by Oscar Firschein, Stanford University MLA 2000

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Francis Bacon (editor’s note: see also IEP entry) in his essay Idols of the Mind warns the scientist of the dangers of relying on information picked up in the marketplace or by tradition.  Instead, the scientist should rely on information gained by empirical methods.  Thus, the scientist committed to rationalism should behave differently than the rest of the population which functions using non-empiric information.  One would think that the contrast between the type of rationality pursued by the scientist compared to the unprovable faith of the lay world would offer interesting material for treatment in the novel, but this is not the case. The activities and beliefs of the scientist are seldom treated in the modern novel.

The term lab lit has been applied to the rare cases of such writing by Dr. Jennifer Rohm, a cell biologist at University College, London.  As editor of the web site lablit.com, trying to promote this genre, she claims that only around one hundred realistic novels have ever been written that contain scientists plying their trade.  Her web site defines the term lab lit as follows:

Lab lit is not science fiction; briefly, lab lit fiction depicts realistic scientists as central characters and portrays fairly realistic scientific practice or concepts, typically taking place in a realistic – as opposed to speculative or future – world. The action does not have to take place in a laboratory per se, just anywhere where scientists are doing what they do, such as a field station. Although some science fiction does indeed have elements of ‘lab lit’, and the boundaries can be fuzzy, this list is meant to feature real scientists in the real world.

The web site http://www.lablit.com/the_list provides a list of lab lit novels ranging from classics such as Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis to the recently published Solar by Ian McEwan.

While the lab-lit term tends to focus on the laboratory world, an alternative broader term, science-in-fiction, has been used by Carl Djerassi, emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, who has written five books and seven plays on scientific themes.  He uses the term science-in-theatre for plays such as Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen that treat a scientific theme.

Many authors of science-in-fiction have science backgrounds, and tend to write novels about the particular scientific fields in which they have training.  Thus, Michael Crichton often dealt with medical/biological themes, Richard Powers has written about computers and artificial intelligence, Carl Djerassi is heavily into biochemistry and genetics, and Rebecca Goldstein focuses on mathematics and philosophy.  Sometimes, by doing enough research, a writer without scientific background can achieve a realistic result. Jennifer Rohm, of lablitit.com, in reviewing the book Intuition by Allegra Goodman states,

The writer Allegra Goodman is not a scientist, but she certainly could have fooled me.  Her latest novel, Intuition, brings back the sights, sounds, and smells of a dozen years at the lab bench, stimulating emotions I had forgotten I’d experienced.  In lieu of direct research experience, Goodman consulted several scientists in her family and also shadowed some researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge to produce an exacting portrayal of the rise and fall of a cancer biology lab. (Rohm 2006)

Writers who do not have a scientific connection as Goodman had, can turn to the website www.scitalk.org.uk.  Scitalk is an online resource supported by the Newcastle Centre for the Arts (UK) dedicated to connecting writers with scientists and scientists with writers.  An article in the London Times describes how the system works.  A writer, Clare George, was working on a novel in which one of the characters has lost muscular control of his face.  Through scitalk she met Jonathan Cole, a neuroscientist who described to her a disease, bilateral Bell’s palsy, that has the desired characteristics. Clare George wants her character to have trouble opening his eyes in the morning, but Jonathan steers her in a different direction. “The problem with Bell’s palsy is that sometimes you cannot close your eyes and they have to be taped down at night,” he says.  The interview continues for an hour with the writer furiously taking notes. (Times).

The writer Rebecca Goldstein, who will now be our focus of concentration, uses fiction to explore large philosophical and scientific questions in many of her books. Scientists are often the protagonists, and she captures the personalities of these scientists in their day-to-day tasks, their disappointments and their satisfactions.   Goldstein is not daunted by the challenge of introducing difficult technical material into her fictional work. The MacArthur Foundation, in awarding her the “Genius prize,” describes her work as follows:

She tells a compelling story, describing with wit, compassion and originality the interaction of mind and heart.   In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith: religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of being.  Goldstein’s writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence.

Examples from three of her novels and one book of short stories illustrate her approach. These books deal with mathematical discovery (The Mind Body Problem); the mathematics of soap bubbles (Strange Attractors); quantum physics (Properties of Light); and the nature of mathematical genius (36 Arguments for the Existence of God).

Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.  She then returned to Princeton, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks.  She later moved to Barnard and used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. As she described the writing of the novel,

I had just come through a very emotional time, having not only become a mother but having also lost my father, whom I adored.  In the course of grieving for my father and glorying in my daughter, I found that the very formal, very precise questions I had been trained to analyze weren’t gripping me the way they once had.  Suddenly, I was asking the most `unprofessional’ sorts of questions (I would have snickered at them as a graduate student), such as how does all this philosophy I’ve studied help me to deal with the brute contingencies of life?  How does it relate to life as it’s really lived?  I wanted to confront such questions in my writing, and I wanted to confront them in a way that would insert `real life’ intimately into the intellectual struggle.  In short I wanted to write a philosophically motivated novel.

Her “philosophically motivated novel” actually found voice in a story peopled with a world of mathematics.  The Mind-Body Problem was published by Random House and went on to become a critical and popular success.  More novels followed: Strange Attractors in 1994, and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics in 2000. Her latest novel (2010) is  “Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.”

In The Mind Body Problem, Goldstein concentrates less on mathematical details than on the sociology and personality of mathematicians. Renee Feuer is a philosophy doctoral candidate hoping to work on the mind-body problem as a thesis. Goldstein explains the mind-body problem, “. . . the dichotomy between the two worlds – the outer public place of bodies and the inner private one of minds – is exactly what it’s all about.”  Unfortunately, Renee’s studies are interrupted when she marries a math genius and later finds herself facing the problem of how to deal with a husband who has run out of creative steam.  First she describes the situation when her husband, Noam, was at the peak of his powers:

There was an ordering of mathematical talent at the conference. First were the Kohanim, the high priests, descendents of Aaron – about seven or eight mathematicians who conversed directly with God.  Then came the tribe of Levis, very special but not allowed entry into the Holy of Holies.  And last came the congregation of Israelites, awaiting word from those on high, but still a nation apart, chosen by God. (Mind 116)

Renee is amused to find that the mathematical hierarchy is duplicated in the groupings of the spouses at breakfast.  Wives of the most prominent mathematicians eat together, while wives of lesser mathematicians must keep to their own grouping.

Noam looks down at work on the philosophy of science:

When physicists start writing about the philosophical consequences of their former work, you know they’ve had it.  That’s the form their senility takes, they start spouting philosophy . . . A scientist or mathematician in full command of his powers has no interest in or time for philosophy. (Mind 270)

And he expresses his contempt for the lay person:

Most people’s experience is limited to sensory input, and their capacities for conceiving are limited to the categories appropriate for organizing this input.  No wonder so much is inconceivable for them. They wouldn’t even be able to get a grasp on such concepts as the hypercube in four-dimensional space, or infinities differing from one another by orders of magnitude, or even the square root of minus one. What are they going to say – that such mathematical facts are inconceivable? For them they are.  One has to let go of one’s sensory imagination, soar way beyond the physically conceivable.  The physical limits are not the conceivable limits. (Mind 106-107)

And finally, Goldstein describes what happens to Noam when the creative power is lost:

“I’ve lost everything.  I’ve lost everything. You might as well know now.  There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know.” . . .

“I’ve lost my mathematical powers.” His voice broke. “I don’t have it anymore.  I never knew what it was when I had it, and now I don’t have it anymore.”

Tears streamed down his face. So that was it! Noam was suffering! This was sadness I was hearing and seeing. (Mind 265)

Strange Attractors is a collection of short stories.  Two of them concern Phoebe Saunders, at twenty-six an acknowledged expert on the mathematics of soap bubbles and soap films. In the story “Geometry of Soap Bubbles,” part of the Strange Attractors collection, Goldstein discusses the science of soap bubbles.

Soap bubbles consist of flat or smoothly curved surfaces, seamlessly joined together, with surfaces meeting in only two ways: either exactly three surfaces meet along a smooth curve, or six surfaces (together with four curves) meet at a vertex.  The angles formed are always equal – 120 degrees when three surfaces meet along a curve, close to 109 degrees when four curves meet at a point – so that all the elaborate, asymmetrical shapes of froth are built of interactions of maximum symmetry. (Strange 164)

Phoebe, a recently minted Ph.D. in mathematics, is given the honor of presenting a paper on the mathematics of soap bubbles to a French mathematical institute.  Dining with her fellow mathematicians there she marvels at the brilliance of their conversation compared to the experts in other fields.

It had seemed to her as if the entire table of mathematicians was lifting itself off the ground, wordlessly acquiescing in their collective transcendence, they were levitating upward toward the ceiling of the faculty club; while beneath them, over at the other tables, occupied by the wretchedly earthbound empiricists, the plodding art historians and chemists, literary theorists and linguists had continued to talk and chew their food; to get up and leave to go back to offices and lectures; taking no note of the miracle that had embraced the table of mathematicians, defying physics, rising up on the unleashed powers of a priori genius (Strange 250)

Properties of Light deals with the world of quantum physics, inspired by an  actual incident. The novel is notable because it describes the process of theoretical physicists working together. Goldstein tells the story of Samuel Mallach who, as a young man, developed a theory that was ignored by the physics establishment.  Now an old man, he has been relegated to teaching a ‘physics for poets’ class and is shunned by his peers.  A young physicist with extraordinary mathematical abilities comes across Mallach’s paper and decides to work with him to provide a formal basis for the theory.  The old physicist provides the insights and theoretical framework, while the young man uses new advanced mathematical techniques to provide the formal grounding for the ideas. Together they try to resolve the paradoxes of quantum physics concerning the effects of observation on physical processes. The end-product of such science has a beauty all its own as the two physicists try to solve the problem.

The math was not yet as beautiful as the two of them knew it would be.  It was still a twisted skein and it was rough.  If they could work it out so that it was beautiful, so that it was diaphanous and lit, then they would know.  And then they would tell the world. (Properties 156)

Goldstein ably captures the excitement of scientific work in her description of the fellowship of the two physicists.

We had finished a wonderful day’s work.  We had lifted a bit of the heavy veil the material world wears across its face, mysterious and beautiful beyond measure, and caught a feature of a feature never quite glimpsed before.  No one who has never done this can possibly imagine the bliss. (Properties 100)

The physics is sensed not only intellectually, but also in the body,

I need to feel the physics here inside of me, in my own muscles… we walked around the frozen pond and he danced some physics out for me.  It was a dance of ecstasy he danced… (Properties 199)

Goldstein is keenly aware of the ego of the scientist. In the following, note the emphasis on “the truth he had found.”

… Mallach loved the truth he had found because it was the truth he had found. He might have seemed to some … to possess the self-transcendence of a saint, but it was only because his egotism was too large to be contained in the first person. It spread itself out in waves of universal abstraction.  The angels are no different. (Properties 102)

Goldstein has no hesitation in dealing with highly technical topics.  She describes the science in great detail.

In the famous two-slit experiment, both photons and electrons can be made to behave schizophrenically: both like a particle and a wave.  But here’s something even stranger: the troubled entities only behave psychotically when they’re unobserved.  The physicist infers the schizophrenic motion from the scattering traces that are left behind on a photographic plate.  If someone actually looks at their behavior prior to the final detection, the aberrations vanish, and the electrons and photons conduct themselves like proper particles, unsplit and reassuringly normal. (Properties 161)

The novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, although primarily concerned with the philosophy of belief, manages to include some interesting scientific material.  The book tells of a young philosopher of religion, Cass Seltzer, who suddenly gains fame and fortune when he writes a best selling book on atheism.  Despite his reputation as an atheist, Cass actually has a warm spot in his heart for his childhood upbringing in the Orthodox Jewish world.

In the book, science is brought in by other characters, a game theorist, an anthropologist, and a child mathematician.  Goldstein describes the work of Cass’s girlfriend Lucinda, “the goddess of game theory,” who formulated the famous Mandelbaum Equilibrium:

Game theory is the attempt to use mathematics to capture the relative rationality of different strategies in various situations, where how well a person fares isn’t just a matter of his own decisions but of the decisions of the other players.  It’s a theory that analyzes behavior in terms of rational agency, meaning that the theory assumes that each agent wants the biggest payoff, or utility, for himself. (Arguments 32)

But Lucinda is jealous when Cass gains a position at Harvard and more fame than she can expect. She expresses her contempt for the ‘soft sciences.’

You’ve done well for yourself, and I’m happy for you.  But I don’t respect what you do and the fact that you have acquired more prestige than I have, when my work is so much more important is not something I can tolerate. I can’t degrade myself by being regarded as your female companion, the pretty young woman at the inferior institution who will be patronized by the Harvard elite.  To be with you is to have everything that is wrong with academia constantly rubbed in my face. (Arguments 332)

In 36 Arguments Goldstein describes Azarya, a six-year-old mathematical boy genius who is heir to the leadership of a Hasidic sect.  She sets down in great detail the characteristics of prime numbers discovered by the child.  In particular, the child has discovered that there is no largest prime (he calls the numbers maloychim or angels).  Here is Azarya’s presentation to his father.

Rav Klapper asks how many prime maloychim are there?  How long does this go on?” . . . “Ayn sof! Without end! Just as, with all the maloychim, there are always more, so it is with the prime maloychim. Not one of them is the biggest.  How long do they go on? Forever! L’olam va-ed!” (Arguments 219)

The child follows this with a detailed proof that there is no largest prime.

Unlike most ways of making a living, science tends to be a mysterious closed world to the lay person.  The use of unfamiliar terminology and of mathematical or chemical symbols are a major source of confusion.  The modes of scientific thought tend to be hidden from the non-scientist. Science-in-fiction offers the reader of the novel a rich brew of objective scientific explication played out upon the stage of human characters and motivations. We should be grateful to authors such as Rebecca Goldstein who are able to capture the behavior and beliefs of scientists, not in dry philosophical essays, but in readable and insightful books.

References

Bacon, Francis. Nuvum Organum. Charleston, South Carolina: Forgotten Books.

Goldstein, Rebecca. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. NY: Pantheon Books. 2010.

… Properties of Light. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 2000.

… Strange Attractors. NY: Penguin Books. 1994.

… The Mind Body Problem. NY: Penguin Books.1983.

Goodman, Allegra. Intuition. Dial Press. 2006.

Rohm, Jennifer. “Turning to Fraud,” (book review), Nature, Vol. 440, p. 996, 20 April 2006.

The Times Higher Education Supplement, Oct. 21, 2005, p.7. (http://www.scitalk.org.uk/releases/21071GH.pdf)