veryone has childhood heroes –
a brilliant sports star, say, or an
adventurer. It’s all part of growingup – as is discovering they weren’t quite
as heroic as you thought. My first hero
was Captain Scott, whose story of steely
determination to reach the South Pole
moved me to tears when I read it as a kid.
Only years later did I find out that he was
an amateurish bungler.
My scientific heroes have fared better.
Sure, Louis Pasteur sometimes cut corners
in his scientific studies of disease, but the
outcome saved countless lives. Physicist
Richard Feynman was a bit of a show-off,
but there’s no doubting his genius.
And then there’s Albert Einstein, who
just gets more impressive by the day. His
theories are still producing the goods a
century on – witness the recent detection
of gravitational waves. Yet even he made
mistakes. He never accepted quantum
theory, and wasted years searching for a
theory that unified the fundamental forces
of nature.
The tragedy of Einstein’s lost years is
that it was clear his quest was doomed
even as he worked on it. His rejection
of quantum theory ruled out any hope
of understanding the subatomic world.
Then there’s the awkward fact that when Einstein started work,
‘everything’ involved just two forces of nature – gravity and
electromagnetism. As the years went by, other fundamental forces
were identified, but they didn’t stop Einstein. He was still working
on his Theory of Some Bits of Everything on the day he died.
Still, it’s the prerogative of all geniuses to pursue their own
hobbyhorses, isn’t it? Maybe, but I can’t help being saddened
when I learn that yet another brilliant scientist has been seduced
into spending time on one particular Big Question: the nature of
consciousness.
Pondering how our brains create the sense of being conscious
has entranced countless thinkers, from René Descartes to Nobel
laureates like Francis Crick of DNA fame. None of them made
any real progress, in the sense of developing theories that could be
tested scientifically.
And yet still they come. As you read this, some very clever
people are in Arizona for the most prestigious conference devoted
to the problem of consciousness.
Held every other year since 1994, the week-long gathering used
to be called Towards a Science of Consciousness. But it’s been
The Last Word
ROBERT MATTHEWS is Visiting Professor in Science at Aston University, Birminghamrenamed The Science of Consciousness.
So after centuries of conjecture, beard-stroking and thought, have
the great minds nailed down the problem to the point they can
put rival theories to the test? Er, no, not exactly. The conference
features the usual grab-bag of imponderables being kicked around
by the usual mix of cerebral celebs. In short, the name change is just
an exercise in rebranding – the scientific equivalent of steaming the
label off a bottle of plonk and renaming it Château Lafite.
Part of the conference has been designated the Pribram Session,
named after Karl Pribram, one of the pioneers of brain research
who died last year at the age of 95. He was yet another brilliant
scientist who spent his latter years wrestling with the mystery of
consciousness. The outcome was an enormous book whose thesis is
flaky at best.
I’m sure that Pribram’s peers will have a grand time in Arizona.
But part of me wishes they would bend their intellects towards
problems they can at least agree on. ßE
ILLUSTRATION: ADAM GALETHE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES