20 - 26 December 2001
Issue No.565
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 December 2001 Issue No.565 |
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Plain talk
The ongoing argument about what Nobel laureate Roald Hoffman calls the public fear of the scientist is timely. Hoffman, an outstanding chemist, is also a poet and playwright -- in this respect he resembles C P Snow, the scientist and novelist who, in his book The Two Cultures, triggered off a whole series of discussions and debates about "the chasm" separating science and art. Thus none of this is new. Arguments about the relevance of science to human life started directly after the atomic bomb devastated Hiroshima. Snow, then in a unique position, was merely taking the argument further; his book comprised a series of interviews conducted with scientists applying for jobs in the US. Hoffman, however, approaches the issue from a different angle.
His line of thinking derives from his profession, chemistry. Thinking people, he claims, recognise the benefits of chemistry even as they are repelled by pollution and fearful of the harm chemistry can do to the human body and the earth. He admits that there is a duality of benefit and harm in all the sciences. But this, he says, is merely a consequence of human beings being what they are, neither angels nor machines but rather agents of good and evil.
Chemistry is about substances or molecules and their transformations; at its deepest level, it addresses the theme of change. "And while human beings have a romantic, spiritual evaluation of change," he goes on to explain, "the reality is that change is inherently fraught with danger and often resisted by individuals and even more so by societies. No wonder the science of change will be viewed in different, conflicting ways by thinking and feeling human beings," he concludes.
In the last 200 years, artists have given the world new and incredible things, too. Why are scientific achievements alone subject to interrogation? Hoffman's answer is simple: the achievements of science have radically altered the face of life on earth, while those of art have not. That is why people are concerned about science, despite the immense benefits it has brought: it has a direct bearing on the way they live; and, as people fully realise, its potential for destruction is equally immense.
The media, moreover, ignite the fires of doubt. And scientists, as Hoffman says, are media shy. For years on end they are stuck in their laboratories carrying out experiments. Unlike artists, whose work has an immediate impact, scientists progress in silence and isolation. Hoffman deplores this, he laments the public's attitude to science and the unfavourable press it constantly receives. He is rightly worried about what he calls "the seemingly ambivalent response of the public to the amelioration of the human condition that science has wrought." He is right in that this response is, sadly, unfair.
Arthur Miller, not the famous writer but a professor of the history and philosophy of science at University College, London, adopts a different approach altogether. Science and art, he insists, giving examples, are shoulder to shoulder. Einstein and Picasso made their greatest breakthroughs almost simultaneously; and the connection, he suggests, cannot have been entirely serendipitous. Both, he claims, were concerned with the same problem: simultaneity and spatial representation. Both concluded that the way you look at things is the way they are. And they both went on to become icons of their age. Thus perhaps the chasm to which so many allude is not as wide as it is perceived. Yet until this fact is sufficiently recognised by the media and the public, Hoffman's concerns continue to be well-founded. The chasm may be an illusion, in other words, but its effects are real. And it is through comparisons like that drawn by Miller that one glimpses a way out of the difficulty. When the public realises that scientists and artists in every age work side by side on the same issues, perhaps they will be as open to scientific developments as they are to artistic ones.
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