The polymath

Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi once made the pithy observation that "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought."

I think that's really what sets apart the scientists from the rest of us -- that ability to go from "wow, that's weird!" to "... and here's how I think it works."  But there's another piece, too, that has unfortunately been lost over time through the sad fact of increasing specialization within the sciences.

And that's the ability to be conversant in a great many different disciplines, and the capacity for drawing connections between them.

Another accurate observation -- this one, I haven't been able to find an attestation for -- is that "Researchers these days are learning more and more about less and less, until finally they're going to know everything about nothing."  One of my mentors, science educator Roger Olstad, called this "focusing on one cubic millimeter of the universe," and said that generalists make better teachers, because they can draw on information from lots of disparate fields in order to make sense of their subject for students.  Fortunately for me; I'm an inveterate dabbler.  I'd have been a lousy candidate for a doctoral program, because I don't seem to be able to keep my mind locked on one thing for five minutes, much less the five years or more you have to focus in order to research and write a dissertation.

What's kind of sad, though, is that it hasn't always been this way.  Before the twentieth century, scientists were almost all polymaths; it behooves us all to remember that the word science itself comes from the Latin scientia, which simply means "knowledge."  Consider, for example, the following advances, all made in the latter half of the seventeenth century.  Do you know who was responsible for each?

• Made the first accurate measurements of motion of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, allowing the astronomer Giovanni Cassini to calculate the planet's rotational period
• Deduced the law of elasticity -- that for springs (or other elastic objects), the linear extension is directly proportional to the force exerted
• Made the first-ever drawing of a microorganism (the fungus Mucor)
• Figured out that the optimum shape for a weight-bearing dome is exactly the same as the curve of a hanging chain, only upside-down (the inverted catenary), revolutionizing architecture
• Was the first to note that venous and arterial blood differ in appearance, pressure, and composition
• Determined that the force of gravitation is an inverse-square law
• Figured out (through microscopic analysis) that petrified wood retains the cellular structure of the living wood it came from
• Studied waves in two-dimensional plates, and was the first to observe their nodal patterns (now called Chladni figures after an eighteenth-century physicist who did an extensive analysis of them)
• Built the first balance-spring pocketwatch
• Coined the term cell after seeing the microscopic holes in thin slices of cork, and likening them to the monks' quarters (celluli) in a monastery
• Concluded, from studying lunar craters, that the Moon must have its own gravity
• Was the first to analyze schlieren, the streaks caused when two transparent fluids with different indices of refraction mix (such as heat shimmer over a hot roadway, or when you stir simple syrup into water)
• Speculated that there was a specific component of air that allowed for respiration in animals -- and that both respiration and combustion gradually removed whatever that component was
• Developed the first clockwork drive for telescopes, allowing them to compensate for the Earth's rotation and track the movement of astronomical objects 

You're probably on to me by now, and figured out that these advances in diverse fields weren't made by different people.  They were all made by one man.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

His name was Robert Hooke.  He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635 to an Anglican priest and his wife, and because of frail health wasn't given much in the way of formal education.  But his mechanical aptitude was evident from a really young age.  He was especially fascinated with clocks, and after studying the workings of a brass pendulum clock in his father's study, he went off and built himself one out of wood.

It worked.

He got the rudiments of drawing from a short-lived apprenticeship with painter Peter Lely, but once again his health interfered; according to an 1898 biography, "the smell of the Oil Colours did not agree with his Constitution, increasing his Head-ache to which he was ever too much subject."  So he went on to more generalized study, first at the Westminster School and then at the University of Oxford, from which he graduated in 1662.

Three years later, he'd accomplished so much he was appointed Curator for Life to the newly-founded Royal Society of London.

It's hard to exaggerate Hooke's contribution to Enlightenment science.  He was interested in everything.  And damn good at pretty much all of it.  The misses he had -- not beating Newton to the Universal Law of Gravitation, for example -- were more because he stopped pursuing a line of inquiry too soon, usually because he went on to some other pressing interest.

Hooke got a reputation for being prickly -- one biographer called him "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful" -- for his determination to get credit for his many discoveries.  This picture of Hooke as having a sour, grasping personality comes mainly from his conflict with two people; Christiaan Huygens (another remarkable polymath, who tangled with Hooke over who had the right to the patent for the balance-spring pocketwatch), and none other than Isaac Newton.

Newton was not a man to piss off.  Not only was he brilliant in his own right, he was apparently "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful."  He and Hooke started out at least on speaking terms, and exchanged some information with each other, but it very rapidly devolved into a vicious rivalry.  Newton, for his part, never did acknowledge that Hooke had any role in the development of the Universal Law of Gravitation.  In a 1680 letter, Newton wrote, "yet am I not beholden to [Hooke] for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to think on these things & for his dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the Ellipses, which inclined me to try it ..."

There's an allegation -- disputed by some historians -- that when Newton was appointed president of the Royal Society at Hooke's death in 1703, Newton had all of Hooke's portraits destroyed.  The one surviving painting supposedly of Hooke is almost certainly not him, but of Flemish chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont.  In fact, all we have left of Hooke's likeness for certain is an unflattering description of him from his friend John Aubrey: "He is but of midling stature, something crooked, pale-faced, and his face but little below, but his head is lardge, his eie full and popping, and not quick; a grey eie.  He has a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excellent moist curle.  He is and ever was temperate and moderate in dyet."

His odd posture and appearance -- as well as his ongoing health problems -- are now thought to be due to the degenerative spine disease Scheuermann's kyphosis, which eventually led to his death at the age of 67.  But what he accomplished despite his physical handicaps is somewhere beyond remarkable.

Now, imagine if Hooke's career had begun in a typical Ph.D. program where he was told, "focus on one thing only."

Don't misunderstand me; I'm grateful for experts.  The current anti-expert bias in what passes for a government in my country is nothing short of idiotic.  It amounts to, "I'm going to discount this person who has spent her/his entire adult life studying this topic, in favor of some crank with a website."  But there's also room for the generalists -- people who aren't afraid to delve into whatever takes their fancy, and bring that breadth of experience to whatever they undertake.

People like the extraordinary polymath Robert Hooke.

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Hero worship

Sometimes I get questioned on my decision to quote (or even mention in a non-negative light) individuals who are not good human beings.

It's a complex issue, sometimes.  When it comes to fiction, I draw the line at supporting writers who are horrible people and still stand to profit from my reading their work.  I won't read, watch, or recommend anything by Neil Gaiman, J. K. Rowling, and Marion Zimmer Bradley for that reason; in the case of Gaiman, I've loved a lot of his writing, but what he's been credibly accused of is so deeply reprehensible that I can no longer read his work without the nausea creeping in.  (Bradley is dead, but my purchase of her work would still profit her estate, so... nope.)

The line is even blurrier when it comes to scientists, whose work is usually not so entangled with who they are as a person.  Both Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss have been accused of serious sexual misconduct; while I apply the same rule to their writing (I will no longer purchase or read anything either man writes), does it invalidate their scientific achievements?  In fact, the topic comes up because a few days ago I mentioned Richard Dawkins and his observation that what religion a person belongs to has more to do with geography than with choice, and I had a reader write to me to ask why I'd quoted someone like Dawkins, whose anti-trans stance I find appalling.

It's a trenchant question.  My response is that my agreeing with Dawkins about some things doesn't mean I agree with him about everything.  I maintain that he is one of the most lucid and brilliant exponents of evolutionary biology I've come across, and has incisive (and insightful) things to say about religion, but when he strays out of those fields, well... not so much.  To go from "I agree with what X said about Y" to "I agree with what X says about everything" is to engage in hero worship.

And hero worship lands you in trouble just about every time, because we humans are all flawed.  We're all odd mixtures of good and bad, moral and immoral, reasonable and unreasonable, in different kinds and measures.  Writer John Scalzi wrote a brilliant piece when the allegations against Neil Gaiman came out last fall, in which he offered a plea to his readers not to put anyone -- very much including himself -- on a pedestal.  "People are complicated and contradictory and you don’t know everything about them," Scalzi wrote.  "You don’t know everything even about your parents or siblings or best friends or your partner.  People are hypocrites and liars and fail to live up to their own standards for themselves, much less yours.  Your version of them in your head will always be different than the version that actually exists in the world.  Because you’re not them.  Stop pretending people won’t be fuck ups.  They will.  Always."

To take a less emotionally-charged example, consider Isaac Newton.  The Father of Modern Physics was, beyond question, a brilliant scientific mind.  Not only did he for the first time come up with an analytical model for motion -- the basis of what we now call classical mechanics -- he invented calculus, the tool now universally used to study it.  His experiments in optics were groundbreaking; he was the first person to demonstrate that white light was a combination of the entire visible spectrum.

A portrait of Newton from 1689 [Image is in the Public Domain]

But.

He was, according to his contemporaries, a prickly, priggish, humorless man, narrow-minded, combative, and deeply misogynistic.  He never forgot a wrong; his vicious (and long-lived) quarrels with Robert Hooke, Samuel Pepys, and John Locke are the stuff of legend.  He was superstitious, and often seemed more interested in arguing matters of his rather peculiar take on theology than expanding knowledge of science.  A full one-tenth of his writings have to do with alchemy.  He wrote extensively about the mystical meanings of the proportions of the Temple of Solomon.  He was obsessed with the End Times, and did in-depth analyses of the Book of Revelation (he concluded that the world wasn't going to end until at least 2060, which is a relief).

He was not, honestly, someone most of us would care to spend much time with.

The contributions he made to physics and mathematics show signs of true genius.  At the same time, he seems to have been an ill-tempered and suspicious religious fanatic.  Why are we surprised by this, though?  As Scalzi points out forcefully, none of us are pure of heart, whatever we may accomplish, however far we rise in the public eye.

I'm not saying it's not disappointing when our heroes end up having feet of clay.  I was honestly devastated (not to mention repulsed) when I read the article that made public the allegations against Neil Gaiman.  (I won't link the article here, because it's frankly disturbing; if you're so inclined, a quick search will locate it for you.  Be forewarned, though, the whole thing is one big trigger warning.)   There will always be a measure of "Oh, no, not you too" we feel when someone we've looked up to doesn't live up to our good estimation -- or, in the case of Gaiman, falls way below it.

But like I said, humans are complex and baffling creatures sometimes.  We're all amalgams.  I try to live up to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," but like everyone, I fail way more often than I'd like.  There are parts of my past that I look back upon with deep shame, and there are a few incidents that I'd do almost anything to be able to go back and change.  And I guess that's the only answer, really; to keep in mind we're all fallible, to treat our fellow humans as well as we can, to make amends as well as we can when we do fail, and to make sure we don't keep making the same mistakes over and over.

To quote Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better."

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