Prophecy and Progress

"We can trace the Victorian Gentleman's best qualities back to the parfit knights and preux chevaliers of the middle ages; and trace them forward into the modern gentleman, that breed we call scientists..... The scientist is but one more form, and will be superseded."

John Fowles, "The French Lieutenant's Woman"

The prospect of reviewing progress in a particular field - whether for an Annual Report or over a longer period for some other document- is a daunting one. Things which from one point of view seem to be key events or concepts vanish almost into insignificance when viewed from another. One thing, however, is for sure: it's all almost certainly the fault of the computer.

The machine on whose screen I write this has more power than was available to a whole department twenty five years ago. Unheard volumes of storage (but still never enough), capability for instant access to the data and opinions of friends and colleagues across the world (equally the capability of propagating my views, for good or ill, accurate or inaccurate, to a potential "audience" of at least 30 million) and the ability to generate experimental information (real information?) faster than ever before, seem somehow to have set the basic experimental nature of laboratory work at a remote distance, if it appears at all. (What 1970 chemist would ever have countenanced performing a "titration" on a screen - yet this and other "practical" exercises seem to be replacing bench work to a greater and greater extent, at least at the "teaching" stage, but in some cases also beyond. What price prediction of spectra (rather than observation) "taking over" in the next twenty five years?)

Given then, an avoidance of an historical review, and more a consideration of the place of the reviewer in the scheme of things, what role can we assign to the scientist - the experimenter - when he doesn't have to swirl his flask (even metaphorically) to see whether a reaction will work? Science, even experimental science, is about control, of course, about being able to predict and thus control the course of nature (who was it that said "When you can measure something, you can own it"?) Increasingly it seems over the last twenty five years, the politics of science has shifted from a "need to know" to a "need to control" (or at least a need to "influence"). No bad thing, perhaps, because control will then reside properly with the politicians. But what to do with the superfluous (and costly) experimenters? Since their role includes rationalising fragmentary information about the world around, in much the same way as the minstrels and troubadours of the middle ages did, why not redefine the scientist's new métier as that of modern "story tellers" who have little need of experiments, but merely require a large fund of anecdotes? (or perhaps just a large database, like the Internet) The computer then can help not only in storing their articles, but in speaking them - and later perhaps in generating them. And then, since everything will eventually reach the stage of being computer based, there will come a time when we will have no need of experiments or experimenters at all ....

The 18th January 1996 is the 60th anniversary of the death of Rudyard Kipling, that paragon of story-tellers of the British Empire. So it seems both fortunate and appropriate that a previously unheard of manuscript has come to light. Although Kipling had a healthy respect for engineers and scientists (I suspect mostly Scottish engineers, since he spent a good deal of his time travelling on steam ships) he seldom wrote about them and this little story is unusual in that apparently it deals with an aspect of the progress of science....

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