Blog by Pippa Goldschmidt
Some fiction writers
are apt to be magpies with science and pick off the shinier bits for use as
metaphors to adorn novels that otherwise have little to say explicitly about
the subject. And scientists’ activities around communicating their work usually
assumes that the science itself will remain unchanged.
But yesterday’s event
with Ben Marcus and Charles Fernyhough turned this assumption on its head to
consider the influence of fiction on science. In his latest novel ‘The Flame
Alphabet’ Ben Marcus makes concrete the power of language to hurt us;
children’s language has become toxic to adults who struggle to find an
antidote. It’s a metaphor for the inevitable separation between parents and their
children, as well as the gap between speech and thought. Charles Fernyhough is
an academic psychologist and author who has written both non-fiction as well as
fiction. His most recent book ‘Pieces of Light’ is an exploration of the
science of memory and his forthcoming novel ‘A Box of Birds’ tests a
neuroscientist’s view that her sense of self is only an illusion.
Both speakers talked
about the capacity of fiction to put science under the microscope – Charles
Fernyhough stated that if neuroscience’s recent theories of how we think and
remember aren’t convincing in fictional settings then it should be neuroscience
that is found wanting. Ben Marcus views fiction as a way of telling the truth
about the world. This shouldn’t be
particularly startling, after all science relies on thought experiments such as
Schrodinger’s Cat – experiments which are undoable in the real world and yet
which tell us something about how that world operates. Fiction can be seen as a
thought experiment – one where the author sets up the initial conditions and
the reader creates the outcome. We all do science, every day, when we interact
with the world and try and make sense of it. And scientists are influenced by
apparently non-scientific thoughts and ideas. See ‘What Scientists Read’ for a neat
little experiment about literary influences on science.
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