A Brief Guide to the Great Equations (22 page)
Heaviside’s version of Maxwell’s equations were quickly and gratefully adopted by prominent electromagnetic researchers, including Hertz, and the entire scientific community converted by the 1890s. The equations have remained virtually the same ever since; the version at the beginning of the chapter is taken from the standard textbook
Classical Electrodynamics
by J. D. Jackson.
Fittingly, Heaviside’s achievement in revising Maxwell’s was once captured in an analogy. Reviewing Heaviside’s work, FitzGerald compared Maxwell to a general who conquered a new territory but had not the time to find the best roads or make a systematic map. ‘This has been reserved for Oliver Heaviside to do’, he wrote. ‘Maxwell’s treatise is cumbered with the
débris
of his brilliant lines of assault, of his entrenched camps, of his battles. Oliver Heaviside has cleared those away, has opened up a direct route, has made a broad road, and has explored a considerable tract of country.’
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But Maxwell was a strange kind of general who worked in a strange kind of terrain. The territory he conquered was so potent and extensive that his work, as Feynman noted, would have a far greater impact on human nature than that of any group of generals.
OVERCOMING ANOSOGNOSIA; OR RESTORING THE VITALITY OF THE HUMANITIES
Simon Schama’s book
History of Britain
, at 1,500 pages, is a solid history of that country, and has been made the basis for a multipart documentary film. Yet the book contains no mention of James Clerk Maxwell, nor any mention of the role that this scientist played in laying the foundation for electrification, light, heat, communication, and the electronics revolution of the twentieth century, in Britain or elsewhere. Schama’s book omits any references to the contributions made by British scientists and engineers to transforming Britain and the world.
The neglect of science, indeed, is common in history books – most disturbingly, even in books that profess to care about the masses, and oppressed and underprivileged peoples. Since it was first published in 1980, for instance,
A People’s History of the United States
, by Howard Zinn, has sold over a million copies and become one of the most influential works of history in the U.S. A popular textbook in schools and colleges, it claims to focus on ‘hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.’
However, Zinn’s book makes no mention of people resisting, joining together, and winning when it comes to science. It says nothing, for instance, of the struggles to reduce childhood
mortality, to increase life expectancy, or to develop systems of mass transportation. There is no mention of Norman Borlaug, who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for leading the ‘green revolution’, and who helped end hunger for millions of people. Another no-show is the microbiologist Maurice Hilleman, whose vaccines saved more lives than were lost in all the wars to which Zinn devotes chapters.
Mass electrification fails to feature in Zinn’s book, although the unit costs of electricity are discussed in the context of a program to give ‘enough help to the lower classes’ to prevent them rebelling. Steam power is not covered, nor is the internal-combustion engine, although railroads are discussed in relation to racial segregation, unions, strikes, and methods of exploiting American Indians.
Zinn, in short, considers scientific changes inconsequential to ‘the people.’ History, for him, is a grand pageant of ideologies; if science is at all significant in that pageant it is perhaps only in forging the weapons that the ideological partisans use to beat up each other.
The omission does not necessarily make the book defective as history. As Zinn notes, historians cannot avoid selecting and emphasizing some facts rather than others, although they have a duty to avoid promoting ideological interests, knowingly or not. But Zinn’s omissions do make the book defective as an account of ‘the people.’ The conquest of dreaded and once-common epidemic diseases, such as polio and encephalitis, have fundamentally affected how all of us view life and death. Developments in astronomy and the discovery of evolution have affected our sense of time and space, and our place in nature. These events all took place within the timeframe of Zinn’s book. Although some of these developments were pioneered by non-Americans, they profoundly altered how human beings seek answers to the questions of what we know, should do, and can hope for.
Schama and Zinn are not the only ones to ignore the impact of science. Many authors of contemporary fiction fill their books with characters who are nothing more than superannuated children, seemingly unaffected by technological training and devices. Some writers – like Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Neal Stephenson, and David Foster Wallace – do present protagonists who are interested in and influenced by their technological surroundings. But these writers can be severely criticized by reviewers for their efforts.
Commenting on McEwan’s
Saturday
, for instance, John Banville roasted the author for being ‘wearingly insistent on displaying his technical knowledge’ and complains of ‘big words in this book.’ The book indeed has some big words. However, the training that turns people into technically literate professionals not only accustoms them to using big words, but also affects how they speak and act. Technically competent people often delight in their technical competence, and wield this competence when interacting with the world. This is precisely what McEwan so ably captures.
Dismissing the effect of science on modern life has nothing to do with the ‘two cultures.’ Rather, it shows a blind spot in the work of some writers and scholars whose duty it is to become aware of the world around them. It is more serious than amnesia. We can name the condition with one of the ‘big words’ that McEwan’s protagonist uses in
Saturday
. It is ‘anosognosia’ – a medical term (derived from a combination of the Greek words
agnosia
, or ‘without knowledge’, and
nosos
, or disease) that means a lack of awareness of one’s own diseased condition; that is, not knowing that one is diseased.
What are the causes of anosognosia? I count four contributing factors.
One is drama: scientific and technological change tends to lack the exciting settings of other historical turning points. It is not generally heralded by bloody battlefields or by clashes of
titanic personalities, and unfolds in a way that makes it difficult to dramatize differences. A second is the hope among even so-called enlightened and progressive scholars that we can reinvent ourselves and remake the world, Marxian-style, achieving liberation at a revolutionary stroke; admitting dependence on science and technology serves to dampen such hopes. A third is fear of specialized knowledge, knowledge that one might take extra training to acquire.
Finally, and most importantly, scholars in the humanities often see themselves as having a critical function – they see themselves as asking the important questions that help humanity navigate the world’s dangers. But if the fate of ‘the people’ is as tied up with science and technology as it is with ideologies – with who is exploiting whom – this leading role is blunted, or at least shared. For those who identify the humanities with such a critical function, this might even seem threatening. Far safer for its practitioners to circle the wagons, dwelling on what is distinctive about the humanities rather than what is possible! This is what makes so many humanities programs both defendable and lifeless. Moreover, such wagon circling is self-interest in disguise; thus, an ideology – a belief structure lacking empirical support – itself.
Overcoming anosognosia requires admitting that a truer picture of humanity may be less dramatic than we hope, curbing our fascination with shortcuts to liberation, and accepting that humanity’s important questions are addressed by a variety of disciplines. This will strengthen, not threaten, the humanities. For only when the humanities couple their inquiries into human dimensions and possibilities with an awareness of what science has disclosed of the dimensions and possibilities of the world will the humanities most effectively be able to provide answers to the questions of what we know, should do, and can hope for.
Celebrity Equation:
E = mc
2
DESCRIPTION
: Energy and mass can be converted into one another, with the amount of energy being equal to the mass multipled by the speed of light squared.
DISCOVERER
: Albert Einstein
DATE
: 1905
A while ago I was reading an interview with the actress Cameron Diaz in a movie magazine. At the end the interviewer asked her if there was anything she wanted to know, and she said she’d like to know what
E
=
mc
2
really means. They both laughed, then Diaz mumbled that she’d meant it, and then the interview ended.
E
=
mc
2
: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation
E
=
mc
2
is the most famous equation of all time. It has made the cover of
Time
magazine. It has been the subject of a ‘biography’ that treated the equation as though it were a person. It is the title of a play by Hallie Flanagan, the woman who headed the Federal Theatre Project during the Depression. The Dalai Lama calls it ‘the only scientific equation I know.’
1
Poems and pop songs have been written about it; those
of a certain age may remember the hit single ‘Einstein A Go-Go’, by 1980s electronic pop band Landscape, the lyrics of which went ‘You’d better watch out, you’d better beware, coz Albert says that E equals mc squared.’ More recently, singer Mariah Carey put out an album entitled,
E
=
MC
2
, with the right-hand term alluding to her initials. During the so-called science wars of the 1990s, debate raged over the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s assertion that
E
=
mc
2
is a ‘sexed equation’ because it privileges the speed of light.
2
The equation has turned up on postage stamps of various lands, in movies (
School of Rock
), popular fiction with scientific pretensions (Dan Brown’s
Angels & Demons
), and numerous cartoons and video games.
The physicist Stephen Hawking was once warned not to include any equations in his writings for a general audience because, or so he was informed, every equation would halve the number of readers. As a result, he was determined not to use any equations in his book,
A Brief History of Time
. But
E
=
mc
2
appears in the book, and in multiple places. This did not dent sales, and it went on to become one of the best-selling science books for a general audience of all time.
All this might make us wonder whether
E
=
mc
2
is not a real equation at all but rather a celebrity. A celebrity is someone everybody knows of, but not about. Similarly, everybody recognizes this equation, and is sure that it is important, but it’s never clear exactly why. We know plenty of gossip about it but still always feel we are seeing it from the outside. We wonder how much work it really does. The status of
E
=
mc
2
, like that of a celebrity, seems manufactured by some mysterious social process.
Yet, in the end, celebrities are just human beings, and
E
=
mc
2
is just another equation. Like other equations, it sprang from dissatisfaction
with the way things were fitting together, its first appearance was different from the form in which we know it today, it reorchestrated the way human beings looked at the world, and it had unexpected consequences.
How, then, did this equation get to be a celebrity?
Equations can be born from several different kinds of dissatisfactions. Some spring from a scientist’s sense that a confusing heap of experimental data can be better organized. Others arise from the feeling that a theory is too complicated and can probably be simplified, or that its parts are not fitting together properly. Still other dissatisfactions arise from mismatches between a theory’s predictions and experimental results.
The equation
E
=
mc
2
resulted from a special and rare case of dissatisfaction felt by many physicists at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The dissatisfaction was created by a troubling experimental result that highlighted an inconsistency between two great, comprehensive, and venerable scientific systems: Newton’s and Maxwell’s. More exactly, the result highlighted an inconsistency between two principles – the principle of the relativity of motion, and the principle of the constancy of the speed of light – each basic to one system.