SCIENCE, IMAGINATION AND NARRATIVE

David: Can you tell us what it is you do? Because I know you do quite a number of things.

SG: Well, in the sciences, I’m interested in understanding how diversity emerges in infectious disease systems.

David: You’re not just a scientist though, are you?

SG: No, I write novels as well.

David: And how do those two things sit together in one brain?

SG: This is a question I’ve been asked a lot, and to me they come from very much the same source, which is a desire to understand or come to terms with the world, the universe.

David: So they’re not different kinds of thinking for you? Because people often imagine that scientific thinking is very different to a more literary or artistic thinking.

SG: At one level I think they are the same kind of thinking in that they’re driven by the same sort of desire to make sense of the internal and external universe that I happen to inhabit. But the languages employed are very different, I think.

In science, much of my pleasure in using words is that they adhere very closely to whatever concept I need them to represent. So I’m always seeking there to reduce the distance between the word and what it represents.

David: A sort of exactness?

SG: Yes. So you want them to… When I write, if I’m writing an equation and I use a symbol ‘x’, I really want its meaning to be precise. I feel like I’ve failed if ‘x’ means too many different things. So the closer ‘x’ is to what I want it to represent, the happier I am. Whereas when I’m writing fiction, I like there to be a gap between the word and what it refers to. I think a lot of the energy of fiction lies in that gap.

David: A sort of ambiguity?

SG: It’s a sort of disorder that’s not an arbitrary disorder. It’s somewhere… It’s moving away from order, but not so far as to be so ambiguous.

Ard: In science people often think that it’s all about cold hard facts and there’s no imagination. And then, obviously, writing novels is about imagination. What do you think about that dichotomy?

SG: Well, I think science is all about imagination. And what attracts me to science is the ability, or the opportunity, to be imaginative. So, for me, my journey through science has been one of using my imagination to come up with different ideas.

David: Is there a narrative in science? Does science use narrative, or is that purely…?

SG: I think narrative is a very strong element in science. I think…

David: Really?

SG: To me, narrative is where we’re headed.

David: That’s not obvious to a lot of people. I think in the popularisation of science, it’s a great big museum of facts. There’s a drawer with a fact here and then a drawer with another fact there, and he who had the largest number of drawers with facts in is the best! For you, it’s not like that? I mean, what’s the role…

SG: For me, it’s not like that.

David: …of narrative in science, then? I mean, how does it…?

SG: Because I’m interested in coming up with theories – I am a theoretical biologist at the end of the day – so theories are, of course, stories. So, for me, it’s not very interesting to just have a pile of facts.

There’s a huge synergy between actually arriving at the right narrative structure and the process of science as I experience it, which is recruiting these facts and then trying to think of a way in which they fit together that is coherent.

Ard: So sometimes the scientific facts fit together to tell a story, and the same is happening when you’re writing a novel?

SG: I don’t actually like the word story, myself. I think narrative is a better term.

Ard: Narrative. A real narrative. So would you say that what makes a scientific theory or narrative a good one, is that it’s fruitful? That it somehow goes on its own and does something that you didn’t even think it was going to do when you put it together?

SG: I’ve been searching for a long time for what does make a good narrative because it’s the same in fiction. At some point the book has, for me anyway, the right narrative.

David: It’s interesting what you said, though, because I’ve spent my professional life talking to scientists, and most often scientists will say, ‘In science, you should just stick to the facts.’

How often have you heard that from a scientist? ‘In science, we stick to the facts.’ Which would suggest that if I know these three facts, then I should only talk about them. I shouldn’t generate a story that suggests it might go somewhere, to use your phrase. And yet that is the strength of a theory, isn’t it? That it points to where you might go next?

SG: It points beyond facts. Exactly. I can’t think of any piece of science that’s been done that doesn’t take the facts and then construct from those facts something greater than the sum of the facts. But I was thinking in terms of it being fruitful.

David: What was it? Use and…

Ard: Usefulness and fruitfulness.

David: Tell me the difference.

SG: So, usefulness, I suppose… You know, many models, particularly in physics, have been ridiculously useful. And their validation in some ways is contained within their usefulness. The fact that they can send us to the moon is pretty useful. But then there are also fruitful theories. Fruitful, I think, is better than that. It’s not just useful: it’s creating a universe that will allow us to move forward.

Ard: I think fruitfulness is a hard thing to explain to an outsider, but you know it when you see it. A fruitful theory is something that explains something about the world that you see, so it’s important that it links to truth. But it also often tells you things that you didn’t know before, and then those things end up also being found in nature. And then it’s fruitful: it told you something you didn’t expect.

SG: It offers insights.

Ard: Insights, and often unexpected ones: ones that you wouldn’t have ever come up with had you not written the theory down.

HOW NARRATIVE SHAPES SCIENCE

David: One of the things that a lot of the scientists and mathematicians that we've talked to over the last few weeks have said is that mathematics is woven into the universe. Do you think something similar can be said about narrative?

BO: I would say narrative is woven into the universe to the degree that the universe is perceived by consciousness.

Narrative is a natural part of consciousness and a natural part of the way the mind works. It’s completely inevitable. It's there in dreams. It's there in unconsciousness. It's there in all the states of living being. We can speak of narrative, even in terms of matter that doesn't have consciousness, the minute something disintegrates: the fall of a rock; the altered movement of a stream; the changing patterns of a wave – they're all elements of narrative.

Ard: One or two people we've interviewed said, ‘Well, you know, these stories mislead us. Narrative is a bad thing because it fools us.’ But I think you're saying something different. Am I hearing that right?

BO: Well, everything fools us, let's be clear about that. For one very simple reason: we have no means of knowing what objective reality is – it's just simply not possible. We have no instrument by which to record the absolute nature of reality. There's no instrument, because whatever instrument that is will at some point be filtered through, or looked through, the lens of consciousness, of us.

So as long as that is happening, we are always constantly limiting reality as we perceive it, because any perception of reality that we can have is limited to our senses and our faculties. So we don't know the absolute nature of reality. So whatever it is we perceive of reality, we're always being deceived. We're always being deceived because we don't have the total picture.

What narrative does… narrative is, I believe, a great neutral power. On the one hand it has this extraordinary power to create patterns, which then become patterns of perception. It bypasses the intelligence. It goes straight to some primal part of us, of our emotion, of our unconscious. It bypasses all of our filters. It's partly because it works through images, through symbols and through the structure by which we perceive reality. It's a very, very powerful thing.

So, on the one hand it does that, but on the other hand it helps us shape reality. It helps us actually grasp what it is that we're experiencing. Without a sense of narrative locked into our DNA, locked into every part of our cells and our minds, reality would be a great mess of nonsense. We have no way of actually… This conversation would be meaningless without a sense of narrative.

David: Do you think science itself has a narrative, which it sometimes thinks it doesn't have? Because scientists like to say, ‘Well, we've got facts.’ They don't so often say, ‘but we also have a narrative, a story of science.’

BO: Oh, I think science has a narrative. It's unavoidable. I'll give you a very simple example: the whole idea of a wave and particle. The minute you have images, you already have the beginning of narrative, because you have the beginning of the shaping of the way something can be perceived.

I think those are actually two great poetic ways of perceiving reality: the wave and the particle. With one we perceive reality in its density and with the other we perceive reality in its immeasurability and its dream-like qualities, so that both those two images, which are poetic and a narrative, also, I think, conform to two great ways of looking at the world which you have in in literature.

Ard: I want to ask a slightly different question about narrative and mathematics because I've heard you speak on this. So how are mathematics and narrative similar and how are they different?

BO: Well, maths and narrative have quite a few things in common and quite a few divergent elements. They have progression, symmetry, a sense of a journey actually. Mathematicians always speak about the journey of a problem, not only the journey of the solving of a problem, but the journey of a problem through other people having worked through it, worked with it.

I think another similarity is there's an intuitive element to both of them. Mathematicians always speak of the intuitive. Sometimes they arrive at the truth intuitively before they have solved it physically. There's an intuitive element.

Where they diverge? There are many areas where they diverge. Narrative allows for imaginative expansion. Mathematics is more crystalline. Narrative always wears the human flesh. It's always embodied. That's how I always think of mathematics as being very pure in that sense.

The truths of maths are absolutely implied in the equations. It has nothing to do with consciousness in that… it has to do with consciousness, in the sense that mathematicians, the human being, is alive, but it is implied in itself, whereas the truth of literature is partly brought by the reader. It's shared. If it's not shared, it does not exist. A story does not exist if there's no one to hear it.