Great scientists and explorers—the creatures who look at the stuff of the universe and wonder at their species’ ways and origins—tend to be enthusiastic, optimistic and energetic by temperament, although there are, of course, many exceptions. Exuberance serves science well: it helps to overcome the tedium and setbacks intrinsic to scientific work, overrides mental and physical weariness, and makes risk-taking both attractive and probable. Positive mood, because it facilitates creativity and problem-solving, is likewise critical. Exuberance makes science fun, a type of adventure; and adventure, in turn, becomes a part of what scientists and explorers seek. Risk and the possibility of failure fade in comparison.
Charles Lindbergh put the danger of risk in the context of the excitement of flight: “I had been attracted to aviation by its adventure, not its safety,” he said, “by the love of wind and height and wings.” His fellow aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said much the same thing: “I know nothing, nothing in the world, equal to the wonder of nightfall in the air. Those who have been enthralled by the witchery of flying will know what I mean.… ‘It’s worth it, it’s worth the final smash-up.’ ” Indeed, the dangers of flight often become a part of its pleasures. The pioneer aviator and inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont, young and new to aviation and lost during a violent thunderstorm, said after he was safe again, “There was a fierce kind of joy … amid the lightning flashes and the thunderclaps, I was a part of the storm.… And when the dawn comes, red and gold and purple in its glory, one is almost loath to seek the earth again, although the novelty of landing in who knows what part of Europe affords still another pleasure.” There is, he continued, “the true explorer’s zest of coming on unknown peoples like a god from a machine.” The pilot, like the explorer, is up against nature and must come to know it in new ways. His business, wrote Saint-Exupéry, “is with the wind, with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares in expectancy for the coming of dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to a port as to a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.”
The excitement of adventure can stave off its physical hardship. Saint-Exupéry wrote that his exuberance for flying was such that “I was neither hungry nor thirsty. I felt no weariness. It seemed to me I could go on like this at the controls for ten years. I was happy.” The excitement comes back anew. Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, wrote in her memoir West with the Night, “I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure.” The certainty of the uncertainty is a rush in its own right.
The promise of adventure can fend off the ennui of conventional life. On the eve of his expedition to search for the source of the Nile, Richard Burton wrote in his journal of escaping world-weariness, the apathy of the known: “Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares, and the slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood. Excitement lends unwonted vigour to the muscle, and the sudden sense of freedom adds a cubit to the mental stature. Afresh dawns the morn of life. Again the bright world is beautiful to the eye, and the glorious face of nature gladdens the soul. A journey, in fact, appeals to Imagination, to Memory, to Hope—the sister graces of our mortal being.”
Most scientists and explorers throw themselves into their work with enthusiasm, if not an actual sense of adventure, but few exhibit excitement at the legendary level of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, who, having discovered the solution to a problem set for him by the king, reputedly ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I have found it! I have found it!”) and, it is said by Plutarch, was slain by a Roman soldier because he refused to interrupt his work on a geometry problem he had traced out in the dust. Enthusiasm sweeps up those under its influence, away from the direction of doubt, difficulty, and distraction. Nikola Tesla said, “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success.… Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything … an inventor has so intense a nature with so much of it of wild, passionate quality, that in giving himself to a woman he might love, he would give everything, and so take everything from his chosen field.”
Exuberance not only drives people onward, it sustains them in times of drought. David Levy, the discoverer of more than twenty comets, had to wait nineteen years before he found his first one. Why, after a thousand hours of watching the skies to no avail, did he keep on looking? “The point of the search for comets,” he says, “is that I love searching for comets.” Exploration is its own reward. Good leaders know this intuitively. One hundred and fifty years before David Levy searched the skies, Thomas Jefferson had observed that his close friend and private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, possessed a “passion for dazzling pursuits.” Lewis’s ardor for exploration, fueled by Jefferson’s own scientific enthusiasms and an expansive vision for America, spurred a bold expedition to map the rivers and peoples, describe the wildlife, and give an account of the “soil and face” of the American wilderness. Jefferson knew Lewis’s temperament well and understood, as he put it, that “no season or circumstance could obstruct his purpose.” Jefferson bet on the power of passion, and he won.
There is in some people a passion to know the ways of nature—whether to discover a comet or to map a continent. Alan Lightman, reflecting on his life as a theoretical physicist, spoke of the all-consuming passion to know, an unrelenting determination to run down the truth: “I miss the intensity,” he wrote. “I miss being grabbed by a science problem so that I could think of nothing else, consumed by it during the day and then through the night, hunched over the kitchen table with my pencil and pad of white paper while the dark world slept, tireless, electrified, working on until daylight and beyond.” He worked without stop, he remembers, “because I wanted to know the answer. I wanted to know the telltale behavior of material spiraling into a black hole, or the maximum temperature of a gas of electrons and positrons, or what was left after a cluster of stars had slowly lost mass and drawn in on itself and collapsed.… I knew that the equations inexorably led to an answer, an answer that had never been known before, an answer waiting for me.”
The combination of curiosity and joy so characteristic of scientific work calls to mind the galumphing quality of exuberant play: watching, chasing an idea first up one path and then down another, tussling with competitors, and flat-out exhilaration in the chase. Creative science and play are fun; they promise the unexpected. The nuclear chemist Glenn Seaborg, who, with his coworkers, discovered plutonium and nine other previously unknown elements, said, “I couldn’t believe that I was being paid to do what I would have chosen as a hobby.… It was exciting just to walk into the lab, full of anticipation that that day I might be the first human being ever to see some unimaginable new creation.” Most scientific work is routine; indeed, it is often frustrating, boring, and difficult. Scientists live for the unpredictable turns: the mind’s galumphing, like love, is a many-splendored and much-desired thing.
Lewis Thomas, in The Fragile Species, describes the playlike quality to the work of the early molecular biologists: “Beginning with the discovery by Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty of DNA as the structure, and the elucidation of its fine architecture by James Watson and Francis Crick, investigators all around the world settled down to play with this new thing … it was a long line of extremely hard work, hotly competitive, frustrating to a lot of investigators. Nonetheless, it was the greatest fun for the imaginative winners in the games, one grand game after another. The energy which drove the hard
work along was uncomplicated and irresistible: it was the urge to find out how a singularly strange and engrossing part of nature works.”
Exuberant play, as we have seen in other mammals as well as in ourselves, creates a more energized and enriched environment in which to imagine, discover, and make connections. Scientists who are enthusiastic and energetic also enrich others with their enthusiasm. They attract people into their intellectual orbits and infect them with their exuberance; they transmit This is important, not only to those with whom they work but to scientists in other laboratories as well. Long before the significance of a discovery is fully realized, scientists enthuse; through their enthusings, they heighten awareness of the problem at hand and generate competition, both of which are likely to lead to even faster discovery. Intellectual play, like the play of childhood, is a serious business.
Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer’s writer on the subject of adventure and exploration, argued vehemently for the role of play in all types of creative work, especially that of the artist. “The book, the statue, the sonata,” he wrote, “must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. Is it worth doing?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist.” Stevenson’s observations are equally true for the scientist.
The delight of finding beauty in the natural world is a further draw of science. This was clear in the lives of John Muir and Snowflake Bentley, and brilliantly apparent in the lectures and writings of Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and Richard Feynman. “Science is not everything,” said the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, “but science is very beautiful.” G. H. Hardy, the father of modern analytic number theory, insisted that beauty was both a lure and a defining quality of mathematics: “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful. The ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”
An early jolt of beauty is, for many young scientists, as alluring as the fix of first discovery. The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks writes of his reaction to learning about the structure of the atom: “Bohr’s atom seemed to me ineffably, transcendently beautiful—electrons spinning, trillions of times a second, spinning forever in predestined orbits, a true perpetual-motion machine made possible by the irreducibility of the quantum, and the fact that the spinning electron expended no energy, did no work. And more complex atoms were more beautiful still, for they had dozens of electrons weaving separate paths, but organized, like tiny onions, in shells and subshells. They seemed to me not merely beautiful, these gossamer but indestructible things, but perfect … in their balancing of numbers and forces and shieldings and energies.”
The exuberance of discovery is often accompanied by a joy in the sheer beauty of its shape or function. James Watson and Francis Crick give separate but like accounts of their delight in determining a fundamental pattern in nature. Shortly after discovering DNA’s structure, Watson writes in The Double Helix, “we had lunch, telling each other that a structure this pretty just had to exist.” Crick, describing an after-dinner talk Watson gave at Cambridge a year or two later, elaborated: “I have seen more than one speaker struggling to find his way into his topic through a haze of alcohol. Jim was no exception. In spite of it all he managed to give a fairly adequate description of the main points of the structure and the evidence supporting it, but when he came to sum up he was quite overcome and at a loss for words. He gazed at the model, slightly bleary-eyed. All he could manage to say was ‘It’s so beautiful, you see, so beautiful!’ But then, of course, it was.”
I was fortunate to grow up around exuberance. My father, a scientist and a great enthusiast, was surrounded by ebullient friends and colleagues who were scientists or mathematicians. They were lively and endlessly curious. They were also, for a child, great fun to be around because they were utterly captivated by the same things that enthrall children—stars, fireflies, wind, why a frog is marked the way it is, the reasons snow seems sometimes to crunch and at others to creak—and they laughed a lot and gesticulated wildly when talking about their ideas. They found the physical world fascinating and wondrous, as children do. (Indeed, one of my father’s books from graduate school, Physics of the Air, which I now own and still read with pleasure, is an amazement of topics—fog, wind gusts and eddies, beaded lightning, snow crystals, whisperings of trees and murmurings of forests, clouds, the twinkling of stars and the luminescence of rainbows—and, even though these natural phenomena are described in terms of often quite incomprehensible diagrams and equations, the very fact that scientists studied such things seemed to me magical when I was young. It still does.) My father and his friends found enormous joy in asking questions, and then more questions, or in just batting ideas about. Best of all, unlike most other adults, they did not curtail their enthusiasms or respond condescendingly to those expressed by children. Exuberance was seen as a natural response to the world, not one to be kept in check.
Science and the enthusiasm of scientists retain their wonder for me. In many ways the passions of the great artists and scientists are not so different, however much has been made of the supposed temperamental divide. Psychologists and historians of science study the discoveries of scientists extensively, but examine their emotions and motivations far less closely. (Of course, scientific discoveries, like works of art, are themselves the important thing. But they are not the only thing.) Yet scientific thought removed from the emotions that drive and nourish it is as desiccated as the heart taken from its vessels of blood.
In 1968 a book was published that detonated the myth of science as a preserve for the calm and detached. James Watson’s The Double Helix was, for the tens of thousands of young scientists in the making who read it, a fresh and exuberant look into science and intellectual pursuit. It brought to life a world that, in Watson’s words, “seldom proceeds in the straight-forward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.” He wrote his book, in part, he said, because “there remains general ignorance about how science is ‘done.’ That is not to say that all science is done in the manner described here. This is far from the case, for styles of scientific research vary almost as much as human personalities. On the other hand, I do not believe that the way DNA came out constitutes an odd exception to a scientific world complicated by the contradictory pulls of ambition and the sense of fair play.”
The discovery of the structure of DNA is the defining event of modern biology. It has been described by Sir Peter Medawar as the greatest achievement of science in the twentieth century, and by the renowned Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson as a scientific accomplishment that “towered over all that the rest of us had achieved and could ever hope to achieve. It came like a lightning flash, like knowledge from the gods.” Medawar, an immunologist and Nobel laureate, emphasized the elegance of the Watson-Crick solution: “The great thing about their discovery was its completeness, its air of finality … if the solution had come out piecemeal instead of in a blaze of understanding: then it would still have been a great episode in biological history but something more in the common run of things; something splendidly well done, but not in the grand romantic manner.” Watson himself described his and Crick’s discovery as an “adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.” The adventure was a quest, the goal was the Holy Grail of biology, and the knights errant turned out to be ferociously competitive, monomaniacal, and right.
The publication of The Double Helix rocked the
world of academic biology. Some loved it. The mathematician, scientist, and anthropologist Jacob Bronowski said that Watson’s account “communicates the spirit of science as no formal account has ever done… [it] expresses the open adventure of science; the sense of the future, the high spirits and the rivalry and the guesses right and wrong, the surge of imagination and the test of fact.” The sociologist Robert Merton, in a New York Times review, wrote that he knew of no other book like it in describing scientists at work, that it was a “wonderfully candid self-portrait of the scientist as a young man in a hurry.” Watson, he said, had portrayed honestly what had always been true in history: scientists are intent not only on discovery, but on being first. Richard Feynman wrote to Watson, “You are describing how science is done. I know, for I have had the same beautiful and frightening experience.”
Alex Comfort, both a scientist and novelist, suggested that Watson might well deserve a second Nobel Prize, for literature. He began his review in the Manchester Guardian by stating that there “has never been anything quite like this tactless and truly remarkable book.” Generally, he pointed out, “one doesn’t write a low-down on the Church while staying in Holy Orders.” Comfort captures the book’s romance and high spirits perfectly: “The style is elated, and so it should be: there is no experience of human intoxication to equal the solving of a fundamental problem in Cambridge in early spring, when one is in one’s twenties. This excitement is transmitted to any reader, even if he thinks DNA is a kind of aircraft glue.”
Other reviewers were less kind, not to say vitriolic. Harvard University Press refused to honor its initial commitment to publish the book. Lawsuits were threatened. The editor of Nature, the journal that had published the original scientific paper by Watson and Crick, stated that “no fewer than a dozen distinguished molecular biologists had declined an invitation to review the book.” Of those who did review it, several were outraged by Watson’s depiction of raw scientific competitiveness and his personal arrogance, his caustic appraisal of colleagues (especially Rosalind Franklin), and a seeming abandonment of the grace and ideals of Science. He was accused of character assassination and of portraying a world of intense ambition; his book, it was said, was a “bleak recitation of bickering and personal ambition.” The science editor of The Saturday Review worried about its damaging effects on immature minds.
Exuberance: The Passion for Life Page 19
