Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [96]
His creative use of science will go on as long as Ovshinsky has the power to think, but he will never become an insider. It’s not just the lack of formal scientific training that has been an obstacle to Ovshinsky’s acceptance. He has also made a rod for his own back by refusing – like Hannes Alfvén – to stick to one scientific discipline. He has published papers in neuroscience, cosmology, physics, chemistry, materials science, computer science and psychiatry. To Ovshinsky, the idea of separating science into disparate disciplines is unnatural and unprofitable.
Alfvén once explained why, in his opinion, the scientific consensus went the other way. ‘Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory,’ he said. ‘In many instances, such parochialism is founded on the fear that intrusions from other disciplines would compete unfairly for limited financial resources and thus diminish their own opportunity for research.’
Sadly for science, this resistance to outsiders – the siege mentality – is usually rather successful. In the Gospel according to St Matthew, Jesus makes a telling statement about the economy of heaven: ‘Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.’
That’s a vexing idea, and it goes against our deepest notion of fairness. Much more comfortable is Karl Marx’s agenda for redistribution: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ However, as sociologist Robert Merton pointed out way back in 1966, although science ostensibly follows Marx, in reality it follows Jesus. The greater your scientific reputation, the more likely your papers are to receive rapid recognition. Once you’ve reached the top in science, it’s actually quite hard to fall, even when you’re busy treading on the fingers of those trying to assail your lofty tower. Merton calls this phenomenon of outsiders being kept on the outside – with much gnashing of teeth – the Matthew effect.
J.B.S. Haldane noticed it at work in his sphere. During the late 1950s he spent a few years as a professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, where one of his students, S.K. Roy, had carried out a Herculean task in improving the quality of various strains of rice. Haldane knew what would happen when he and Roy published the work together. ‘Every effort will be made here to crab his work,’ he wrote. ‘He has not got a PhD or even a first-class MSc. So either the research is no good, or I did it.’ According to Haldane, Roy deserved about 95 per cent of the credit. ‘The other 5 per cent may be divided between the Indian Statistical Institute and myself,’ he said. ‘I deserve credit for letting him try what I thought was a rather ill-planned experiment, on the general principle that I am not omniscient.’
That may seem extraordinarily generous for a senior scientist, but then Haldane was a Marxist, and had been a fully paid-up member of the British Communist Party. Not that you have to espouse Marxism to be generous and a scientist. An earlier example of bucking the trend was the mathematician Isaac Barrow. In 1669, Barrow gave up the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge to make way for his student, Isaac Newton. It is interesting to note that Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar dreamed of becoming the Lucasian Professor; sadly, the Machiavellian antics of Arthur Eddington made that impossible. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Eddington, a devout Quaker, followed Jesus’s philosophy to the letter.
Science is a fight to the intellectual death, but not between equal adversaries. It takes place in a gladiatorial arena where the challenger has to overcome not only the established champion, but also his or