Joan of Arc and Science

I recently visited the equestrian statue of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) in Strasbourg, France. I have posted a video [https://youtu.be/ahKGTla7E18 ] about what I learned.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl, aged about 17, when she claimed that the Archangel Michael and Saints Margaret and Catherine had told her that she needed to lead the French troops to victory over England, which at that time (1429) occupied a large portion of what is today France. This was during the Hundred Years’ War, and France was not doing too well. The French troops were under siege in Orléans.

Jeanne must have had a mesmerizing personality, because she convinced the future French King Charles VII that the voices in her head had told her France would prevail and Charles would be king. She was put in charge of the portions of the French army that eventually drove the English away from that siege and some others as well. She was a military heroine—a 17 year old peasant girl. The story did not end so well for her. She started losing battles, and when she was 19 she was put on trial and convicted of heresy. She was burned at the stake in 1431. One of the charges was that, in leading battles, she had worn men’s clothing. Later, a new trial found her not guilty and today she is esteemed as one of the patron saints of France. Everyone has heard about her.

Every artistic depiction of her shows her to be very beautiful. The usual standards of physical beauty, however, is not at all necessary. She would have appeared beautiful to those who believed her divine claims, no matter what she actually looked like.

What this means for us, as we examine the role of religion in human history, is that even the craziest of claims are credible if the person making them is persistent and absolutely convinced of them. She heard the little voices in her head and had not the slightest doubt of their authenticity. Many historians today believe that Jeanne was schizophrenic (the little voices were in her brain) or had Menière’s disease (the little voices were in her inner ear). We do not know. More to the point, she did not know.

Religious claims can be made and believed on no further basis than the assertion of those who make them. No other evidence is needed. Many people claim that there is, in fact, evidence other than assertions that support many religious beliefs, such as Jesus’ resurrection. But such evidence is not necessary to true believers.

Scientific thinking, however, requires that the person making a claim provide evidence that is verifiable to people other than the one making the claim. You can read more about it in my book Scientifically Thinking. This is an important reason that we should depend on science, rather than religious assertion, to guide us in making decisions of worldwide importance—which nearly all of our decisions are these days.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

This is the phrase that celebrity physicist Richard Feynman used to describe the joy of scientific research. But it also describes the joy of science education. Feynman was as brilliant of a scientist as you could hope to meet, and to him mathematical equations were as obvious as the nose on your face. But he knew very well that science education did not consist of learning piles of facts. He knew it was a matter of joy: professors and students alike should share this joy. This is what I always tried to do as a science educator, even to the extent of trying out what some colleagues thought of as stunts.

This is the reason that Bill Nye the Science Guy is more popular among people in general than any professor could hope to be. Professors try to impress their colleagues; but Bill Nye’s audience is ordinary intelligent people.

Jamy Gormaud is France’s answer to Bill Nye. He started off as a reporter, then discovered the joy of science—just as Carl Zimmer and David Quammen started off as fiction writers and found their calling in science writing. Today, with his YouTube channel, Jamy uses humor—a lot of it—to communicate not only science but also history to a large audience. My wife and I started watching his videos in order to learn French, by slowing down the videos and reading subtitles. But I appreciate his joy of science. In one of his books (Mon Tour de France: Des Curiosités Naturelles et Scientifiques) he has assembled a tour of France to see scientific curiosities. Several dozen videos later, he is still one of our favorite video hosts. Jamy describes the pleasure of learning new things as “la connaissance qui soulève l’esprit” (knowledge that lifts the spirit). He practices “la vulgarisation de la science.” Vulgarization is not a bad word in French, although American professors and writers hate to be accused of vulgarization. It just means making science understandable and interesting to non-specialists.

He takes his readers to old places to see new things. He starts his book in the marshlands of northeastern France mainly because he saw some great sunrises there when he was a kid. This chapter is about why sunrises (and sunsets) are red. Maybe you know why, and maybe you don’t. My answer was mostly right.

Sunlight is intensely white, which results from the mixture of all visible wavelengths of light. But when sunlight encounters atmosphere, it scatters. Blue wavelenths, at one end of the spectrum, scatter more than the others, which is why the sky around the noontime sun on a clear day is blue and the sunlight itself is yellowish: the sunlight is white minus some of the blue color. When sunlight has to travel through more of the atmosphere, as when it comes in at an angle at sunrise or sunset, not only do the blue wavelengths scatter but also the others, except those at the red end of the spectrum. If you did not know this, you might have felt your brain grow a little bit right then. Thanks to Jamy, and maybe to some outstanding science teacher you may have had in the past.

Jamy, and other good science educators, also draws in perspectives from outside of science. It was Isaac Newton who explained that white light is all the rainbow colors mixed together. We do not perceive it as a range of colors, but as bands of color. It turns out, for reasons I explain in my book Scientifically Thinking, that our brains create the illusion of bands of color, which helps our brains make sense of the world. But, Jamy wondered, why did Newton say there were seven bands of color? Clearly there are bands, but can you really see seven bands? Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Long before Newton, Robert Boyle had written that a rainbow has five bands of color. Jamy explained in his book that Newton was very religious—he wrote more pages about religion than about science—and to him seven had great Biblical significance. That is, Newton had a little bit of religious illusion even in his hard scientific observations.

He must be very satisfied in his work. To the extent that my videos fulfill the same role as his, I am satisfied. Even though I have retired, I continue to be a science educator, in the tradition of Jamy Gourmaud.

George Washington Carver

This essay and the next will also appear in my science blog. However, the third essay in this series about George Washington Carver is unique to this blog.

You have probably heard of George Washington Carver (1864-1943) as the early-twentieth-century Peanut Man who developed hundreds of commercial products from peanuts, and from other southern United States crops, in his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. But these products were probably the least important part of his work, at that time and in his legacy today. He is also remembered as the black man who earned respect from whites who might otherwise have dismissed blacks as an inferior, perhaps uneducable, race.

Carver had a brilliant mind for botany and chemistry. He was also a teacher whom his students loved, because he was humble despite his vast knowledge, and he cared individually about each student. He wanted each student to experience scientific discovery for themselves. While most science teachers today take this approach, it was uncommon in Carver’s day.

His fame was as much for his personal story as for his scientific work. He was born into slavery just before the end of the Civil War, then kidnapped. His owner got him back in exchange for a horse. After the war, George’s owner raised him as one of his own children. George struggled for years to get an education from whatever school would allow a black man to learn. He was the only black student at Iowa State University. His mentors there wanted him to stay as a faculty member, but instead he accepted a call from Booker T. Washington to join the Tuskegee faculty.

For much of his career, Carver labored in obscurity. Tuskegee president Booker T. Washington was impatient with Carver’s disorganized approach to college duties. Whatever Carver accomplished, Booker T. Washington always thought of something more that he ordered Carver to do. At one point, even though Carver spent every waking moment working for the institute, Washington told Carver he needed to repair the toilets. Washington’s regimented and disciplined approach to everything conflicted with Carver’s slower and more thoughtful approach.

Once at Tuskegee, Carver showed his ability to produce excellent work with almost no resources. Though he eventually had a lot of glassware for his teaching and research laboratories, he had literally nothing to work with when he first arrived. So, he found a whiskey bottle at the dump. He tied a string around the middle. He cooled the bottle in cold water, then lit the string on fire. The fire made the cold bottle crack in two. The top half was a funnel, the bottom half a beaker.

Then in 1921, Carver testified before the federal House Ways and Means Committee about all the food and industrial products that could be made from peanuts. The committee was interested because World War I had interrupted many imports into the United States, and they wanted to know what “home-grown” products we could have in the event of a future war. Even though these products ended up not being marketed, the committee was very impressed with this humble and brilliant man. From that point, Carver became a celebrity, and his fame spread worldwide.

By the end of his life, Carver was receiving many prizes and worldwide recognition. Meanwhile, in American society, the legal rights for black people were becoming ever more restricted. After an initial period of openness after the Civil War, southern states found ways to prevent blacks from voting, and blacks ended up with almost no political voice. While Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were widely admired, most white people considered them individual exceptions from their otherwise benighted race.

Carver never sought fame (though it came to him) or fortune (which he had opportunities to refuse). He lived in a small room on the Tuskegee campus. Books were stacked floor to ceiling in the corner. He had a display case for his crochet work. Rocks and stalactites covered a table, and flowers crowded his window box. His personal space reminds me of my own.

I chose George Washington Carver as my favorite scientist in my recent book, Scientifically Thinking. The main reason was not so much because of his scientific research, which was creative but not of the highest quality, as for his motivation. He believed that scientific research at a university should prove directly helpful to the people living around it, and to the world in general. The inspiration of his peanut research (and also research on sweet potatoes and pecans) was to allow poor farmers to produce value-added products, at home, that they could sell for more money than peanuts. He also did research, and taught local farmers, about how to preserve soil fertility, so that they could produce more from each of their acres. This is also one of my main motivations in teaching and research. Like Carver, I am a mediocre scientific researcher, but my heart is in outreach to the wider community, opening their eyes to the wonders and practical benefits of science.

All this, despite the fact that Carver did not really follow what nearly every scientist in his day and today would consider good scientific method. That is the topic of the next essay.

Fiction as Science: The Example of On the Beach

This essay appeared on my science blog as well. The next essay, however, to be posted in a few days, is unique to this blog.

Fiction can be science. This is a point that I made in my recently-released book Scientifically Thinking: Sometimes fiction has a structure similar to scientific research. The novelist sets up an experiment and runs it to test a hypothesis, just like a scientist would, only the experiment takes place in a fictional mind-space rather than in the lab or field.

In 1957, the world was on the cusp of nuclear annihilation, and nobody knew what might happen next, and what the consequences of nuclear war might be. Everyone knew there would be a lot of radiation, but nobody knew how much or what the physiological effects on humans or any other species might be.

Into this milieu of peril came Nevil Shute’s famous novel On the Beach, in which the entire Northern Hemisphere had been destroyed by nuclear war. The Southern Hemisphere, including Australia where the novel is set, did not participate. And yet the radiation crept inexorably down from the north. On the southern shore of Australia, even as the radiation destroyed northern Australia, life continued almost as before. The electric trains still ran, since Australia had its own low-quality coal for power plants, but there was no gasoline, so people rigged up their cars to be drawn by horses. The novel was set in 1964, which was the future, but near enough so that the readers could not feel distant from it.

This novel was made into a famous 1959 movie starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins. Only a really important movie could have gotten this line-up.

It is an amazing movie, except that almost the only soundtrack was Waltzing Matilda over and over and over. But even here the movie was well done. Drunken fishermen were singing the song out of tune, but right at a dramatic moment when Dwight and Moira had to confront their doomed love for one another, the orchestra played the tune in perfect and disturbing harmony.

Into this Australian scenario comes an American submarine that just happened to be in the south when the war struck. Toward the end, Commander Dwight Towers realized that he and his crew were the only Americans still alive in the world. He was the only American with any authority. When he realizes this (page 164 of Signet edition), “He said wearily, ‘I guess the United States is me, right now. I’m thinking of running for President.’”

Nevil Shute set up the fictional experiment, and controlled the variables that he knew would make the results of the experiment too difficult to interpret.

• Shute made the dying silent and without destruction. If the novel was filled with explosions and carnage, it would just be confusing. But Shute had the radiation approaching invisibly. The atmospheric circulation of the Northern Hemisphere is almost entirely separate from the Southern, but not quite. The air is almost still right where the sun is straight overhead, but this latitude of stillness moves north and south with the seasons, causing the atmosphere of the North to mix with that of the South in a gradual and totally consistent manner. Every Northern Hemisphere city that the submarine crew saw through their periscope during a reconnaissance mission was nearly intact except for the total absence of people.
• Shute made it easy for people to choose a painless end to their lives. The Australians also chose to end their lives, once they knew death was inevitable, by taking poison pills, for which they lined up at health dispensaries. For the sake of simplifying the experiment, Shute made up a poison that makes you painlessly fall asleep forever. I am not aware that any such poison exists.

Therefore the novel can focus clearly on the central questions, rather than being distracted by mayhem.

One question this novel addresses is this: what would people do if life seemed utterly normal, except that they knew that death was coming, and they knew almost exactly when it would arrive and how it would happen?

• One hypothesis is that people would go wild and plunder one another and establish warring states. Maybe this is, in fact, what Americans would do, with our tradition of taking whatever we want for ourselves and our worship of guns. One might imagine that a lot of men would go wild and take as many women as they could get, and plunder the houses of anyone with no, or fewer, guns.
• But another hypothesis is that people would continue on with their daily lives as long as possible. This is what the Australians did and what countries with a greater sense of social identity would do. I imagine that this is what would happen in, say, Finland. The people continued their jobs, their families, their marriages just as before. This is also what Americans did during the Cold War: they continued their daily lives.

Why would a society of people continue with their normal lives even as death approaches? Here are two possible reasons.

• A normal life was their only sense of comfort and happiness.
• A normal life allowed them to fantasize that it wasn’t really happening. In this novel, the American submarine commander Towers has a romance with a young Australian woman (Moira Davidson), but he is chaste with her since he considers himself still married to his wife in Connecticut, even though she must be dead. Towers even bought presents to take home to his wife and children, whom he knew yet denied were dead. The wife of the Australian naval officer put in a garden for the next year that she pretended to believe would still come. This might be the most chilling aspect of the novel: to see people living in their fantasy worlds.

In the end, everyone dies doing what they loved best. One seaman, when the submarine came to his hometown, jumped ship and spent his last day fishing in his own boat. Another, who had a race car, was willing to die during a dangerous race, but he won the championship; then took his poison pills while sitting in his race-car (in the book; in the movie, he killed himself with carbon monoxide). The Australian officer dies in bed with his wife. Moira dies as she watches Dwight sink his submarine offshore. They all died, except Dwight and Moira, with smiles on their faces.

Another question that this novel addresses: What is your responsibility to alleviate the inevitable suffering for those who cannot understand it? The Australian officer tells his wife she may have to kill their baby rather than let it suffer if they die first. At first she angrily insists that this is murder, but eventually decides it is mercy.

Yet another question: Is it fair the Southern Hemisphere should suffer from the fallout of what the Northern Hemisphere has done? All the characters struggle with this constantly, though only once in a while blurting it out.

I hope we are never in a position to find out what we would do if the end of the world was coming inevitably, gradually, and at a time we knew several months in advance. I hope that the real experiment is never done. Is it possible that this novel, and the movie made from it, forced people to confront the reality of the nuclear threat and keep it from actually happening?