The Age of Wonder

"The reason for picking this is that it is a sort of cross-cultural book. Richard Holmes is a very eminent biographer. He has written biographies of several of the Romantic poets including Shelley and Coleridge. And I was intrigued when I saw this book by him sitting in our bookshop, because I didn’t know that he was particularly interested in science. His book is all about how, even in the age of Romanticism, science was an important part of culture. And it was, as the title suggests, both beautiful and offering much but also terrifying. In those days it was considered completely normal to be interested in the arts but also to do scientific experiments. There was no contradiction there. Nowadays we have gone through this whole two cultures thing and many people think there is a massive divide, which I don’t think there is. And do you think it would be helpful today if people were happy to embrace different disciplines and there weren’t such divisions between science and art? Indeed I do, and as part of the 350-year celebrations the Royal Society and Tate Modern invited three artists to work with three scientists on different aspects of climate change and then to have a workshop on what they can do with the subject. Some people would say that the whole idea of science saving us from the whole mess of climate change is a bit of a cop-out because we should be helping ourselves. I would say, yes, don’t bank on science alone. What is clear is that there is no free lunch, and almost everything we do has consequences of some sort or another. And there are still some things that ordinary people could and should do, and one of the most important things is to waste less. But on the other hand I don’t think there is any reason to despair. Most of us who are working in this field alternate between optimism and despair on a fairly regular cycle. And people often say, ‘Are we headed for a catastrophe? What do you think?’ The answer is, I think we are in for a bumpy ride but I think there is a lot that we can do about it to make it less bumpy, and we could and should get on with them while we still have time. I don’t agree with the extreme environmentalists who say that all technological solutions should immediately be treated with suspicion. It isn’t science that has got us here. The first people who started burning coal weren’t scientists. They were just ordinary people trying things out. Essentially it’s just people who are responsible for the situation we are in. I do think that science played a part and science can also play a part in solving it, but we need other people as well."

"It’s a splendid book. Richard Holmes is a literary biographer. He is well known for a two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , which was published 5-10 years before this. It’s a group biography of writers and scientists in the late 18th and early 19th century—Herschel and Humphrey Davy on the science side, and the Romantic poets, mostly in England, and their engagement with the sublime and with science. Among Holmes’s qualities are his warmth, his extraordinary depth of knowledge and the fluency in his writing. It’s just a really enjoyable read. It’s particularly germane to the topic of science and wonder because the period he’s writing about—which is roughly the 1770s through to the 1830s—is the time of the Romantics. In Britain, if not necessarily elsewhere, we tend to think of the two cultures—C.P. Snow’s phrase from the 1950s—that there’s a culture of the arts and a culture of the sciences and never the twain shall meet. People will go back to William Wordsworth, for example, saying “we murder to dissect”—this loathing of the medics who will just tear apart a body and do not appreciate its integral beauty. Or John Keats’s line about how the touch of cold philosophy unweaves the rainbow. There’s a sense that science is inimical to beauty and wonder of life. But one of the things that figures in Richard Holmes’s book is Coleridge’s great enthusiasm for science. Coleridge was friends with Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist of the age, a great discoverer and a scientific entrepreneur. Coleridge was asked, ‘Why do you go to to all these lectures that they run at the Royal Institution?’ and he said, ‘to improve my stock of metaphors.’ He said that science being necessarily performed with a passion of hope is poetical. So this book is enlightening to read if you still had this idea of the two cultures, to see that the same false dichotomy was playing out around the 1800s. In fact, it wasn’t a dichotomy at the time either, and it isn’t a dichotomy today. You even hear people today talking about the one culture. Even we arts graduates have some reasonable grasp of the second law of thermodynamics as well as the late plays of William Shakespeare. It’s an accepted part of our culture, that you need to know both — or at least that’s hope."

"This comes directly after the period I looked at myself. Daston and Park argued that there was an age of wonder in medieval times, when wonder was regarded as a virtue and curiosity was a vice. Medieval wonder was all about being awed and dumbstruck at what God could create, and your questions stopped there. Whereas the wonder that Richard Holmes is thinking about in this book was an emergent appreciation of the awesomeness of nature – the Romantic notion of the sublime. This was almost a backlash to the strict rationalism that eventually emerged from the so-called scientific revolution during the Enlightenment. I found Richard’s book inspirational not only because it’s so beautifully written, and deeply informed about the cultural currents of those times, but also because of what it says about how to think and write about science. He says we have to find a more inclusive and generous way of writing about science, that no longer separates science from the rest of culture. We have some fantastic writing about science today, and the best science writers do a great job of making complex scientific ideas seem very lucid. But it is still difficult for us to get away from presenting it as a dollop of science separated from everything else, such as culture. I’ve increasingly tried to avoid that – to show how science is embedded in culture, feeds into culture, and is affected by it. And that is what Richard does in this book too, for the late 18th and early 19th centuries."