PD Smith

Keep your fin­gers crossed for me – my edit­ed man­u­script just went off to my agent in the US, Zoe Pag­na­men­ta. Hope­ful­ly it’ll find a home at a pub­lish­er there – oth­er­wise those of you across the pond who have expressed an inter­est in buy­ing it will have make do with a UK edi­tion… 

I also thought I’d tell you about a real­ly great book I’ve just been review­ing – The Oxford Dic­tio­nary of Sci­en­tif­ic Quo­ta­tions. Ok, so the title does­n’t sound so hot, but believe me this is a won­der­ful book. Med­ical his­to­ri­ans WF Bynum and the late great Roy Porter spent fif­teen years accu­mu­lat­ing quotes on sci­ence. This is the splen­did result — to my mind, it’s a lot more than just a ref­er­ence book for it real­ly opens up the cul­tures of sci­ence and allows you to dip into some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing debates in human his­to­ry. 

I also like the way they haven’t just includ­ed quotes by famous sci­en­tists. There are ones from writ­ers, poets, and crit­ics. Pas­sages from Max Born stand next to Borges, Fred­er­ick Sod­dy next to Tom Stop­pard (Rosen­crantz: “Eter­ni­ty is a ter­ri­ble thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”); and Hans Bethe is along­side the Bible, which would have brought a wry smile to the face of the physi­cist who revealed the secret of the sun’s ener­gy.  

The great Ger­man writer and Roman­tic sci­en­tist Goethe is well rep­re­sent­ed. They missed one of my favourites: “Life divid­ed by rea­son leaves a remain­der.” But this was new to me: “Math­e­mati­cians are like a cer­tain type of French­man: when you talk to them they trans­late it into their own lan­guage, and then it soon turns into some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent.”

For some rea­son Ein­stein only gets three or so pages of quotes, where­as New­ton gets more than eight pages. William Blake (half a page) would have been dis­pleased: “Pray God us keep / From sin­gle vision & New­ton’s sleep!”  

This is one of my favourites from Ein­stein: “I nev­er think of the future. It comes soon enough.”

On the sub­ject of the future, there’s this clas­sic from quan­tum guru Niels Bohr: “Pre­dic­tions can be very dif­fi­cult – espe­cial­ly about the future.” By the way, just in case you won­dered (and I know Steven Hall did), Bohr is respon­si­ble for my pro­file quote too. 

There are some suit­ably incom­pre­hen­si­ble pas­sages from Stephen Hawk­ing, as well as this won­der­ful side-swipe at Ein­stein’s oppo­si­tion to the unpre­dictabil­i­ty of quan­tum the­o­ry: “God not only plays dice, but also some­times throws them where they can­not be seen.”

This book gives sci­ence and sci­en­tists a human face. As the out­spo­ken co-dis­cov­er­er of the struc­ture of DNA, Jim Wat­son, shows: “One could not be a suc­cess­ful sci­en­tist with­out real­iz­ing that, in con­trast to the pop­u­lar con­cep­tion sup­port­ed by news­pa­pers and moth­ers of sci­en­tists, a good­ly num­ber of sci­en­tists are not only nar­row-mind­ed and dull, but also just stu­pid.”  

Wat­son’s quote per­haps explains this clas­sic mis­judge­ment by indus­tri­al­ist Thomas J Wat­son, Sr.: “I think that there is a world mar­ket for about five com­put­ers.”

Remem­ber that the next time you lis­ten to some technophile pre­dict­ing that a shin­ing sci­en­tif­ic utopia is just around the cor­ner. Or as George Bernard Shaw put it: “Sci­ence is always wrong. It nev­er solves a prob­lem with­out cre­at­ing ten more.”

Carl Sagan has these wise words on the prac­tice of sci­ence itself: “One of the great com­mand­ments of sci­ence is, ‘Mis­trust argu­ments from author­i­ty’. (Sci­en­tists, being pri­mates, and thus giv­en to dom­i­nance hier­ar­chies, of course do not always fol­low this com­mand­ment.)”

But it seems some­how appro­pri­ate when talk­ing about quotes from the great and the good that the final com­ment should go to an anony­mous say­ing: “Man occa­sion­al­ly stum­bles on the truth, but then just picks him­self up and hur­ries on regard­less.”

If any of you have got a favourite quote – not just on sci­ence, but on life, the uni­verse & every­thing (it does­n’t get broad­er than that!) – then I’d love to hear them. My own rather quirky favourite on sci­ence (not in Bynum & Porter’s book) is from the cold war film Hell and High Water (1954):  

“That’s no female. That’s a sci­en­tist.”

[orig­i­nal­ly on MySpace]

I’ve always loved that pho­to­graph of Bertolt Brecht from the 1930s in which he’s wear­ing a work­er’s flat cap and smok­ing a thick Cuban cig­ar. It seems to cap­ture some­thing of his para­dox­i­cal per­son­al­i­ty — Brecht, the bour­geois Bol­she­vik.

There’s a fine pro­duc­tion by David Hare cur­rent­ly run­ning at the Nation­al of what is for my mon­ey Brecht’s great­est play. Brecht worked on The Life of Galileo longer than any oth­er play. There are three ver­sions: one com­plet­ed in 1938, anoth­er fin­ished in Amer­i­ca just before the atom­ic bomb­ing of Japan, and a final ver­sion from 1955.

Writ­ten in exile on the same Dan­ish island where Niels Bohr worked on his doc­tor­al the­sis, Brecht’s orig­i­nal play high­lights the plight of intel­lec­tu­als — such as those left behind in Nazi Ger­many — who resist author­i­tar­i­an regimes in the name of intel­lec­tu­al free­dom. But the atom­ic bomb changed every­thing for Brecht. “Overnight the biog­ra­phy of the founder of the new physics read dif­fer­ent­ly,” he wrote.

What had been a play about sci­ence as a dis­ci­pline with the poten­tial to lib­er­ate peo­ple from an irra­tional world-view, was recast into one which illus­trates the refusal of sci­en­tists to accept their respon­si­bil­i­ty to humankind and their com­plic­i­ty in the mis­use of sci­ence. For Brecht, Galileo’s recan­ta­tion before the author­i­ty of the Church came to rep­re­sent the Fall of sci­ence. Galileo is no longer a hero but a trai­tor.

Ein­stein died on 18 April 1955, two days after the Cologne première of Galileo. In his notes, Brecht iden­ti­fies Ein­stein’s equa­tion E=mc² as an exam­ple of how the ide­al of pure sci­ence has become very dan­ger­ous in the mod­ern era. Such equa­tions can so eas­i­ly be turned into the math­e­mat­ics of mass mur­der.

Audi­ences in the cold war would have instant­ly seen that Brecht’s Galileo was not just a his­to­ry play, but about pol­i­tics and the pur­pose of sci­ence. Brecht tipped his work­er’s cap to Fran­cis Bacon when he wrote that sci­ence should be about reliev­ing the drudgery of human exis­tence. What is the point of the dis­cov­er­ies of Galileo and his fel­low physi­cists (he asks) if all they ulti­mate­ly lead to is big­ger and bet­ter bombs? One day, pre­dicts an old­er and wis­er Galileo, the sci­en­tists’ yells of Eure­ka! will be greet­ed by a uni­ver­sal cry of hor­ror because of the ever more ter­ri­ble super­weapons their dis­cov­er­ies make pos­si­ble.

David Hare’s pro­duc­tion is excel­lent (apart from the pseu­do-Cabaret car­ni­val scene, about which the less said the bet­ter). Simon Rus­sell Beale’s per­for­mance in the title role is superb and cap­tures per­fect­ly the pas­sion for life and sci­ence that is cen­tral to Brecht’s Galileo. But the con­tem­po­rary rel­e­vance of Brecht’s sci­en­tif­ic mes­sage at a time of renewed fears about weapons of mass destruc­tion seems absent from Hare’s ver­sion, which is a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty. Although to my eyes, the stage set evoked the skele­tal remains of the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Bomb Dome, a haunt­ing reminder of the dead­ly pow­er of the laws of physics. Or was it just meant to rep­re­sent an obser­va­to­ry?

I spent the evening at the Nation­al with my edi­tor, Jon Tur­ney,and his fam­i­ly. The edit­ing on Dooms­day Men is com­plete, well almost. Less is more, was Jon’s ratio­nale and I kept repeat­ing it to myself like a mantra as I decid­ed whether to accept or decline his dele­tions. Being edit­ed is a bit like going to the den­tist. It’s painful but you know it’s for the best. And thanks to Jon, the final text is much improved. When you live and breathe a book project for years, it’s dif­fi­cult to find the dis­tance nec­es­sary to see where a few more words are need­ed or some can be cut. That’s why a good edi­tor is so impor­tant. It’s a les­son some pub­lish­ers have for­got­ten. For­tu­nate­ly Pen­guin is not one of them.

So now, after three years of research­ing the life and times of the Dooms­day Men, I’ve returned my last library book (at one point I had fifty on loan) and checked the final end­note ref­er­ence (there are over a thou­sand). It’s at moments like these that you feel like putting your feet up and light­ing a Brecht­ian cig­ar…

[orig­i­nal­ly on MySpace]

What do you believe but can­not prove? This is the intrigu­ing ques­tion posed by John Brock­man at Edge.org. The “bril­liant minds” he asked to respond are all mem­bers of Brock­man’s so-called “third cul­ture”, by which he means sci­en­tists and “thinkers in the empir­i­cal world”. So pre­sum­ably wool­ly-head­ed philoso­phers and oth­er arts-based thinkers not trained in the sci­ences need not apply.

Despite this Ian McE­wan some­how snuck beneath the wire and even gets to write the intro­duc­tion to Brock­man’s book. As McE­wan right­ly says the con­tri­bu­tions do indeed express “the spir­it of a sci­en­tif­ic con­scious­ness at its best”.

One con­trib­u­tor claims rather dark­ly that “we are sim­ply over­ad­vanced fun­gi and bac­te­ria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, mean­ing­less space” — a com­ment that prob­a­bly illus­trates the dan­gers of post­ing com­ments while suf­fer­ing from a bad hang­over (be warned blog­gers).

But gen­er­al­ly there is an empha­sis on pos­i­tive pre­dic­tions: we are not alone in the uni­verse (Paul Davies); we will cir­cum­vent the speed of light (Ray Kurzweil); “there is a future much bet­ter, in terms of reduced human suf­fer­ing and increased human poten­tial than the present”. The lat­ter, inspir­ing­ly upbeat pre­dic­tion comes from Oliv­er Mor­ton, author of the excel­lent Map­ping Mars.

It’s a great book for read­ing on the tube, as its bite-sized con­tri­bu­tions are ide­al for short jour­neys. My own favourite is from math­e­mati­cian Ver­e­na Huber-Dyson: “most of what I believe I can­not prove, sim­ply for lack of time and ener­gy.” I know the feel­ing. Back to the edit­ing then…

So what do you believe but can­not prove? Let me know!

[orig­i­nal­ly on MySpace]

No more edit­ing for me for a few days. I’ve reached about half-way through the 500 or so pages of my man­u­script. Two rea­sons for the pause: to pre­pare my accounts and to do some review­ing. Being forced to con­front the real­i­ty of how lit­tle a free­lance writer earns is always painful, so I’ll pass over the first fair­ly rapid­ly. But the sec­ond is more inter­est­ing.

Deb­o­rah Cad­bury’s Space Race is a great read. She tells the sto­ry of the space race through the lives of the Sovi­et rock­et sci­en­tist Sergei Korolev and the ex-Nazi Wern­her von Braun.

The mate­r­i­al on von Braun may be famil­iar but it is an extra­or­di­nary sto­ry that shows the ter­ri­ble ambi­gu­i­ty of sci­ence — its abil­i­ty to turn dreams into real­i­ty and take peo­ple into space, but also its destruc­tive poten­tial. For the rock­ets that were built to take us to the moon were also meant to deliv­er H‑bombs onto New York, Lon­don and Moscow.

That ambi­gu­i­ty was appar­ent at the release of the 1960 biopic about von Braun, I Aim at the Stars. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly giv­en the num­ber of his mis­siles that hit us, it flopped in Britain. One review was mem­o­rably head­lined: “I Aim at the Stars, but Some­times I Hit Lon­don.”

As I’ll show in Dooms­day Men, von Braun was the orig­i­nal mod­el for Dr Strangelove, the ulti­mate mad sci­en­tist of the Cold War. And it’s the sto­ry of the Atom­ic Age, told in pop­u­lar fic­tion, film and the lives of the sci­en­tists, that best reveals how our sci­en­tif­ic dream­s turn all too eas­i­ly into night­mares.

You’ll have to wait a few more months for Dooms­day Men (there’s the small mat­ter of the edit­ing to fin­ish yet), but I hope to pro­vide a few tasters of the book in this blog. So watch this space…

[orig­i­nal­ly on Myspace]

For the last week I’ve been going through the edit­ed ver­sion of Dooms­day Men. It’s nev­er easy see­ing your favourite lines struck through, but you reas­sure your­self with the thought that a bet­ter book will emerge at the end.

This is one lit­tle anec­dote that will prob­a­bly be con­signed to the cut­ting room floor:

Physi­cist Niels Bohr once greet­ed one of Wolf­gang Pauli’s lat­est the­o­ries with the com­ment: “We are all agreed that your the­o­ry is crazy. The ques­tion, which divides us, is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being cor­rect. My own feel­ing is that it is not crazy enough.”

But don’t wor­ry — there are plen­ty more where that came from…

[orig­i­nal­ly on MySpace]