Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [17]
All of this led Faraday to a particular view – a preconception – of what he would discover in his experiments. First he discovered the magnetic field that inhabited ‘empty’ space around a magnet. His view of the integrity of all things led him to conceive this field as being composed of closed loops: for him, circular forms were more reflective of the Creator than were lines that stretched merely from one point to another.
The discovery of electromagnetic induction came from a similarly spiritual part of Faraday’s mind. This is the phenomenon whereby the movement of metal wire within a magnetic field generates electricity in the wire. This was revolutionary to the trained mathematical scientist, but it all made perfect sense to Faraday. The phenomena of electricity and magnetism were tied together in mutual embrace. If a moving electrical conductor produced a magnetic field, then a moving field would be expected to produce a current in a conductor. Movement, magnetism and electricity were a reflection of the Trinity: locked together, separate but inseparable – a mystery.
It is thanks to this faith-inspired discovery that you have electrical power delivered to your home. And thanks to the symmetry of nature, Faraday showed that we can turn the arrangement on its head, allowing a current to flow within a magnetic field to create motion. Here we have the genesis of yet another staple of the modern world: the electric motor that powers everything from giant industrial plant to computer disk drives.
Faraday was by no means the only scientist to be motivated by a religious faith. Nicholas Copernicus, who removed the Earth from the centre of the universe, referred to nature as ‘God’s Temple’ and claimed that God can be known through the study of nature. It is ironic that the same attitude, which would be heavily criticised if it were raised in scientific circles today, also caused Copernicus’s work to be put on the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of forbidden books.
Inspired by Copernicus’s orbiting planets, and adopting the same view as Faraday – that God would use a system of ‘unity in diversity’ – the surgeon William Harvey theorised that the human body had a circulatory system that mirrored the orbits of the planets. ‘I began to think whether there might not be a Motion, As It Were, In A Circle’, he wrote in 1628, when he revealed the results of his investigations into the movement of blood around the body. His conclusion was that the heart ‘is the beginning of life; the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in his turn might well be designated the heart of the world’.
God is not popular in science these days. A survey of members of the US National Academy of Sciences revealed that 85 per cent reject the notion of a ‘personal God’. Even that is not good enough for some scientists. The astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, for example, has turned the statistic on its head, lamenting that 15 per cent of ‘the most brilliant minds this nation has’ accept the idea of a personal God. ‘How come that number isn’t zero?’ he asks.
Religion is also a thorn in the flesh of Oxford University chemist Peter Atkins. His response to the NAS survey was similar to Tyson’s. ‘You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word.’ For Atkins, religious belief and a scientific worldview are mutually ‘alien categories of knowledge’.
However, the evidence doesn’t bear Atkins’ statement out. Michael Faraday, for one, stands as proof that holding religious beliefs – as well as taking drugs and experiencing dreams, visions and moments of ‘undeserved’ insight – can provide the key to scientific discovery. Why? Because science is much more irrational than scientists would like to admit.
If there is a common thread to be teased out of these tales of drugs, dreams, visitations and visions, it is surely that, as Feyerabend said, ‘anything goes’ for the scientist. It certainly seems that ‘anything comes’: inspiration