By Thierry Courvoisier
Springer
This book is a curiosity, but like many curiosities, well worth stumbling across. It is the product of a curious, roving mind with a long and illustrious career dedicated to the exploration of nature and the betterment of society. Pieced together with cool scientific logic, it takes the reader from a whistle-stop tour of modern astronomy through the poetry collection of Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, to a science-inspired manifesto for the future of our planet. After an opening chapter tracing the development of astronomy from the 1950s to now, subsequent chapters show how gazing at the stars, and learning from doing so, has brought benefit to people from antiquity to modern times across a wide range of disciplines.
Astronomy helped our ancestors to master time, plant crops at the right moment, and navigate their way across wide oceans. There’s humour in the form of speculation about the powers of persuasion of those who convinced the authorities of the day to build the great stone circles that dot the ancient world, allowing people to take time down from the heavens. These were perhaps the Large Hadron Colliders of their time, and, in Courvoisier’s view, probably took up a considerably larger fraction of ancient GDP (gross domestic product) than modern scientific instruments. John Harrison’s remarkable clocks are given pride of place in the author’s discussion of time, though the perhaps even more remarkable Antikythera mechanism is strangely absent.
By the time we reach chapter three, the beginnings of a virtuous circle linking basic science to technology and society are beginning to appear, and we can start to guess where Courvoisier is taking us. The author is not only an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Geneva, but also a former president of the Swiss Academy of Sciences and current president of EASAC, the European Academies Science Advisory Council. For good measure, he is also president of the H Dudley Wright Foundation, a charitable organisation that supports science communication activities, mainly in French-speaking Switzerland. He is, in short, a living, breathing link between science and society.
In chapter four, we enjoy the cultural benefits of science and the pleasure of knowledge for its own sake. We have a glimpse of what in Swiss German is delightfully referred to as Aha Erlebnis – that eureka moment when ideas just fall into place. It reminded me of the passage in another curious book, Kary Mullis’s Dancing Naked in the Mindfield, in which Mullis describes the Aha Erlebnis that led to him receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. It apparently came to him so strongly out of the blue on a night drive along a California freeway that he had to pull off the road and write it down. Einstein’s famous 1% inspiration may be rare, but what a wonderful thing it is when it happens.
Chapter five begins the call to action for scientists to take up the role that their field demands of them in society. “We still need to generate the culture required to […] bring existing knowledge to places where it can and must contribute to actions fashioning the world.” Courvoisier examines the gulf between the rational world of science and the rather different world of policy – a gulf once memorably described by Lew Korwarski in his description of the alliance between scientists and diplomats that led to the creation of CERN. “It was a pleasure to watch the diplomats grapple with the difference between a cyclotron and a plutonium atom,” he said. “We had to compensate by learning how to tell a subcommittee from a working party, and how – in the heat of a discussion – to address people by their titles rather than their names. Each side began to understand the other’s problems and techniques; a mutual respect grew in place of the traditional mistrust between egg-headed pedants and pettifogging hair-splitters.” CERN is the resulting evidence for the good that comes when science and policy come together.
As we reach the business end of the book, we find a rallying call for strengthening our global institutions, and here another of Courvoisier’s influences comes to the fore. He’s Swiss, and a scientist. Scientists have long understood the benefits of collaboration, and if there is one country in the world that has managed to reconcile the nationalism of its regions with the greater need of the supra-cantonal entity of the country as a whole, it is Switzerland. It would be a gross oversimplification to say that Courvoisier’s manifesto is to apply the Swiss model to global governance, but you get the idea.
Originally published in French by the Geneva publisher Georg, if there’s one criticism I have of the book, it’s the translation. It made Catherine Bréchignac, who speaks with fluidity in French, come across as rather clunky in her introduction, and on more than one occasion I found myself wondering if the words I was reading were really expressing what the author wanted to say. Springer and the Swiss Academy of Sciences are to be lauded for bringing this manifesto to an Anglophone audience, but for those who read French, I’d recommend the original.
