In Our Time - The Scientist

Episode Date: October 24, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the origin of the concept and historical role of the scientist. The word "science" first appeared in the English language in 1340 and ever since its meaning has been in a state of flux. The notion of "the scientist" has had a similarly evolving history. For some, "the scientist" does not truly appear until after the Renaissance, others put its emergence much later than that. When did the words and concepts we recognise today take on their contemporary meaning? How has the role of the scientist, and our understanding of it, changed? Has science always been a rival to religion, or was it once an ally? And how has the scientist been perceived by the wider world – as a modern saint, the "priest of reason", or as a terrifying and amoral menace - the "mad scientist" of film and literature? With John Gribbin, Visiting Fellow in Astronomy, University of Sussex; Patricia Fara, Lecturer on the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University; Hugh Pennington, Head of the Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Aberdeen.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the word science first appeared in the English language in 1340, and ever since its meaning has been in a state of flux. The notion of the scientist has had a similarly evolving history.

For some, the scientist doesn't truly appear until after the Renaissance, Others put its emergence much later than that. So when did the words and concepts we recognise today take on their contemporary meaning? How has the role of the scientist, and our understanding of it, changed? Were the Greek scientists? Has science always been a rival to religion, or was it once an ally? And how has the scientist been perceived by the wider world? As a modern saint, the priest of learning, as in Newton's time, the genius, Newton again,

or as a terrifying and amoral menace, the mad scientist, a film and literature? with me to discuss the scientist John Gribbin, visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex, an author of Science, A History, 1543 to 2001, Patricia Farah, who lectures on the history of science at Cambridge University, and is author of Newton, the Making of Genius, and Hugh Pennington, head of the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Aberdeen.

John Grimmin, your book begins in 1543. Is that the moment when we can start speaking about the scientist, or are we overlooking the contribution of Babberts? Melonians, Greeks, Egyptians. Let's stick with the Greeks. Well, we certainly are. As I say in the book, I mean, that's a deliberate choice. There's only so much you can squeeze into one volume. And 1543 is a convenient marker because there was the publication that year of Copernicus' famous book on the revolutions of celestial objects. And the same year, by a happy coincidence, Vesalius published a book on the human body.

And they represented steps towards seeing human beings as part of the natural world, not something special. I will take that as a sounding point for the rest of the program but before we go and we have to acknowledge that and Vesalis has given me a clue because he based a lot of his work on Galen and what do we think of him and then Archimedes are you ruling out? We're going to talk about the Renaissance onwards John but are you actually saying that the Greeks, the Egyptians,

let's see with the Greeks, weren't really scientists in the way that you're thinking about it and if so, why not? Well, if pressed, I would say that. I think they weren't scientists because, to put it very crudely, they didn't do experiments. Didn't Archimedes do experiments? Yes, there are always exceptions. but by and large the Greeks didn't do experiments.

They thought about the world, and they had ideas such as the perfection of circles, so they saw the orbits of planets and so on as being made up of circles and epicycles in the way we learned about at school, rather than accepting that things could be imperfect and elliptical, whatever. And people like Galen,

I mean, Vesalius actually went beyond Galen, that's the point. They questioned what the Greeks had done for a very long time. there'd been an acceptance that the ancients had been wise and knew everything and that what was being discovered was actually just a rediscovery of what they already knew. So the Renaissance in scientific terms is also a time when people are saying, hang on a minute, perhaps we know something that the ancients didn't know.

Well, let's put that to one side. Let's go back to 1543 with your Galileo and Vesalius. So what are we doing then? What road does that put us on? This is the road which takes us to the place we are today, where we see human beings as being part of the natural world, not breathed on by God, not in a special place in the universe

and not in a special place in the hierarchy, if you like, of life on earth or in the universe. And we see ourselves as being a natural product of the processes that go on in the universe at large. And that process begins when people, like Veselius, start dissecting human beings. And again, Vesalius getting his hands dirty before him, the tradition was that you would have a master who would sort of stand to one side

while a humble person actually did the cutting up of the cadavers. Does it not who does the cutting up? Yes, because how can you understand what's going on if you haven't personally been involved? If you're not the person who's cut into the muscle or looked at the liver or felt the heart or whatever it is, how can you have a proper understanding of it? That's the point. This is hands-on science. Patricia Farah, are you happy defining men like Galileo, John's reference?

referred to, but also William Gilbert, the Elizabethan scholar who's, or scientist, one might venture. It was he a scientist? I mean, are you happy to call these people scientists, Galileo and William Gilbert? No, I'm not. I do agree with John. I don't think the Greeks were scientists either, but I certainly, I think 1543 is rather an arbitrary date to pick, important that it was. And I've had a lot of problems with using the word scientist before the 19th century. For one thing, the word scientist wasn't even invented until 1833, It was invented by William Huell, who was then the Master of Trinity and went on to become a very famous mathematician, astronomer and historian, a philosopher of science.

And he coined the word at a meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science in 1833 because he wanted to establish a group identity for people who were then calling themselves things like naturalists, experimental philosophers, men of science. and this word which is so automatic for us to use the whole time actually only caught on very slowly. So Charles Darwin, for example, who only died towards the end of the 19th century, he never called himself a scientist.

No, but I'm going to go back to the Renaissance. Right. And do you think, although they did not call themselves scientists, they were in fact, if William Gilbert was not a scientist, what was he doing that was not science? He would have probably called himself a natural philosopher. I think even going back to the Greeks and also the natural philosophers of the Renaissance

and the 17th and 18th century, they were doing a lot of things which we now allocate as belonging to science, but they're also doing a lot of other things as well. Newton and the other natural philosophers of his period, for example, were primarily interested in learning more about God. God was absolutely central to natural philosophy, and I certainly don't think that's true of modern science.

Hugh Pennington, where do you stand on this? Well, I'll take a contrary view. and say that for me, science started around about the time, William of Ockham in the 14th century. Now, he wasn't a scientist, and, you know, by whatever definition you use. But what he was doing, he was a philosopher, but I think he was paid, he was a monk, and, you know, he was a member of an order.

He got his keep, anyway. He got his keep, and he fell out with the university authorities in Oxford, and he was accused of heresy. And these actually are things which we can see coming into modern times. But what he was talking about was things like our species, things in their own right? Is there an essence of a species which distinguishes it from the other species

or are species just a sort of human construct? And he did a lot of very, very interesting thinking about that. And that is thinking which is still very relevant today. If you talk about Linnaeus, if you talk about modern classification, it is an issue that we haven't yet resolved. So he was doing what, with the benefit of hindsight, was what you'd call theoretical science.

It's not experimental science. The concept of actually looking at the objects that he was trying to classify was something he didn't probably enter his mind. He could think about it. And he was also looking at the relationship between what he was working up and God and the power of God and so on.

It was all part of a grand scheme of things. So I would take it right back to the 14th century and say, well, here is somebody who is doing what he wouldn't call science, but what is relevant to science today. So therefore, he has a position in the sort of canon of scientists, if you like, in the very, very broadest sense.

This idea of a natural philosopher, which Patricia brought up John Grevin, how would you distinguish a natural philosopher from a scientist? Are we still, after your Renaissance pistol start, are we still talking more about natural philosophers? Absolutely. I mean, I think the point about... Can you define that for those who... Philosophers and scientists sort of blended together or diverged,

depending on which way you look at it. I mean, some philosophers became more scientific and some became less. So there were two processes going on. And I think what's important is that these processes were going on not just in different groups of people, but in the same individual. So you have people like Newton, who was, in my terminology, very much a scientist, but also an alchemist

and also a serious student of religion and many other things as well. And one of the things that is very clear, if you look at the way the development of our thinking about the world, if you want to use a neutral expression for it, has developed, is that it's become more specialised, as we all know, and that you no longer have the great generalists who are able to look at what we now call science, religion, philosophy, all in the same human package,

because there's so much to do in each narrow area, and that's a problem. Science is, the two notions are coming up there. One is which could take us to Newton, which is very useful having a Newton expert here, Patricia Farah. But the idea of religion being very much part of the natural philosophy, let's just take Newton, and then the idea emerging that such a person as Newton and persons like him could be called genius and the scientist being invested with the idea of genius.

Could you tell us how you think that occurred? I think the word genius in Newton's own lifetime didn't mean an individual person like it does now. It meant a sort of character and attribute. So you could have a genius for a particular thing. So Newton, for example, had a genius for mathematics and a genius for making telescopes. Women had a genius for things like painting silk or playing music. And I think the word scientific genius didn't really originate until the beginning of the 19th century. And it was part of the whole cult of romantic literary and artistic genius, which appeared first in Germany with people like Gertemus famously and later moved over to England and after that to France.

And I think initially the word scientific genius was a complete contradiction in terms. Emmanuel Kant, for example, specifically pointed out that Newton was not a genius because he could explain how he'd arrived at his conclusions. He proceeded in a logical, orderly way. Whereas a genius, someone like Gertor or William Blake, was someone who received their ideas through inspiration, through an internal creative act.

It was somebody who was almost verging on the edge of insanity. So I think certainly in the early 19th century and through quite a lot of the Victorian period, this whole idea of a scientific genius had a certain amount of tension in it. There was a sort of discordance between the two parts. That's very interesting because, of course, many scientists have exactly that same flash of inspiration.

They get their inspiration first, and then they get worked backwards to produce their explanation. And that's this great fraud about scientific papers that start by saying, you know, we did A, B, C, and D, and our conclusion is this. And very, very often the conclusion comes and then the scientist works out the logical structure to support it. And also that metaphorical apple of Newton's is, there is an apple tree.

Well, that... Hugh Panicking wants to go. Well, isn't this what William Heel was saying when he wrote about science? He was beginning to emphasize that unlike the sort of traditional Baconian view where you gathered facts and then, you know, worked out something from the facts, there were people in science who had these flashes of genius and were thinking and hypothesizing and so on. I think he was a bit careful about it, wasn't he? He wasn't wanting to emphasise the scientist as the great man,

but he was bringing that back into, well, raising that as an issue for how science actually worked. Well, it was very difficult. He was in a very difficult position because Newton was his great hero. So he wanted obviously to elevate him on a pedestal. But at the same time, he was very involved in the British Association for the Advancement of Science. So he wanted to present science as a collaborative endeavour, something where people worked very methodically and very systematically. And so if you have a model of Newton who just sits under the apple tree and gets a flash of inspiration and is perhaps slightly mad,

that completely contradicts this very sort of Victorian hard work model of how science should proceed. And so a lot of people were rather reluctant to give credence to the apple story. To try to narrow it down a bit, in John, when we're talking about Newton's genius, we are bringing up, if it were, we are bringing up the idea of the individual. and we're now told that science is almost invariably collaborative. We'll also bring up the idea of inspiration where we were told the Beconian idea was that it was, you collected things and you put one thing on top of another and eventually you had a little pyramid or a big pyramid, whatever you had.

You addressed that and you just said here a few minutes ago, look, scientists can have flashes of inspiration. I've heard a great number of scientists say that. And obviously one doesn't see why not. These are created things. And why is there such a resistance to... it. I'm quite prepared to believe the apple, and I don't think that's a sort of

fairy tale, that something happened, and it clicked. And I think it can sometimes be as simple as that. There is a problem because most people aren't geniuses. Most scientists aren't geniuses. So for the average scientist, the Baconian method is the best way to do it.

You plod along at your laboratory bench or whatever it is, and you do your little bit, and you help to build up the structure. And there are only a few people who are capable of having those rare insights and everybody else depends upon them, but there's a reluctance to admit it.

Why is the reluctance to admit it? Nobody's reluctant to admit to. Shea's a genius, Gertie was a genius and so and so. And even sort of, we get down to have about the tenth rate artists are called geniuses sometimes. Nobody's afraid to admit it in the arts.

They saw the glory in it. It's top-ne-hapenna now. But why, I mean, are you so rigorous? I mean, that's a very good thing. I'm just interested. Why? Personally, I don't know, I welcome it. I think it's a good thing. It's a good thing to be rigorous.

It's a good thing to have genius in the modern sense and to have people who have these insights. And I think it helps to show that scientists aren't different from other people, which is a theme of my book, that the scientific genius is the same as the artistic genius. The creative process is the same for a musician as for a Newton or for whatever it might be. So I just take a step back, Hugh Pennington.

The Royal Society, which is founded in 1660, we've been back about 50 or 100 years here, Did that begin in institutionalisation of the idea of science, which has had not entirely a good effect? Well, I suppose it did, yes. I mean, it provided a structure for people to publish their ideas. It provided journals in which people could have, little bit peer review up to a point.

And here was a club that people could get together and influence politicians and all that kind of thing. Or interested in science? Well, I suppose in the early days of the Royal Society, well certainly later it became a sort of club of amateurs rather than, because there went to any professional scientists, there were very few. And, you know, the sort of traditional English kind of system

of, you know, the clergyman who were, you know, the Gilbert White type of person doing interesting work, I think it was relatively easy to get into the Royal Society until it was reformed. You had to pay. Yes, you had to be, I suppose there was very much a class basis to it as well. You had to pay and you had to be a man. And a London basis.

I mean, there is an aspect of the Royal Society, which I think it's very important, which we haven't discussed yet, is that the Royal Society actively welcome contributions from people like navigators, farmers, ballistics experts, ordinary sort of people that we might call artisans who are then often called mixed mathematicians. So if we go back to this question of where does science originate, it didn't just originate in the universities and amongst intellectual people. There were a lot of very, very practical inventions, which some of them had lasted for centuries and centuries, which natural philosophers at the Royal Society took over and converted into what we now know as scientific instruments. So I think that is also a very, very important background to modern science, and it's another reason why I keep harping on about this,

that the use of the word scientist is completely anachronistic, because William Gilbert, for example, in his very famous book about magnetism, which was published in 1600, he drew what we would now see as the sort of originators of very accurate technical magnetic instruments for measuring the earth's magnetism. But these were basically instruments which he'd taken over from ordinary seafaring men. I think that when you write about that, I thought that was a terrific contribution and revelation to the bottom-up idea of what became science. I think we should get away there. And the idea of people who are navigators, people in the field like Gilbert White collecting stuff, and so on.

And also the idea that the story of the same. The steam engine is invented, this is the way it pumps and pumps, and then later the theory of thermodynamics comes in. We have a theory of thermodynamics, so therefore all this will happen. That's fascinating. Can you give the listeners one or two more illustrations of that? Because it might be just new to them as it's new to me, of what you call the artisan approach, which is taken up by,

and taken on by is another matter, but taken up by people who we can loosely call scientists just to get it over with. Well, I think one very good example is the emergence of geology at the beginning of the 19th century, which is one of the earliest scientific societies. And that relied on information that was given by land surveyors who'd been building roads. They relied on information that was provided by people who'd been in the army, by farmers, by people who were miners, who were experts on what happened underneath the ground. So all these different sort of practical areas fed into geology,

which became a very popular amateur science of the Victorian period when everyone was going down to Lyme Regis and gathering fossils. And Darwin, of course, talked to pigeon fancies and so on about how they worked up these incredible breeds of birds and so on as part of his evidence when he wrote the origin of species. Yeah, the first few chapters are all about agricultural breeding or cows and sheep and pigeons and things like that. Oh, I love the idea of Darwin being based on pigeon fountains.

That's made my day. It's absolutely terrific, isn't it? You see him letting the pigeon go, I suppose it did, obviously, yeah. John, do you think that the 19th century, we think of Newton, of course, and we think of Galileo, of course, and we think of Archimedes, some of this, John. But do you think the 19th century was the real time when the science, we know the word was invented in 1833, challenge of a poet, response of a scientist, and so and so forth.

Right, we got there now. But do you think that could be called the most revolutionary period in science, the 19th century? Yes, I think that's without doubt. I mean, in the sense that we've been talking about science, you can make a case that modern science began then, and it was when people started thinking about the world in a different way. Can you therefore describe what modern science and the characteristic of modern science is? It's professionalism, I suppose, in a word.

I mean, that must mean more than getting paid. Yes, it means that you're dedicated to it as a career. I mean, as we heard, I mean, Darwin would not have regarded himself as a scientist in any kind of modern sense, and he was one of the last of the, if you like the gentleman amateurs. I mean, somebody who had an independent income and was curious about the world and thought about it and wrote about it,

but in no sense was he dependent on doing that. Is there not something just before they pass into the, beyond twilight, into the darkness of our history, is there not something beguiling and very interesting about these men who did not depend on universities, men who did not depend on having a profession, I'm sorry, it is men so far, who did not depend. Men who had these houses,

where they could settle it. Is there not something about the exceptional contributions that they made which might give us just a moment's pause? It does. It's an absolutely wonderful thing and there are many people who made huge contributions and one of my favourites is Henry Cavendish who was a most peculiar person

but enormously wealthy. He did behind trees when he saw a woman. He literally would hide if he saw a woman coming the other way. But what you have to remember is that for every Henry Cavendish or Darwin there was some downtrodden peasant who was probably just as clever

and just as interested in the way the world worked and had to spend his life following the horse, you know, behind a plow. There's a stage at which religion and science split apart in the 19th century. It's very, very painful. Can you just give us the main points as far as your concern, Patrick, Patricia? What do you see significant about the way that happens and why, in the same thing, do some scientists become regarded? You refer to Newton in your book as a saint, thought of as a saint.

So what's going on there as a secular saint? I think a lot of it is to do with social change. I think it was in the interest of Victorian scientists and a Victorian clergyman to establish separate identities for themselves. And I think to a large extent, what the scientists wanted to do was take over some of the authority that had previously been held by the church. And that's partly why I talk about Newton as a secular saint. Because I think in earlier centuries, saints were revered in our society

and as our society has become more secularised, civic heroes have taken their place. And another reason why I call Newton the secular saint is because I'm not sure that I agree that there are such things as geniuses. I think we like to call people geniuses. I think geniuses are a very intangible quality, and I think it's rather like sanctity.

It's something that you can't pin down. And we also associate particular places with saints who had shrines where people went to worship them. And I think the same things happened with very famous people, not just Newton, but also Shakespeare and other famous people. We like to go back to see the places where they live, the places where they work, the places they were born, almost so those places like a saint shrine

had acquired a sort of quasi-religious aura. You were nodding. I thought you were going to say something here. Well, that's right. No, it is difficult talking about genius and so on and sainthood. But science now has its whole canon of people who are regarded as a set. And of course the Nobel Prize is the kind of canonisation process in a sense. Absolutely.

It would be very interesting to see whether people are going to start making pilgrimages to the laboratories of molecular biology in Cambridge, which, you know, is an incredibly successful saint factory. They will do next year because it's the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA by Watson. Maybe they'd rather go to the eagle where they used to have a drink. That would have a pressure. The idea of the mad scientist, John, which we can use Mary Shelley's book as an instance, not necessarily a starting point, because as Patricia said earlier, a lot of people thought Newton to be mad. The idea of the mad scientist and the relationship with Frankenstein, and as this last century developed,

the turn, the great scientific exemplar of our lives, science was going to bring us truth, science did bring us progress, signs alleviated pain, science is, and then the turn says, science is a dangerous thing, science is Dr. Strange love, science is worrying crops, science is atom bombs and so on and so forth, and then maybe they're all out of control these people. Can you talk to the idea of the mad scientist? just you're several strands there I mean one is I think a lot of them were mad I think I think

Newton was in some senses mad Cavendish was probably mad there are other examples you can think of and it is possible I mean using this word genius again you know that that being different from other people and having insights goes together you know people like van goff maybe you'd regard as mad as well but this question is a popular image I mean first of all science is going to save the world and then a couple of days decades later it's the great evil and it's bad for us and anything to do with science is bad. And the example that I am always amazed by is that the process which used to be called nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in medicine to look inside the body, is now called

magnetic resonance because the word nuclear has such evil overtones. I think the problem... I still use it about the family. Yes. I think the problem, only it's a terrible word to use, especially today with all the stuff that's in the news is education. I mean, people don't understand what science is all about, and they don't understand that it's a process of inquiry

and finding out about things, and what you do with it, is then, if you like, politics, and that it's the old cliche, you know, a knife can be used to murder people, but it doesn't mean that a knife is bad in itself. People don't understand what science is. That's the problem. I think there's a paradox here,

and it was illustrated by one of the very early Gregories in the 17th century, He was the first person... One of your 14 professor, Gregor. That's right. He was the first person to have a barometer in Scotland, and the local people regarded him with a graver suspicion. He was, to them, he was a wizard.

He had these magical things that he could forecast the weather with. But they also wrapped on his door because he did medicine on the side, and they knew that his remedies would be better than the wafie down the road. So I think people, you know, want their cake and want to eat it, and, you know, they're suspicious of it as well at the same time. They want the benefits of science, but they do see the down, sides and of course we all lost scientists, we all lost our innocence in August

1945 to Roshaven Nagasaki. Do you agree with that enormously sweeping statement by John Grin which we haven't got time to attack properly that nobody understands science? I hope that some scientists understand the science that they're doing. But yes I think I would agree and I think that's why there's such enormous public uproar against genetically modified food for instance is that people are reacting rather hysterically without really understanding the issues. And I think, unfortunately, I think what public education in science too often means is trumpeting scientific progress and scientific achievements.

And I think people should be made to realize that scientists do make mistakes. Scientists change their mind. Science is a question of disagreement, of controversy, of discovery. And I think if people were given the credit of being able to appreciate that, I don't think it would diminish their respect for science. And I think it would make people less ready to jump on bandwagons and be very critical. of science without really understanding what the issues are. But are you surprised, finally, that the great scientific thrust from, let's start with you, with your Galileo, which has been so almost great, we can see it if you want, as almost a fairy tale.

Up and up it goes. It has now been arrested in some way. Does it surprise you, Hugh Pennington? Not really. I think the signs have been there a long time. And, you know, I think now that people are better educated. they're asking more questions. They have higher expectations.

They still have very poor understanding of what science is about, as we've just heard. They have very high expectations of it. Not your fault, not your person, but you're not getting out and telling people more about it, it's getting other people to do it for you. I mean, there's plenty of you. You've had a good run.

Why haven't you made more of an effect? I think people are getting out and talking about it more. It's been a big change during my career that when I started out that people really didn't communicate about their work, scientists didn't, do a lot more. So there's hope for the future. Well, we can't end on a better turn than that, John Grimmin. Thank you.

Thank you very much for taking part. And next week we'll be talking about architecture, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.co.uk forward slash radio 4.