More expeditions set out to observe eclipses and check Einstein’s predictions, in 1922 in Australia, in ’29 in Sumatra, in ’36 in the USSR, and in ’47 in Brazil. Not until the development of radio astronomy in the fifties was there incontrovertible experimental verification, but essentially these years of practical striving were irrelevant. The theory was already in the textbooks, from the twenties onward. Its integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist.
So the meanderings of narrative had given way to an aesthetics ofform; as in art, so in science. I typed on into the evening. I had spent too much time on Einstein, and I was casting about for another example of a theory accepted for reasons of its elegance. The less confident I became about this argument, the faster I typed. I found a kind of inverted argument from my own past: quantum electrodynamics. This time round there was a mass of experimental verification on hand for this set of ideas about electrons and light, but the theory, especially as propounded by Dirac in its original form, was slow to gain general acceptance. There were inconsistencies, there was lopsidedness. In short, the theory was unattractive, inelegant, it was a song sung out of tune. Acceptance withheld on grounds of ugliness.
I had been working for three hours and I had written two thousand words. I could have done with a third example, but my energy was beginning to fail. I printed out the pages and stared at them in my lap, astonished that such puny reasoning, such forced examples, could have held my attention for so long. Counterarguments welled from between the neat lines of text. What possible evidence could I produce to suggest that the novels of Dickens, Scott, Trollope, Thackeray, etc., had ever influenced by a comma the presentation of a scientific idea? Moreover, my examples were fabulously skewed. I had compared life sciences in the nineteenth century (the scheming dog in the library) to hard sciences in the twentieth. In the annals of Victorian physics and chemistry alone there was no end of brilliant theory that displayed not a shred of narrative inclination. And what, in fact, were the typical products of the twentieth-century scientific or pseudo-scientific mind? Anthropology, psychoanalysis—fabulation run riot. Using the highest methods of storytelling and all the arts of priesthood, Freud had staked his claim on the veracity, though not the falsifiability, of science. And what of those behaviorists and sociologists of the 1920s? It was as though an army of white-coated Balzacs had stormed the university departments and labs.
I fixed my twelve pages with a paper clip and balanced their weight in my hand. What I had written wasn’t true. It wasn’t written in pursuit of truth, it wasn’t science. It was journalism, magazine journalism, whose ultimate standard was readability. I wagged the pages in my hand, trying to devise further consolations. I had usefully distracted myself, I could make a separate coherent piece out of the counterarguments (the twentieth century saw the summation of narrative in science, etc.), and anyway, it was a first draft, which I would rewrite in a week or so. I tossed the pages onto the desk, and as they landed I heard, for the second time that day, the creak of a floorboard behind me. There was someone at my back.
The primitive, so-called sympathetic nervous system is a wondrous thing we share with all other species that owe their continued existence to being quick on the turn, fast and hard into battle, or fiery in flight. Evolution has culled us all into this efficiency. Nerve terminals buried deep in the tissue of the heart secrete their noradrenaline, and the heart lurches into accelerated pumping. More oxygen, more glucose, more energy, quicker thinking, stronger limbs. It’s a system so ancient, developed so far back along the branchings of our mammalian and premammalian past, that its operations never penetrate into
So the meanderings of narrative had given way to an aesthetics ofform; as in art, so in science. I typed on into the evening. I had spent too much time on Einstein, and I was casting about for another example of a theory accepted for reasons of its elegance. The less confident I became about this argument, the faster I typed. I found a kind of inverted argument from my own past: quantum electrodynamics. This time round there was a mass of experimental verification on hand for this set of ideas about electrons and light, but the theory, especially as propounded by Dirac in its original form, was slow to gain general acceptance. There were inconsistencies, there was lopsidedness. In short, the theory was unattractive, inelegant, it was a song sung out of tune. Acceptance withheld on grounds of ugliness.
I had been working for three hours and I had written two thousand words. I could have done with a third example, but my energy was beginning to fail. I printed out the pages and stared at them in my lap, astonished that such puny reasoning, such forced examples, could have held my attention for so long. Counterarguments welled from between the neat lines of text. What possible evidence could I produce to suggest that the novels of Dickens, Scott, Trollope, Thackeray, etc., had ever influenced by a comma the presentation of a scientific idea? Moreover, my examples were fabulously skewed. I had compared life sciences in the nineteenth century (the scheming dog in the library) to hard sciences in the twentieth. In the annals of Victorian physics and chemistry alone there was no end of brilliant theory that displayed not a shred of narrative inclination. And what, in fact, were the typical products of the twentieth-century scientific or pseudo-scientific mind? Anthropology, psychoanalysis—fabulation run riot. Using the highest methods of storytelling and all the arts of priesthood, Freud had staked his claim on the veracity, though not the falsifiability, of science. And what of those behaviorists and sociologists of the 1920s? It was as though an army of white-coated Balzacs had stormed the university departments and labs.
I fixed my twelve pages with a paper clip and balanced their weight in my hand. What I had written wasn’t true. It wasn’t written in pursuit of truth, it wasn’t science. It was journalism, magazine journalism, whose ultimate standard was readability. I wagged the pages in my hand, trying to devise further consolations. I had usefully distracted myself, I could make a separate coherent piece out of the counterarguments (the twentieth century saw the summation of narrative in science, etc.), and anyway, it was a first draft, which I would rewrite in a week or so. I tossed the pages onto the desk, and as they landed I heard, for the second time that day, the creak of a floorboard behind me. There was someone at my back.
The primitive, so-called sympathetic nervous system is a wondrous thing we share with all other species that owe their continued existence to being quick on the turn, fast and hard into battle, or fiery in flight. Evolution has culled us all into this efficiency. Nerve terminals buried deep in the tissue of the heart secrete their noradrenaline, and the heart lurches into accelerated pumping. More oxygen, more glucose, more energy, quicker thinking, stronger limbs. It’s a system so ancient, developed so far back along the branchings of our mammalian and premammalian past, that its operations never penetrate into
Similar Books
![Porpoiseful Intent [Placida Pod 2] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove)](https://fs.dianahicksbooks.com/547743/thumbs/152x264/porpoiseful-intent-placida-pod-2-siren-publishing-everlasting-classic-manlove.png)
