John Hodgson deconstructs popular physics

Elizabeth Leane (2007): Reading Popular Physics: disciplinary skirmishes and textual strategies Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 227 pages, £50.00.

Elizabeth Leane is a literary critic whose first degree was in mathematical and theoretical physics. Her Reading Popular Physics analyses key works of popular physics published over the last twenty-five years, focusing on the authors’ style and literary methods. Her book provides a fascinating analysis of the writers’ use of such techniques as metaphor, narrative, and characterisation to convey particular ideas about science and scientists to the lay reader.

Quantum theory and consciousness

In her introductory chapters, Leane sets her topic in the context of the history of science popularisations and of debates about the ‘two cultures’ of science and literature. She then explores the use of metaphor in popularisations of quantum theory.

Gary Zukav’s widely read The Dancing Wu Li Masters makes the well-known point that quantum mechanics ‘tells us clearly that it is not possible to observe reality without changing it’, but extends this argument by suggesting through metaphor that consciousness is intrinsic to the physical world. He even attributes consciousness to subatomic particles, and suggests that, through consciousness, ‘each of us shares a paternity in the creation of physical reality’. Thus Zukav suggests that quantum mechanics restores humanity to the central place that was lost when Copernicus showed that the earth was not the centre of the Universe.

Mythical origins

There is something mythic about this claim, and Leane turns to Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to explore the ways in which these writers use mythic narrative structures in their accounts of the origin of the Universe. This is far from their explicit purpose: they both begin by debunking traditional mythological explanations of the origins of the Universe in order to establish the rationality of myth’s implicit alternative, science.

Weinberg presents a pessimistic narrative of the development of a universe of vast inhospitality, but suggests that the practice of science gives purpose to what would otherwise seem pointless. This, suggests Leane, is a mythic, rather than a scientific, narrative: ‘It is a story which explains Western scientific society to itself’. Hawking similarly claims: ‘Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest.’ Leane argues that The First Three Minutes and A Brief History of Time impose a narrative structure upon the Universe, so that its beginning (the Big Bang) permits through evolutionary progress its final goal – complete knowledge of itself through science.

Representations of the scientist

Leane suggests that Hawking’s work is given further mythical power by its presentation of the author himself as a seer whose mind, by virtue of his well-known bodily disability and dependence on machinery, is as purely rational as it is possible to be. In her third analysis of physics popularisations, she turns to the representation of the scientist himself.

She shows that Gleick’s Chaos and Waldrop’s Complexity characterise the scientist in terms of the private investigator of noir detective fiction, as epitomised by the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The noir private investigator (such as Philip Marlowe) haphazardly trails clues: his method (or anti-method) resembles the supposed chaotic and complex nature of scientific progress and physical systems. Although this method contrasts with the classical detective (most famously Sherlock Holmes, who withdraws to do some pure thinking), the Marlowe-type resembles him in his distance from the surrounding social world. The physics popularisers’ use of this stereotype links with other conventional ideas of the scientist as deficient in social skills, obsessive, and exclusively male. In these ways, science is presented as separate from everyday life and culture.

Better understanding

Elizabeth Leane’s book argues the importance of science popularisations in defining the public view of science, and shows the ways in which the writers’ use of metaphor, narrative and characterisation convey particular ideas about scientific practice and knowledge.

It appears that Zukav adheres to a certain New Age mysticism, Hawking and Weinberg adopt a cosmic viewpoint that may reassure both themselves and their readers, and Gleich and Waldrop choose a familiar and exciting literary genre.

The theory of quantum mechanics does not necessarily imply that subatomic particles are conscious, or that there is a central role for consciousness in the physical world. Despite the epic narratives of Hawking and Weinberg, the Universe does not have to be seen in terms of evolutionary progress to a zenith of scientific consciousness. And the scientist may not be necessarily male, eccentric, or work in isolation. By analysing the language of popular science books, Reading Popular Physics makes an important contribution to a better understanding of science.

Dr John Hodgson is in the School of Creative Arts at the University of the West of England. He is Research Officer for the National Association for the Teaching of English.