The Universe Within (26 page)

Mary started writing
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
on one of these journeys to Italy with Percy, when she was only eighteen. It was published anonymously, although with a preface by Percy, when Mary was twenty-one. Now recognized as one of the earliest works of science fiction,
96
Frankenstein
provides a compelling warning about the seductions and dangers of science. Shelley's reference to Prometheus shows the still-persistent influence of ancient Greek civilization on the most forward thinkers of the time.

Contemporary science set the background for the novel. In November 1806, the British chemist Sir Humphrey
Davy gave the Bakerian Lecture at the Royal Society in London. His topic was electricity and electrochemical analysis. In his introduction he said, “It will be seen that Volta [inventor of the battery] has presented to us a key that promises to lay open some of the most mysterious recesses of nature . . . There is now before us a boundless prospect of novelty in science; a country unexplored, but noble and fertile in aspect; a land of promise in philosophy.”
97

Public demonstrations and experiments were very popular in London at this time. A particularly notorious example was an attempt by another Italian, Giovanni Aldini, professor of anatomy at Bologna, to revive the body of a murderer six hours after he had been hanged. Aldini's demonstrations were breathlessly reported in the press: “On the first application of the electrical arcs, the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened . . . Vitality might have been fully restored, if many ulterior circumstances had not rendered this —
inappropriate
.”
98

Mary Shelley was likely inspired by events like these, and the general fascination with science, to write
Frankenstein
. Her novel captures the intensity and focus of a young scientist — Dr. Frankenstein — on the track of solving a great mystery: “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” Overwhelmed with the exhilaration of his finding, he states, “What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within my grasp.” His success encourages him to press on: “My imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man.”
99
Without any thought of the possible dangers, Frankenstein creates a monster whose need for companionship he cannot satisfy and who eventually exacts revenge by murdering Frankenstein's new bride.

In 1822, four years after
Frankenstein
appeared, Percy Shelley was drowned in a sailboat accident off Italy. Four years after that, Mary published her fourth novel,
The Last Man
, foretelling the end of humankind in 2100 as the result of a plague. The book is a damning critique of man's romantic notions of his own power to control his destiny. Echoing
Frankenstein
's reference to Prometheus,
The Last Man
opens with the discovery of the cave of an ancient Greek oracle at Cumae in southern Italy. (In fact, the cave was actually discovered more than a century after the publication of Shelley's book.) The narrator recounts finding scattered piles of leaves on which the Sibyl, or prophetess, of the oracle at Cumae, recorded her detailed premonitions. After years of work organizing and deciphering the scattered fragments, the narrator presents
The Last Man
as a transcription of the Sibyl's predictions.

In her introduction
,
Shelley refers to Raphael's last painting,
The Transfiguration.
It depicts a stark dichotomy between enlightenment and nobility in the upper half of the painting, and the chaotic, dark world of humanity in the lower half. This conflict, between Apollonian and Dionysian principles, has been one of the most constant themes in literature and in philosophy. Apollo and Dionysus were both sons of Zeus. Apollo was the god of the sun, dreams, and reason; Dionysus was the god of wine and pleasure. Shelley's reference to the painting is interesting. There is a mosaic copy of Raphael's
Transfiguration
in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome — a sort of digital version of the real painting — and Shelley compares her task of reconstructing the Sibyl's vision with that of assembling
The Transfiguration
if all one had were the painted tiles.

The central theme of the book is the failure of Romantic idealism. Mary's husband, Percy, believed profoundly in the primacy of ideas. Writing about ancient Rome, for example, he stated: “The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea: the consequence was empire, and the reward ever-living fame.”
100

Early on in
The Last Man
, the ambitious, fame-­seeking Raymond is elected as Lord Protector: “The new elections were finished; parliament met, and Raymond was occupied in a thousand beneficial schemes . . . he was continually surrounded by projectors and projects which were to render England one scene of fertility and magnificence; the state of poverty was to be abolished; men were to be transported from place to place almost with the same facility as the Princes in the
Arabian Nights
. . .”
101

Before any of these plans came to be realized, war between Greece and Turkey intervenes, and Raymond is killed in Constantinople. Adrian, son of the last king of England, is a leading figure. But he is a hopeless dreamer (clearly modelled after Shelley's husband, Percy). Following a brief period of peace, he states, “Let this last but twelve months . . . and earth will become a Paradise. The energies of man were before directed at the destruction of his species: they now aim at its liberation and preservation. Man cannot repose, and his restless aspirations will now bring forth good instead of evil. The favoured countries of the south will throw off the iron yoke of servitude [Shelley's reference to slavery]; poverty will quit us, and with that, sickness. What may not the forces, never before united, of liberty and peace achieve in this dwelling of man?”
102

Adrian's dreams are also soon shattered. A plague is rapidly spreading west from Constantinople, and people come flooding in from Greece, Italy, and France. Raymond's dithering successor, Ryland, flees his position as the plague enters London. Adrian, the Romantic, assumes command, but his principal strategy is to convince people to pretend that there is no plague. Eventually the truth becomes obvious and he has no choice but to lead the population out of England, onto the Continent, where they slowly and painfully die.

Throughout, Shelley recounts the false optimism of the characters, who are always trying to see a bright future when they are in fact doomed. Their grandiose visions and their delusions about the powers of reason, right, and progress cause them to fail, again and again. Finally, the last survivor, Verney, sails off around the world: “I form no expectation of alteration for the better, but the monotonous present is intolerable to me. Neither hope nor joy are my pilots — restless despair and fierce desire of change lead me on. I long to grapple with danger, to be excited by fear, to have some task, however slight or voluntary, for each day's fulfilment.”
103
The irony is palpable.
The Last Man
was received poorly on its publication and was forgotten for one and a half centuries, but it has recently come to be seen as Shelley's second-most important work.

I cannot help also referring to one of the book's minor characters, the astronomer Merrival. His calculations have told him that in a hundred thousand years, the pole of the Earth will coincide with the pole of the Earth's orbit around the sun and, in his words, “a universal spring will be produced, and the earth will become a paradise.”
104
He pays no attention to the spreading plague, even when it affects his family, busy as he is writing his “Essay on the Pericyclical Motions of the Earth's Axis.” I hope we scientists are not Merrivals!

NEARLY TWO CENTURIES HAVE
passed since
Frankenstein
. The monster Shelley envisaged Dr. Frankenstein creating has not materialized, nor so far have uncontrollable diseases like the plague she imagined in
The Last Man
. Nevertheless, the dangers she speaks about are as relevant as ever, and we would do well to pay attention to her concerns. Advances in biology have led to vaccinations, antibiotics, antiretrovirals, clean water, and other revolutionary public health advances. And genetic engineering has not yet produced any monsters. However, the benefits of science have been shared far too unevenly. There have been, and there continue to be, a vast number of deaths and untold suffering from preventable causes. The
only
guarantee of progress is a continued commitment to humane principles, and to conducting science on behalf of society.

One does not need to look far to find examples where science's success has encouraged a certain overreach and disconnect. There is a tendency to exaggerate the significance of scientific discoveries, and to dismiss non­scientific ideas as irrelevant.

As an example from my own field of cosmology, let me cite Lawrence Krauss's recent book,
A Universe from Nothing
. In it, he claims that recent observations showing that the universe has simple, flat geometry imply that it could have been created out of nothing. His argument is, in my view, based upon a technical gaffe, but that is not my point here. Through a misrepresentation of the physics, he leaps to the conclusion that a creator was not needed. The book includes an afterword by Richard Dawkins, hailing Krauss's argument as the final nail in the coffin for religion. Dawkins closes with, “If
On the Origin of Species
was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism [which is what Dawkins calls religion], we may come to see
A Universe from Nothing
as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”

The rhetoric is impressive, but the arguments are shallow. The philosopher David Albert — one of today's deepest thinkers on quantum theory — framed his response at the right level, in his recent review of Krauss's book in the
New York Times
, lamenting that “all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don't know,
dumb
.”
105
In comparing Krauss's and Dawkins's arguments with the care and respectfulness of those presented by Hume in his
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,
all the way back in the eighteenth century, one can't help feeling the debate has gone backwards. Hume presents his skepticism through a dialogue which allows opposing views to be forcefully expressed, but which humbly reaches no definitive conclusion. After all, that is his main point: we do not know whether God exists. One of the participants is clearly closest to representing Hume's own doubts: tellingly, Hume names him Philo, meaning “love.”

For another example of the disconnection between science and society, let me quote the final paragraph of U.S. theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg's otherwise excellent book
The First Three Minutes
, describing the hot big bang. He says, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself . . . The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
106

Many scientists express this viewpoint, that the universe seems pointless at a deep level, and that our situation is somehow tragic. For myself, I find this position hard to understand. Merely to be alive, to experience and to appreciate the wonder of the universe, and to be able to share it with others, is a miracle. I can only think that it is the separation of scientists from society, caused by the focus and intensity of their research, that leads them to be so dismissive of other aspects of human existence.

Of course, taking the view that the universe seems pointless is also a convenient way for scientists to eliminate, as far as possible, any prior prejudices or ulterior motives from their research. They want to figure out how things work without being biased by any thoughts of why they might work that way. It is reasonable to postpone questions of purpose when we have no scientific means of answering them. But to deny such influences is not to deal with them. Scientists are often consciously or unconsciously driven by agendas well outside science, even if they do not acknowledge them.

Many people outside science are interested in exactly the questions that scientists prefer to avoid. They want to know what scientific discoveries mean: in the case of cosmology,
why
the universe exists and
why
we are here. I think that if science is to overcome the disconnection with society, it needs to be better able to explain science's greatest lesson: that for the purpose of advancing our knowledge, it is extremely important to doubt constantly and to live with uncertainty. Richard Feynman put it this way: “This attitude of mind — this attitude of uncertainty — is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, we cannot retreat from it anymore.”
107
In today's soundbite world, intellectual modesty and being frank about uncertainty are not the easiest things to promote. Nevertheless, I suspect scientists will become more, not less, credible if they do so, and society will feel less alienated from science.