Faraday’s dogma

(Versión en castellano aquí)

When asked the secret of doing science, the great chemist Michael Faraday, replied in the early 1800s: Work, finish, publish- no-nonsense common sense from a humble autodidact, who rose from working class ob- scurity to being offered (and refusing) the Presidency of the Royal Society in his maturity. Faraday’s extraordinary experiments exploring electromagnetism are legion. Given his status, his words are treasured to this day by scientists. Surely, those words have been drummed into countless young postgraduate researchers by well-meaning seniors for generations. His vision of experimental science remains de rigeur to this day:

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

That quote hints that science may be an ethereal enterprise, less focussed than a take- no-prisoners voyage of discovery. Science is poetry? Alternatively, Faraday’s insistence on ”facts” as the stuff of his poetry is to many reassuringly grounding, bringing the practice back to earth. The brevity and subliminal appeal to common-sense of both quotes seems to me a hallmark of British science. I see a direct line, for example, from no-nonsense Faraday to (in my mind) the most British scientist of all, the (New Zealander!) Ernest Rutherford, who classified all science as physics or stamp-collecting, and reckoned the odds of betting against science at 1012 to 1. So it came as a surprise to me to come across the following words, also from Rutherford . . .

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. … The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.

Those words can be parsed to imply that creativity resides in science, just as in art. That claim is no threat to modern science, but what if it were taken more literally? It is somewhat startling to a card-carrying scientist (including this one) to read Rutherford’s words once more…”scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art”! Is science another domain of artistic practice, alongside sculpture, film-making, etc.? That reading is perhaps overblown; after all, Rutherford explicitly invokes the notion of a logical progression to scientific ”discovery”, an implicit credo dear to the hearts of many practising scientists. Yet he also allows for the creation of scientific theories as works of pure art, regardless of their validity. Hmmm. Do scientists ”create” rather than ”discover”? And, for that matter, do artists ”discover” or ”create”?