Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  The chair is for ‘Public Understanding of Science’, that is the holder will be expected to make important contributions to the public’s understanding of some scientific field rather than study the public’s perception of the same. By ‘public’ we mean the largest possible audience, provided, however, that people who have the power and ability to propagate or oppose the ideas (especially scholars in other sciences and in humanities, engineers, business people, journalists, politicians, professionals, and artists) are not lost in the process. Here it is useful to distinguish between the roles of scholars and popularizers. The university chair is intended for accomplished scholars who have made original contributions to their field, and who are able to grasp the subject, when necessary, at the highest levels of abstraction. A popularizer, on the other hand, focuses mainly on the size of the audience and frequently gets separated from the world of scholarship. Popularizers often write on immediate concerns or even fads. In some cases they seduced less educated audiences by offering a patronizingly oversimplified or exaggerated view of the state of the art or the scientific process itself. This is best seen in hindsight, as we remember the ‘giant brains’ computer books of yesteryear but I suspect many current science books will in time be recognized as having fallen into this category. While the role of populariser may still be valuable, nevertheless it is not one supported by this chair. The public’s expectation of scholars is high, and it is only fitting that we have a high expectation of the public.

  ‘Understanding’ in this instance should be taken a little poetically as well as literally. The goal is for the public to appreciate the order and beauty of the abstract and natural worlds which is there, hidden, layer-upon-layer. To share the excitement and awe that scientists feel when confronting the greatest of riddles. To have empathy for the scientists who are humbled by the grandeur of it all. Those in the audience who reach the understanding sufficient to reveal the order and beauty in science will also gain greater insight into the connectedness of science and their everyday life.

  Finally, ‘science’ here means not only the natural and mathematical sciences but also the history of science and the philosophy of science as well. However, preference should be given to specialities which express or achieve their results mainly by symbolic manipulation, such as Particle physics, Molecular biology, Cosmology, Genetics, Computer science, Linguistics, Brain research, and, of course, Mathematics. The reason for this is more than a personal predilection. Symbolic expression enables the highest degree of abstraction and thence the utilization of powerful mathematical and data processing tools ensures tremendous progress. At the same time the very means of success tends to isolate the scientists from the lay audience and prevents the communication of the results. Considering the profoundly vital interdependence between the society at large and the scientific world, the dearth of effective information flow is positively dangerous.

  In order to accomplish the above goals, the appointees to the chair must have a pedagogical range that goes beyond the traditional university setting. They should be able to communicate effectively with audiences of all kinds and in different media. Above all, they must approach the public with the utmost candor. Naturally, they will interact with political, religious, and other societal forces, but they must not, under any circumstances, let these forces affect the scientific validity of what they say. Conversely, they should be also candid about the limits of scientific knowledge at any given time, and communicate the uncertainties, frustrations, scientifically perplexing phenomena, and even the failures in their area of expertise.

  Scientific speculation, when so labeled, and when the concept of speculation and its place in the scientific method has been made clear to the audience, can be very exciting. It is a very effective communication tool, and it is by no means discouraged.

  We recognize that persons with these combined qualifications are rare. Therefore, the preferences listed above for particular scientific specialities should be taken secondary to the appointees’ pedagogical and communication talents.

  The appointees should have the opportunity to continue their scientific work. This is best accomplished if their appointment in the Department closest to their field would be held jointly with the Department of Continuing Education. While being firmly based in Oxford, the appointees should receive every possible support from the University for travel and for visiting professorships. In accordance with this, their teaching and administrative responsibilities within Oxford should be correspondingly limited, and should be directed primarily towards the education of nonspecialists. They would be expected to write books and magazine articles in any medium for the popular as well as scientific audiences, participate in public lectures, whether through the University or otherwise, and generally participate in the expression of the ‘Public Understanding of Science’.

  There is always a potential danger that a benefaction can prove counterproductive if the first holder’s previous post is not filled when he or she vacates it. I make this gift on the assumption that Richard Dawkins’s existing post in the Department of Zoology will be filled, in a similar field, as a matter of routine when he vacates it.

  I gratefully acknowledge the contribution from Prof. Dawkins, who provided me with a framework for the present program.

  Charles Simonyi

  Bellevue, 15 May 1995

  Obviously the members of the appointment boards for all future Simonyi professors must read his letter in full, and it should be in front of each one of them around the committee table. But I would call attention especially to a number of points. He makes the distinction between popularizers of science and scientists (with original scientific contributions to their credit) who also popularize. He interprets ‘understanding’ of science ‘a little poetically’. He wrote the letter three years before I published Unweaving the Rainbow, and I like to think that when that book finally appeared he found it resonant with his wish. My preface to that book contains a tribute to him as a Renaissance man with an ‘imaginative vision of science and how it should be communicated’. I explained how we had talked over these matters since becoming friends and I offered Unweaving the Rainbow as my written contribution to the conversation ‘and as my inaugural statement as Simonyi Professor’.

  In an especially telling passage of his manifesto, Charles urges future Simonyi professors to be candid about the limitations of science, while never allowing religious or political forces to affect the scientific validity of what they say.

  Finally, a more short-term but important point, Charles realized that his gift might backfire if I were simply moved sideways and my lecturing position in zoology lost. One of my motivations in seeking the move was specifically so that I might be replaced by new blood bringing fresh enthusiasm to Oxford zoology, even as I carried my own renewed enthusiasm to the world outside. I was indeed replaced, by a succession of excellent younger zoologists: David Goldstein, Eddie Holmes, Oliver Pybus – each of whom soon went on to a prestigious professorship – and now the wonderful Ashleigh Griffin (who, I hope, will be with us a long time before the same happens to her).

  Simonyi Lectures

  One of the first things I did as Simonyi Professor was to endow, in a much smaller way with my own money from book royalties, an annual Charles Simonyi Lecture in Oxford. In accordance with Charles’s manifesto, the lecturers I invited have all been distinguished scholars in their own right, and have all been successful in increasing the public understanding of science. I’m proud to say it is a pretty starry list. Here they are, with the titles of their lectures:

  1999 Daniel Dennett The evolution of culture

  2000 Richard Gregory Shaking hands with the universe

  2001 Jared Diamond Why did human history unfold differently on different continents?

  2002 Steven Pinker The blank slate

  2003 Martin Rees The mystery of our complex cosmos

  2004 Richard Leakey Why our origins matter

  2005 Carolyn Porco In orbit! Cassini e
xplores the Saturn system

  2006 Harry Kroto Can the internet save the Enlightenment?

  2007 Paul Nurse The great ideas of biology

  Finally, in 2008, the year of my retirement, I gave the tenth Simonyi Lecture myself, my valedictory swansong, with the title ‘The purpose of purpose’.

  A high point of that same year, incidentally, was the wonderful retirement dinner that the Vice-Chancellor, John Hood, arranged for me in the University Museum, with a guest list every bit as distinguished as that for my seventieth birthday dinner three years later.

  Except for the first two, which took place in the Zoology Department, all the Simonyi Lectures were in the comfortable and stylish surroundings of the Oxford Playhouse. The enlightened managers of the Playhouse were keen to promote science as well as drama. I’ve already mentioned that they put on Michael Frayn’s important play Copenhagen, about the enigma of Werner Heisenberg’s wartime visit to Niels Bohr, and that afterwards they invited Oxford physicists to a question and answer session with Michael Frayn himself. Michael told Lalla and me afterwards that he found this quite a testing experience, but I thought he handled it extremely well, and so did distinguished physicists that I spoke to, for example Sir Roger Penrose and Sir Roger Elliott.

  The Heisenberg–Bohr meeting, if I may digress again, is of historic importance because of the enigma of Germany’s failure to develop an atomic bomb. If anyone could have led such a project, it would have been Heisenberg. When he miscalculated that it couldn’t realistically be done, was it a deliberate mistake? To think so would be a tribute to his memory, but unfortunately the answer is probably no, as I first learned from Roger Elliott’s predecessor as Wykeham Professor of Physics, Sir Rudolf Peierls, my senior colleague at New College. Peierls was one of the two British physicists (both Jewish refugees from Hitler) who first correctly calculated that an atomic super-bomb was possible, and alerted the Allies to that fact (the ‘Frisch–Peierls memorandum’). In his aged widowerhood, Sir Rudolf invited Lalla and me to a large dinner party in his Oxford flat, for which he did the cooking entirely by himself. When all the other guests had left we stayed to help wash the dishes, and he told us the story of Heisenberg’s apparently sincere (secretly recorded) astonishment on first learning the news of Hiroshima. Also while washing the dishes, we were fascinated to hear of the ingenuity by which Sir Rudolf had earlier guessed that the Germans were not putting any serious effort into an atom bomb project. Knowing the world of German physics intimately, he carefully examined university lecture lists and noted that Professor This, Professor von That and Doctor the Other were all still giving their lectures in their respective universities, at a time when they would surely have been seconded to an equivalent of the Manhattan Project if such existed. Lovely piece of detective work! And he was a lovely man who, after the war, struggled like Robert Oppenheimer to reduce the dangers of the terrible weapons they had helped to create, becoming a prominent member of the Pugwash movement for world peace. I attended his funeral in 1995, and was sorry he was not around to give a Simonyi Lecture, for he had a great interest in public understanding of science and presented me with a signed copy of his book The Laws of Nature, which explains physics to people like me.

  Each of the Simonyi Lectures was followed by a dinner for about sixteen people, usually in New College but on two occasions in the timelessly beautiful Wytham Abbey, just outside Oxford, through the kindness of its owners, Michael and Martine Stewart, who also graced the table with their own lively company. Charles himself flew in (piloted his jet into Oxford’s tiny airport) for several of the lectures. It was at one of these post-lecture dinners that Charles presented me with one of my most treasured possessions, a first edition Origin of Species, one of the original print run of only 1,250. I was tongue-tied with emotion when he stood up and made a gracious speech as he presented it to me.

  It is a privilege to have known all nine of ‘my’ Simonyi Lecturers. I first became aware of Dan Dennett when he and his colleague Douglas Hofstadter invited a chapter of The Selfish Gene (the meme chapter) into their thought-provoking anthology The Mind’s I. The anthology also includes the text of Dan’s own ‘Where am I?’, a tour de force of a lecture in which he pretended that his brain (‘Yorick’) was secured on a life-support system in a vat, communicating with his body by radio and running in perfect synchrony with an exact copy (‘Hubert’) downloaded into a computer. It made no difference which of the two ‘brains’ controlled his body. So confident was he of their interchangeability that, as his climax to the lecture, he switched from one to the other – with dramatically hammed-up results that fully justified the standing ovation I have no doubt the lecture received.

  The ‘Where am I?’ lecture is one of those philosophical works – indeed, Dan is one of those philosophers (along with A. C. Grayling, Jonathan Glover and Rebecca Goldstein) – that enable me (and I think many scientists) to ‘get’ what philosophers can be good for. His thinking has a high-spirited, teasing quality as well as great depth, and he is one of that new breed of philosophers of science who are knowledgeable about science and able to talk, on equal terms, to leading scientists about their own field. He is a warmly sympathetic friend, and the sort of conversationalist who ‘raises the game’ of whoever he is talking to. When I have a conversation with Dan, I can almost feel my intelligence quotient rising towards (though never reaching) his.

  This ‘raising the game’ is a curious ability, rare but not unknown in others (for example Steven Pinker, to pick a further name from my list of Simonyi Lecturers) and it might repay research by education theorists. The late Bernard Williams (another distinguished philosopher who became a friend, together with his sweet wife Patricia) had a similar effect, but in his case he seemed to make his companion become wittier and more amusing. So does the literary scholar and biographer Hermione Lee, another New College colleague, now President of Wolfson College, Oxford and still a good, though now less often seen, friend. I don’t know where the phrase ‘raise one’s game’ comes from, but it is apt to all these people.

  As I shall mention in the ‘Memes’ section of the next chapter, Dan Dennett is one of those (another is the briskly intelligent psychologist Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine) who has taken the idea of memes and run with it. Memes play a significant role in several of Dan’s books, including Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Consciousness Explained and Breaking the Spell, among others. He is an evocative phrasemaker, with a bulging quiverful1 of Intuition Pumps (to quote the title of another of his books, itself an intuition pump in its own right): ‘cranes’ and ‘skyhooks’ are among my favourites. He is also a devastating deflater of obscurantism and pretentious ‘deepities’ (his excellent coining, which could be defined ostensively as ‘almost anything ever said by Deepak Chopra, Karen Armstrong or Teilhard de Chardin’).

  Years after Dan’s Simonyi Lecture, I was with John Brockman in New York and John confided to a group of us that Dan had suddenly been taken dangerously ill. The prognosis was dire and we, his friends, had already prepared ourselves to mourn when the news began to get slightly better. Dan was saved by heroic American medicine and state-of-the-art heart surgery. While recuperating in hospital, he wrote a deeply moving article called ‘Thank goodness’. The contrast with the conventional ‘Thank God’ was calculated. He was thanking the goodness of the team of surgeons and doctors, the nurses, the inventors of the advanced scientific equipment that enabled them to diagnose and treat him, even the launderers of his bloody sheets. With gentle sarcasm he mocked those who had written to say they were praying for him: ‘And did you also sacrifice a goat?’ Read his paper: it is an exultant heart-cry of gratitude to recipients who really deserve gratitude (and who really exist).1

  Richard Gregory died in 2010, a great loss to our shared enterprise of raising public appreciation of science. He was a psychologist specializing in visual illusions as a window shining light into the workings of the mind, but he combined his psychology with the skills and intuitions
of an inventive engineer and he also had a deep knowledge of the history of science. He pioneered the style of ‘hands-on’ science museum that became well-known through his own Exploratory at Bristol and the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

  His personal manner was one of joyous, hopping-about enthusiasm. When explaining a favourite piece of science he almost seemed to dance on the spot, chortling with joy, like a big schoolboy bursting with excitement as he unwraps a new toy for Christmas. He greatly appreciated his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he made a point of writing me a kindly glowing letter when I myself received the same honour much later: ‘It’s much more fun being “in” than “out”!’

  I first met Richard when he came to give a talk in Oxford while I was a graduate student. As an afterthought to his psychology lecture, in response to a question he described his wickedly ingenious invention of an attachment to an astronomical telescope. The idea (now superseded by the computer equivalent of the same trick) was a cunning technique of taking photographs through previously exposed photographic negatives, in order to average out the random ‘noise’ of interference in the upper atmosphere.

  I next met him when he was again visiting Oxford, and Lalla and I invited him to dinner in our flat, together with Francis Crick and his wife Odile (who took the photo that appears in the picture section). It was a huge privilege for Lalla and me to have these two intellectual giants at our table and hear them spark off each other – a kind of forerunner of what I would later call a mutual tutorial.

  I just mentioned Sue Blackmore, and I am reminded of her affectionate obituary of Richard Gregory, which captures the man beautifully. She describes her own first meeting with him in his Bristol lab in 1978, and her memory of