A hundred years ago, a manuscript arrived at the German science magazine, Annalen der Physik. Its title was "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper" (On the electrodynamics of moving bodies) and the author was an office worker called Albert Einstein.
The paper is easy to follow and contains neither experiments nor references. Yet this one paper established the constancy of the speed of light, the demolition of "luminiferous ether" as a substance held to fill all space, and established the theory of relativity.
It starts with a single insight from which all else follows -- that the connection we make between the notion of time and what we read on a clock is only provisional.
We have to take into account that all our judgments in which time plays a part are always judgments of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say, "That train arrives here at seven o'clock," I mean something like this: "The pointing of the small hand of my watch to seven and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events."
It is no surprise that this insight was made by a commuter. But this imaginative leap reminds us that all worthwhile science rests ultimately on such leaps of faith. Science starts with a hypothesis, that is, a "what if" question. What if I mix these two chemicals together, rather than those? What if we assume that time is a fluid medium, not tied to the hands of a clock? What then would we find out?
In the act of creating a hypothesis we conjure a fantasy universe in which we let our minds roam ahead. If we are scientists, we assume that our invented world has the rules of the real world, relaxed sufficiently only to explore the consequences of our hypothesis.
A capacity for fantasy is something we should encourage in scientists. But this notion has been lost by those whose self-imposed task it is to drill the public in the discipline of science. In August 1998, the UK-based Independent newspaper published an astonishing denunciation of the fantastic by John Durant, professor of the public understanding of science at Imperial College London.
The occasion was the release of a movie, The X-Files, based on the TV series in which FBI agents investigate sundry paranormal phenomena.
Durant's argument was that we should avoid such flummery, cleaving to prescribed facts that he and his colleagues would obligingly set out for us.
Durant was wrong to worry that every person who watches The X-Files believes in flying saucers. People enjoy imagining things beyond their experience, and working out what their reactions might be were they to encounter them, an ability of which any proponent of science education might approve. Were we all to take Durant's advice and believe only those things that he and his colleagues tell us are true, (simply because they, the authorities, tell us so) science would die.
In this context, Einstein has less in common with Durant than with, of all people, JRR Tolkien. As Tolkien says in his essay On Fairy Stories, belief in the fantastic requires the audience to suspend disbelief, otherwise the effect will be spoiled. After all, a hypothesis has to be tested before it can be admitted.
When I told people I planned to write a book on Tolkien's universe from a scientific standpoint, they either remarked that I would not have enough material (evidently wrong), or pointed to Gandalf's denunciation (in The Lord of the Rings) of the reductionist urges of the traitor Saruman -- that he who takes something to bits to discover how it works has left the path of wisdom.
The easy equation of Gandalf with Tolkien resembles that of time and clocks. Any more than the most cursory reading of Tolkien shows he had a deep respect for science. What Tolkien objected to was the misapplication of science for the purposes of wealth creation, domination or the acquisition of power.
Science, like well-crafted fantasy, is not about the known, for that is boring. Science is about exploring the limits of the unknown and trying to peer further into the gloom. In his essay The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien argued that scholars of Beowulf had spent too much time excavating the ancient epic for clues about linguistics, and not enough appreciating it as a story.
As scientists, we must set our courses into the unknown. The monsters, Tolkien said, are what we should be looking at.
Henry Gee is a senior editor at Nature and author of The Science of Middle Earth.
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