A note on the sociology of science
A recent article on one of the great scientists in the field of General Relativity prompted our astronomer to reflect on stereotypes in science, and how sometimes they can be very wrong.
In 1915 Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity, an accomplishment that stands to this day. That is, while the consequences of his theory have been vastly extended in the past century, no new theory has replaced it. It is the way we understand how gravity works.
The theory itself, however, was only a beginning. It was a set of tools to investigate gravity; actually working out what would happen in a given situation is another step. Since the equations of GR are nonlinear and four-dimensional this is not an easy thing to do. It took several scientists of very high caliber to explore this new universe. One of these was the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître.
During the First World War, while Einstein was finishing his theory, Lemaître was serving in an artillery battery on the Western Front. After the war he became a Catholic priest. To us, the conjunction is unsettling; the Crusades are now long past, and we do not want our priests to be warriors. (Our armies have chaplains, true, but he was not a chaplain. And it is certainly possible for the shock of war experience to incline a man toward a spiritual life; but this does not seem to have been the case for Lemaître, who was headed in that direction beforehand.)
After he received his doctorate, he studied astronomy and especially General Relativity at Cambridge with Arthur Eddington, one of the masters of the new field and incidentally a Quaker and pacifist. Among other contributions, Lemaître discovered the solution of Einstein’s equations that describe an expanding universe: the Big Bang. (Others discovered equivalent solutions independently, but communication was imperfect.) To those raised on the story of Galileo and the idea that the Catholic Church is uniformly hostile to science, this can also be unsettling: a priest making a major contribution to cutting-edge physics! But the Vatican even has its own observatory that continues to play an important role in astronomy.
Also serving in the artillery during the war, but on the German side, was Karl Schwarzchild. He was the first to produce a solution for what we know now as a “black hole,” an object from which light cannot escape (though the solution has many other applications). He also can make us uncomfortable: he joined the army in 1914 although over 40 years old; we do not want our scientists to be supporters of Prussian militarism. He did not live through the war.
It seems that science is indifferent to many personal qualities of scientists, including factors we consider very important. Who today could be making great contributions to science, but is not, because he or she doesn’t fit our ideas of what a scientist should be?
