Aspects of Irish science and culture

My thoughts today are prompted by the interesting conversation on the place of science in culture recently with science communicator Brian Trench [https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/molecules-metaphors-and-the-place-of-science-in-culture-1.4882858].

Science is undoubtedly part of Irish culture because Irish men and women have been doing science with considerable distinction for several hundred years. This natural aptitude for science makes science “part of what we are”, the title of Charlie Mollan’s two-volume magnum opus covering the lives and accomplishments of great Irish scientists from Robert Boyle (1627-1691) to John Bell (1928-1990), published by the Royal Dublin Society, 2007.

Almost all Irish science prior to the 20th century was carried out by scientists from the Protestant ascendancy class, because Catholics, in the main, had neither the means, leisure nor education to practise science. This at least partly explains why, when nationalist Ireland established our new State in 1922, appreciation of our Irish scientific tradition was put on the back burner in favour of reviving the Irish language and celebrating our literary tradition.

Our native scientific heritage remained largely unacknowledged up through the 1960s. The situation is much better now but we still have a considerable way to go in this regard. One odd aspect of our reluctance to acknowledge past great Irish scientists of Anglo-Irish background is the wholehearted appreciation we have for our literary giants like Wilde, Yeats, Shaw and Beckett, and for numerous political notables such as Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) and Robert Emmet (1778-1803) who likewise came from this background.

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Science communication

Science is now a big deal in Ireland. Our Government recognises that a modern economy needs a developed indigenous scientific infrastructure and pumps money into science. Communication of science to the public has really taken off — we even have festivals of science communication. A far cry from the early 1990s when science featured very little in the media and Irish Times editor Connor Brady made the farsighted decision to initiate structured science coverage in the newspaper.

He tested the waters by employing me to write a weekly science column, which I started in January 1995. The column proved to be popular and within a year Brady expanded The Irish Times science coverage to a weekly science page, incorporating my column, under the editorship of Dick Ahlstrom. The page is still running strong, now supplemented by regular science stories throughout the newspaper.

Considerable efforts are now taken to publicly promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem). And, most recently, arts has been added to this list leading to the new acronym Steam. I am uneasy with this development. The arts are the imaginative, creative, non-scientific branches of knowledge, literature, poetry, painting, sculpture and so on, and are fundamentally different from Stem. The arts produce personal knowledge, eg you can easily recognise a Van Gogh painting by his unique personal style.

Let us say three poets are asked to each write a poem describing a sunset. They will almost certainly produce three distinctly different poems. Poet A may describe a beautiful sunset. Poet B may describe how he proposed to his sweetheart while watching a sunset. Poet C may describe the death of his father as a spectacular sunset illuminated the landscape outside. The personal approach is essential in the arts.

Now ask three scientists to each write descriptions of sunset. This time you will get three very similar accounts, each conveying the same basic information about wavelengths of light, scattering of light in the atmosphere etc. Uniformity is the hallmark of science on matters that are settled.

Good art produces works of great beauty. Some people, eager to see connections between art and science, claim that there is also beauty in science, pointing, for example, to ‘beautiful’ equations. But this is to confuse elegance and economy with beauty. And, as an electron microscopist, I can attest to the fact that microstructures often please the eye. However, such “beauty” is usually based on symmetry, which is only one aspect of beauty. In my opinion, to speak of beauty in science in the same breath as beauty in art is unreasonable.

Science and the arts give us complementary views of the world, each essential to our overall understanding, but neither science nor art can do the work of the other. To think otherwise seems mistaken to me.

• William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC