Scientists as Storytellers by Steve Zeitlin

Volume 29
Fall-Winter
2003

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...the struggle of scientists themselves to create metaphors and parables to understand and explain the universe attests to the universal need for stories.

Steve Zeitlin is the director of City Lore in New York City.

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Scientists as Storytellers by Steve Zeitlin

How do you wear the universe? Does it drape across your shoulders loose or snug? Are you lost in it? Does it need some alterations? Is it a rag or shmatte thrown across your shoulder? Or are you life resplendent in that intergalactic diamond cloak? I jotted down these lines, inspired by the new popular cosmologists—scientists like Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku, who use homespun metaphors to make the mysteries of the universe as comfortable as a well-worn coat.

Scientists often use stories and parables to convey their theories to the public. But unlike the ancient Greek and Babylonian sages, who used tales and myths to bring religion to the people, the new cosmologists use the homespun metaphor to give the gods of mathematics a human face. In this new literature, a beam of light—almost impossible to catch because time slows down as you approach it—becomes a ghost ship, the Flying Dutchman about whom old sailors once spun tall tales. The scientists claim credit for their own discoveries, their own individual advances in scientific thinking, but they share an evolving body of stories and metaphors—a kind of folklore of science—that can convey their ideas in lay terms. Cosmologist John Wheeler, for instance, uses an old-fashioned image from his high school era to explain how a black hole can be visible in the darkness of space. At a high school prom, when the lights are low, you can see the girls in white dresses whirling around; the young men in black tuxedos are barely visible. Yet the white whirls give convincing evidence that there must be something holding them in orbit. The girls are like bright stars, the boys the black holes.

Once, human beings looked up into the sky and imagined stories written in the constellations, such as Orion and Gemini; science and folklore were one and the same. Today, a folklorist sets forth on a journey into the very different world of the scientist. I began by reading Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, Brian Green’s The Enchanted Universe, and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters. I was struck by the way that scientists use similes and metaphors and stories. To understand the relationship between science and folklore, I sought out some of the scientists and asked them about the relationship between science and storytelling. Spending a few hours in the orbit of their universes was like being outside on a clear night of stars. In his book Hyperspace, Japanese American Michio Kaku discusses how cosmologists have replaced "'faith' in an all-powerful God with 'faith' in quantum theory and general relativity." In an interview, he reminded me that the gospel according to St. John, chapter one, verse one, reads, "In the beginning was the word." "The physicists," said Kaku, "say 'in the beginning was the quantum.'"

My favorite scientist-as-storyteller parable, used by many contemporary scientists, is the tale of Flatland, a favorite allegory for theoretical physicists who explore string theory. String theory posits that within the smallest units in the cosmos, quanta, are still smaller units comprising tiny vibrating strings. The notion of tiny vibrating strings is not that hard to understand. We know that there are things so small we can’t see them—atoms, electrons—and so why not vibrating strings? But here’s where it starts to get a little dicey. The strings are not just vibrating in our three-dimensional world, they are vibrating not in four or five but in ten dimensions. Now that is going to require some megametaphor to explain—perhaps something more than a metaphor—a whole story, in fact.

To explain it, scientists like Brian Green and Michio Kaku are fond of drawing on a nineteenth-century novel by Edwin Abbott, headmaster of the City of London School, who used a powerful extended metaphor or parable to convey the notion of a multidimensional universe. The characters are squares, lines, triangles. They live in a world with no height; they’re flat as a page. These figures could not picture what things look like in our three-dimensional universe. One day, a sphere rolls across their world. The novel’s hero, Mr. Square, can’t see the sphere because he lives in two dimensions. But as the sphere moves through his world as if it were a flat piece of paper, he sees a circle that grows bigger and then smaller. Lord Sphere, a character from a different universe, called Spaceland, tries to describe what he looks like to Flatland’s Mr. Square. He asks him to picture a direction that is "upward and not northward." Mr. Square remains unconvinced. Frustrated, Lord Sphere resorts to deeds to prove his case. He peels Mr. Square off the page, who then floats like a sheet of paper on the wind. Returning to his flat world, Mr. Square is thoroughly convinced. He tries to convert his fellow Flatlanders, but they label him a heretic and throw him in jail.

Another science writer pictured a world as flat as a pool table and suggested that a multidimensional world might seem to its inhabitants as alien as a misaimed pool ball jumping up off the table and over the side. In an interview, Brian Green talked with me about Flatland. "By exploring readjustments of world view that are required in moving from a two- to a three-dimensional universe," he said, "we can get a sense for what it would be like for us to go from our three-dimensional world into four or five dimensions. Because it turns out that string theory demands that our world actually has more dimensions than we are aware of from common experience."

The scientists I spoke with gave different reasons for using stories. I was surprised to learn that their metaphors and stories are more than a way to convey their ideas to lay audiences. Brian Green said, "I don’t feel I understand anything if I only understand the mathematics." Astrophysicist Margaret Geller described how the creation of stories guides her research. In her daily work, she posits a smooth-running story and then tests it against reality. It’s been said, she told me, that "science is 'creativity in a straitjacket' because you can make up lots of stories, and the ones that don’t match nature are worthless. The only ones that are good are the ones that are consistent."

Scientific theories have wreaked havoc with many of humanity’s most fantastic myths, but the struggle of scientists themselves to create metaphors and parables to understand and explain the universe attests to the universal need for stories. The universe goes on forever, and particles can grow endlessly small. As creatures trying to grasp it all with our mere kilogram of brain, we cry out for a beginning, a middle, and an end. Perhaps we might think of storytellers and scientists alike—as anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff once put it—not as Homo sapiens but as Homo narrans, human beings as storytellers.

But the search for beauty and meaning in the cosmos goes beyond even storytelling. Knowing of my passion for popular science, this year for Father’s Day my wife gave me a copy of It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, edited by Graham Farmelo. The book suggested some other points where aesthetics and science intersect. Mathematics, Brian Green told me, is a language, just as English is a language. In English, metaphors are like equations, albeit a little less precise than a mathematician’s. Farmelo’s book begins with a discussion of the mother of all equations, Einstein’s e=mc². He compares the equation to a powerful poem that, like a perfect sonnet, would be spoiled if as much as a word or comma were changed. The premise of the book, which presents essays by scientists from several fields, is that in modern science, the universe is explained by very simple equations, beautiful in their simplicity, suggesting that God is either a mathematician or a poet—or both. Paul Dirak, the Nobel Prize-winning Cambridge physicist and creator of the Dirak formula, once said, "God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world." Margaret Geller recalls him speaking to her class at Princeton. "I spent my life writing beautiful formulas," he said.

As I read Farmelo’s book, Keats’s famous line popped into my head: "beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know." It’s an equation: beauty = truth, truth = beauty. Although they don’t use the word truth, scientists seem to be looking for the same elegant simplicity, the same beautiful formula, because according to them, the physical principles of the universe are best expressed with elegant formulas. The beauty of the formula captures what a poet might call "truth." So scientists are using metaphor and story not only to convey their ideas to the public, not only to provide themselves with a deeper understanding of their own ideas, but also to search for the elegant formulas and ideas that some scientists consider the hallmark of all truly great theories.

Physicist Michio Kaku told me about the elegant formula that string theorists have devised. He suggested that it has the beauty of Einstein’s e=mc² and can do what Einstein tried to accomplish for the last thirty years of his life but never achieved: putting together the insights of quantum mechanics and general relativity, the theories of the smallest and the largest bodies in the universe. Before string theory, scientists postulated a "unified field theory" that was a foot long, had dozens of variables, and was anything but graceful. It was like "trying to put together the most beautiful animal in the world by pasting together giraffes, whales, and mules with Scotch tape," said Kaku. He then came up with his own twist on the Flatland story. Once, he told me, a gorgeous gemstone fell to Flatland and broke in two parts. One piece was general relativity and the other quantum mechanics. The Flatlanders simply couldn’t find a way to tape them together to create a unified theory. Then a sage suggested that they shift one piece not "left or right" but "up" into another dimension—and the two parts fit perfectly.

So the constellations may have been a figment of the ancients’ imaginations, but there are still plenty of stories out there in the universe. And a folklorist can feel quite comfortable under a canopy of beautiful stars in our humble corner of the Milky Way galaxy within the Virgo supercluster of galaxies within the known universe.

"Scientists as Storytellers" by Steve Zeitlin appeared in Voices, Vol. 29, No. 3-4, Fall-Winter, 2003. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.