object and scientific experiment. Suspended in a glass bubble with wires attached to it – something straight out of a fifties B-movie, you’d think – is a strangely eighteenth-century Lilliputian coat. It’s made of ‘Victimless Leather’ – leather made of animal cells growing on a matrix. This leather is ‘victimless’ because it has never been part of a living animal’s skin. Yet the tiny coat is alive – or is it? What do we mean by ‘alive’? Can the experiment be terminated without causing ‘death’? Heated debates on this subject proliferate on the Internet.
The debate would have been right at home in Swift’s Grand Academy: a clever but absurd object that’s presented straight but is also a joke; yet not quite a joke, for it forces us to examine our preconceptions about the nature of biological life. Above all, like Swift’s exploding dog and the proposal to extract sunshine out of cucumbers, the Victimless Leather garment is a complex creative exercise. If ‘What is it to be human?’ is the central question of
Gulliver’s Travels,
the ability to write such a book is itself part of the answer. We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine. Perhaps, by imagining mad scientists and then letting them do their worst within the boundaries of our fictions, we hope to keep the real ones sane.
3 M ARGARET W ERTHEIM
L OST IN S PACE : T HE S PIRITUAL C RISIS OF N EWTONIAN C OSMOLOGY
Margaret Wertheim is an Australian-born science writer, lecturer and broadcaster, now based in Los Angeles. Her books include
Pythagoras’ Trousers,
a history of the relationship between physics and religion, and
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet.
She is the founder, with her twin sister Christine, of the Institute For Figuring, an organisation devoted to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics. Their projects include a giant model coral reef made using crocheting and hyperbolic geometry that has become the biggest art/science project in the world.
T HE MAD SCIENTIST PLOTTING WORLD DOMINATION IS A FICTION. BUT IT IS NO FICTION THAT THE MODERN SCIENCE WHICH WE IDENTIFY WITH THE R OYAL S OCIETY WAS A PROFOUND CHALLENGE TO EXISTING WORLDVIEWS AND SYSTEMS OF MEANING. JUST HOW PROFOUND IS EXPLORED BY M ARGARET W ERTHEIM, WHO WONDERS WHETHER WE HAVE YET COME TO TERMS WITH THE CHANGE.
S TARSHIP D REAMING
The Starship
Enterprise
heads into the void, its warp drive set to maximum, its crew primed ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’. The drive engages, a burst of light flares out from the rear engines and with an indefinable Woosh ingrained in the minds of
Star Trek
fans everywhere, the world’s most famous spaceship disappears from our screens and zaps across the universe to a far distant galaxy. As one of those besotted millions, I am not here to quibble about the scientific ‘errors’ in Gene Roddenberry’s masterpiece; as far as I’m concerned ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ remains the most thrilling line on television. What I wish to discuss here is an underlyingpremise of the series that has tugged at the back of my consciousness since childhood. The crew of the
Enterprise
take it for granted – as do real-life physicists, astronomers and SETI enthusiasts – that our cosmos is a homogeneous space ruled everywhere by the same physical laws. Such continuity is logically necessary if humans are ever to travel to the stars or communicate extraterrestrially. So essential is the idea of spatial homogeneity to modern science it has been named ‘the cosmological principle’ and it serves as the foundation of our faith that if indeed we are
not
alone then we will share something meaningful with our alien confrères – the Laws of Nature.
In the realms of both science fiction and science practice the importance of this principle is hard to overstate, for it underpins physicists’ confidence that the patterns of behaviour discovered here on
The debate would have been right at home in Swift’s Grand Academy: a clever but absurd object that’s presented straight but is also a joke; yet not quite a joke, for it forces us to examine our preconceptions about the nature of biological life. Above all, like Swift’s exploding dog and the proposal to extract sunshine out of cucumbers, the Victimless Leather garment is a complex creative exercise. If ‘What is it to be human?’ is the central question of
Gulliver’s Travels,
the ability to write such a book is itself part of the answer. We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine. Perhaps, by imagining mad scientists and then letting them do their worst within the boundaries of our fictions, we hope to keep the real ones sane.
3 M ARGARET W ERTHEIM
L OST IN S PACE : T HE S PIRITUAL C RISIS OF N EWTONIAN C OSMOLOGY
Margaret Wertheim is an Australian-born science writer, lecturer and broadcaster, now based in Los Angeles. Her books include
Pythagoras’ Trousers,
a history of the relationship between physics and religion, and
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet.
She is the founder, with her twin sister Christine, of the Institute For Figuring, an organisation devoted to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics. Their projects include a giant model coral reef made using crocheting and hyperbolic geometry that has become the biggest art/science project in the world.
T HE MAD SCIENTIST PLOTTING WORLD DOMINATION IS A FICTION. BUT IT IS NO FICTION THAT THE MODERN SCIENCE WHICH WE IDENTIFY WITH THE R OYAL S OCIETY WAS A PROFOUND CHALLENGE TO EXISTING WORLDVIEWS AND SYSTEMS OF MEANING. JUST HOW PROFOUND IS EXPLORED BY M ARGARET W ERTHEIM, WHO WONDERS WHETHER WE HAVE YET COME TO TERMS WITH THE CHANGE.
S TARSHIP D REAMING
The Starship
Enterprise
heads into the void, its warp drive set to maximum, its crew primed ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’. The drive engages, a burst of light flares out from the rear engines and with an indefinable Woosh ingrained in the minds of
Star Trek
fans everywhere, the world’s most famous spaceship disappears from our screens and zaps across the universe to a far distant galaxy. As one of those besotted millions, I am not here to quibble about the scientific ‘errors’ in Gene Roddenberry’s masterpiece; as far as I’m concerned ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ remains the most thrilling line on television. What I wish to discuss here is an underlyingpremise of the series that has tugged at the back of my consciousness since childhood. The crew of the
Enterprise
take it for granted – as do real-life physicists, astronomers and SETI enthusiasts – that our cosmos is a homogeneous space ruled everywhere by the same physical laws. Such continuity is logically necessary if humans are ever to travel to the stars or communicate extraterrestrially. So essential is the idea of spatial homogeneity to modern science it has been named ‘the cosmological principle’ and it serves as the foundation of our faith that if indeed we are
not
alone then we will share something meaningful with our alien confrères – the Laws of Nature.
In the realms of both science fiction and science practice the importance of this principle is hard to overstate, for it underpins physicists’ confidence that the patterns of behaviour discovered here on
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