by Bill Bryson
Immortality has been one of the constant desires of humanity. The means to it differ – one may receive it through natural means, as in Luggnagg, or from a god, or by drinking an elixir of life, or by passing through a mysterious fire, as in Rider Haggard’s novel She, or by drinking the blood of a vampire; but there’s always a dark side to it.
Luggnagg is Gulliver’s last noteworthy Book Three stop. Through his encounter with the Struldbrugs, he’s drawing close to the heart of Swift’s matter: what it is to be human. In Book Four he plunges all the way in: his final voyage takes him to the land of the rational and moral talking-horse Houyhnhnms, and brings him face to face with an astonishingly Darwinian view of humanity’s essence. The filthy apelike beasts called Yahoos he encounters there are viewed by the Houyhnhnms as beasts, and treated as such; and, much to Gulliver’s dismay, he is at last forced to recognise that, apart from a few superficial differences such as clothing and language, he too is a Yahoo.
As Swift’s friend Alexander Pope wrote shortly after the publication of Gulliver’s Travels, ‘The proper study of Mankind is Man.’ In our own age, that study is not only proper, it’s more necessary than ever. The botched experiments of Swift’s projectors and our own exponentially successful scientific discoveries and inventions are both driven by the same forces: human curiosity and human fears and desires. Since, increasingly, whatever we can imagine we can also enact, it’s crucial that we understand what impels us. The mad scientist figure is – to paraphrase Oscar Wilde – our own Caliban’s face in the mirror. Are we merely very smart Yahoos, and, if so, will we ultimately destroy ourselves and much else through our own inventions?
Science was just coming into being in the age of Swift. Now it’s fully formed, but we’re still afraid of it. Partly we fear its Moreau-like coldness, a coldness that is in fact real, for science as such does not have emotions or a system of morality built into it, any more than a toaster does. It’s a tool – a tool for actualising what we desire and defending against what we fear – and like any other tool, it can be used for good or ill. You can build a house with a hammer, and you can use the same hammer to murder your neighbour.
Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn’t changed for thousands of years, because as far as we can tell the human template hasn’t changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly, and the Hat of Darkness so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and to be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve. We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don’t want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be as gods.
But in addition, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the shadow side of our other wants. Swift’s Grand Academy and its projectors, and their descendants the mad scientists, are among those shadows.
Last week I came across a ‘project’ that’s a blend of art object and scientific experiment. Suspended in a glass bubble with wires attached to it – something straight out of a fifties B-movie, you’d think – is a strangely eighteenth-century Lilliputian coat. It’s made of ‘Victimless Leather’ – leather made of animal cells growing on a matrix. This leather is ‘victimless’ because it has never been part of a living animal’s skin. Yet the tiny coat is alive – or is it? What do we mean by ‘alive’? Can the experiment be terminated without causing ‘death’? Heated debates on this subject proliferate on the Internet.
The debate would have been right at home in Swift’s Grand Academy: a clever but absurd object that’s presented straight but is also a joke; yet not quite a joke, for it forces us to examine our preconceptions about the nature of biological life. Above all, like Swift’s exploding dog and the proposal to extract sunshine out of cucumbers, the Victimless Leather garment is a complex creative exercise. If ‘What is it to be human?’ is the central question of Gulliver’s Travels, the ability to write such a book is itself part of the answer. We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine. Perhaps, by imagining mad scientists and then letting them do their worst within the boundaries of our fictions, we hope to keep the real ones sane.
3 MARGARET WERTHEIM
LOST IN SPACE: THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF NEWTONIAN COSMOLOGY
Margaret Wertheim is an Australian-born science writer, lecturer and broadcaster, now based in Los Angeles. Her books include Pythagoras’ Trousers, a history of the relationship between physics and religion, and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. She is the founder, with her twin sister Christine, of the Institute For Figuring, an organisation devoted to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics. Their projects include a giant model coral reef made using crocheting and hyperbolic geometry that has become the biggest art/science project in the world.
THE MAD SCIENTIST PLOTTING WORLD DOMINATION IS A FICTION. BUT IT IS NO FICTION THAT THE MODERN SCIENCE WHICH WE IDENTIFY WITH THE ROYAL SOCIETY WAS A PROFOUND CHALLENGE TO EXISTING WORLDVIEWS AND SYSTEMS OF MEANING. JUST HOW PROFOUND IS EXPLORED BY MARGARET WERTHEIM, WHO WONDERS WHETHER WE HAVE YET COME TO TERMS WITH THE CHANGE.
STARSHIP DREAMING
The Starship Enterprise heads into the void, its warp drive set to maximum, its crew primed ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’. The drive engages, a burst of light flares out from the rear engines and with an indefinable Woosh ingrained in the minds of Star Trek fans everywhere, the world’s most famous spaceship disappears from our screens and zaps across the universe to a far distant galaxy. As one of those besotted millions, I am not here to quibble about the scientific ‘errors’ in Gene Roddenberry’s masterpiece; as far as I’m concerned ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ remains the most thrilling line on television. What I wish to discuss here is an underlying premise of the series that has tugged at the back of my consciousness since childhood. The crew of the Enterprise take it for granted – as do real-life physicists, astronomers and SETI enthusiasts – that our cosmos is a homogeneous space ruled everywhere by the same physical laws. Such continuity is logically necessary if humans are ever to travel to the stars or communicate extraterrestrially. So essential is the idea of spatial homogeneity to modern science it has been named ‘the cosmological principle’ and it serves as the foundation of our faith that if indeed we are not alone then we will share something meaningful with our alien confrères – the Laws of Nature.
In the realms of both science fiction and science practice the importance of this principle is hard to overstate, for it underpins physicists’ confidence that the patterns of behaviour discovered here on Earth will govern distant worlds. Apples, planets, stars, galaxies, black holes and the explosive aftermath of the big bang are all compelled by gravity’s unifying force. The Enterprise can set its navigation system to any spatial coordinates precisely because the cosmological principle assures its crew that when they arrive the physics they know and trust will still be working. In contrast to biology, whose plasticity Star Trek writers gleefully celebrate in a myriad polymorphous modes, the laws of physics remain the same everywhere – they are the Platonic ideal at the core of an otherwise capricious cosmos. It is physics that makes ours a uni- rather than a multi-verse.
To citizens of the twenty-first century the cosmological principle may seem close to tautological. For us space is now an arena to b
e measured and mapped, ‘the final frontier’ on which we have imposed a metric of parsecs and light years. Yet the idea of spatial continuity was one of the more contentious propositions of the scientific revolution and its consequences have been far reaching. I want to argue here that adopting this view set the stage for an unbearable tension between science and Christianity and has problematised the very concept of a human ‘self’. In essence, concepts of space and concepts of self are inextricably entwined so that when a culture adopts a new conception of space, as Western culture did in the seventeenth century, it impacts our sense of not merely where we are but of what we are. While Newton’s synthesis famously united the heavens and Earth, it tore a hole in our social fabric that we are still struggling to comprehend and whose consequences continue to reverberate in the US ‘war’ between science and religion.
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPACE
The magnitude of the transformation taking place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not lost on any of its participants. Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo and Newton all understood that what was at stake in the revolution under way was the fate of the Christian soul. Each of these men stood on the side of God and argued that the emerging cosmology supported a case for the divine. What all of them feared was a universe stripped of spirit. They believed in a Holy Spirit whose Love in-formed the world and in the immanent spirits of their fellow human beings; in ‘the new astronomy’ they saw the reflected glory of their Creator, whose presence in the material universe supported their faith in Christianity’s promise of the soul’s eternal salvation. As Johannes Kepler summed up the case: ‘For a long time I wanted to become a theologian … Now, however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.’
The literally soul-destroying potential of the new cosmology hung like a cloud over the consciousness of seventeenth-century science and the source of this angst originated in concerns quite apart from its mechanistic tendencies. By the middle of the sixteenth century thoughtful minds had begun to discern that the idea of continuity between the terrestrial and celestial realms threatened the foundation of Christian faith as it had been construed for 1,500 years. By supplanting the geocentric finitude of medieval cosmology, the new science threatened to undo the metaphysical balance between body and soul on which Christian theology relied.
Contrary to accounts given in many popular science books, medieval cosmology was underpinned by a rigorous logic that attempted to encompass the totality of humans as physical, psychological and spiritual beings. Medieval scholars read the world in an iconic rather than a literalist sense; nature was a rebus in which everything visible to the eye represented multiple layers of meaning within a grand cosmic order. The physical world was the starting point for investigations that ultimately sought to comprehend a spiritual reality beyond the material plane and what is so beautiful here is that the metaphysical duality of body and soul was mirrored in the architecture of the cosmos.
As is well known, the medieval cosmos was finite, with the Earth at the centre surrounded by concentric spheres that carried the Sun, the Moon, the planets and stars revolving around us. Beyond the sphere of the stars was the final sphere of the universe proper, what the medievals, following the Greeks, called the primum mobile. Technically this constituted the limit of the universe – here, as Aristotle argued, space and time ended. Critically, because physical space was finite, medieval minds could imagine that ‘beyond’ the material world there was plenty of ‘room’ left for some other kind of space. On medieval cosmological diagrams we see it labelled the ‘Heavenly Empyrean’. What lay ‘beyond’ physical space was the spiritual space of God and the soul.
In the final stanzas of The Divine Comedy Dante enacts this transition. Having traversed the span of his universe from the depths of Hell in the centre of the Earth, up the purifying mountain of Purgatory and through the celestial layers, Dante pierces the shell of the primum mobile and bursts through the skin of the world to come face to face with God, ‘the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars’. For medieval thinkers this spiritual domain was the primary realm of the Real with the physical realm serving as a secondary and rather pale reflection. Just what it meant to have a ‘place’ outside physical space was a question that much exercised medieval minds – no scholar of the Middle Ages believed that Heaven lay literally beyond the stars. Yet whatever the philosophical difficulties, scholars of the time insisted that physical space was not the totality of reality but one half of a larger metaphysical whole.
This dualism of body and soul – matter and spirit – was mirrored in a dualism that was believed to exist between the terrestrial and celestial realms. Again, following the Greeks, medieval natural philosophy held that the two regions were qualitatively distinct regions: in the terrestrial realm things were made up from the four mundane elements, earth, air, fire and water; those in the celestial realm (stars, planets, comets and so on) were composed of a fifth element, or quintessence, also known as the æther. Everything in the terrestrial realm was subject to decay and death, those in the heavens were believed to be eternal, prone neither to decay nor change. Subtleties compounded, for the celestial realm was not itself homogeneous. Ascending from the surface of the Earth medieval cosmology posited that in each successive sphere things became more ethereal. In effect, celestial space exhibited a vector of grace: the closer one got to God, the more ‘pure’ the region was said to be. Within the scheme of medieval cosmology, celestial space thus served as a mediating zone between the purely material realm of the Earth and the purely spiritual realm of the Empyrean. To put it another way, the celestial heaven of the planets and stars stood as a metaphor for and pointer to the religious Heaven of God and the soul, and the whole of medieval thinking rejoiced in this analogy.
But what if terrestrial space and celestial space were not qualitatively distinct? What if the cosmos was a homogeneous domain? Just such an idea began to bubble into European consciousness during the fifteenth century forming the seeds of what would become, in the seventeenth, a full-blown reconfiguration of Western cosmological thinking.
The first person to express this vision in anything like its modern form was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, Nicolas of Cusa, who completed in 1440 a masterpiece of scientific proleptics entitled On Learned Ignorance. The universe Cusa proposed had no crystal spheres and no hierarchy of planets; in one daring swoop he abolished the distinction between the ‘base’ Earth and the ‘ethereal’ heavens, positing that the stars and planets were also mundane material bodies. Cusa’s cosmos was infinite – ‘unbounded’ is the word he used – a space in which all regions were materially and spiritually on par. He even suggested that other stars were peopled by other physical beings, an idea that would not be broached again for 150 years. Cusa’s ideas were too radical for most of his contemporaries, but in the sixteenth century the tectonic plates of the Western psyche began to shift, resulting in the work of Copernicus and all that came after him.
Why was such a shift occurring? After all, the medieval world picture had held stable as a philosophical construct for more than a thousand years. The telescope had not yet been invented, astronomical observations were not qualitatively better, the Ptolemaic model continued to yield reasonable results. Cosmological technologies were not perceived to be failing. So what was going on? Astronomy wasn’t undergoing a crisis, nonetheless underlying conceptions of how reality might be were beginning to change. We know this primarily not from what scientifically minded thinkers were saying but from what painters were doing. Long before the rise of science a new Western attitude to space was apparent in the realm of art, and to understand the cosmological transformation wrought by Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century it is instructive to turn first to the frescoes of Giotto. Here we can see explicitly the spiritual stakes that were coming into play as Europeans began to feel their way out of a medieval world.
Along with medieval philosophy, medieval art focused on the numinous re
alm of the soul. Art also was iconic, aiming to represent the spiritual order beyond the material world. One way of conveying that order was through scale; thus Christ would be the largest figure in a painting, with angels next in size, followed by saints and martyrs, then ordinary human beings. Backgrounds too were iconic; gold and azure represented Heaven, whose value was viscerally present in exorbitantly expensive gold leaf and lapis lazuli pigments. Depth was almost absent from these images. But in the late twelfth century representation began to undergo a subtle transformation with a gradual interest in three-dimensionality starting to emerge. This new style reached a crescendo with Giotto’s work in the Arena Chapel in Padua in which he depicted a sequence of near-life-sized images recounting the life of Christ. What is immediately startling about these Christ Cycle frescoes is their sense of physical presence. Figures look solid and are anchored to the ground as if compelled by gravity. We are clearly no longer in Heaven but on Earth. Everyone appears at the same scale: Christ and humans and angels. Flat blue and gold backgrounds are replaced by attempts at genuine landscapes; there are mountains, trees and carefully observed studies of animals. Buildings seem to be leaping out of the surface. True, they are not entirely convincing, but one feels here that the artist is striving to convey three-dimensional space.
All this was in keeping with a revivified interest in the natural world. After the hiatus of the early Middle Ages, scholars had begun to recover the science and mathematics of ancient Greece, and during the thirteenth century the study of nature underwent a renaissance. With his careful attention to empirical detail, Giotto reflected this novel scientific bent. For artists and their patrons (many of whom were leaders of the Catholic Church) the observations of the outer eye were becoming more interesting than the revelations of the inner eye. In short, visual attention was shifting towards the material realm.
