Safe Science

Back in the late sixties when I was a high school student in Hampshire, England, we were faced with the question of our academic destiny at the age of thirteen or fourteen. It was time to specialise, to choose between science and the arts. It seemed a momentous decision, one that would set us on a path of no return - for life. I recall the advice clearly. We were to choose eight subjects unless we intended to be scientists or historians, in which case we should add Latin because it would help us to puzzle out the meaning of technical or ancient words. Students wishing to become 'real' scientists, we were advised, should choose chemistry, physics and maths, leaving biology to the arts students. Although my arts marks were probably better than my science scores, I was born with the surname Newton and spent much of my school life rebutting jokes about falling apples. Some revenge was required. I also impressed one science teacher sufficiently with my apparently innate understanding of why you need to punch two holes in a can of soft drink before you can pour yourself a glass. That was it: my label of scientist was complete.

I found science to be an exciting and challenging subject which seemed, despite playing with test tubes, largely historical. Maybe that explained the Latin rationale after all. I studied drawings of atoms ringed with orbits, each orbit carefully strung with exactly the right number of electrons, like beads on an abacus. The electrons got excited, jumping around between orbits and occasionally popping off to join in the orbital delights of neighbouring atoms, but all was strictly according to mathematical formulae. No flights of fancy or uncertainty were permitted here. Order, order and more order.

I learned that there were three subatomic particles: the excitable but predictable electrons and two extremely boring sleepy particles, protons and neutrons, snuggled together as the little dot drawn at the centre of each atom. Life and the universe was, quite simply, entirely constructed from energetic balls, sleepy balls, invisible orbits and enormous spaces filled with the magnetic tension which held all the balls together. All we had to do was learn the geometry and mathematics of the structures, predict chemical reactions with certainty and explain the physics of electricity, light, heat, mechanics and magnetism strictly in terms of cause and effect. It was all incredibly neat, tidy, predictable and as classical and dead as the Latin grammar I laboured with between times. Every exciting discovery we made in the lab had already been discovered by someone else, usually centuries earlier.

In the big outside world people were timewarping in rockets decades after Einstein had formulated his theories on relativity. Heisenberg had confidently announced uncertainty forty years before I entered the school science lab; before even my parents were born. Schoolboys interested in big mechanical machines and explosions were excited by the new Concorde and mumbled about supersonic sound and the breaking of the sound barrier, but the speed of light had more to do with science fiction, in our school world, than reality.

I learned the methods of good science: control experiments, objective observation and quantifiable, measurable outcomes. If I was indeed a descendant of Sir Isaac, I hoped I did him proud. No one told me, at the time, that he had room in his life for his passion with magic and the occult and was closely associated with key Druids of his time. School science, was narrow, focussed, classical, rational, mechanistic, reductionist and very useful for explaining how things generally worked in the everyday world of mechanical things. It was also totally blinkered to the realities of modern physics and to the observations and theories born some sixty years before and established as common currency in higher scientific circles for two generations.

At university my scientific world widened when I discovered that I could study biology as well as chemistry and physics. I remember Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle making a fleeting appearance in the shape of a long mathematical formula, peppered with Greek algebraic symbols chalked on the physics blackboard. Greeted by our consternation it was hastily erased by the lecturer and remained only as an ink squiggle in my lecture notes, alongside a facetious comment of mine that perhaps Greek would have been a more appropriate school subject than Latin. By contrast I was wooed by the fascinations of biology with its menu of genetics, ecology, animal behaviour, neurophysiology and embryonic development that seemed somehow more relevant to life and more open to debate and conjecture. I made the full transition to biology at the end of my first year.

The older professors in the zoology department were suspicious of the younger staff who enthusiastically researched ecology and animal behaviour, observing whole interconnecting systems like 'desert ecosystems' or 'population behaviour' and drawing holistic conclusions rather than analysing constituent parts. These systems, the older professors noted, had a distinct tendency to add up to something larger than the sums of their parts. Biology was being described from a top down perspective, and, worse still, they argued, some of those descriptions were qualitative.

As we were funnelled into our final year, academic specialism required us to select our final choices and I chose neurodevelopmental biology because it seemed challenging, open to extraordinary new developments and, above all, speculative. It was an okay subject to muse about, to throw around concepts and to be totally awestruck by the process of formation from a fertilised egg to a whole animal or human: an entity which was surely more than the sum of its parts.

I graduated from university with little if any understanding of the implications of the previous sixty or seventy years of modern science. I had heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle yet I was conditioned by a classical science education which gave me a personal uncertainty about the scientific worthiness of the holistic systems I was intellectually and intuitively attracted to. Maybe the old school was right, I pondered. Maybe, as a biologist I could never be a 'real' scientist after all. I was overjoyed later to finally encounter nonclassical modern physics and its liberating ideas, such as those described in the previous chapter.

My own teenage children now study science at school as an adjunct to their greater passions within the arts. While biology has been transformed and updated, the physics and chemistry curricula have not changed much since the sixties. The basics are still the same. Why?

Modern physics is difficult, but no more difficult than some of the more classical areas of science or mathematics. Classical science has been keenly taught via analogy for decades, and modern physics is surely exciting territory to describe with imagery. School students today have imaginations well stretched and exercised through their exposure to high technology and a pervasive media. The concepts and findings of modern science, taught with analogy, should be exciting and inspirational material well within the grasp of such fertile minds. Infinitely more so, I would suggest, than the sleepy and sometimes inappropriate laws of classical science.

Classical science has its place and all school students need to be grounded in its basics. It provides the knowledge we need to deal with important aspects of everyday life, such as technology, electricity, plumbing, medicine, mechanical machines, chemicals, engineering and so on. But it is only half the story, and until we undertake to teach our children the findings, implications and paradoxes of modern physics, they stand to lose a more balanced perspective of the way the universe really works.