Reading Popular Physics

Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies

Elizabeth Leane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351906524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Physics
• Index: Physics

Reading Popular Physics is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the nature and implications of physics popularizations. A literary critic trained in science, Elizabeth Leane treats popular science writing as a distinct and significant genre, focusing particularly on five bestselling books: Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Steven Weinberg's The First Three Minutes, James Gleick's Chaos, M. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity, and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Leane situates her examination of the texts within the heated interdisciplinary exchanges known as the 'Science Wars', focusing specifically on the disputed issue of the role of language in science. Her use of literary analysis reveals how popular science books function as sites for 'disciplinary skirmishes' as she uncovers the ways in which popularizers of science influence the public. In addition to their explicit discussion of scientific concepts, Leane argues, these authors employ subtle textual strategies that encode claims about the nature and status of scientific knowledge - claims that are all the more powerful because they are unacknowledged. Her book will change the way these texts are read, offering readers a fresh perspective on this highly visible and influential genre.

Chapter 1
Popular Physics Books: A Brief History

The late twentieth-century popular science boom is sometimes represented as a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. Jack Harris, writing in British Book News, states that the boom “could be called a renaissance except that nothing remotely like it has ever happened before” (508). However, the assumption that the late twentieth-century boom is entirely unprecedented overstates the case. This chapter provides some context through which to understand the recent boom. I briefly discuss popular physics book publishing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then examine in more detail the early-to-mid twentieth century, particularly the surge of interest in the genre following Einstein’s work on the theory of relativity.¹ This wider context reveals significant parallels between the recent boom and previous periods of growth in the genre. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the specific characteristics of popular physics book publishing during the recent boom, especially in the “glamour” areas of quantum mechanics, cosmology and chaos theory. In the second half of the chapter I point out some particularly prominent texts and identify some broad trends within these three areas. The wider cultural significance of the late twentieth-century boom, and the backlash it provoked in some parts of the literary community, are then examined in Chapter 2.

This study is literary rather than historical in focus, and does not aim to give a comprehensive history of the genre. Such a history deserves, at the least, a full-length study of its own. Roger Smith’s bibliography of popular physics lists nearly nine hundred items, most of which are books. The genre is thus a large one, and also historically diverse. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent concludes her preliminary survey of twentieth-century science popularization with the observation that this activity has shown “nothing like a linear process of development” in response to either “the specialization of science” or “a public demand”; it is “a complex and multidimensional phenomenon which has periods of expansion and relative decline” depending on “social, political and cultural contexts” (“In the Name of Science” 336). These observations are equally true of popular physics books as a subset of science popularization. Bensaude-Vincent and other historians of science have produced a wealth of research examining science popularization within particular disciplines, periods, readerships and media. Here, I draw on this body of work and my own research to provide some context for the following chapters.

Popular Physics Books Before 1900

Although expositions aimed at explaining science to a wide audience have a history as long as science itself (Meadows and Hancock 1), the unstable categories of “popular science book” and “popular physics book” become more nebulous the further one moves into the past. To begin with, the “general readership” for which these books are designed changes with historical period. Until the later nineteenth century, the expense of books of all kinds put them beyond the budget of most sectors of society, and comparatively low literacy levels also limited their reach. Thus, while popular science books (in the sense of expositions for non-specialist readers) did exist in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their readerships were far smaller than is the case today. Another instability stems from the historical development of what we now label science. “In the eighteenth century,” writes Bensaude-Vincent, “there was simply a difference of ‘styles’ between the scientist and the layman. In the nineteenth century it evolved into a difference in ‘languages’ requiring a ‘translation.’ In the twentieth century there was a difference of worlds” (“In the Name of Science” 329).

Until the development of various specialized, professionalized scientific languages, “natural philosophy” was accessible to any educated person. Prior to the nineteenth century, “science” as it is now conceived did not exist as a welldefined category, and the genre of the “science book” is correspondingly difficult to define (Rousseau, “Science Books” 236). Similarly, “physics” did not itself exist as a well-defined discipline until the later nineteenth century; the word “physicist” dates from the 1840s. Phenomena such as electricity and magnetism, of much interest at the turn of the nineteenth century, were considered part of chemistry at this time (Nye 4). Even during the nineteenth century, a division between books read by scientific specialists and books read by the general public is hard to sustain. Many of that century’s seminal works, such as Darwin’s Origin of Species, assumed a general readership (D. Knight, Natural Science Books 190). Scientific debates (such as that about the age of the Earth) ranged across different fields, and popularizers did the same.

Within these limitations, however, it is possible to identify retrospectively a long-standing tradition of popularization of those parts of science which we now categorize as physics. While science, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, was not characterized by the specialism and professionalism that it is today, the mathematical sophistication of physics always rendered it esoteric to some extent, and thus in need of exposition. Isaac Asimov suggests that Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle was “perhaps the first person to make a reputation in science on the basis of popular science writing alone” (“Popularizing Science”). Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) was first published in 1686, and appeared in numerous French and English editions over the next century. Fontenelle uses a literary device—a series of conversations between a natural philosopher and a beautiful marquise—to explain Copernican astronomy. A number of prominent eighteenth-century British popularizers of astronomy, including John Harris, James Ferguson and Benjamin Martin, were directly influenced by Fontenelle (Douglas 3). Newtonian physics and heliocentric astronomy were widely popularized in England in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, forming part of a new market for popular science books produced by increased leisure; “literally hundreds” of popularizations of Newtonian theory were published in the eighteenth century (Rousseau, “Science Books,” 211, 215). Many of these, like Fontenelle’s book, found a readership in educated women. Rousseau identifies the “coffee houses” as the primary sites of science popularization, and the origin of many popular science books (207). Particularly in demand were books designed to accompany popular science lectures, and “itinerant popularizers” worked with booksellers and printers to exploit this market (208).

In the nineteenth century, the growth of the middle classes, cheaper printing techniques, the spread of literacy and the increasing specialization of science saw the development of a mass market for popularizations (Macdonald-Ross 182). The public consumption of science in museums, zoos, exhibitions and lecture halls was complemented by the private consumption of popular science books, which catered for a variety of budgets and tastes (Bensaude-Vincent, “A Genealogy” 103). David Knight observes that although periodicals were a prominent site for the popularization of science at this stage, “[b]ooks were also crucial” (“Scientists” 77). And while various fields of science such as chemistry, geology, and biology, as well as “fringe” sciences such as mesmerism and phrenology, all generated considerable public interest during the nineteenth century (Knight, “Scientists” 83), physics continued to have significant popular appeal. Prominent physicists such as Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), and John Tyndall all published popular books, usually based on public lectures they had delivered.² As in the previous century, however, many popularizations were written by expositors who were not themselves scientists (Rousseau, “Science Books” 214; Lightman, “‘Voices of Nature’”), or were positioned on the edge of the scientific community. The latter group included female popularizers such as Mary Somerville and (later in the century) Agnes Clerke. Women also continued to form a significant readership for popular science; Myers notes that purpose-written books designed for women and children enjoyed large sales throughout the nineteenth century (“Science for Women” 173). Alongside the growing professionalization of science there remained a sense of public participation (Bensaude-Vincent, “A Genealogy” 105). Popular astronomy books, for example, including those by Clerke, Thomas Dick, Richard Proctor and Robert Ball, were very successful throughout the century, reflecting the continuing opportunities for amateurs to take part in and contribute to this field (D. Knight, “Scientists” 79, 80).

Bensaude-Vincent argues that “[t]he continuity between science and common sense was … the basic postulate which underlay and even inspired most nineteenthcentury popular enterprises” (“A Genealogy” 104). T. H. Huxley famously equated science with “common sense” (4: 1–23), and prominent nineteenth-century popular lectures such as Huxley’s “On a Piece of Chalk” (8: 1–36), given in 1868, and Faraday’s series of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for children, The Chemical History of a Candle (first given in the winter of 1848–49 and published in 1861), grounded scientific knowledge in everyday objects. Popularizers of physics similarly tended to base their expositions on observable, familiar phenomena, which could be easily demonstrated during lectures: Tyndall’s highly successful Heat: A Mode of Motion (1863) begins with a discussion of friction, demonstrated by rubbing a piece of wood against a thermopile. And although nineteenth-century physics was dominated by the development of thermodynamics, abstract philosophical implications of this subject, such as “heat death,” seem to have occupied relatively little space in popularizations of this time. Stephen Brush in The Temperature of History observes that nineteenth-century physics popularizations such as Tyndall’s made hardly any mention of the second law’s disturbing implications, in contrast to early twentieth-century popularizers such as Arthur Eddington and James Jeans (61–2). Certainly, the nineteenth-century emphasis on the mundanity and accessibility of physics contrasts markedly with the early-to-mid twentieth century, in which the intensely popularized “new physics” necessitated “a radical break with common-sense views of the world” (Bensaude-Vincent, “A Genealogy” 107).

This is not to suggest, however, that nineteenth-century physics popularizations displayed no interest at all in wider philosophical, social or religious questions. Myers notes that many of the scientist-popularizers of the day “were also arguing for a particular philosophical or social position, as well as for their discipline”: Tyndall for materialism; Maxwell for “a moral and spiritual alternative” to this materialism; Thomson for “a loophole in Darwinism” (“Nineteenth-Century Popularizations” 41). Many lay-popularizers such as Dick, Proctor and Clerke were writing within an explicitly Christian world-view (Lightman, “‘Voices of Nature’”; Astore). There was also significant interest in psychical research among respected Victorian physicists: J. J. Thomson, Oliver Lodge, Lord Rayleigh and William Crookes were all actively involved in the Society for Psychical Research (or SPR) (Wilson 38). Lodge went on to incorporate his spiritual beliefs into physics popularizations in the early twentieth century, and another prominent physicist and SPR member, Balfour Stewart, co-wrote with fellow physicist Peter Tait a popularization entitled The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State (1875; initially published anonymously).

The success of The Unseen Universe, which ran through numerous editions, demonstrates a later nineteenth-century public interest in popularizations that went beyond a “common-sense” view of the world. The book can be seen as a popularization written to promote an ideological viewpoint, specifically a refutation of the materialism favoured by Tyndall and others, and an argument for the consistency of physics with the immortality of the soul (Heimann 73). Although its style is unmistakably Victorian, Stewart and Tait’s book seems to have anticipated twentieth-century popularizations in a number of ways. Its title, with its connotations of mystery and the unknown, is close to early twentieth-century titles by anti-materialists, such as Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe (1930)—one of the working titles for which was “The Shadowland of Modern Physics” (Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake 52)—and Eddington’s Science and the Unseen World (1929). Like these later popularizers, Stewart and Tait take the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics as one of their central concerns.³

Notions of physics as something enigmatic and mysterious (rather than commonsensical) were thus evident to some degree in popularizations before the turn of the twentieth century. J. W. N. Sullivan, a prominent science writer of the 1920s, observed retrospectively that the later nineteenth century had seen the emergence of popularizers who presented science as “a catalogue of marvels” (“Popular Science” 84). He traces this desire for “marvels” back to an immediate post-Darwinian popular interest in science, which he believes was “of a different kind from the leisurely interest previously shown by the cultured classes.” Whereas the earlier enthusiasm represented “more genuinely an interest in science for its own sake,” the post-Darwinian interest “had a different emotional basis and was merely the diversion of an interest in religious or social questions” (83). While subjects such as biology and geology had an “inevitable and immediate” association with “violent emotions,” the “more exact sciences … seem to have compromised by specialising on ‘marvels.’ The ‘Marvels of Science’ became a familiar heading, and the unsophisticated public were stunned by figures” (84). Sullivan’s observation of this prevalence of “marvel-mongering” indicates that the “gee-whizz” mode identified by John Carey as the popularizer’s equivalent of the sublime (Faber Book of Science xvi) was well established by the late nineteenth century.

Bensaude-Vincent observes that in several European countries including Britain, “An unexpected decline of popular science literature can be noticed at the turn of the century.” She connects this decline with a decrease in public confidence in science as a panacea, and a tiring of “repetitive celebrations of progress” (“In the Name of Science” 321). A similar downturn occurred in the United States (Burnham 172). By the 1920s, however, science—and particularly physics—was again very much the subject of popular interest.

The Einstein Boom

The 1920s and 1930s saw a boom in popular physics books in both Britain and the United States, a publishing phenomenon which, like the late twentieth-century boom, was clearly identified by publishers and popularizers of the time (Whitworth, “Clothbound Universe” 52–7; Gregory and Miller 29). The boom was kick-started by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1916). Numerous critics have noted the media circus that surrounded Einstein and his theory in the years immediately following Eddington’s 1919 eclipse observation, which “proved” Einstein’s prediction that light rays should be bent by a gravitational field to a larger degree than that predicted by Newtonian theory.⁴ Friedman and Donley refer to the “publishing boom” following the observation and state that “within five years of the eclipse expedition, scientists published a number of books popularizing the new theories”—i.e., relativity and quantum physics. They cite in particular Einstein’s own popularization, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, published in an English translation in 1920 (seven editions were released in nineteen months), and Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation, published in the same year, which was among the most successful expositions of the subject on both sides of the Atlantic (17). By the time Herbert Dingle published Relativity for All in 1922, there were suggestions that the craze was dying down, although popularizations continued to be published (Whitworth, “Physics” 60–61), including Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity and Sullivan’s Three Men Discuss Relativity (both 1925).

Sociologists Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch suggest that there were a number of factors, both external and internal, behind the popularity of Einstein’s theory:

[It] had something to do with the ending of the Great War and the unifying effect of science on a fractured continent. It had something to do with the dramatic circumstances and the straightforward nature of the 1919 “proof” of relativity. And it undoubtedly had something to do with the astonishing consequences of the theory for our commonsense understanding of the physical world. (The Golem 27)

Whereas Huxley had emphasized science as “common sense,” Einstein’s theory appeared to signify incomprehensibility and esotericism. Physicist Hannes Alfvén suggests that the public were “relieved” that physical reality was comprehensible only to “Einstein ...