct. Extinction has been the fate of the huge majority of species that have ever lived. In order for our descendants to defy not just time but geological Time, dodging the type of bullet that decked the dinosaurs, we shall need to be powerfully unique. Well, to be sure, we are blessed with some relevant uniquenesses. We are the only species with language – and how that got started is a scientific teaser in its own right. Consequently, ours is the only species whose knowledge is cumulative, building directly and even exponentially (at least where the all-important computer technology is concerned) on past generations; the only species with a technology that might equip a Noah-style minority to survive a global catastrophe of dinosaurian magnitude. Who could have foreseen a species of African apes capable of reaching escape velocity and hurtling out of Earth’s gravity well? We are the only species with any hope of saving the planet from the fate of the dinosaurs – for an even larger comet or asteroid will, one terrible day, arrive. Worried about climate change? If not too late it will be science that saves us, the only thing that can.

But science is not just useful. Usefulness is just the start. Science is wonderful, uplifting, enthralling. Science books, if worthy of their matter, have the power to lift us above the mundane, to raise our imaginations to realms that in past centuries were surrendered to the poverty of religion. Science is, or should be, the inspiration for great literature, works to stand in the highest of our literary canons. Why has the Nobel Prize in Literature never been awarded for writing science?

I haven’t made a detailed count, but the Nobel Prizes in literature have almost always gone to novelists or poets. A simple majority would have seemed appropriate, for novels really can illuminate what it is to be human. William Golding could have written a psycho-anthropological thesis, but it would have gathered dust under ‘non-fiction’ instead of flying off the fiction shelves as Lord of the Flies. The Nobel list includes a well-deserved sprinkling of philosophers and historians such as Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill. But not a single one of the 118 prizes for literature has been awarded to a scientist. The only arguable exception was Henri Bergson (1859–1941), but he was a mystic and the very opposite of a scientist. Nowadays he is known mainly for an obscurantist tautology: life is driven by a mysterious élan vital – deliciously satirized in Julian Huxley’s railway train propelled by élan locomotif. It is tragicomic to suggest that scientific literature has risen no higher than Bergson. Julian Huxley himself was a better candidate but he was easily outshone by, to name but a few writing in English, James Jeans, Carl Sagan, Lewis Thomas, J. B. S. Haldane, D’Arcy Thompson, Jacob Bronowski, Ernst Mayr, Loren Eiseley, Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Peter Medawar stands out above all, but he won the prize for physiology, so literature too might have seemed over the top. But just read, say, Pluto’s Republic, revel in his patrician mastery of cultivated, deeply literate wit, and wonder how the Nobel literature committee could have overlooked him.

Science is the poetry of reality. It provokes and simultaneously soothes our existential terror of deep time and intergalactic space, our bafflement in the face of evolved complexity – Darwinian life: perhaps above all the brain itself, the only object in the known universe capable of even trying to understand itself. Deployed by the Darwinian algorithm, the blind laws of physics coerced atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements into sculpting a brain. A hundred trillion connections fire between 86 billion neurones, and the brain finds itself capable of mathematics, poetry and philosophy, finds itself numinously transported by a Beethoven quartet, by a Shakespeare sonnet, or by awed contemplation of the silent wastes between the stars. 

"It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns."
(Sir Charles Sherrington, Nobel Prize for Physiology, 1932)