Classic Edition: Stronger Than Old Hapless Gods

I was scheduled for a deeply unpleasant medical test yesterday, which I thought was going to leave me lots of time for blogging. yesterday afternoon and this morning. The preliminary test turned out to be so unpleasant (if anybody ever offers to stick a tube through your nose into your stomach, decline politely) that I didn't go through with the test, and, in fact, was kind of wiped out all last night. Hence, yesterday's light blogging, and today's lazy blogging.

One of the controversial things that China Miéville said on the Readercon panels I went to was to sort of dismiss the whole idea of narrative as some sort of confining bourgeois construct. He appeared to be arguing that any work with a coherent story was inherently dishonest, as there is no story in reality (though he did back off this somewhat in other comments).

While I'm not the right sort of person to argue that there is some greater purpose to reality, I have a hard time accepting his claims about the artificiality of narrative, or, rather, the idea that it's something we can or should dispense with. To cop a phrase from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Story is a force of nature. Even in science, narrative is very important to the way we understand the world.

Below the fold, I'll reproduce the text of an old post on story in science, which produced some intersting discussion at the time, and seems sort of relevant to the comments at Readercon.

In the very nice comment thread that's sprung up around the last post (this is why I envy Teresa Nielsen Hayden), Mary Messall writes about Physics in general:

The thing is stories don't give you numbers that can be checked by experiment. Equations do. Insofar as we demand that our science be experimentally verifiable, we're demanding that it consist of equations. In that sense there's no such thing as "a scientific explanation." Explanations are inherently unscientific -- unpredictive, unfalsifiable.

What's more, I find (to my dismay) that a great many, perhaps even the majority, of the equations we're given in class are used *without* interpretation. Sometimes I wander around demanding an interpretation for some specific expression from everyone in the department, and mostly I eventually come up with some story that satisfies me, but it's amazing how many of the people I ask in the meantime don't know and *don't care*.

And they're better at solving problems than I am.

I'm a little bit bitter about some of the professors who've had that attitude. "Interpretation is the same thing as popularization, as speculation. Frivolous. Unrigorous. Beneath us. Shut up and calculate." They're right, in a way. It can't predict anything.

I guess I still think stories (and applications, which are usually disdained by the same people) are the [horse], and the equations are the [cart]. But the equations-for-their-own-sakes people may be better scientists than I am. I'm not sure.

It's a big enough idea that it deserves a post of its own. I've written about something vaguely similar in the area of lecture prep-- twice, in fact: one, two-- so it should come as no surprise that I tend to think of stories as an integral part of physics.

Contrary to what Mary says, I've found that the very best physicists I know (and this includes a couple of Nobel laureates, if I may be permitted a JVP moment) are the ones who have the best grasp of the stories and interpretations. At least for the sort of physics that I do, it's essential to ground your understanding of the physics in terms of the real motions of real atoms that are the basis of everything. If you can understand what's going on in simple terms, and more importantly explain it that way to other people, that's a big step toward being able to push experiments in new directions, and explore new phenomena.

To some degree, this is an issue of sub-fields. I work in atomic, molecular, and optical physics, where the problems we study generally involve a smallish number of atoms doing comprehensible things. Other fields rely much more heavily on sophisticated mathematical tricks to make their problems tractable, which makes it harder to tell stories about what's going on. I took one class on Solid State, and after the first couple of weeks, I no longer had the foggiest idea what was going on in terms of actual electrons moving through solid materials-- it was all "reciprocal lattice vectors," which I still don't understand-- which made it a deeply unpleasant class all told.

On the other hand, though, I think the link between success in physics and a good grasp of stories could be extended to many of the best and brightest regardless of research topic. Einstein's real breakthrough with Special Relativity was a matter of storytelling-- people knew before Einstein that Lorentz transformations would solve the problems with Maxwell's Equations, but thought it was too weird. Einstein showed that not only was it the right solution, but it had to be that way, and he did it by providing stories to make it all make sense (again, see some earlier posts: one, two). Schroedinger's equation is in some sense a story that makes Heisenberg's matrix mechanics palatable (the theories are mathematically equivalent, but as I understand it, nobody could make heads or tails of Heisenberg's stuff). And when you get down to it, what are Feynman diagrams but little stories about what happens to an electron as it moves from point A to point B?

Yes, in some sense, the equations are the main thing. But when you look at the history of physics, you find again and again that the real giants of the field are the people who matched an interpretation to the equations, who came up with stories to explain it all. Any fool with a computer can manipulate equations, but it takes real genius to explain what's going on in a way that makes it make sense.

I don't have a good answer to "What's a photon?", but at least I can say this: If you feel that interpretations and stories are an important part of physics, you're in good company.