Faraday’s Dogma

From Firenze University Press Journal: Substantia

Stephen Hyde, Department of Applied Mathematics, Australian National University

When asked the secret of doing science, the great chemist Michael Fara-day, replied in the early 1800s

Work, finish, publish

no-nonsense common sense from a humble autodidact, who rose from working class obscurity to being offered (and refusing) the Presidency of the Royal Society in his maturity. Faraday’s extraordinary experiments explor-ing electromagnetism are legion. Given his status, his words are treasured to this day by scientists. Surely, those words have been drummed into countless young postgraduate researchers by well-meaning seniors for generations. His vision of experimental science remains de rigeur to this day:

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

That quote hints that science may be an ethereal enterprise, less focussed than a take-no-prisoners voyage of discovery. Science is poetry? Alternatively, Faraday’s insistence on ”facts” as the stuff of his poetry is to many reassuringly grounding, bringing the practice back to earth. The brevity and sub-liminal appeal to common-sense of both quotes seems to me a hallmark of British science. I see a direct line, for example, from no-nonsense Faraday to (in my mind) the most British scientist of all, the (New Zealander!) Ernest Rutherford, who classified all science as physics or stamp-collecting, and reckoned the odds of betting against science at 10 to 1. So it came as a surprise to me to come across the follow-ing words, also from Rutherford…

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. … The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.

Those words can be parsed to imply that creativity resides in science, just as in art. That claim is no threat to modern science, but what if it were taken more literally? It is somewhat startling to a card-carrying scientist (including this one) to read Rutherford’s words once more…”scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art”! Is science another domain of artistic practice, alongside sculpture, film-making, etc.? That reading is perhaps overblown; after all, Rutherford explicitly invokes the notion of a logical progression to scientific ”discovery”, an implicit credo dear to the hearts of many practising scientists. Yet he also allows for the creation of scientific theories as works of pure art, regardless of their validity. Hmmm. Do scientists ”create” rather than ”discover”? And, for that matter, do artists ”discover” or ”create”?These conundrums are age-old, but largely forgot-ten in the day-to-day hustle and busyness of the massive production line of science, whether from a crowded lab in some unprepossessing rural university, or the fabled CERN scientific complex, so extensive that its ”lab” sprawls across a national border, straddling France and Switzerland. Perhaps they are forgotten for a simple reason: science is expensive. In fact, science is far more costly than even the most costly art productions, including the bloated budgets of Hollywood productions. After all, Hollywood films are deemed to have failed unless they recoup their production costs, and (far) more. Value is no more, or less, than a balance of expenditure over costs. Ask a film producer, or a crusading journalist, or the imaginary taxpayer, summoned into the mind of any politician as he or she weighs up a country’s annual Budget. Science too is likewise constrained. Its triumphs, such as the extraordinarily rapid development of Covid vaccinations are sure indicators of its value. Likewise, the current crowd of ”scientific experts” quizzed by the media on the Covid epidemic: a daily parade of epidemiologists from all corners, whose variety of models will surely explain any eventuality. Despite the public swagger of science, it remains at heart a fragile construction. Even at its most strident, its ”facts” are unclear. To give one current example, the debates over effective quarantine measures in Australia gloss over the ”fact” that aspects of the fundamental science of viral transmission, from fluid mechanics to soft-matter science, remain unknown. Despite an apparent consensus, science remains a human activity, far more complex than a well-equipped voyage of discovery. Any reckoning of the (financial) value of science is messy and ultimately hopeless. The conscientious accountant must include the price of microplastics in the environment, of fossil fuel extraction, as well as the benefits of vaccinations.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Substantia-1528

Rea Full Text: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/subs/article/view/1528