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Paradoxically, a book designed to rectify this situation reveals that there have always been bridges across that Snow-bound abyss. There is a quotation from Karl Popper crisply equating the methodology of the natural scientist and the historian: ‘In both we start from myths — from traditional prejudices, beset with error ….’ The narrow specialisation of, and within, disciplines was a dismal feature of late 20th-century academe and is mercifully just about over. The best people in all fields have not ring-fenced their perceptions. The social sciences are included in this book, and Karl Marx is quoted relevantly: ‘Natural science will in time incorporate itself into the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.’
The ancient Greek scientists, well represented here, were ‘philosophers’, and science was ‘natural philosophy’ before the word ‘philosophy’ was hijacked by the unnatural kind. The scientists in this volume often write poetically. ‘What would be the use of a neuroscience that cannot tell us anything about love?’ asks the British zoologist John Zachary Young (1907-97). The sixth-century Spanish theologian St Isidore of Seville analysed the ‘material of music’, the German geologist Hans Cloos (1885-1951) described geology as ‘the music of the earth’, the 20th-century American physician Lewis Thomas described music as ‘the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work’.
The selection of quotations from writers who are not or not primarily scientists is extravagantly generous and eclectic, though I missed Kipling’s fantastic poem about underwater transatlantic cables. This may be because technology is not in the remit (nor, in medicine, is the clinical). But among many others represented are Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Emerson, T. S. Eliot, and a poet I have never heard of, May Kendall (1861-1931), who wrote ‘Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus’ and ‘The Conquering Machine’; plus Charles Kingsley (a piece from The Water-Babies, would you believe). And do you know which French novelist wrote that ‘a man cannot marry before he has studied anatomy and has dissected at least one woman’? Statesmen and men of God have their say, as do mockers and parodists of science such as Swift and Voltaire. There is a song here by Cole Porter, and Tom Lehrer’s genial ballad ‘The Elements’, which begins, ‘There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminium, selenium’, and ends 32 lines later with ‘These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,/ And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discarvered.’
The selections from the scientists themselves about what they have ‘discarvered’ are sometimes downright whimsical: (‘An insolent reply from a polite person is a bad sign’: Hippocrates. ‘Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss’: Sigmund Freud.) But the bulk of the material is properly serious, and often eloquently inspirational, expressive of despair or, more often, pure joy. The slant is towards the philosophical, reflective, and descriptive, thus satisfying the requirements of the 18th-century German geologist A. G. Werner: ‘I would rather have a mineral ill-classified and well-described, than well-classified and ill-described.’
There are other dictionaries of scientific quotations. But this extraordinary compilation is infinitely richer than a trawl through existing collections, nor is it like most dictionaries of quotations, which often deal in sound-bites. Although some of the extracts are only a few lines long, others extend to 800 words or so, and important texts such as Origin of Species are represented by a whole raft of significant passages. The volume has therefore something of the leisurely feeling of John Carey’s Faber Book of Science, and is for long, ruminative browsing — once you start you really can’t stop — rather than for just checking a reference or finding a quote for a particular purpose.
There are not many anecdotes — there is already an Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes — but those that there are are charming. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) is quoted as finding it ‘very difficult to form a clear idea’ of the nature of atoms, ‘especially when compounded bodies are under consideration’. The German chemist Kekule von Stradonitz (1829-96) was more fortunate. He had a vision of them as mad leprechauns. During his stay in London, he lived in Clapham.
One fine summer evening, I was returning by the last bus ‘outside’ as usual, through the deserted streets of the city, which are at other times so full of life. I fell into a reverie and lo, the atoms were gambolling before my eyes! Whenever, hitherto, these diminutive beings had appeared to me, they had always been in motion: but up to that time I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair: how the larger ones embraced the two smaller ones: how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller: whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy dance …. The cry of the conductor, ‘Clapham Road’, awakened me from my dreaming: but I spent part of the night in putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms. This was the origin of the ‘Structural Theory’.
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