Technical Knowledge

First published in Phlogiston Fourteen, August 1987.

I studied chemistry at university. It was three years of very hard slog and I came out of it convinced that the best way to lose interest in a subject is to study it intensively at a tertiary level; which is why I’m a computer programmer rather than a chemist these days. My urge to go out and shake a test tube has atrophied somewhat. As far as I can tell, the only advantage I have ever gained from my study of chemistry is that I can say 2, 4-dinitrophenylhydrazine at parties when I’m drunk, which most people find pretty awe-inspiring since they can’t even say it when they’re sober.

So there I was, studying chemistry, surrounded by supposedly intelligent people who were also studying chemistry (and physics, and metallurgy and pharmacy—we had a lot of courses in common) and I discovered that the only person I could talk to about anything except chemistry (or physics or whatever) was the guy studying English who lived down the corridor in the Hall of Residence.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying that these people were stupid. They certainly weren’t that. In their subject of choice I had to struggle hard to keep up with some of them; and there were quite a few whose brain power put them way outside my league. But they were intellectually narrow minded. The only books they ever opened were their course texts. If it wasn’t part of the course it just didn’t impinge on their minds. Some of them didn’t even read newspapers! If I wanted to discuss enzyme kinetics or gas chromatography, I couldn’t find a better crowd of people. But if I felt like discussing the novels of D. H. Lawrence they would mostly just stare at me in puzzled incomprehension until I went and found the guy studying English. (Mind you—he didn’t know anything at all about enzyme kinetics or gas chromatography—it worked both ways.)

Now, I’m not claiming to be some sort of Renaissance Man, a Leonardo figure bestriding C. P. Snow’s two cultures. Anything but. I think I’ve just got a pack rat mind. Like the elephant’s child I have an insatiable curiosity. I don’t believe for one minute that there was any conscious prejudice on the part of my friends. They didn’t think there was anything intrinsically wrong with being interested in the novels of D. H. Lawrence (or whatever). It was simply that there wasn’t room in their heads for more than one idea at a time—so if it wasn’t chemistry then it didn’t matter as far as they were concerned. Consequently I was regarded as a little bit of an oddball. I read books that didn’t have anything at all to do with the courses that I was taking. I read books for pleasure, for goodness sake. Talk about eccentric!

Well, I suppose they were entitled to their opinion, but to me their attitude seemed needlessly narrowing. I agree with Snow that no person can consider themselves to be truly educated without having some sort of foot in both camps. It is all very well being able to devise an experiment to measure the loss of activity of lysozyme after bombardment with gamma radiation from a cobalt-60 source and to explain the results, but if you don’t know that cobalt compounds have often been used to give the blue colour in paints and glazes then you miss something when you look at the sky in a picture by Constable. And vice versa of course. (If you are interested, the radiation breaks the sulphur linkages that hold the outside bits of the molecule together and it goes “sproing” and becomes a totally different shape. Since enzyme activity is often a function of the shape of the molecule for reasons which are far too complicated to fit in between these parentheses, the activity of lysozyme decreases under gamma ray bombardment.) Most of my chemistry friends had probably never heard of Constable, and I doubt if my English student friend knew what gamma rays were. But I had, and I did, and filling the odd corners of my mind with that sort of junk makes me very good at Trivial Pursuit even if it has no other use.

One of the disadvantages of this sort of polarisation of interests is that someone on one side of the fence often has an unrealistic view of the other side—a lack of appreciation of just what is involved in that area. The “artistic” (as opposed to the “scientific”) view of SF provides a very good example of the dichotomy.

This point of view argues that much SF can be regarded as a sugar-coated pill to teach you about science. Normally this arrant nonsense is spouted by someone who is fairly scientifically illiterate, but who doesn’t realise just how ignorant he really is; someone who is attempting to bridge the gap (and who deserves praise for that effort) but who is probably looking for an easy way out. Unfortunately there is no such easy solution and choosing to read SF is not a good way to gain an insight into science per se. Anyone who considers otherwise is suffering from exactly the intellectual blindness that I have been discussing.

I will agree that SF can and does teach an awful lot about the philosophy of science—the meaning of the phrase “scientific method” if you like. It teaches the idea that science can be as rigorous and as intellectually stimulating (if not more so) as anything on the artistic side of the curriculum; and that is in itself a very useful lesson to learn, but if you really think that after reading a few “Hard Science” novels you are going to understand relativity or quantum mechanics, then you have a very naive view of what science really is.

Even having said this much about what SF can teach I suspect that I’m out on a very thin limb. A true appreciation of the subject of the last paragraph is more properly achieved by reading books specifically concerned with the philosophy and history of science—Karl Popper, for example—rather than by reading an SF novel. But let it stand.

Such a lack of appreciation of what science is really all about was brought home to me quite forcibly shortly after the publication of Larry Niven’s Ringworld Engineers. That novel, as I’m sure you recall, was much concerned with the stability (or lack of it!) of the Ringworld structure. Now that is a very complicated subject, and it seemed to me that Niven handled it quite well. Maybe he made some mistakes of detail or maybe he didn’t—I don’t know. Despite having had some quite advanced training in physics and mechanics I do not feel qualified to discuss the technical aspects of what he did with the Ringworld. I know enough to know that I don’t know enough—if that isn’t too Irish for you. So I am quite prepared to go along with what Niven tells me simply for the sake of the story. Notice that I am not saying that I necessarily believe what he is saying. I have an open mind.

However, I overheard two SF fans arguing about that book. As it happens, I knew both the people quite well and I knew that neither of them had any formal scientific training of any significance. Both of them were very well read in SF (particularly hard SF) and both seemed to think that it qualified them to discuss the physics of the Ringworld. One argued that Niven had done it correctly, one argued that he hadn’t. I found it interesting that the only arguments that either of them could bring to bear on the subject were vague waffles culled from God knows where. I don’t think they’d even read the same books because they used terms which (from the context) neither of them seemed to understand and which sometimes appeared to mean different things to both of them. When one person said “angular momentum” the other seemed to understand it to mean “kinetic energy” and the argument got more and more heated as each failed to convince the other.

Not once did either of them attempt to define the problem mathematically because neither of them knew mathematics. (SF doesn’t have very much to say about mathematics.) Both of them failed to realise that the only possible arguments that could be brought to bear were mathematical ones—English was simply not precise enough. And having defined the equations that governed the situation to each other’s satisfaction (not hard in this case provided your physics is up to scratch), plug in the values of a few physical constants (and estimate the nonexistent ones that apply to the Ringworld substance itself—I suggest you take a course on “Strengths of Materials” first) and see what it tells you. End of argument. At least on the level they were discussing the problem. There are other levels, but we won’t go into that.

I derived a lot of amusement from this argument. It whiled away what otherwise had promised to be a dull afternoon. But I didn’t join in—partly because I didn’t consider that I knew enough (my physics and maths were definitely not up to scratch. I no longer trust my mathematical abilities beyond the level of very elementary calculus, which somewhat limits the physical arguments I can bring to bear as well) and partly because I knew that I would never be able to convince either of the two of them just how silly they were being. They had been indoctrinated with the “SF can teach you about science” message. The sugar-coated pill had slipped down a little too easily, I think.

You can turn it on its head of course. How about the “artistic” aspects of SF? Are there any? Well, yes there are. But again you cannot expect to pick up a liberal arts education from a literary diet consisting solely of SF.

The absolutely appalling ignorance of other fields of artistic endeavour shown by many readers (and writers!) of SF is a constant source of irritation to me. I once started to write an essay comparing Robert Heinlein, Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham (three writers with, it seemed to me at the time, a startling amount in common). I quickly abandoned the project when I discovered that nobody in my circle of SF acquaintances had ever heard of Maugham and their only knowledge of Kipling was through the Disney cartoon of the Jungle Book. I was reminded yet again of my university days. The same narrowness of viewpoint. (Incidentally, my wife is the only person I’ve ever met who has read more Kipling than I have. She introduced me to the delights of Stalky.)

Heinlein himself is a good example of this blinkered approach. In Stranger in a Strange Land he introduced a (fictional) piece of music called The Nine Planets Symphony. This irritates on two levels—it suggests that Heinlein thinks that a symphony can have nine movements, and it ignores Holst’s Planet Suite which would have served his purpose much better! Normally I admire Heinlein’s erudition even when I hate his writing—but his knowledge does sometimes seem a little thin outside of science and engineering.

It is interesting that we seem to expect this sort of intellectual blindness from engineers. I’ve never met anybody who had a good word to say for them (including my father—and he was one!)

I once went on a programming course during which somebody asked the lecturer a question. She paused and thought for a moment and then said, “That’s really the sort of question you should ask an engineer”. She thought a little longer. “If you can find one that can talk, that is”.