Travelling to Infinity (24 page)

The scenario was set for a grim, recurring competition. Stephen would ask if I would like to go with him to a conference in, say, New York and tensely I would decline. Tacitly ignoring my
reluctance, he would repeat the same question week after week until I was reduced to a frenzy, overwhelmed with guilt at letting him down, yet saddened by his lack of understanding. This pressure
exacerbated the fear of flying which had pursued me since the tour of America in 1967, hovering over me like a great black bird at the mere mention of air travel. I had flown only twice since then,
once on the winter holiday to Majorca when Robert fell sick, and the second time to Switzerland in May 1970. There had been a trip planned to Tbilisi in Georgia in September 1968, but to my silent
relief, many British scientists, including Stephen, refused to attend in protest against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia that August. My fear of air travel was not completely unjustified: in
the late Sixties and Seventies, not only did aeroplanes fall out of the sky with chilling regularity, they were also the favourite targets for hijackings by the growing bands of international
terrorists.

The sum total of all the conflicting pressures doomed me to years of misery and travel by the longest, most roundabout means. In 1971, when Stephen was invited to attend a conference in Trieste,
he went by air while Robert and I took the train, leaving seven-month-old Lucy with my parents. After the long, hot journey across Europe, we stopped in Venice, where Robert, bewitched by the view
from the top of the Campanile, refused to descend – until the sudden clang of the heavy bells at midday sent him running for the lift. He then insisted on sitting down at a table in St
Mark’s Square outside Florian’s, which proved to be an expensive lesson – the equivalent of £6 for a tiny cup of coffee – so the next time we passed Florian’s by
and sat down on the steps around the porticoed square – only to become targets for the local pigeons.

Two years later, the proposed trip to Moscow via Warsaw was a very different undertaking: travel by air was indispensable and applications for visas had to be sent months in advance. There was
no choice; I would be away from the children for nearly a month, as in those repressive days after the fall of Khrushchev, nobody other than me would be granted a visa to accompany Stephen. The
prospect haunted me but the plans were laid, the tickets were booked – paid for, as always by some scientific organization or other – and, with some difficulty, the visas extracted from
the Russian embassy. It was very dispiriting to think that in the space of a few short years, I had become a pale shadow of the student who had travelled alone round Spain, blithely disregarding
all parental concerns, revelling in the spirit of adventure, and relishing air travel, even in clapped-out propeller aircraft. Bound for Warsaw and Moscow but wan with care, I slipped away from the
children as they played happily in their grandparents’ house in St Albans in August 1973.

Astronomers were flocking to Poland in 1973 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer whose dissatisfaction with the
complicated mathematics needed to account for the movement of the planets in the earth-centred universe of Ptolemy’s theory compelled him to develop a new theory of the universe in 1514.
Still considering myself as something of a medievalist, but a medievalist with more than a passing interest in cosmology, I was fascinated by the iconoclastic effect of the Copernican theory, which
postulated that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun, and thus superseded the Ptolemaic theory which had become tantamount to an article of faith, both scientific and religious,
though in fact it bore little relation to the biblical concept of a flat earth, above which was heaven and below which was hell. On my first visit behind the Iron Curtain – apart from a day
trip to Yugoslavia from Trieste in 1971 – I also found in Poland a lesson in the nature of tragedy: the tragedy of history in a country which bore the scars of oppression and division, the
philosophical tragedy for mankind of the schism between science and religion which resulted from Copernicus’ theory, and the tragedy of genius.

Although Copernicus did not live to see how his theory was developed by Galileo in the seventeenth century, he must have been well aware of its dangerously controversial nature. He might be seen
as the first scientist to open the Pandora’s box of science, with its dual potential of advancing human knowledge and yet of posing uncomfortable dilemmas which would test man’s moral
integrity. The theory well deserved the term by which it came to be known: the “Copernican Revolution”. Since, according to Copernicus, the earth was no longer at the centre of the
universe, man was not at the centre of creation. Man, therefore, could no longer be said to have a special relationship with the Creator. This fundamental change in perspective was to liberate man
from the oppressive medieval obsession with the divine image, enabling him to expand his intellectual capabilities and value his own physical attributes – and it was one of the powerful
influences behind the philosophy of the European Renaissance, when architects built palaces rather than cathedrals, and artists and sculptors replaced the religious image with the human form,
depicted for its own sake, for its beauty and strength. In scientific terms, the Copernican theory paved the way for the discoveries of Newton in seventeenth-century England, where a positive
aftereffect of an otherwise fanatical Puritanism had been the release of rational thought from the grip of religious superstition. Within Catholicism, however, the Copernican theory was to produce
an ugly, anti-scientific reaction, the repercussions of which are still felt throughout society.

Perhaps wary of its implications, Copernicus did not permit his work
Concerning the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres
to be published until just before he died; a copy of the printed
work was reputedly brought to him on his deathbed on 24th May 1543. Nonetheless he had not sought to hide its contents, for the theory had been widely disseminated over a long period, and he
himself had lectured to the Pope Clement VII on the subject in Rome in 1533. Perhaps the Pope did not fully understand the implications of the lecture because it was presented to him merely as a
simplification of the cumbersome Ptolemaic mathematics, or perhaps he did not take it seriously, because it was not until some time later – in the seventeenth century – that it fell to
Galileo Galilei to bear the full brunt of the Church’s ire for his support and publicizing of the new system.

A charming popular account of the spyglass ascribes its invention to children who were playing around with bits of glass and lenses in the workshop of a Flemish spectacle-maker and found that by
putting two lenses together they could see distant objects plainly. The spectacle-maker saw the potential of the gadget for the toy market, but when in 1609 Galileo heard of it, he worked out the
underlying theory in one night and developed his own improved version, the telescope, which he demonstrated to that city’s incredulous merchants from the Campanile in Venice. To their
astonishment, they could see in detail the markings on a sailing ship on the horizon, two hours from port. Galileo then realized that his revolutionary navigational aid could be turned on the
heavens. He built a telescope in Padua, discovered four new planets – in fact the satellites of Jupiter – and published his own watercolour maps of the moon. His observations, which
showed that not all heavenly bodies necessarily orbited the earth, convinced him of the accuracy of the Copernican theory. In 1610 he somewhat naively publicized his proof of the theory obtained
from his observations, and in the next few years found himself in conflict with the Church, for whom the earth was theologically fixed at the centre of the universe.

In 1600, Giordano Bruno had been burnt at the stake for daring to speculate about astronomical matters, yet Galileo was undeterred by Bruno’s fate. Innocently supposing that no one would
want to contradict visible evidence, he went on to become the main and most successful proponent of the Copernican theory, especially because he published his findings in the vernacular language,
Italian, instead of Latin. The attack this represented on the traditional Judeo-Christian view of a conveniently earth-centred universe posed an unacceptable threat from within to a church already
struggling to contain the forces of Protestantism from without, and in 1616 the Church authorities issued an admonition requiring Galileo not to hold or defend the Copernican doctrine.

The election in 1623 of Maffeo Barberini to the Papacy as Urban VIII alleviated Galileo’s uncomfortable situation temporarily. Barberini was a highly cultured man and a lover of the arts,
but he was also proud, extravagant and autocratic – he reputedly had all the birds in the Vatican garden killed because they disturbed him. He was however a friend of Galileo’s and
helped to bring about a limited relaxation of the 1616 injunction by commissioning Galileo to write a discourse –
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e
copernicano
– giving the arguments for and against the two competing systems, on condition that the discourse should be completely neutral. Inevitably the book, when it appeared in 1632,
was seen as a categorical statement of the force of the Copernican argument and led to Galileo’s arrest and trial by the Inquisition. He was sentenced to house arrest in his villa at Arcetri
where, old, blind and captive, the king of infinite space bounded in a nutshell, he eloquently lamented the disparity between the vastness of his area of research and the limitations of his
physical condition, a situation with which it was all too easy for us to sympathize: “This universe is now shrivelled up for me into such a narrow compass as is filled by my own bodily
sensations.”

Despite the life sentence of house arrest, his creative powers were not dulled. A new manuscript,
Concerning Two New Sciences
, was smuggled out of Italy to Holland where it was
published in 1638. With this manuscript, Galileo is said to have laid the foundations of modern experimental and theoretical physics, and with it the scientific tradition moved north, away from the
repressions of southern Europe.

Although Galileo was a devout Catholic, it was his conflict with the Vatican, sadly mismanaged on both sides, that lay at the basis of the running battle between science and religion, a tragic
and confusing schism which persists unresolved. More than ever today, religion finds its revelatory truths threatened by scientific theory, and retreats into a defensive corner, while scientists go
into the attack insisting that rational argument is the only valid criterion for an understanding of the workings of the universe. Maybe both sides have misunderstood the nature of their respective
roles. Scientists are equipped to answer the mechanical question of
how
the universe and everything in it, including life, came about. But since their modes of thought are dictated by
purely rational, materialistic criteria, physicists cannot claim to answer the questions of
why
the universe exists, and
why
we human beings are here to observe it, any more than
molecular biologists can satisfactorily explain
why
– if our actions are determined by the workings of a selfish genetic coding – we occasionally listen to the voice of
conscience and behave with altruism, compassion and generosity. Even these human qualities have come under attack from evolutionary psychologists who have ascribed altruism to a crude genetic
theory by which familial cooperation is said to favour the survival of the species. Likewise the spiritual sophistication of musical, artistic and poetic activity is regarded as just a highly
advanced function of primitive origins.

Frequently over the decades of our marriage, stimulated by a scientific article or television programme, I found my mind exercised by questions of this nature and would try to discuss them with
Stephen. In the early days our arguments on the topics rehearsed above were playful and fairly light-hearted. Increasingly in later years, they became more personal, divisive and hurtful. The
damaging schism between religion and science seemed to have extended its reach into our very lives: Stephen would adamantly assert the blunt positivist stance which I found too depressing and too
limiting to my view of the world, because I fervently needed to believe that there was more to life than the bald facts of the laws of physics and the day-to-day struggle for survival. Compromise
was anathema to Stephen however, because it admitted an unacceptable degree of uncertainty, when he dealt only in the certainties of mathematics.

Galileo died on 8th January 1642, the year in which Newton was born and three hundred years to the day before Stephen was born. It was therefore not surprising that Stephen adopted Galileo as
his hero. When in 1975 he received a medal from the Pope, he took the opportunity to launch a personal campaign for Galileo’s rehabilitation. The campaign was eventually successful but was
nevertheless seen as a victory for the rational advance of science over the hidebound antiquated forces of religion, a theological capitulation, rather than as a reconciliation of science with
religion.

In the sixteenth century, Nicolaus Copernicus had led the life of a true Renaissance man, untroubled by the crises that Galileo was to suffer in the next century. Copernicus enjoyed all the
advantages, breadth of education and experience of that period of intellectual expansion and travelled widely, as far as Bologna, Padua and Rome. He studied medicine as well as mathematics and
astronomy. He made translations from Greek into Latin, fulfilled a number of diplomatic functions and presented proposals for the reform of various Polish currencies. Ironically, five hundred years
later, such broad possibilities were denied to Copernicus’ modern compatriots as they celebrated his quincentenary.

From the scientific point of view, the great advantage of the Polish setting for the commemorative conference was that it provided a meeting place for all the great minds from both West and
East, since Russian physicists were able to travel to Poland, if not further field, with relative freedom. For Westerners, Poland was certainly more accessible than the Soviet Union: our Polish
visas came through automatically, whereas the Russians were much less welcoming. The only inconvenience of entry into Poland, as a number of male delegates found, was that the bearer of a passport
was expected to resemble his photograph down to the last detail. Since the year was 1973, many of the younger delegates and students were sporting long hair and fine bushy growths of beard, bearing
little resemblance to their passport photos which could have been taken nearly ten years earlier when they were but whining schoolboys with satchel and shining faces. The only means of persuading
the Polish authorities that they really were who they purported to be, and not decadent hippies intent on undermining the purity of communist culture, was to shave off their beards and cut their
hair at the border post. They arrived in Warsaw looking like sheep from the shearer. Stephen was probably the only one among them whose hair was actually shorter than on his photo and did not have
to subject himself to an urgent trim.