'You must have felt this too', the physicist Werner Heisenberg, one of the
pioneers of quantum mechanics, once remarked to Albert Einstein; 'the almost
frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly
spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.'
There is often an almost spiritual reverence to the way many scientists view
nature, as well as a humility about humanity's seeming insignificance when
faced with the immensity of the cosmos. 'Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,
the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged
by this pale point of light', the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote on seeing a
picture of the Earth from space. 'Our planet is a lonely speck in that great
enveloping cosmic dark.'
Few modern scientists have better expressed this feeling of scientific reverence
than Richard Dawkins. 'The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us
is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable', he
suggested in Unweaving the Rainbow. 'It is a deep aesthetic passion
to rank with finest that music and poetry can deliver.' It is not surprising,
then, that this sense of awe is a central theme in The Oxford Book of
Modern Science that Dawkins has edited.
An anthology can serve many purposes. It can introduce new readers to a subject.
It can try to establish a canon of definitive readings. It can provide a snapshot
of how a particular age views a particular subject. It could, through a perverse
selection of readings, throw new light on a subject. The Oxford Book of
Modern Science Writing is none of these. Certainly, there are readings
here on the Big Bang theory, on quantum mechanics, on evolution and genetics.
But the anthology is less about science as a body of knowledge than it is
about the poetry of nature and the nature of the scientific imagination. It
is a meditation on how scientists relate to wonder of the world.
And it is a real treasure trove of unexpected pleasures. The collection opens
with astronomer James Jean suggesting that 'we find the universe terrifying
because it appears to be indifferent to life like our own.' It ends with The
Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan's meditation on viewing the Earth from space.
In between we have Albert Einstein on religion, D'Arcy Thompson on spirals
in nature, Primo Levi on the life of the carbon atom and Jacob Bronowski on
science and language.
Yet the anthology feels less than the sum of its parts. What is missing is
Dawkins' own voice. Certainly it feels a bit odd that there is no extract
from one of Dawkins' own work here - he is, after all, arguably the greatest
popular science writer of his generation.
More importantly what is missing is Dawkins' voice as editor. There is barely
an introduction to the collection and only very short commentaries on the
individual pieces. A collection such as this that is as much an argument as
an anthology requires a strong editorial hand to guide the reader and package
the pieces. Can science really be described as an aesthetic experience? Does
it really provide, as Richard Feynman suggests, a deeper understanding of
beauty than poetry? And what is the relationship between beauty and truth?
All these questions are raised but the debate is never properly framed. The
trove would have been that much more valuable had we been better guided through
the treasure.