The Case for Solitude in Science

We’ve built an unquiet world. Just mentioning the din risks cliché. Between the churning machines, the constant chatter of hyper-connectivity, the amplifiers on everything, and all of the rest of it, it's as if society didn’t even put up a fight, to the point of being disdainful of silence in the first place. We need our noise and I don’t think anyone is quite sure why.

But noise can also be bad for us, even on a physiological level; it’s implicated in a range of health problems, including high blood pressure, coronary disease, ulcers, colitis, and migraine headaches, as well as general stress and increased susceptibility to viral infection and toxic substances. Also: noise is not good for being a genius, according to a piece out this week in Physics World written by Felicity Mellor, a senior lecturer in science communications at Imperial College London. Physicists over the years have benefited greatly from not just silence, but solitude. We tend to take at face value that increased connectivity is good for innovation and ideas—but history tells us it’s not so simple.

Mellor notes that in the UK scientists are pushed, as a matter of policy, to assess other’s publications, collaborate with other scientists, and communicate/engage with the public. Scientists are in essence forced into a web with other scientists and even laypeople and efforts to cut loose from it are punished by the establishment. No longer can a researcher hope to send themselves into thought-exile and expect to remain funded or otherwise supported. Mellor points out that notable loners Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Henry Cavendish, and Paul Dirac would quite possibly all find themselves cut loose from the establishment in this climate.

Newton, in particular, cultivated the image of the hermit – disheveled, shut away in his rooms, and thinking about esoteric matters that few others could hope to understand. He published reluctantly, attempting to restrict his audience to only those he thought capable of appreciating his work. Indeed, it was only after much persuasion that he eventually agreed to his Principia being published in full.

Cavendish, the 16th century discoverer of hydrogen, meanwhile insisted on communicating only via notes, while Werner Heisenberg was only able to finally put his ideas on paper while on the small island of Heligoland, thus formulating the basis for quantum mechanics. Somewhat famously he’d made his retreat in an effort to avoid the relative chatterbox of fellow physicist Niels Bohr, seeking out the “proper, uncoerced balance” in his interactions with the world. Bohr, as one extreme on the communication/connection spectrum, had thrown this balance off for Heisenberg, who had little choice but to retreat.

It’s peculiar comparing all of these physics pioneers to the thinkers of today. One imagines working in a physics department office at Kings College at the dawn of quantum physics being an environment very difficult to control, a chattering sea of thought, most of it quite worthless not for ideas, but for new ideas. Mellor argues that pushing for collaboration all the time threatens creativity. Indeed, creativity is something seldom considered an aspect of science nowadays. It’s popular to think of science as just one big river of progressing thought, with every single thinker’s idea entirely dependent on the ideas around it and the current behind them.

Consider, for example, the movement against individual Nobel Prize awards. Recently, there’s been Peter Higgs, the namesake of the Higgs boson but just one of a number of thinkers all chasing the same idea at the same time. 1964 saw three different papers from six different authors all describing what would become the Higgs boson. Privileging solitude and quiet is to privilege the notion of individual genius, and it’s not always like that. Theoretical physics, even if it does involve the occasional island retreat, is still best thought of as a grand linkage of genius, if not a river. In 2011, three researchers shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, representing two teams totaling 51 different scientists working together. A 2012 Scientific American editorial called on the Nobel committee to change its policy from awarding individuals to awarding teams and collaborations, arguing that it’s more true to life:

The Nobel committees force a category error: they insist on awarding the prize to a few individuals, while in reality, the nature of the scientific enterprise has changed. Teams now perform the bulk of the highest-impact work. Whereas a century ago a patent clerk famously divined the theory of relativity in his spare time, discovering a Higgs boson requires decades of planning and the efforts of 6,000 researchers.

The general thinking is that physics has gotten too big for individuals. The ideas of the future—dark matter and energy, cosmic inflation, the expanded Standard Model—require shared brain power and shared resources. Solitude is not so simple now. Nonetheless, its argument remains and it still has a place. The catch is that fitting solitude and quiet into Big Physics is not as simple as individual researchers ditching to some island for a while, and I’m not sure there’s a clear alternative in 21st century science.

Mellor’s conclusion is compelling, but isn't it also hopeless? “Delete the silences from speech, and one is left with incoherent babble. Delete the silences from scientific research and perhaps the result will be nothing but noise.”