Steven Pinker: The Polymath Sublime

Already famous at 40, Josef Haydn was searching for new means of expression. The result was his six Opus 20 string quartets, a dazzling set whose new directions put their stamp on every composer who has since attempted the form. For those accustomed to previous quartets, including Haydn’s own, every minor turn was a major surprise, each new direction conveying a sense of the composer’s joy as he reveled in his mastery of his medium. At 40, already a well-respected cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Steven Pinker came suddenly to the world’s attention with his first book of popular science, the bestselling Language Instinct, an embodiment of the linguistic sublime. Emboldened by instant fame, he followed this achievement by following Francis Bacon, making all knowledge his province, telling us how the mind works, why it isn’t a blank slate, and why violence has declined. Not many professors are interviewed by Stephen Colbert; not many can be described as a brilliant lecturer who looks like a rock star: “His curly shoulder-length mane and Cuban heels give him the air of a prog rocker on his third comeback tour. He has a superbly defined jaw, glittering blue eyes and a kilowatt smile which he beams at his class as he switches on the microphone.” Not many professors find themselves on a poster that updates Raphael’s famous painting The School of Athens, a gathering of ancient worthies. Figure 10.1 is a depiction easily identified by the caricature’s flowing locks. Raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Montreal, Pinker first distinguished himself as the graduate student of the prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Kosslyn, who said of him: “He was officially my student, but almost from the start we were colleagues.” After studying with Kosslyn, Pinker went on to carve out a successful academic career as an experimental psychologist, first at MIT, then at Harvard, specializing in language acquisition in children. But he was not satisfied as a mere academic star, much sought-after, much honored, destined to shine brightly but not to dazzle.

Richard Dawkins: The Mathematical Sublime

In an episode of The Simpsons, “Black Eyed, Please,” Ned Flanders has a nightmare. He visits his “personal hell” where they “worship famous atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion,” a devilish figure in the process of “making Catholic-saint stew.” Irreverent enough to be attracted to the program’s irreverence, and enough of a celebrity to be asked to do the show’s voice-over, Dawkins is content to appear as a parody of himself. But his skepticism is no act. It is deep-seated, with roots in his early childhood. Concerning his 18-month-old self, Dawkins says: …At Christmas a man called Sam dressed up as Father Christmas and entertained a children’s party in Mrs. Walter’s house. He apparently fooled all the children, and finally took his departure amid much jovial waving and ho-ho-ho-ing. As soon as he left, I looked up and breezily remarked to general consternation, “Sam’s gone!”… This precocious skepticism blossoms in Dawkins’s later views, a set of convictions in which science does not so much supplement as substitute for religion: “a friend . . . persuaded me of the full force of Darwin’s brilliant idea and I shed my last vestige of theistic credulity probably about the age of sixteen.” To Dawkins, biology is no more—and no less—than a rigorous skepticism applied to the living world. No need for Father Christmas. Without question, Dawkins’s vision of biology, a living world ruled by mathematics, is a “grand conception,” readily comparable to the origin stories of Weinberg, Greene, Randall, and Hawking, a saga of “how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.” In his work, Dawkins has employed mathematics to create, as Adam Smith said of Copernicus, “another constitution of things, more natural indeed, and such as the imagination can more easily attend to, but more new, more contrary to common opinion and expectation, than any of those appearances themselves.”

Rachel Carson: The Ethical Sublime

Rachel Carson has become Saint Rachel, canonized time and again by the environmental movement. May 27, 2007, marked the 100th anniversary of her birth. In that year, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, Massachusetts, hosted a major Rachel Carson centennial exhibition. The show was a partnership project of the museum and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and it featured artifacts, writings, photographs, and artwork from Carson’s life and career. In 2012, the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring was commemorated by a Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens event and exhibit. From September 7 through October 23, the exhibit presented artwork, photos, and interpretive panels in the visitor center. Canonization, and the posthumous fame it bestows, comes at a price: the disappearance of the Rachel Carson whose work was driven by two forces. The first was the love of nature. A perceptive review of The Sea Around Us compares Carson with great science writers who share with her a love of nature: . . . It is not an accident of history that Gilbert White and Charles Darwin described flora and fauna with genius, nor that the great mariners and voyagers in distant lands can re-create their experiences as part of our own. They wrote as they saw and their honest, questing eye, their care for detail is raised to the power of art by a deep-felt love of nature, and respect for all things that live and move and have their being. . . . The second force was the love of a woman, Dorothy Freeman, a person who in Carson’s view made her later life endurable and her later work possible: . . . All I am certain of is this: that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort, recognizing the heartache, the great weariness of mind and body, the occasional black despair it may involve—someone who cherishes me and what I am trying to create, as well. . . .

Steven Weinberg: The Conjectural Sublime

Steven Weinberg had been working for some time on the problem of the strong force that holds together the components of an atom’s nucleus. He was getting nowhere. “Suddenly,” while driving home in his red Camaro, insight arrived. He did not have the wrong answer to the problem of the strong force but the right answer to a different, equally interesting problem: …And I realized the massless particle in this theory that had given me so much trouble had nothing to do with the heavy particles that feel the strong interaction; it was the photon, the particle of which light was composed, that is responsible for electric and magnetic forces and that indeed has zero mass. I realized that what I had cooked up was an approach not just to understanding the weak interaction but to unifying the theories of the weak and electromagnetic forces into what has since come to be called the electroweak theory… “A Model of Leptons” is a paper of which he is justly proud. It has garnered 4,503 citations; a copy has been offered for sale at $950. This is the physicist at his mathematical best, a language he speaks as if it were his native tongue. Another incident confirms Weinberg’s extraordinary talent. Physicist Rich Muller has a bright idea. After several tries, however, the mathematics continues to defeat him. Despondent, he walks down the hall to an office where Steven Weinberg is chatting with Freeman Dyson. The two agree to help: …Weinberg went to the blackboard, wrote down the first equation. “And then he did some manipulations on it,” said Muller, “and stood back.” Dyson said, “I think if you make a substitution of variables now— .” Weinberg said, “Oh, yes, of course,” and wrote several more lines. “I was taking notes,” Muller said, “but I wasn’t sure what he was doing.” Weinberg paused in his writing, and Dyson said, “Now evaluate the delta function,” and Weinberg said, “Oh, okay.” Weinberg wrote down a few more lines, and Dyson said, “Good. You’ve proven it.”

Move Over, God

In the last two hundred years, physics, biology, and linguistics have markedly increased our understanding of three mysteries that continue to pique human curiosity: How did the universe begin? What is the origin of life? What accounts for language, a capacity we share with no other creature? For helping us answer these questions, we have to thank linguists like Steven Pinker, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, and theoretical physicists like Steven Weinberg. They each have a gift for translating important technical arguments in their respective disciplines into the ordinary English we all can understand. Accompanying this extraordinary achievement in popularization, however, there is an odd fellow traveler, a campaign against religion, against God, a concerted attack extraordinary in its persistence and its vehemence. In this final chapter, I would like to investigate the extent, source, and nature of this attack, this insistence on the part of so many scientists that they are not agnostics, properly skeptical of God’s existence, but atheists, firm believers in his nonexistence, that science, not God, is the only wellspring of the sublime. It is the firmness of their belief that is in question. When Wolfgang Pauli purportedly said of another scientist’s work that “it is not right; it is not even wrong,” he meant that this work violated the boundaries of the discipline Pauli so successfully inhabited, that the offending scientist was deluded when he thought he was doing physics. Of course, such professional judgments are far from perfect. Two eminent English mathematicians had already dismissed the work of Ramanujan when G. H. Hardy, having received it unsolicited in the morning mail, judged its author as on a par with Euler or Gauss. Still, this reversal of fortune is the exception, not the rule. When, however, even world-renowned scientists cross the border into a neighboring discipline in the humanities, say theology or biblical study, the exception is the rule: they dismiss what they do not trouble to understand.

Stephen Hawking: The Scientific Sublime Embodied

Lucy Hawking has had the good fortune of being the daughter of the most famous living physicist; she has had the better fortune of having been a teenager before Stephen Hawking became famous, a time when he was known and respected only by other theoretical physicists. In this less hectic time, he was just a father, a man with a disability, to be sure, but not a disabled man, a sufferer from Lou Gehrig’s disease who defied the odds. Who could view as disabled a man who zipped through the streets of Cambridge in a Formula 1 electric wheelchair driven at reckless speeds and, on one occasion at least, almost disastrous consequences? Hawking is now, perhaps, the most famous physicist since Einstein. While his work significantly expands the territory of the scientific sublime, his life embodies that sublime. This is not the ethical sublime that Rachel Carson, the subject of the next chapter, embodies; it is not a code of conduct. Rather, it is our firm sense that we are dealing with an extraordinary human being who has overcome daunting challenges to become an impressive virtual presence, a man who, alone among contemporary scientists, is a star, nay, a superstar. Confined to a wheelchair, he towers above us, an exemplar, a demonstration of just how deep a deep-seated commitment to science can be. But is he any good at physics? Is it all hype? His heroes—Galileo, Newton, and Einstein—are models he cannot hope to emulate. Those on whom he consistently relies—Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Richard Feynman—are clearly his superiors. True, he is an elite physicist honored by his peers, but he is more a Dom than a Joe DiMaggio, excellent, though not the very best. As he says himself, “To my colleagues am just another physicist.” But his professional reputation hardly matters, because, as he asserts with characteristic good humor: . . . To the wider public I became possibly the best-known scientist in the world. This is partly because scientists, apart from Einstein, are not widely known rock stars, and partly because I fit the stereotype of a disabled genius. I can’t disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses—the wheelchair gives me away. . . .

Brian Greene: The Speculative Sublime

Charles Dodgson warned a child correspondent of the dangers of living in the looking-glass world of mathematicians like himself, the high price of consistently believing “six impossible things before breakfast”: . . . Don’t be in such a hurry to believe next time—I’ll tell you why—If you set to work to believe everything you will tire out the muscles of the mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn’t believe it, but rushed out into the street without his umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn’t recover its right shape for nearly two days. . . . In all his books, Brian Greene is our tour guide on a journey into his particular looking-glass world—string theory, an exercise in the speculative sublime, a sublime only for aficionados, certainly not for you and me. Here is the abstract of an article cited a respectable 201 times: . . . We show that a string-inspired Planck scale modification of general relativity can have observable cosmological effects. Specifically, we present a complete analysis of the inflationary perturbation spectrum produced by a phenomenological Lagrangian that has a standard form on large scales but incorporates a string-inspired short distance cutoff, and find a deviation from the standard result. We use the de Sitter calculation as the basis of a qualitative analysis of other inflationary backgrounds, arguing that in these cases the cutoff could have a more pronounced effect, changing the shape of the spectrum. Moreover, the computational approach developed here can be used to provide unambiguous calculations of the perturbation spectrum in other heuristic models that modify trans-Planckian physics and thereby determine their impact on the inflationary perturbation spectrum. Finally, we argue that this model may provide an exception to constraints, recently proposed by Tanaka and Starobinsky, on the ability of Planck-scale physics to modify the cosmological spectrum. . . .

Lisa Randall: The Technological Sublime

In 2008 a rap video by Kate McAlpine went viral (nearly eight million views at present). Not your typical rap video, it takes place in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider and on the grounds 100 feet above. During the performance, the computer-generated voice of Stephen Hawking chimes in as part of a periodic call and response. Throughout, the lyrics are replete with technical terms like “protons,” “lead ions,” “antimatter,” “black holes,” “dark matter,” “Higgs boson,” “Standard Model,” “graviton,” “top quark,” and acronyms like “ALICE,” “ATLAS,” and “CMS.” Here is the central refrain: . . . The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head. The Higgs boson, that’s the one that everybody talks about And it’s the one sure thing that this machine will sort out. . . . McAlpine’s was a prophesy that proved right on target. In 2016, François Englert and Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize in physics for a conjecture they had made over a half century earlier, a mathematically driven leap of faith that became a scientific fact when the Higgs boson was detected—a hitherto mysterious but absolutely central member of the particle zoo. It was a discovery that confirmed the otherwise highly confirmed Standard Model, the explanatory centerpiece of the quantum world. At five billion dollars, the detector of the Higgs, the Large Hadron Collider, is the most expensive scientific apparatus ever built. It is a Mount Everest of machines, the apotheosis of the technological sublime. This form of sublimity is near the center of Lisa Randall’s professional life, the only means by which her deepest conjectures about the universe can be demonstrated. Hers is a flight into the scientific stratosphere tethered to events that she hopes will be observed by two incarnations of the technological sublime: the Large Hadron Collider or the GAIA satellite. When the UK funding for the Large Hadron Collider was still in question, Science Minister William Waldegrave challenged British physicists, telling them “that if anyone could explain what all the fuss was about, in plain English, on one sheet of paper, then he would reward that person with a bottle of vintage champagne.”

Richard Feynman: The Consensual Sublime

Richard Feynman was a fox, not a hedgehog: he did not know one big thing; instead, he knew many things. He was an inspired tinkerer, a Thomas Edison of theoretical science. Still, like Leo Tolstoy, he yearned to be a hedgehog. Feynman’s vision was like Tolstoy’s: “scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a monistic vision of life on the part of the fox bitterly intent on seeing in the manner of the hedgehog.” This difference extends to method and attitude. While the great physicist Hans Bethe, Feynman’s frequent working companion at Los Alamos, proceeded deliberately in any argument between them, Feynman “was as likely to begin in the middle or at the end, and jump back and forth until he had convinced himself he was right (or wrong).” It was a contest between “the Battleship and the Mosquito Boat,” a small, lightly armed torpedo vessel. From 1948 to 1958, Feynman enjoyed triumph after triumph. To a former student, Koichi Mano, Feynman wrote: “You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods.” Working on these problems, Feynman reflects a general conviction typical of successful scientists. Another scientist says what Richard Feynman might have: “There’s nothing I’d rather do. In fact my boy says I am paid for playing. He’s right. In other words if I had an income I’d do just what I’m doing now. I’m one of the people who has found what he wanted to do. At night when you can’t sleep you think about your problems. You work on holidays and Sundays. It’s fun. Research is fun. By and large it’s a very pleasant existence.” Problems close to the gods are their gift, but the gods are capricious. This is why for many geniuses, being a genius is a career as brief as an athlete’s. For most, as for Feynman, a dreaded day arrives: the great insights stop coming. The marvelous decade having passed, Feynman tells his student Mano that he turned to “innumerable problems you would call humble.”

Isn’t Science Sublime?

For over a half century, popular science books have been embraced enthusiastically by the welcoming public, from Richard Dawkins on evolution to Brian Greene on string theory. But while shelf upon shelf of books of popular science exist, only one book exists on these books, Elizabeth Leane’s Reading Popular Physics. Perhaps that’s because no other book is needed; perhaps there is no more mystery to solve, no conundrum to unravel. Take A Brief History of Time: it is selling far better than Gone with the Wind, apparently with good reason: it is a better read. A reviewer on Amazon opines: “Stephen Hawking is an established scientific genius, but this book establishes him as a brilliant writer—an extremely rare, yet valuable combination.” A blog critic pronounces his verdict: “A Brief History of Time is far more than a science book. It’s one of the renaissance books that is so seminal to the notion of who we are, and where we might be in the next 50 years, that it should be required reading for every person from high school on. If that seems like a big ask you’ve got the wrong idea about this book. It’s light and easy and fun, full of subtle humor and provocative notions.” These are views about a book chock-full of abstruse ideas strenuously avoided in their school years by all but future physicists. The universal attraction of such books is the mystery I would like to solve, the conundrum I would like to unravel. Jon Turney, a scholar of popular science and former editor of Penguin Books, questions whether such a book can be written: “At some point,” he says, “one must ask if it is possible . . . to consider the whole ensemble of books. I have my doubts. Even books on the same topic, quantum physics say, are tremendously diverse, in style, level, approach, and in which genres they draw on.” Turney is not totally despairing of success; he suggests that potential authors see popular science books as symptoms of larger forces in our culture. I intend to act on Turney’s suggestion. I acknowledge the diversity of style, level, and approach that Turney sees as an obstacle to a comprehensive account. But I attribute this diversity not to a difference in goals but to differing literary talents and to different takes on what science is and what it can accomplish. However different their skills and their subject matter, these writers are in the business of generating in their readers a sense of wonder at a nature whose workings science, and only science, can comprehend.