By George Johnson The Bodley Head, 208pp, £14.99
BEAUTY IS TRUTH, KEATS SAID, and truth beauty. But as George Johnson outlines in this book, sometimes there's an important variant: in some scientific experiments, beauty
yields truth.
Johnson's list is eclectic and his outlook romantic. "Science in the 21st century has become industrialised," he states, with experiments "carried out by research teams that have grown to the size of corporations". By contrast, Johnson favours the laboratory technicians, chronicling "those rare moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to the universe and persisted until it replied".
His selections include the canonical and the overlooked. The first chapter describes Galileo's studying motion by rolling balls down an incline, often considered the founding experiment of modern science. Another chapter recounts Isaac Newton's using prisms to grasp the nature of colour. But Johnson also brings to life less familiar figures like Luigi Galvani, who illuminated the nature of electricity; Albert Michelson, who (with Edward Morley) determined the constant speed of light; and – a particularly inspired choice – Ivan Pavlov, whose famous dog experiments advanced physiology and neurology.
Johnson has a good feel for detail and an easy touch with larger concepts. The vexing, counterintuitive Michelson-Morley result showed that light always appears to travel at the same rate, regardless of our relative movement or the mythical "aether" once thought to slow it down. As part of Einstein's theory of special relativity, Johnson writes, this principle helped make clear that "there is no fixed backdrop of space, or even of time". Instead, the speed of light is "the one true standard".
Historians have wondered how much Einstein knew about the Michelson-Morley experiment, or if he reached the same conclusion independently. Johnson bypasses such discussions, although he could have noted this one (or explained why Michelson is more significant than Morley). Instead, he quickly sets the scene of each discovery and explores how each scientist sorted out a rich, messy mixture of evidence and theory – no fixed formulas here about how science progresses.
Johnson's best chapter describes a scientific duel in the 1790s over the nature of electricity. Galvani accidentally discovered "animal electricity" in dismembered frogs, but a sceptical Alessandro Volta thought Galvani's metal tools had generated the effect. Neither was entirely right, but their debate helped prove that there is only one form of electricity (not many, as some thought) and that it flows through life, too.
Johnson's lively book nicely evokes the lost world of the tabletop experiment. But are all remaining advances really beyond the reach of individual hands and minds, as he supposes? Might we still attribute major ideas to ingenious individuals, even if their ideas have to be tested by teams?
Certainly, Johnson is entitled to his nostalgia. Nevertheless, if lone scientists rarely push knowledge forward today, they rarely impede it, either.
Consider Lord Kelvin, who appears here in a chapter on James Joule's heat experiments. For all he accomplished, Kelvin later dismissed geological evidence about the Earth's age, using his authority in thermodynamics to insist that our planet was actually much younger than evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and TH Huxley supposed. Kelvin's conclusions were wrong, but it took decades to overturn his views. Sometimes, less individual influence is a good thing.
One other question lingers: what makes a scientific experiment beautiful? Johnson favours simplicity – not just clean, artful experiments, but those that let us replace convoluted theories with simple explanations. Galileo applied uniform mathematics to the motion of all objects, contradicting Aristotle's idea that heavier objects fall at faster rates. William Harvey showed that one form of blood circulates throughout the body, not two. Newton proved colours are refracted light beams, not – as Descartes had suggested – complex "spinning globules of aether".
Historically, few people seeking beauty in science have displayed a baroque sensibility. The traditional aesthetic is classical, invoking the simplicity and symmetry of revealed forms – whether revealed on a cluttered lab bench or through elegantly spare theorising.
Indeed, the notion that scientific thinking is beautiful enjoyed a neoclassical revival, following the spread of Newton's work in the 18th century. When Johnson says his ten scientists found "an unknown piece" of the universal "scaffolding", the architectural metaphor is telling. In this view, scientists who have sized up the world's complexity and extracted lucid explanations are a bit like the engineers of ancient Greece or Rome who studied piles of stones and formulated basic building principles. We judge their work based on both form and function.
If Johnson's aesthetic sense is conventional, his vision is broad. This tidy book finds beauty throughout science – even among dead frogs and drooling dogs.
The full article contains 788 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
