#tom mcleish

[anaxerneas]

Tom McLeish, Soft Matter

[luxe-pauvre]

Every scientist knows this, but for two centuries they have fallen mute about it, preferring instead a safer narrative about the ‘empirical method’ or ‘the logic of scientific discovery’. Science education favours the presentation of results, and a focus on knowledge, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science. [...] If scientists are somewhat shy about their experiences of imagination, then the artists, writers and composers I spoke to needed the same patience (and similarly the occasional drink) to draw them out about their repeated need to experiment. Scraping the paint from the canvas, redrafting the novel for the 10th time, rescoring the thematic musical material is – as every artist knows – the consequence of the material constraints that creativity meets unanticipated. The artist, too, makes hypotheses about how her material, words or sounds will achieve the goal in mind, however indistinctly conceived. The historically contemporaneous birth of the English novel and of the experimental method in science turns out to be no coincidence. Without making the naive claim that art and science are in any sense ‘doing the same thing’, the narrative similarities in the experience of those who work with them are remarkable. They need digging out because they become obscured by scientists shy of talking about imagination and artists about experiment.

Tom McLeish, Science is deeply imaginative: why is this treated as a secret?

[anaxerneas]

"Can you Count the Clouds?" asks the voice of God from the whirlwind in the stunningly beautiful catalogue of nature-questions from the Old Testament Book of Job. Tom McLeish takes a scientist's reading of this ancient text as a centrepiece to make the case for science as a deeply human and ancient activity, embedded in some of the oldest stories told about human desire to understand the natural world. Drawing on stories from the modern science of chaos and uncertainty alongside medieval, patristic, classical and Biblical sources, Faith and Wisdom in Science challenges much of the current 'science and religion' debate as operating with the wrong assumptions and in the wrong space. Its narrative approach develops a natural critique of the cultural separation of sciences and humanities, suggesting an approach to science, or in its more ancient form natural philosophy - the 'love of wisdom of natural things' - that can draw on theological and cultural roots. Following the theme of pain in human confrontation with nature, it develops a 'Theology of Science', recognising that both scientific and theological worldviews must be 'of' each other, not holding separate domains. Science finds its place within an old story of participative reconciliation with a nature, of which we start ignorant and fearful, but learn to perceive and work with in wisdom. Surprisingly, science becomes a deeply religious activity. There are urgent lessons for education, the political process of decision-making on science and technology, our relationship with the global environment, and the way that both religious and secular communities alike celebrate and govern science.

[anaxerneas]

Tom McLeish, Soft Matter

[lepartiprisdeschoses]

I started reading Tom McLeish's book on soft matter without knowing anything about the author previously, coming across things like this helps keep my interest in the Book of Job going. "That wonderful hymn to earth system science" is just a section of the Voice from the Whirlwind's speech, but that is an interesting way to describe it.

[anaxerneas]

Furthermore, the nature of experiment and ways of theorizing in soft matter raises profound questions of where 'fundamental' scientific ideas really lie. The American physicist and Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson, in a landmark article entitled 'More is Different' published in the 1970s, described how structures can 'emerge' at length scales much greater than those of atoms and molecules, but which are just as fundamental. Soft matter provides many illustrations of Anderson's claim that the notion of fundamental physics should not be tied to any one scale of length or energy, and that while reductionism (the explanation of the behaviour of a system purely in terms of that of its smallest constituents) is an essential tool in science, it cannot be the whole story of how we understand the world. Nature is built from many components, but fundamental novelty arises also from the way they are assembled hierarchically. A few dozen atoms can build small molecules, which can in turn be assembled into giant 'macromolecules' or 'nanoparticles', whose properties now depend not on their tiny building blocks but on their shape and structure as a whole.

Tom McLeish, Soft Matter

[oupacademic]

Tom McLeish, author of Faith and Wisdom in Science, explains how science and religion are intertwined and how science can actually be a deeply religious activity.

GIFs by Priscilla Yu for Oxford University Press.

[oupacademic]

If science has also been proven guilty of making claims that turn out to be false, Tom McLeish questions why science is perceived as being so different to religion. 

Image: Oxymoron, by Franco Folini. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.