Gee Whiz! : Three Books About Science

No sooner have I written this title than I see that it's inadequate. The word "science" is a kindergarten word. What follows is a description of books about three men who were deeply interested in the world around them. But that, too, is inaccurate.  What we have here is three books, two of which were written by insatiably curious men about other men in the past that have stimulated their interest because these men, too, were inordinately adept at examining and appreciating the wonders they observed all around them. These two books are accompanied by a third which describes the journey by an individual who was similarly inspired by his surroundings to describe the path he followed to pursue his dream of examining that world in greater depth.  

It might also be worth mentioning that all three books have a worldly or even cosmic scope, but also a regional focus. Seb Falk, who teaches at Cambridge, writes about discoveries in the library there and the lives of monks at nearby Bury St. Edmunds. (check) Hugh Aldersey Williams, a resident of Norwich, writes about the city's most famous son, Sir Thomas Browne, and  Gary Fildes writes about his own development as a budding amatuer  astronomer in the depressed Northumberland town of Sunderland. 

But enough about the inadequacy of titles.

In The Light Ages, Seb Falk introduces us to the world of medieval science by means of a single discovery. In December  1951 a young Cambridge researcher named Derek Price opened a manuscript lacking a title page but catalogued as an instruction manual for constructing an astrolabe, perhaps five hundred years old. He found something quite different. Instead of a manual written in Latin he found a work written in middle English and dated 1392 on every page describing an astronomical device far more complex than an astrolabe.. Geoffrey Chaucer had written a book on a similar subject just a year earlier, and there were grounds for suspecting that he had written this one, too.

As it turned out, Chaucer was not the author, but Falk makes a good story out of following the life of Brother John of Westwyk, the monk who did actually write it. He succeeds in clarifying the importance of such astronomical devices in an age that lacked firmly established calendars, but more than that, he recreates the world of monks, monasteries, universities, and daily life in medieval England without drawing undue attention to the religious elements involved. And considering how murky that age seems to most of us, Falk does a remarkable job a describing the era on its own terms, rather than as a half-baked preamble to more modern scientific discoveries and principles. Hence the book's title. Not the Dark Ages, but the Light Ages.  

"On Westwyk's journey through medieval science  [he writes]  we will meet a fascinating cast, none of them household names. The Spanish Jew- turned-Christian who taught a Lotharingian monk about eclipses in Worcestershire; the clock-building English abbot with leprosy; the French craftsman-turned-spy; the Persian polymath who founded the world's most advanced observatory. Medieval science was an inter­national endeavour, just as science is today. Religious belief spurred scientific investigation, but deeply devout people had no problem with adopting theories from other faiths. .. Watching how one individual knew what he knew will help us understand the ways medieval thinkers built on each other's work and influenced other scholars working in different languages thousands of miles away."

Falk has enormous enthusiasm for the astronomical principles that Westwyk and others put to use in constructing their time-keeping and navigational devices, and he tries his best to pass that on to us. The book is also amply illustrated with diagrams full of azimuths, zeniths, ascensions,  and astrological signs. But this material, while central to the narrative, is perhaps the book's least interesting element. After all, few of us will ever use an astrolabe, much less build one for our own use. But equally vivid are Falk's descriptions of daily life, social organization, crusades, plagues, medical lore, international development and exchange, and other more or less incidental stuff. We lose track of Westwyk and other characters for pages and sometimes chapters at a time, in part because longs stretches of his life have left no record, but also because Falk in intent on fleshing out the material required to help us understand the broader scene. The book carries all the fascination of Evan S. Connell at his best, but with boyish enthusiasm in place of Connells often mordant humor. 

Hugh Aldersey-Williams embarks on a similar mission in The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century. His focus is ostensibly narrower—the writings of a single seventeenth-century physician and essayist mentioned in the title. But Browne wrote about so many things that Aldersey-Williams  has his hands full examining even a representative sampling. In any case, his intent is not to convince us of how modern Browne was, but rather, to introduce us to his life and work, and also to suggest that quite a few of Browne's beliefs and speculations, which may seem odd or out-of-date or simply wrong at first glance, offer surprising parallels to the practices and uncertainties of our own time. 

Aldersey-Williams  begins his essay with a narrative of a dramatic witch trial during which Browne was called upon to testify as an expert witness. Browne offered his opinion as a physician that the fits and other symptoms exhibited by the two allegedly "bewitched" children were natural. But he went on to say, "gratuitously" in Aldersey-Williams' view, that this very naturalness was "evidence of the subtilty of the devil, who was controlling the witches actions." This comment likely contributed to the conviction and death of the two women accused of bewitching them.

Why did Browne add that remark? Aldersey-Williams  doesn't know, but he takes the episode as emblematic of Browne's often maddening equivocations and seeming indifference to the resolution of vital questions of the day. Like Montaigne in southwest France at an earlier date, Browne wrote during a period of intense religious and political strife, though you'd hardly know it by reading him.

Alongside his career as a physician, Browne took and interest in, and wrote about, many aspects of natural history, in the spirit, not of exact science, but of curiosity. Aldersey-Williams  organizes these ruminations into categories such as Plants, Tolerance, Melancholy, Faith, and Science, one chapter per subject. Within each category there is room for a wide variety of observations and musings, both on Browne's part and on that of his later-day biographer. The two are equal partners, in fact, and Aldersey-Williams' reflections are a vital part of the "dialogue."

For example, Aldersey-Williams  opens the chapter titled "Physic" with the case of a 102-year-old bulimic woman that Browne is treating. Browne, after describing the woman's condition and indulging in a digression that takes him through one of Plutarch's anecdotes, concludes: "though I am ready to afford my charity unto her, yet I should be loth to spend a piece of ambergris I have upon her, and to allow six grains to every dose till I found some effect in moderating her appetite; though that be esteemed a great specific in her condition."

Aldersey-Williams  acknowledges that it's easy to dismiss the medical practices of Browne's day as "insufferably primitive," yet he also notes striking parallels to modern attitudes and techniques.

"It is in its way a thoroughly modern encounter. Browne displays curiosity and compassion. He is alert to a possible connection between the woman's medical condition and her environmental circumstances. The medicine is unusual but like all medicines at this time it is natu­rally sourced rather than made artificially (ambergris is a fatty accretion ejected from the stomachs of sperm whales and could be found floating on the sea or lying on the coast). Browne has a clear idea of its specific effectiveness, and is aware that dosage is an important factor. He is also conscious that medicine costs money, that he must husband his resources in order to run his medical practice at a profit, and that attention given to a 102-year-old may not, in the end, be, as today's euphemism has it,' optimal resource allocation'."

The author  goes on the observe what everyone who's been to the doctor knows: today's medical practice also leaves a lot to be desired.  He describes a recent visit to a GP due to a stomach bug. "I am out in under ten minutes clutching a prescription for some opioid that will address my symptoms and a mild bewilderment at the doctor's lack of curiosity about the cause of my illness." The doctor also mentions antibiotics, but leaves it to Aldersey-Williams  to observe that no infecting bacterium has been identified, and the drugs would be unlikely to be effective. The doctor then asks Aldersey-Williams  if he wants a referral, without specifying what it would be for. "At the end I feel as if I have been played," he concludes, "and that he has had me labeled all along as one of the 'worried well'."

One of Browne's greatest claims to fame is as the inventor of new words. More than seven hundred neologisms have been attributed to him. Though many have since fallen from common use, a short list of his more durable creations (copied from Wikipedia) would include ambidextrous, antediluvian, analogous, approximate, ascetic, anomalous, carnivorous, coexistence, coma, compensate, computer, cryptography, cylindrical, disruption, electricity, exhaustion, ferocious, follicle, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, herbaceous, holocaust, insecurity, indigenous, jocularity, literary, locomotion, medical, migrant, mucous, prairie, prostate, polarity, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian. Aldersey-Williams  devotes some time on this aspect of Browne's genius, but finds the task daunting, and soon decides to highlight one or two here and there as they appear in the text with extended notes at the bottom of the page. Good idea.

In the chapter on Animals, Aldersey-Williams  draws from the text of Browne's work Psuedodoxia Epidemica to create an impromptu bestiary that includes the ostrich, the bittern, the owl, the sperm whale, the mole, and the badger, among other creatures. Because the book from which the material is drawn is devoted to what Browne calls "vulgar errors," these two-page entries are more odd than accurate or informative. For example, in Browne's day many people thought the legs of a badger were shorter on one side than the other, because these creatures were often seen running rapidly down the furrows of a plowed field.  Browne rejects this thesis, not by examining a badger or a badger skeleton, but on the strength of inductive reasoning: the legs of all other animals are the same on both sides. If a badger were differently construed, it would, in Browne's words, be "repugnant unto the course of nature."

Aldersey-Williams  is disappointed by Browne's conventional line of reasoning in this case. A more Brownian solution would have been to capture a badger, chain him to a tree, and measure his speed going clockwise and then counterclockwise around it. If the times differed, it would "prove" that the animals  legs were not the same length on either side.

Such flashes of whimsy appear through the books. Yet it's clear that Aldersey-Williams  knows the man he calls his "hero" inside and out, and has read and absorbed even the driest and least interesting of Browne's works, thus saving us the trouble. I've poked my nose into Browne's Religio Medici, his Urne Burial, and one or two other works with interest—the era, the style, the mood, the quizzical intelligence come through—but when push comes to shove, Aldersey-Williams' book is more stimulating, thought-provoking, and fun to read by far.

An Astronomer's Tale: a Life Under the Stars, is a simpler book. Its author, Gary Fildes, grew up in a working-class home and began his professional career as a brick-layer. He went to soccer matches with his "mates" and brawled with fans of the opposing team almost by instinct. But he harbored a secret love for the night sky that was nurtured by family and a neighbor with similar interests, and a good telescope. This is the story of how Fildes, with tireless enthusiasm but no formal training in astronomy, guilelessly pursued his interests and eventually became director of the Kiedler Observatory in Northumberland, a public institution that's located in one of the world's most spectacular dark-sky havens.

Fildes isn't a researcher or even an expert astronomer; he's an educator. His passion for watching the night sky is evident on every page, and every chapter is punctuated with a section describing the night sky at a given time of year and focusing on a specific constellation. The book chronicles Fildes' extraordinary rise in the field of science education, which surprised him as much as anybody else,  in terms designed to encourage others to do the same. Or at the very least, to do a bit of reading, then find a dark place, and stand in awe of the heavens in the midst of which we go about our daily lives.