22 theories that shook the world

The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-Century Science
By Alan Lightman
Pantheon, 553 pp., illustrated, $32.50

In 1959, the English scientist-turned-novelist C. P. Snow famously complained about the gap between ''the two cultures," and especially about the short shrift given to science in the public culture. Why was it that the poet T. S. Eliot was accounted an ''intellectual" but not the physicist Paul Dirac? Wasn't Dirac's achievement in describing the magnetic monopole at least as important, and as much an act of creative imagination, as Eliot's ''The Waste Land"?

Almost 50 years on, we hear fewer such complaints. Scientists are happier now -- no more talk of their ''marginal" status in the modern research university -- and, if university graduates in literature or sociology are ignorant of string theory or the role of messenger RNA, then it's widely accepted that's just the way things are in our increasingly specialized culture. The price we pay for the good things arising from intellectual specialization is mutual incomprehension. It's not just that humanists don't understand scientists, since different sorts of scientists, say, physical chemists and volcanologists, typically don't much understand each other. From time to time, there are still grumblings about ''the public ignorance of science," but I've heard few complaints about ''public ignorance of sociological theory" or ''public ignorance of the novels of Anthony Trollope." That alone tells you quite a lot about the esteem in which the natural sciences are held.

Yet some remnants of Snow's uneasiness still remain, and ''The Discoveries," by physicist-turned-novelist Alan Lightman, is one. Lightman wonders why we read ''Moby-Dick" in the original while the great scientific papers of the past are only sifted for their contributions to current wisdom and then distilled into textbooks: ''The mythology seems to be that in science, as opposed to all other human activities, only the final results matter." Scientists consume their own history: As science progresses, so it transforms past discoveries into presently accepted truths. Who needs the scientific-past-as-it-actually-was, since the present is always so much better? The idea of progress -- and so the dispensability of the past -- is much easier to sustain in science than in novel writing.

Lightman also wonders why great imaginative literature circulates widely in educated culture while scientific writings do not. ''The Discoveries" is his remedy for this state of affairs: It assembles his personal list of 22 of the 20th century's greatest scientific papers, each introduced by a brief editorial essay. The papers reproduced here span most of the century -- from Max Planck's 1900 proposal of the quantum theory of energy, to two of Albert Einstein's shattering 1905 papers (on black-body radiation and special relativity), to Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of penicillin, to James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, to the beginnings of recombinant DNA technology in a 1972 paper by Paul Berg and his colleagues. About half of the papers have been abridged -- some by almost 70 percent -- to cut out ''the less important or more detailed material," which, if you think about it, is at odds with Lightman's firm stand on the importance of reading the originals. (Abridgments of ''Moby-Dick" do exist, but they're usually disapproved of by those insisting on the creative force of the original.)

There are two big problems with Lightman's exercise, and neither has anything to do with his choice of papers -- though some will wonder why a century that ended with biomedicine usurping physics' previous role as queen of the sciences is dominated in this collection by physics and astronomy (60 percent of the papers). One problem is that scientific discovery often is a great human act of creative imagination, but it's really hard to appreciate the passion and the creativeness from reading the formal scientific literature. As the immunologist Sir Peter Medawar once wrote, the scientific paper systematically misrepresents the real processes of discovery. Not only do the conventions of formal scientific reporting portray scientists as more open-minded than they usually are, the convention of flat impersonality systematically disguises the drama, the tensions, and the emotions attending scientific work. Consider the vast difference between Watson and Crick's dry and terse 1953 report in Nature, and Watson's electrifying 1968 ''personal account," ''The Double Helix," with its stories of naked scientific ambition, morally dubious trespassings on other scientists' domains, and Watson's notorious views of the talents and physical appearance of his ''rival," the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin. Lightman's introductory essays do something to humanize the discoverers and to set their work in historical context, but, averaging 15 pages, there's not a whole lot that can be done within that compass.

The second problem concerns the nature of the modern scientific paper itself -- practically any paper and not only those winning Lightman's prizes. Scientific papers are usually very hard to understand. They are often incomprehensible to nonscientists and sometimes almost as opaque to scientists in different specialties. In the middle of the 16th century, Copernicus insisted that ''astronomy is written for astronomers": He did not expect just anyone to understand his book introducing the sun-centered system, and the specialized training required to master the languages of scientific disciplines has increased immeasurably since his time. That makes the conditions of intelligibility of scientific papers very different from those of, say, the novel. Both ''Moby-Dick" and ''Catch-22" are now written about by academic specialists in American literature, but neither was written for them.

The impulses that led Lightman to produce this book are praiseworthy -- we do need a better sense of science, and not just great breakthroughs, as ''human drama" -- but Lightman's own novels (''Einstein's Dreams," ''Good Benito"), and well-written, accessible histories of science, are better ways of encouraging such an appreciation.

Steven Shapin teaches at Harvard and is the author of several books on 17th-century science.