Science and the arts

In one of the excellent Sherlock Holmes short stories "The Blue Carbuncle", Holmes detects from a hat that has been given to him that the hat's owner had no gas in his house, as there were a number of candle stains on the hat.

"Candles"? "Gas?". No electricity? No pressing a simple switch and lights coming on?

Light years ago? (Pun intended!). Actually the early 1880s - approximately 130 years ago. For those convinced by scientific research into the subject, 130 years is a very small percentage of the time that this planet has existed, and even for the religious fanatics who would, in their usual silly fashion, limit the earth to no more than 6,000 years, 130 years is far less than 1% of that time.

One simple indication of how far we have come in a relatively short period of time. An ordinary everyday electrician, who comes to fix your wiring if you have a problem, is dealing with problems that were not even conceivable in the 1880s.

Get into the debate as to whether Marconi or Tesla was responsible for inventing radio, and then examine radio technology now. I imagine that both those geniuses would marvel at the progress that has been made.

And it is not just in the realms of technological science where there has been so much progress. Take medical science for example. For the past 30-odd years AIDS and research surrounding it have been constantly in our view.

Go back to the 1880s, the problem then was syphilis - a nasty, highly contagious disease, but one that could not be discussed in polite circles. Then look at some of the famous people who caught it and died - the gunmaker, Samuel Colt, the French author, Guy de Maupassant (I have recently read an article where that was disputed, but anyway) among others.

Between 1905 and 1910 three German scientists, Fritz Schlaudinn, August von Wassermann and notably Paul Ehrlich, worked on the discovery of the causes and cure for this disease, and finally came up with the cure. The disease still survives, it can cause inestimable damage if left untreated, but it can eventually be cured. Its presence, along with AIDS, should though serve as a warning to those who wish to indulge in too frivolous an approach to matters sexual!

We can then conclude that science moves forward and moves us forward. Scientific laws are seemingly fixed, but research will enhance and change them. Over time the original thinking that drove the initial discovery still can be improved. Great scientific brains can still see the possibilities that were not available to their almost equally talented predecessors.

The arts at first glance do not fall into quite the same category. As a trained linguist, I can point out changes that have occurred in common speech even in my life time, as languages evolve. Then of course there is the fact that no two people use exactly the same version of the same language! Shocked by that comment? You shouldn't be!

We all have acquired our own vocabulary, we have all found different ways to express the same situations. Nobody is exactly parallel to anyone else in their choice of vocabulary and clauses used. Language has its scientific layer in the grammatical rules that apply ("ich habe geschrieben", not "ich habe geschriebt"), but the actual choice of using those rules is a personal thing.

And still on the area of arts and science and their differences, there are nebulous areas like history.

IMHO there is such a thing as a scientific historian. The events occurred, they are written down as fact, and the facts are unquestionable. The date that the Weimar Republic was founded, for example, is an exact date. The sequence of facts leading up to that event can also be listed accurately.

The point with history though comes though with the element of conjecture. This happened, but why?

Why was the Weimar Republic conceived the way that it was? Was it a total failure or a partial success that succumbed to unfortunate events?

At this point history becomes an art form. The analysis of the events is often very much an individual assessment. Take the differing views of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock and Ian Kershaw on Nazi Germany for example. They all the acknowledge the same events, but their interpretation as to why differs.

This is interesting, but not particularly dangerous. Where it gets dangerous is where people change historical fact (even things that occurred with the past 24 hours) for their own benefit. It was commonplace for the Nazis to do this. It was a fact of life in the Soviet Union. And it is, notably, beginning to become a fact of life across the western democracies.

Fact and truth become increasingly blurred for the sake of political convenience and its ugly brother, propaganda. Historians will eventually look back upon the facts (if they can be sifted from the propaganda - not always an easy objective, see how much Nazi propaganda from the 1930s and 40s still passes for truth in certain areas), but if you are living now, and the facts are debased, your individual life can suffer.

And when scientific misuse is added to the spread of inaccurate information? Unfortunately that is an everyday occurrence. We are usually too busy with our daily concerns to get too deeply into the issues concerned, but a degree of scepticism in this regard is always healthy.