Three sciences

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For many, science is the central achievement of the twentieth century, displacing the arts as the primary expression of mankind's creativity.  As a result, we tend to believe science's myths, notably those about its essential unity.  We are told that science proceeds by consensus, and as a result offers a uniquely integrated and unified domain.  But this view, written by the mental victors, conveniently ignores the fact that there are really three sciences, not one.

The first is what we normally mean by the term, and what might be more exactly called universal science, if only because of its pretensions.  It is Big Science, embracing the crowd-pleaser theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology; it is the root of all our treasured modern technologies - computers, non-invasive surgery, space travel; it is the defining cultural influence of our epoch, and informs not just the rhythms of our daily lives, but our whole world-view.

Universal science is a construct of the last three or four hundred years.  It supplanted two earlier kinds of science, one a historical relict, now rightly defunct, the other a tradition which endures.  The former was based on Aristotelian physics, and represented the sclerotic legacy of the Middle Age's Scholasticism.  The latter is often called folk science, but is more truly parochial.

It embodies the tribe's knowledge about the larger forces in life - the weather, the tides, the movement of animals.  Today its quaint vaguenesses have been largely superseded by the apparent certainties of its brash younger sibling, universal science.  But it persists in those areas, notably the weather, where modern science flounders hopelessly when confronted by a system whose complexity defies simplistic analysis.  Lore such as 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight, red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning' clearly proclaims its pastoral origins; it also offers an empirical truth still beyond modern science's ken.

The last of the trinity of sciences might be called personal.  It is the solipsistic knowledge that we all have about ourselves, but which has no claim to validity beyond that arena.  This science embraces our specialist cures for colds, requirements for a sound night's sleep, ways to avoid hangovers, and combinations of foods and circumstances that are guaranteed to give us indigestion.  Just as parochial science is almost exclusively concerned with the local external world, so personal science is about our body, that most intimate internal space.

The progression from personal to parochial to universal therefore represents a constant expansion of knowledge's ambition, from the body, to the village, to all creation.  It thus also tracks science's historical rise to power, and its claim to increasing sovereignty.  The reverse movement from universal to personal also defines science's limitations.  Its theories of sub-nuclear matter and galactic cosmogony are so deep and abstract as to be scarcely refutable; but its feeble and flawed explanation of the weather is a constant reproach; and its ignorance about our purely subjective body-knowledge is near-total.

(1989)

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Windy City

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips.  Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power.  With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done.  An enormous silence hung over the whole building.  Outside, there was a clear blue sky.

Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong.  The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead.  Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack.  No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.

People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity.  Everywhere there were scenes of destruction:  huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road.  Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement.  People milled around, some taking photographs.  There were no trains and few buses.  An occasional ambulance flashed by.

On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said.  And the radio itself was strangely different.  Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes.  The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped.  Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee.  A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave.  It felt like the end of the world.

It was the Great Wind of '87.  'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'.  The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature.  Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable.  But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable.  A case of presque-vu.

For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London.  No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power.  Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently.  Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.

Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death.  After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave.  That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable.  In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze.  Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?

(1987)

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