Science and Sensibility

Prof C J O'Brien *

State Level Science Exhibition for children at Lamyanba Shanglen on Ja 04 2013 :: Pix - Deepak Oinam

Man in the twentieth century is surrounded by the products of science. But in spite of that a layman usually ignores science as a mysterious stranger. The reason is the verbiage of the scientific jargon, which keeps it camouflaged. The hour is to present scientific knowledge shorn of this mumbo-jumbo of technical phraseology. And this exactly is the mission of his life- to make scientific knowledge accessible to the man in the street. Comparing the layman's difficulties with literature. The helplessness, which faced with writers like Marlowe, Coleridge and H G Wells, are the difficulties, which every reader meets with scientists like Napier, Humphrey Davy and Rutherford, who were contemporaries of three writers.

Many people tend to believe that science has progressively strangled the arts. But the real scapegoat is not science, but change. Science today is more powerful than in the time of Isaac Newton. But against this, the arts rarely reach the height of his contemporary John Dryden. It is therefore tempting to conclude that science outgrows its older ideas, while great literature remains permanent. But this is a hopeless muddle of concepts. Dryden and Newton each revealed a wholly new set of responsibilities in their forms of knowledge. Both are classic in this sense. And neither are classics in any other sense.

The belief that science destroys culture, and that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected, is directly contrary to history because the culture of the West begins in Greece, and in the great age of Greece, art and science penetrated one another more closely than in any modern age. In England we put the golden age into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, an age of commercial, industrial as well as literary invention.

Sixth years after the death of Elizabeth came the age of Restoration literature. One symbol of the age is the founding of the most important scientific society in the world. The meeting, which founded it, opened with a lecture on astronomy by Christopher Wren, the architect. The society was given its name, the Royal Society, and its motto by John Evelyn, the diarist. To encourage the use of simple and lucid prose, it appointed a committee, which included the poet John Dryden.

It was in the last part of 1700 and beginning of 1800 with the advent of Industrial revolution, which gave the world a structure. Not only that it created great Romantic poets and reforms which has reminded our sensibility. So, today in China, and India and other countries with few machines, life is brutal and laborious, and sensibility is unknown. It was the engine, it was the horsepower which created consideration for the horse, and the Industrial Revolution which created our sensibility.

Science and the arts today are not as discordant as many people think. The difficulties, which we all have in this regard, are a sign of the lack of a broad and general language in our culture. Science and arts shared the same language at the Restoration period. They no longer seem to do so today, because they lack the same language, it is the business of each of us to try to remake that one universal language which alone can unite art and science, and layman and scientist, in a common understanding.

We live surrounded by the apparatus of science: the Diesel engine and the experiment, the bottle of aspirins and the survey of opinion. We are hardly conscious of them; but behind them we are becoming conscious of new importance in science. We are coming to stand that science is not as haphazard collection of manufacturing techniques carried out by a race of laboratory dwellers with acid-yellow fingers and rimmed spectacles. We are aware now that somewhere within the jungle of valves and formulae and shinning glassware lies a content, a new culture.

A knowledge of history of course, even the history of science will not do duty for science. But, it gives us the backbone in the growth of science, so that the morning headline suddenly takes its place in the development of our world. It throws a bridge into science form whatever humanist interest we happen to stand on. And it does so because it asserts the unity not merely of history but of knowledge. The layman's key to science is its unity with arts. He will understand science as a culture when he tries to trace it in his own culture.

It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests. We have fallen into the habit of opposing the artistic to the scientific temper; we even identify them with a creative and critical approach. In a society like ours, which practices the division of labour there are of course specialized functions, as matter of convenience. As a convenience, and only as convenience, the scientific function is different from artistic. In the same way the function of thought differ from, and complements, the function of feeling. But the human race is not divided into thinkers and feelers, and would not long survive the division.

Much of this quarrel between science and soul was trumped up by the religious apologies of Queen Victoria's day, who were anxious to find science materialistic and unspiritual. The sneer that science is not only critical came from others. It was made by the timid and laboured artists of the nineties in order that they might by comparison appear to be creative and intuitive. Yet, this finesse could not hide their own knowledge that the best minds were already being drawn to the more adventurous practice of the new sciences: a movement which Peacock had foreseen seventy five years before in The Four Ages of Poetry.

The arts and sciences ever since have been in competition for the most lively young brains. This competition is itself the clearest evidence that good minds can fulfill themselves as well in one as in the other. Here in fact is one of the few psychological discoveries of our generation to which we can hold with reasonable certainty: that the general configuration of intelligence factors which distinguish the bright from the dull is the same in one man as another, in the humanist as in the scientist. We are divided by schooling and experience; and we do deeper basis of common ability. This is why I write with confidence for laymen and scientists, because the reader who is interested in any activity which needs thought and judgment is almost certainly a person to whom science can be made to speak. It is not he who deaf, but the specialists who have dumb- the specialists in the arts as well as the sciences.

Many people persuade themselves that they cannot understand mechanical things, or that have no head for fingers. These convictions make them feel enclosed and safe, and of course save them a great deal of trouble but, the reader who has a head for anything at all is pretty sure to have a head for whatever he really wants to put his mind to . his interest, say in mathematics, has usually been killed by routine teaching, exactly as the literary interest of most scientists (and, for that matter, of most non-scientists) has been killed by the set book and the Shakespeare play.

Few people would argue that those whose taste for poetry has not survived the School Certificate are fundamentally insensitive to poetry. Yet they cheerfully write off the pleasure of science as if they belonged only to minds of a special cast. Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literary meaning of its name: knowledge. The notion of the specialized mind is by comparison as modern as the specialized man, "the scientist," a word which is only hundred years old.

Therefore, I have in mind as I write a reader who is less interested in the sciences then he is in science. There was in the last century a tradition of self-teaching in the Mechanics' Institutes which in its time was quite popular and. But, the tradition is gone and its going now is not a loss, because the interest in science has widened. We are all aware of widening. Those who hanker after knowledge of science today are not looking for technical information. They are no longer unfortunates who would have liked to work in a laboratory too, if fate had not sent them into a mill (Industrial Revolution facilities) at twelve. I take is for granting that those who take up in book are well content with what they know and do, and are not thinking of themselves viciously as the white-coated hero of a second feature about necessarily be fascinated by marvels of the electron microscope or of radio-active iodine. I think of them as people aware that the world into which they were born is changing during their lifetime.

Few people today are really in doubt about the scale and the lasting importance of this change. But many people push it to the back of their minds, resolute or in embarrassment. And much of time they fear to face it, because they are afraid to acknowledge that this movement is changing their lives, is washing away the landmarks of their family world, rising round their values and in the end drowning the selves which must last them their lifetime. Yet, these fears of the social change which science is working than simple personal fears. They are afraid of being left out. We are afraid that something is happening which shall not be able to understand and which will shut us out from the fellowship of the brighter and younger people.

These fears, I believe are groundless. I believe that it is easy for a man who likes conversation and to read the second reader and again to be comfortable with the larger ideas of science: as easy as it is for scientist to have a fancy for biography. The difficulties are those of language and the personal fear of what is unfamiliar. These are merely fed by those enthusiastic scientists who write as if the laymen were to be pitied, and treat him as an erring would-be scientist who ought to be converted to an interest in the nucleus. Scientist as well as laymen, as balanced people who see about them the world in movement, and who want to know enough about the forces of science outside their own neighbourhood to assess their part in that profound and total movement of history.

Many people affect to believe that science has progressively strangled the arts, or distorted them into some unpleasant "modern" form; and therefore that arts can be revived only by throwing over science. Often, of course, this is merely an elderly sentiment in favour of the arts of our younger days, and the real scapegoat is not science but change. But even where the sentiment is less partial, it springs from a standing of progress in arts and science. Science today is plainly more powerful than, let us say, in the time of Isaac Newton.

Against this, the arts today seldom reach the height of, say, his contemporary, John Dryden. It is therefore tempting to conclude that science continually outgrows its older ideas, while literature remains permanent. But this is a hopeless muddle of concepts. Newtons are no more plentiful today than Drydens, and the works of Newton continuous to stand to modern science in precisely the relation that the prose of Dryden stands to modern prose. Dryden and Newton each revealed a wholly new set of responsibilities in their forms of knowledge. Both are classics in this sense, that they were once pioneers and men of great achievement. And neither is a classic in any sense.

Against this, the arts today seldom reach the height of, say, his contemporary, John Dryden. It is therefore tempting to conclude that science continually outgrows its older ideas, while great literature remains permanent. But this is a hopeless muddle of concepts. Newtons are no more plentiful today than Drydens; and the work of Newton continues to stand to modern science in precisely the relation that the prose of Dryden stands to modern prose. Dryden and Newton each revealed a wholly new set of possibilities in their forms of knowledge. Both are classics in this sense, that they were at once pioneers and men of great achievement. And neither is a classic in any other sense.

The belief that science destroys culture is sometimes supported by historical statements that the arts have nourished only when the sciences have been neglected. This thesis is so, directly contrary to history that I find difficult to begin to debate it. What is this golden age of art untarnished by the breath of rude mechanics? Where did it exist? In the East? The civilisations of Egypt, or India, and of the Arabs belie it. The only oriental poet at all well known in England, Omar Khayyarm, was a Persian astronomer. In the West?

The culture of the West begins in Greece; and in the great age of Greece, art and science penetrate one another more closely than in any modern age. Pythagoras lived before Aeschylus had created Greek drama. Socrates taught when that drama was at its greatest; and is Socrates to be claimed by art or science? And Plato, who did not tolerate poets in his ideal state, was a scholar when Aristophanes closed the eyes of Greek drama. The example of these men in science as much as in art set the modern world afire in Renaissance. And the type and symbol of Renaissance man was from the beginning and remains Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, mathematician and engineer. No- man has shown more strikingly the universality and the unity of the intellect.

In England, we put the golden age into the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and that characteristically was an age of commercial and industrial as well as of literary invention. Voyagers and adventurers like Sir Walter Ralegh were the Leonardos of that age; and Ralegh's own circle, which turned Christopher Marlowe into a rationalist, was dominated by a mathematician and an astronomer. For navigation is dependent on astronomy; it went hand in hand with the new speculations about the world and the solar system; and in turn, the voyages of the great navigators inspired the literature of Elizabethan England. The worlds of art and of science and the physical world unfolded then together. It was not by accident that the first table of logarithms was published within a few years of the First Folio.

Sixty years after the death of Elizabeth, another great age ripened in England, the age of restoration literature, because one symbol of the age is the founding of what has remained the most important scientific society in the world. The meeting which founded it opened with a lecture on astronomy, and the lecture was given by Christopher Wren, the architect. The society was given its name, the Royal Society, and its motto by the most enthusiastic of its founders. He was, John Evelyn, the diarist. When the society wanted to encourage the use of simple and lucid prose, it appointed a committee which included a fellow of the society with a special gift for such writing. He was the poet, John Dryden.

The golden ages of literature were in fact times of greatness when science and the arts went forward hand in hand. Has all this come to an end?

Literary critics say, Yes, it ended in England at the Industrial Revolution, somewhere between 1760 and 1800. Yet these critics date the Romantic Revival from some point between the death of Collins in 1759, which mean so much to Wordsworth, and the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. These two sets of dates are almost identical, and can it be reasonable to keep them in separate compartments of the mind? Is it really tenable to think of the industrial revolution as a kind of death? It gave our world its structure. It turned science from astronomy, what are essentially its modern interests, which hinge on the use of mechanical power. And it created in the romantic poets and the reformers what has remained our sensibility.

I say created our sensibility, although, of course, I have pointed only to the coincidence of dates: that Blake and Coleridge and Wilberforce were after all contemporaries of Arkwright and .James Watt. Against this, those who hold the illusion that pre-industrial England was more sensitive and cultured, point to the misery of the factoring age: women in mines, children in factories, the disasters of enclosure, famine, the Napoleonic wars, and political reaction. These were very terrible evils, but they are evils far older than 1800 and the machines. The labour of women and children for endless hours in their own homes is a commonplace in Defoe's journals in 1725.

Yet the Agustan optimists of his day did not see it as matter for protest. But in the factory these evils became naked and public; and the driving force for reform carne from the men of the mill from Robert Owen and the elder Peel. We today are scandalized that boys went on climbing in chimneys for nearly eighty years after the heart rending poems which Blake wrote about them around 1790; the last of the climbing boys, Joseph Lawrence, is still alive as I write. But the boys had been climbing for a hundred years before Blake without a line of protest from Addison or Gay or Dr. Johnson. In their broad Augustan day, Scottish miners were legally still serfs, just as the miners of Greece had always been slaves; and neither civilisation thought anything amiss. So today in China and India and other countries with few machines, life is brutal and laborious, and sensibility is unknown; I have seen it so myself, under the rusty thin surface of mechanisation in Japan, for women and animals alike.

Keeping the v general perspective in view, however with all of Newtons, Drydens, etc., the future of science in shaping India is to be done not only by the scientist but the layman also which can be seen from our Hon'ble Prime Minister's steps, views and announcements made on different occasions. I give a few excerpts of Dr. Singh, the first Prime Minister to be appointed the general president of the ISCA for 201-2-13, expressed the hope that scientists would use the centenary year events to reflect on "how we can frame the science and technology policy that reflects our aspiration for making science a spearhead of development in our country." "We have to keep pace with what is happening elsewhere in the scientific world, and the evolving aspirations of the Indian people."

Turning to the various events and new initiatives announced in the centenary year, he said the Centre would bring out a publication of 100 high impact discoveries of Indian science during the past 2100 years and a Hall of Fame in cyberspace to portray its global contributions.

He also announced a special scheme for 100 doctoral research fellowships under the public-private partnership mode, between the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Confederation of Indian Industry, and another scheme to invite 25 research scholars from neighbouring countries to undertake doctoral research in India.

"We are, rightly to my mind, focusing our programmes on what we can do to attract our youth to science. There has been some discussion on setting up a science academy for the young during the centenary year. We should also follow up on the1 proposal after due deliberations," he said.

During the celebrations, the Centre would also emphasize themes that related science to integrated rural development, renewable energy and public health challenges like malnutrition with the help of Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the oldest body of the country which has acquired expertise and recognition for providing a range of Science & Technology which meet International standards. Thus to reach all the goals, science which sense and sensibility which is uncommon sense join hands for shaping the future of India by having one universal language, which also in the long run will unite art, science and layman and scientist in a common understanding.

Therefore, learned scholars and scientists within my limited horizons of thought and embarrassing confines of human intellect is rather mystifying and beyond comprehensible inferences. India is not mean but be-l do not stop here but a thought back home at dinning - India never ends - (i) things which we know and accept is knowledge - science (ii) things we know nothing about but still accept faith, (iii) Faith leads India to surer dreams as rosier tomorrows.