Janan Ganesh in The FT
Stephen Hawking’s final research paper clarifies his idea of a “multiverse”. I think. Published posthumously this week, it explores whether the same laws of physics obtain in all the parallel universes that were the Big Bang’s supposed offspring. Apparently. The paper envisages a plural but finite number of universes rather than a limitless amount. It says here.
I do not begin to know how to engage with this material. Nor could I say more than a sentence or two about how aeroplanes achieve flight, or distinguish mass from weight, or name a chemical compound outside those two biggies, H2O and CO2. Not only can I not do calculus, I cannot tell you with much confidence what it is.
For all this ignorance of the sciences, society treats me as a thoughtful person, rewards me with a line of work that is sometimes hard to distinguish from recreation and invites me to politico-media parties, where I catch up with people who, I promise you, make me look like a Copley Medalist.
In 1959, CP Snow spoke of “two cultures”, the humanities and the sciences, the first blind to the second in a way that is not reciprocated. When his cultured friends laughed at scientists who did not know their way around the Shakespearean canon, he invited them to recite the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This should be no great ask for anyone of moderately rounded learning, he thought, but they were stumped, and peeved to be tested. It was more in despair than in mischief that he rolled out this parlour game of an evening.
The subsequent trend of events — the space race, the energy crisis, the computer age — should have embarrassed those steeped exclusively in the humanities into meeting science halfway with a hybrid or “third” culture. In the likes of Ian McEwan, who smuggles scientific ideas into his novels, and Steven Pinker, who has tried to establish a scientific basis for literary style, there are some willing brokers of an intellectual concordat out there.
Yet almost six decades on from Snow’s intervention, near-perfect ignorance of the natural world is still no bar to life as a sophisticate. In Britain, especially, scientific geniuses have always had to coexist with a culture that holds them to be somehow below stairs. This is not the principled anti-science of the Romantics or the hyper-religious. The laws of physics are not being doubted here. It is “just” an aesthetic distaste.
We can guess at the costs of this distaste in a world already tilting to economies that do not share a bit of it. In this vision of the future, China and India are to the west what Snow said Germany and America were to late-Victorian Britain: profiteers of our own decadent neglect of the hard sciences. But what if the stakes are higher than mere material decline?
Since the populist shocks of 2016, there has been fighting talk about the preciousness of facts and the urgency of their defence. It just tends to be tactical — a call for the regulation of Facebook, perhaps, or a more vigilant, news-buying citizenry.
If something as basic as truth is faltering, the cause might be deeper than the habits and technologies of the past decade. The longer-term estrangement of humanities and science seems more like it. A culture that does not punish scientific ignoramuses, and instead hands us the keys to public life, is likely to be vulnerable and credulous — a sucker for any passing nonsense.
It is not the content of scientific knowledge so much as the scientific method itself that helps to inoculate against ideology and hysteria. Doubt, evidence, falsifiability, the provisional status of all knowledge: these are priceless habits of mind, but you can go far in Britain and other rich democracies without much formal grounding in them.
The Eloi-and-Morlocks split between the cultured and the scientific, the latter toiling unseen as a necessary evil, is too one-sided for the wider good. It should be a mortifying faux pas to profess ignorance of Hawking’s work in polite company. In his own country, it borders on a boast.