The Faber Book of Science Read Online Free Page B
Author: John Carey
degree of imaginativeness can become a creative scientist, and a happy one besides, in so far as happiness depends upon being able to develop to the limit of one’s abilities.
Medawar’s remarks caused a considerable rumpus, especially his claim that scientists had something to be clever about whereas arts students had not. Surely, he was asked, he did not intend to imply that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, etc. were not proper subjects for cleverness? Less attention was paid to his claim that science could bring happiness, and not just to geniuses but to people of ordinary ability. Yet that was surely the vital part of his message. If young people are to be wooed back to science, it will not be done by telling them that if they continue to spurn it, Britain will face economic decline (true as that may be). But if scientists demonstrate by their writing that Medawar’s promises of pleasure and self-fulfilment are true, they will not lack recruits.
The new generation of popular science-writers, whose work I have drawn on in this anthology, are the advance guard of that campaign. If readers ask, as they well might, what I, a professor of literature, think I am up to editing a science anthology, my answer is that I have done it for pleasure, self-fulfilment and (in Coleridge’s words) ‘the gratification of knowing’.
Prelude: The Misfit from Vinci
A left-handed, vegetarian, homosexual bastard, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) contravened most of the accepted norms of his day. Reared by his peasant grandparents in a remote Tuscan village, he had minimal schooling. He was apprenticed as a painter because his illegitimacy debarred him from respectable professions. (Painting in fifteenth-century Tuscany was regarded not as ‘creative art’ but as a lowly trade, fit for the sons of peasants and artisans.) Lacking literary culture he was scorned in the highbrow Florence of the Medicis. This turned him towards science and observation. ‘Anyone who invokes authors in discussion is not using his intelligence but his memory,’ he contended.
He was insatiable for newness, both in art and science. His first known drawing was also the first true landscape drawing in western art. He was the first painter to omit haloes from the heads of figures from scripture and show them in ordinary domestic settings, and he was the first to paint portraits that showed the hands as well as the faces of sitters. His Leda (which does not survive) was the first modern painting inspired by pagan myth. His notebooks, of which over 5,000 pages survive, are all written backwards in mirror writing, and are dense with intricate drawings. They record his observations on geology, optics, acoustics, music, botany, mathematics, anatomy, engineering and hydraulics, together with plans for many inventions, including a bicycle, a tank, a machine gun, a folding bed, a diving suit, a parachute, contact lenses, a water-powered alarm clock, and plastics (made of eggs, glue and vegetable dyes).
It is true that Leonardo was not strictly a scientist, nor always as original as he seems. His war-machines had already been designed by a German engineer, Konrad Keyser; his ‘automobile’ by an Italian, Martini. Though he came close to formulating some scientific laws, his insights were sporadic and untested by experiment. He thought of looking at the moon through a telescope a century before Galileo (see p. 8), but he did not construct one. He knew no algebra, and made mistakes in simple arithmetic. His man-powered flying machine, designed to flap its wings like a bird, could never have flown. Apart from anything else, it must have weighed about 650 lbs (as against 72 lbs for Daedalus 88, the man-powered aircraft which flew 74 miles over the Aegean in 1988).
Despite these reservations his notebooks give an astonishing preview of the new world science was to open. The first of the following extracts, recording two autopsies he carried out in Florence on a very old man and a
Medawar’s remarks caused a considerable rumpus, especially his claim that scientists had something to be clever about whereas arts students had not. Surely, he was asked, he did not intend to imply that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, etc. were not proper subjects for cleverness? Less attention was paid to his claim that science could bring happiness, and not just to geniuses but to people of ordinary ability. Yet that was surely the vital part of his message. If young people are to be wooed back to science, it will not be done by telling them that if they continue to spurn it, Britain will face economic decline (true as that may be). But if scientists demonstrate by their writing that Medawar’s promises of pleasure and self-fulfilment are true, they will not lack recruits.
The new generation of popular science-writers, whose work I have drawn on in this anthology, are the advance guard of that campaign. If readers ask, as they well might, what I, a professor of literature, think I am up to editing a science anthology, my answer is that I have done it for pleasure, self-fulfilment and (in Coleridge’s words) ‘the gratification of knowing’.
Prelude: The Misfit from Vinci
A left-handed, vegetarian, homosexual bastard, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) contravened most of the accepted norms of his day. Reared by his peasant grandparents in a remote Tuscan village, he had minimal schooling. He was apprenticed as a painter because his illegitimacy debarred him from respectable professions. (Painting in fifteenth-century Tuscany was regarded not as ‘creative art’ but as a lowly trade, fit for the sons of peasants and artisans.) Lacking literary culture he was scorned in the highbrow Florence of the Medicis. This turned him towards science and observation. ‘Anyone who invokes authors in discussion is not using his intelligence but his memory,’ he contended.
He was insatiable for newness, both in art and science. His first known drawing was also the first true landscape drawing in western art. He was the first painter to omit haloes from the heads of figures from scripture and show them in ordinary domestic settings, and he was the first to paint portraits that showed the hands as well as the faces of sitters. His Leda (which does not survive) was the first modern painting inspired by pagan myth. His notebooks, of which over 5,000 pages survive, are all written backwards in mirror writing, and are dense with intricate drawings. They record his observations on geology, optics, acoustics, music, botany, mathematics, anatomy, engineering and hydraulics, together with plans for many inventions, including a bicycle, a tank, a machine gun, a folding bed, a diving suit, a parachute, contact lenses, a water-powered alarm clock, and plastics (made of eggs, glue and vegetable dyes).
It is true that Leonardo was not strictly a scientist, nor always as original as he seems. His war-machines had already been designed by a German engineer, Konrad Keyser; his ‘automobile’ by an Italian, Martini. Though he came close to formulating some scientific laws, his insights were sporadic and untested by experiment. He thought of looking at the moon through a telescope a century before Galileo (see p. 8), but he did not construct one. He knew no algebra, and made mistakes in simple arithmetic. His man-powered flying machine, designed to flap its wings like a bird, could never have flown. Apart from anything else, it must have weighed about 650 lbs (as against 72 lbs for Daedalus 88, the man-powered aircraft which flew 74 miles over the Aegean in 1988).
Despite these reservations his notebooks give an astonishing preview of the new world science was to open. The first of the following extracts, recording two autopsies he carried out in Florence on a very old man and a
Readers choose
Mia Zabrisky
Dianna Love
Harriet Welty Rochefort
Elizabeth Lennox
D. J. McIntosh
Anne Mallory
Aimee Bender
Mary Oliver
Amanda Scott