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| Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - Matthew Stanley, 2007. Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A.S. Eddington. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
I wanted to review this fascinating biography of the British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) not because of a particular interest in astronomy or the history of science, but rather because of a small island that marks a crucial turning point in Eddington’s life. |
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| I wanted to review this fascinating biography of the British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) not because of a particular interest in astronomy or the history of science, but rather because of a small island that marks a crucial turning point in Eddington’s life. This is the island of Príncipe, situated in the Gulf of Guinea, just off the West Coast of Africa. Príncipe was the location for Eddington’s observations of the solar eclipse in 1919. The photographs and measurements taken during the eclipse became the much-disputed proof for the law of relativity that had been proposed a few years earlier by the young German physicist Albert Einstein.
On the lush tropical island, however, little reminds of the historical event, and few of its inhabitants know about it. Only a commemorative plaque, situated in the large plantation Sundy, a legacy of Portuguese colonialism and the place where Eddington conducted his experiments, reminds of the visit. I came across the plaque when visiting Príncipe in 2007, whilst conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the micro-state São Tomé e Príncipe of which the island forms part. An important cocoa producer up until the 20th century, São Tomé e Príncipe is now better known for its potential offshore petroleum resources. Should there indeed be oil, it could bring enormous benefits to the country’s residents. The estimated 165,000 Santomeans are the inhabitants of one of the poorest African countries blessed with rich natural assets but cut off from global and even regional markets.
Arriving on Príncipe from a Europe that was just coming out of a terrible war, Eddington described the island’s fertile tranquillity with amazement. In the letters to his sister – which are preserved in the Wren library of Trinity College in Cambridge – he talks about the full sugar bowls, the fruit and fish he and his colleague Cottingham indulge in. They arrived on April 29 and passed not even two months with their Portuguese hosts, putting up camp in Sundy, but passing much time in Príncipe’s main city, playing tennis on its tennis court that has remained surprisingly intact to this day. How did the astrophysicist Eddington, Fellow of Trinity College, director of the Cambridge observatory, and Plumian professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy, arrive on this isolated outpost of another nation’s Empire?
This is a complex story. From Stanley’s account, we learn that Eddington was not only a well-known astrophysicist and champion of Einstein in the Anglophone world, but also one of the “great popularizers of science of the 1920s and 30s” (p.194) whose writings on quantum mechanics and relativity were consumed by a wide British public. Significantly, Eddington was a devoted Quaker and pacifist who sought to make commensurate his religious and scientific practice. His writings were at once hugely popular and fiercely criticised: “He was seen to have violated the boundary between religion and science that had been established with such difficulty in the late Victorian period” (p. 236). The relation between science and religion in Britain in the first half of the 20th century, as it is articulated in Eddington’s life story, forms the core problematic of Stanley’s book. According to Stanley, it was Eddington’s belief, particularly his strong conviction of internationalism and pacifism, which moved him to pursue the eclipse expedition in support of Einstein’s theory. Internationalism and pacifism are but two of the valence values that structure Stanley’s portrayal of Eddington. A focus on values, according to the author, helps in exploring the relationship and, importantly, the continuities between science and society and, in Eddington’s case, between the religious and the scientific domains in his life. “[V]alues form a bridge between science and society” (p. 241) and help the historian tackle the “invisible common ground” (p. 242) science and culture. In fact, it is Eddington’s questioning of the supposed distinction between science and society, or science and religion, which provoked the criticism of his contemporaries.
Each chapter of the book revolves around one of the critical “valence values” in Eddington’s life: mysticism, internationalism, pacifism, experience, and the place of religion in modern life. Eddington’s life story is also a story of a very particular historical moment. He was a “birthright” Quaker, grew up in Manchester, influenced by the so-called Quaker renaissance. The Quaker renaissance brought about an important shift towards a distinct conception of mysticism, a non-scriptural approach to religion with a heavy emphasis on immediate awareness and experience in the relation with God. This was fundamental to Eddington’s approach to his life and science: “He was a good Quaker because he saw mystical experience as the root of religion, and he was a good astronomer because he cultivated a mystical pragmatism” (p. 44). Stanley suggests that “mysticism” is key to appreciating the uniqueness of Eddington’s key work, the development of models of stellar structures. His pragmatic, non-deductive approach, guided by a notion of seeking which also characterised his spiritual life, provided a novel approach: “In a dramatic departure from the tradition of celestial mechanics, the value of the theory was to be found in its ability to provide understanding and enable further investigation, not in its deductive relationship to established facts” (p. 53). This was a processual approach in which scientific theories were valued not for providing definite answers but for their ability to enable further investigative steps. It was nothing less than a different conception of scientific practice and its relation to the world.
Arguably, it was the 1919 eclipse that propelled Eddington into the limelight. The preparation for it, as we learn in Chapter 3 of the book, already began a few years earlier under adverse conditions. Europe was at war, and there was little support even among British scientists for the ideas of a young German physicist such as Einstein. Germans were shunned from science circles and Eddington was one of the few who kept active contact. In this overtly hostile climate, Eddington took a stance in defence of internationalism among scientists. However, his pleas to put science above politics fell largely on deaf ears. Nonetheless, with substantial help from his friend and colleague Dyson and with funding from the Royal Society, the preparations for the eclipse expedition were brought on their way. Stanley provides a fascinating account of an extremely difficult and potentially futile undertaking. Chapter 4, on Pacifism, recounts Eddington’s confrontation with the British state that sought to enlist him, like most of his compatriots, into the war efforts. As the Great War continued, the army began to suffer from a manpower deficiency, making conscription nearly inevitable. That Eddington managed to evade it was to do less with his appeals to his pacifist convictions, which were dismissed as incompatible with his status as a scientist, and more with Dyson’s connection to the Admiralty. Eddington accepted the exemption, possibly because it was granted on the grounds of his indispensability in the expedition – his contribution to the Quaker’s work for peace – and as such nearly equivalent to an exemption on religious grounds. Stanley’s argument that in his pursuit of the expedition Eddington was driven by more than a quest for scientific truth is convincing. Many fellow Quakers at the time were doing what was termed “Quaker adventures” – a light-hearted term for the difficult work of carrying out relief work in Germany during and after the war. These adventures served as a model to Eddington’s own. The expedition would be a demonstration in a double sense: of internationalism and of a specific ethics (Barry 1999) valued by Eddington and a scientific demonstration. “It was only with Eddington’s deliberate presentation of the expedition as a milestone in international scientific relations that it came to have that meaning. To its contemporaries, the expedition was a symbol of highly contested visions of what it meant to do science in a world at war” (123).
Príncipe was one of three more accessible places on the path of the eclipse on 29 May 1919. The others were near lake Tanganyika in East Africa and Sobral in Brazil where a second expedition team went. Eddington himself went to Príncipe, travelling by ship via Portugal and Madeira. From 16 May, Eddington and Cottingham began taking check plates; they had brought a variety of different ones to be able to cope with the uncertain tropical conditions. What they had not quite anticipated, or at least not wished for, was that the weather – rather than getting dryer as is usual at that time of year – began to worsen. There was a rainstorm in the morning and the sky remained overcast. Eddington’s telegraph to his friend Dyson following the event: “Through cloud. Hopeful” (p. 107).
It is well known, today, that Eddington’s pictures of the eclipse were of doubtful quality, especially as proof of Einstein’s theories. In Chapter 5, on “Experience”, Stanley discusses the reception of relativity theory and Eddington’s writings on these issues among the British scientific and philosophical public. Relativity theory accorded new and heightened meaning to space and time as physical categories. As Eddington put it, the scientific experiment was a set of “relations” or purely a coincidence in space and time between material objects, observer and “a division on a scale” (156, citing Eddington). Matter did not exist apart from the measurement. In Space, Time and Gravitation (1920), his first and widely read expose on the matter, Eddington set out how for him relativity theory did not so much do away with physics and mathematics than to integrate them. What science provided was now knowledge of structural form, rather than content. Stanley’s discussion of the debate around these findings is succinct and illuminating. Rather than dwelling on scientific details, he shows the relation between Eddington’s interpretation of relativity theory and the debates occurring in philosophy and physics at the time, both those ideas that presumably influenced his thinking and his critics. Importantly, Eddington’s publication became an influential source of knowledge for philosophers at the time, and with them and other commentators, he shared a concern with the division between physical and mathematical, the philosophical and the metaphysical questions that the new theory of relativity had raised.
Eddington’s writings made these topics accessible to a wider public. They also formed part of a wider debate in interwar Britain regarding the relation between a materialist and a natural theological perspective on science. The former was propounded primarily by a group of socialists, holding up the new Soviet Union as an example of a successful scientisation of society. Eddington was, of course, opposed to these views including those of the group of left-wing scientists at Cambridge, as clearly expressed in his publications Science, Religion, and Reality or in Nature of the Physical World. Materialism and the accompanying atheism had been perceived as a threat to religion already during the 19th century. Eddington’s arguments resembled those of other liberal Christian thinkers and posited religion, not Marxism, as the key to social improvement. In contrast to the “crude materialism” of some of his fellow scientists and philosophers – which suggested that ‘the whole of experience is the interplay of…physical entities fulfilling the laws of physics, and that’s all there is to it’ (Eddington, cited p. 233) – he sought to assert the place of belief. It was a defence of natural theology and of religious values, but his ontology was still that of a physicist, albeit with a view of physics that had been radically changed.
2009 will be the 90th anniversary of Eddington’s expedition to Príncipe. It will also be the International Year of Astronomy. In this context, a special project bringing together European and Santomean people, astronomers and social scientists, scientists and non-scientists will seek to confirm the role that Príncipe played in the history of astronomy (http://www.eso.org/~lchriste/trans/IYA/Special_Project_principe_iya.pdf). |
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