Yesterday evening I watched two television plays of a very similar sort, which often seems to happen on TV. One channel puts on a Clint Eastwood movie, and to cut into that audience another channel puts on another Clint movie, often at the exact same time. Most aggravating, if you're a Clint fan, which I often am.
BBC2 TV last night showed Hawking, and then later BBC4 TV showed Life Story. But this time the BBC was cooperating with itself, because after Hawking on BBC2 they had another little show about Hawking's work on BBC4, just before they then showed
Hawking was about Stephen Hawking, and Life Story was about the cracking of DNA by Watson and Crick. I saw Life Story when it was first shown ages ago (1986?), but like everyone else watching it, I was watching Hawking for the first time.
The trouble with plays about science of this exalted sort is that someone like me has only a very dim idea of what is being talked about by all those brainy people, and I was agreeably surprised by how much incidental information I did manage to gather up, not just about the personalities involved, but about some of the actual key concepts.
Both types of information were very welcome. For example, I have never until now known just where Roger Penrose fits into the larger scientific scheme of things. Penrose: brainbox. That was about the limit of my knowledge of this man and his works. Now I learn that he was the first bloke to propose the existence of Black Holes. And as for Hawking …
Until now I have always been deeply suspicious of the cult of Hawking, suspecting that, had he not been so photogenically crippled and obliged to talk with a machine jammed against his emaciated throat, we would pay him no attention at all. But now I learn that Hawking actually has contributed something of scientific substance to the ongoing debate about what The Universe consists of. By applying Penrose's Black Hole notion to The Entire Universe, while reversing the direction of its occurrence, he has turned a relatively small planets-disappearing-down-a-local-plughole act into The Entire Universe starting out from a single point in a huge explosion. A Big Bang, that is to say. Okay, I am hazy about the proof of all that. I could not cover a blackboard with mathematical equations which meaningfully allude to all this. But, very roughly, I get it. Since I expected to get exactly nothing when I started watching Hawking, that was a real plus.
I now actually want to read this.
To put it another way, I stopped feeling sorry for Hawking and started feeling appropriately envious. He is not the physically ruined object of an idiot modern celeb-cult, or not only that. He actually did get his trembling hands onto a major piece of The Truth, the jammy bastard. His grin of self-satisfaction and self-congratulation as he staggered off into his own version of the sunset – his unthreatened mind trapped inside his ever more unreliable body – was really something to see, and a triumph for all concerned.
And nor did I know that Fred Hoyle was famous for disagreeing with all this Big Bang stuff.
Oh, I sort of knew, in the sense of having read it somewhere, and having then forgotten it. And no doubt I will forget all this stuff again very soon. After all, knowing what Penrose and Hawking and Hoyle all said is of no direct importance to me. I won't have to remember any of this, so presumably I won't. Nevertheless, acquainting oneself with the mysteries of cosmology, which have (and here I complete agree with Hoyle's ferocious atheism and despise the deluded religiosity of Mrs Hawking) now entirely replaced the mysteries of the Christian version of cosmology, is something that all educated people should do from time to time.
Personally, I now think that cosmology is an excuse for more total rubbish than any other ology around these days., my favourite "you have got to be kidding" piece of "science" these days being all that malarkey that says that there are lots of different multidimensional universes fanning out in all directions from every single moment in time and space, or whatever the hell it says. Now to me that is just these people ing, in high faluting language: "Well actually we don't know." When multiple universes shows up on telescopes and give us better flat screen TV sets then I'll believe them. Until then, I'm a multi-universe agnostic.
But insofar as the Big Bang has apparently shown up on the telescopes as otherwise inexplicable hissing (as a scientist played by Dempsey from Dempsey and Makepiece explained), then fine: I believe in the Big Bang, and I await the resulting improved TV sets eagerly. I'm a member of the congregation of science, in other words, even if I choose to regard some of the sermons as drivel. Me watching these TV shows approvingly is me nodding towards the altar of my religion.
Life Story caused quite a stir when it was first shown, because it showed scientists not as ego-less priests of The Truth, but as fiercely competitive racers after it. Well, it showed Rosie Franklin as an ego-less priest of The Truth, but the point was, as she herself admitted, she did not crack DNA, while the boy racers Crick and Watson did. When Crick and Watson began their version of the quest, the theory was that cracking DNA would swallow up the lifetimes of all who embarked on it. Crick and Watson had it all up and modelled within a few months, or whatever it was.
This lesson – that, even though the truth is The Truth, scientists are human – now having been thoroughly learned by the sort of people who like me watch TV shows about scientific breakthroughs, I was not at all shocked to learn that cosmology is also a field in which those racing each other for The Truth cover each other in great jets of mud and generally fight like hell to win their various races. Quite right, and good for them.
And good for the BBC. Nobody has much good to say of the BBC in my part of the political landscape, and I often join in with such complaining myself. But this kind of thing justifies the license fee if anything can, I think.
