4. The Birth of a Book
Sometime back, I attended a scientific meeting in New York City at which the scientists present tried to convince their peers of the virtues of their particular theories by creating what can only be described as stories. Of course, the tellers of these tales didn't see them as stories at all, but only as versions of 'The Truth' in which various inconveniences of the real world had been simplified or simply omitted so as to make the story come out right in the end. Such idealizations of nature are a common enough practice in science, although most practicing scientists would probably balk at the labeling of their theories as 'stories.' But, in fact, in their distortion of real-world facts these stories are every bit as fanciful as the types of warpages of reality engaged in by novelists in creating their tales of human strife and struggle.

Having had enough of these scientific stories to last me for awhile, one afternoon I skipped the meeting to engage in my ab-solutely favorite pastime in New York haunting the bookshops from uptown to downtown and most everywhere in between. During this welcome break from scientific storytelling, at oneshop I ran across the published scripts from one of the most successful television series ever produced on PBS, the series Meeting of Minds [1]. This Peabody Award winning series hosted by the polymath, Steve Allen, ran from 1977 to 1979. The format of the show was an interesting one. Allen played the role of the host of a dinner party, to which he would invite famous characters from history Emily Dickinson, Attila the Hun, Charles Darwin and Vladimir Lenin, for example. The content of the show was then simply a dinner-party conversation, ranging over a host of topics that Allen, like any good host, would periodically inject into the discussion.

As I thumbed through these scripts, recalling the pleasures I had when I'd watched the shows in their original screening, I wondered about whether it might not be possible to present ideas of both scientific and philosophical content in this dinner-party format. Why couldn't one, for instance, have a fictional dinner party to which historical characters would be invited to discuss questions like the origin of life, the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life, or the nature of quantum reality? After purchasing the four volumes of TV scripts, I continued pondering this question as I read them more carefully on the long ight back home. Surely, there must be a way of sugar-coating the scientific message of some of the almost impenetrable talks I'd heard earlier in the week in some sort of fictional format, so that the basic idea could be presented in a comprehensible and entertaining way for an intelligent non-specialist. Thus was born the idea underlying my 1998 book, The Cambridge Quintet [2]. More on that in a moment.

Science as Storytelling
Both the creation of science and its recounting for non-scientists almost always takes place in the form of stories. For example, scientific theories of the origin of life are developed around 'scenarios' by which molecules oating around in the 'primordial soup' self-assemble somehow into self-replicating entities from which the myriad lifeforms we see on Earth today have evolved. Similarly, one of the great mysteries in quantum theory, how the Schrodinger wave function, a purely mathematical entity, describes the measured behavior of a physical object like the momentum of an electron, is puzzled out through Schrodinger'sstory of a cat in box, the so-called Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. Both the origin-of-life scenario and Schrodinger's Cat are stories that scientists tell to each other to clarify and extend theories of the physical universe. But there are also the stories scientists tell to the lay public about their work.

The stories of science that a layperson encounters may take many forms. Let me take a longer look at just three of the most common types.



Expository Articles: The Op-Ed page and Science sections of major newspapers, such as The New York Times or The Washington Post, often feature articles written by scientists, whose aim is to tell a story illustrating one or another development in contemporary science. For instance, a few months ago I wrote such a piece myself, in which the aim was to give an account of how it could be that well-meaning but hardly uninvolved climate researchers could come to such diametrically opposed conclusions on the matter of global warming. The story I told in this instance was a common one for scientists, involving the problem of bringing computer models of climatological phenomena into congruence with their real-world counterparts.


Scientific exposition can also be directed at other scientists, as for example in the survey articles and more technical expositions found in general-science periodicals, such as Nature, New Scientist, Science, and even Scientific American. Again, such stories aim to inform their target audience by creating stories that have enough detail to be informative, but not enough to become tedious for non-specialists.

Popular Books: Nowadays, just about every general book-store contains a separate section labeled 'Science.' And the overwhelming majority of books on display in this section are written by scientists (although not always practicing scientists). Occasionally, such a book even achieves a kind of cult status, as with the volumes Godel, Escher, Bach [3] by Douglas Hofstadter and A Brief History of Time [4] by Stephen Hawking. In both these cases, the volume told a story about some aspects of the natural and human worlds, that was designed to convey information to a non-specialist reader about matters scientific.

Fiction: Certainly the least explored but potentially most valuable mode of scientific storytelling is through the medium of fiction. And I don't necessarily mean 'science fiction,' but rather general literature that takes science and/or scientists as its focus. John Updike's volume, Roger's Version [5] is a notable example in this regard, along with the more recent volume Enduring Love [6] by the British novelist Ian McEwen. These works happen to be outstanding pieces of literature that just happen to be about science or scientists, in much the same way that the novels of John LeCarré happen to be about the British intelligence community. Occasionally, such volumes are even produced by scientists themselves, as with Cantor's Dilemma [7], the first volume of a tetralogy by noted biochemist Carl Djerassi, that he terms 'science-in-fiction.' And, of course, there is the more mainstream science-fiction literature, about which so much has been said that I will not discuss it further here, other than to note that many of the classic volumes are difficult to distinguish from the type of science-in-fiction that Djerassi has written. If there is a distinction to be made, my observation is that it resides in the relative emphasis placed on the motivations and character of the scientists in Djerassi's works as opposed to the exploration of the implications of the science, constituting the principal focus of more traditional 'hard' science fiction.


While I find all of these modes of telling stories in the cause of science fascinating and of great value both as enlightenment as well as entertainment it seemed to me that there was yet another possibility, one that I like to term 'scientific fiction.' Let me outline the basis for this form of science-as-storytelling, at least in the form I thought of it when producing my book, The Cambridge Quintet.


Scientific Fiction
The greatest single attraction of an historical novel is that it deals with real historical characters in a 'what-if?'-type of setting. So readers may not only be entertained, they may also actually learn something about how these people of the past lived, worked and played. More than anything else, it is this emphasis on real personages interacting over real intellectual issues that distinguishes what I call 'scientific fiction' from the modes of presenting science outlined above.

A work of scientific fiction is composed of four principal parts.

Historical characters: The sine qua non of scientific fiction is a collection of historical characters whose lives, thoughts, and interactions carry the story of the book. Since the focus is on matters scientific and philosophical, in such a work these characters will mostly be drawn from the worlds of science and closely related intellectual areas. However, this constraint certainly does not rule out artists, writers, musicians, or other types of thinkers besides scientists playing an important but secondary role in the story. Above all else, the focus of a book of scientific fiction is on explicating scientific issues, not on the characters. It is for this reason that a work of scientific fiction is not a novel, at least not as that term is generally understood. But it is a workof fiction. Some readers and reviewers of my book [2] seem somehow to have suffered some confusion on this point. A work of scientific fiction should be judged on how well it presents and explains the science, not on its development of the characters. The interaction of the characters is important, of course, but only insofar as it pushes along the goal of illuminating the intellectual issues residing at the heart of the book. Beyond that it's only an unnecessary and unwanted distraction.

Place(s) and Time(s): The historical characters need a playing field in space and time upon which to act out their struggle with the scientific themes of the story. The only real constraints in this regard are that the place and time be consistent with the issues being considered. For example, it would not do at all to set a story about genetic engineering at Plato's Academy in ancient Athens. Nor could an account of the phlogiston theory of matter be credibly placed at the Cavendish Laboratory in 20th-century Cambridge.

Surface Theme(s): As with any good story, a scientific fiction requires a point of con ict over which the characters can interact. I've found it useful to have at least two sorts of con icts, a sort of surface con ict that may or may not be of ephemeral importance and a deeper con ict that generally rests upon one or another of the eternal conundrums of philosophy. The surface theme(s) might revolve about matters as trivial as academic bickering over rank and position or something a bit deeper, but equally specific, such as a basic mystery of science like the origin of life. But the main point is that the surface theme be sufficiently contentious and urgent that it can both capture the reader's attention andserve to keep the story moving along at a brisk pace. In summary, the surface themes emphasize the emotional and 'human' issues of the story.

'Deep' Theme(s): The deep theme(s) of a scientific fiction relate to the surface theme by serving as a general foundation upon which the surface theme rests. In other words, they create the philosophical and intellectual underpinnings of the story. For instance, if the surface theme were the question of how life originated here on Earth, a possible deep theme supporting a debate on various theories of the origin of life might be the uniqueness of human physico-chemical structure. In other words, would we expect to find the same sort of carbon-based physical structures wherever life has originated in the universe or is there something special or accidental about how it happened here on Earth? Whatever the deep theme of the book happens to be, it should be the main intellectual underpinning of the entire enterprise and serve to support not only the surface theme, but also the interaction of the characters as they debate and discuss the pros and cons of various possible resolutions of the surface theme(s).


This discussion of people, places and themes has been quite general. So let me bring it down to earth by showing how the above structure is implemented in the specific case of my 1998 book, The Cambridge Quintet. The pretense of this work is a fictional dinner-party conversation at Christ's College, Cambridge, in June of 1949. The host of the party is the novelist, scientist and government mandarin, C. P. Snow, who has gathered a starstudded collection of thinkers to consider the problem of whether a computing machine can be constructed and programmed so as to duplicate human cognitive processes. To debate this matter, Snow has invited the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the mathematician Alan Turing, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger, and the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane. The matchups between the general categories for a scientific fiction outlined above and their implementation in The Cambridge Quintet are given in the box below:

Several people have asked me how I came to choose these particular characters and this time and place as the basis for the book. The answer is that once I had settled on the theme of the book (thinking machines) and the time (mid 1949), the rest was almost foreordained. It was clear that work on computing machinery and code-breaking during World War II had set the stage for the thinking-machine question, which was finally elucidated in Alan Turing's famous paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' [8], which was published in 1950. So it's reasonable to suppose that Turing was putting the finishing touches on this work in 1949; hence, the timing of the dinner party and one obvious guest. As Turing's foil it was natural to select Wittgenstein, who not only held a view of human intelligence that was anathema to a mechanist like Turing, but was also Turing's teacher in the sense that Turing was Wittgenstein's target audience in his lectures on the foundations of mathematics held in Cambridge in 193839 when Turing was a student at King's College.


As for the other guests, I wanted a representative from both the life sciences and the physical sciences in order to shed light from these areas on the philosophical and psychosociological aspects of artificial intelligence. As perhaps the most philosophically-minded of all the great quantum physicists, Schrodinger was a natural choice to represent the view of the physical sciences. Similarly, the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane was a logical choice to speak for the life sciences, especially in view of his far-ranging interest in the social aspects of biology.

Finally, the host. For this role I needed someone who understood science but was really a humanist. The novelist C. P. Snow fit this bill perfectly. He was not only a trained chemist, but served for many years as a government advisor on matters of science and science policy. And since Snow was the host of the meal, what better place to hold it than at his old rooms at Christ's College, Cambridge? This venue seemed doubly appropriate, since both Haldane and Turing had been students at Cambridge, while Wittgenstein had been a professor there.

So that's how the skeletal structure of this particular work of scientific fiction came about. Just to show that this lineup of people, places and ideas is not special, let me close by outlining the structure of another book of this type, one I have tentatively titled The One, True, Platonic Heaven. This volume is set in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) just after the Second World War. The principal characters are the mathematician John von Neumann, the logician Kurt Godel, the physicist Albert Einstein, and the director of the IAS, J. Robert Oppenheimer. There are two surface issues serving to carry the story in this work, the first being the enormous resistance of the IAS faculty to von Neumann's proposal to build a computer at the Institute. The second surface theme, which is strangely intertwined with the first, is the faculty's puzzlingly long debate over whether or not to promote Godel to the rank of Professor. The oddness of this situation is that Godel had already been universally recognized as the greatest logician since Aristotle. So why did the faculty wait so long to promote him to Professor?


Underlying these surface themes is the general philosophical question of the limits to scientific knowledge. Godel had opened this book with his famous result on the incompleteness of mathematics, showing that even in mathematics there are no mechanical 'methods' for discovering all true statements about numbers. This fact is intimately tied up with the notion of a computation. So if one wants to know about limits to scientific reasoning outside mathematics, then it's necessary to confront the question of limits to computation. At this point the story intersects von Neumann's quest to build the world's first 'supercomputer.' The following table encapsulates the main ingredients in this story:

Besides the formal structure of a time and place, real-life characters, and surface and deep themes, what The Cambridge Quintet and The One, True, Platonic Heaven have in common is the attempt to elucidate and explain philosophical ideas of substance in a semi-fictional format. In this sense, these books are much more like Jostein Gaarder's 'children's story' Sophie's World, [9] than they are like a mainline novel. Despite the fact that the subtitle of the book calls it 'A novel about the history of philosophy,' the book is a philosophy course set in one typeface interspersed with a fantasy printed in another. But the fantasy is only the sugar-coating to make the philosophy palatable. So it is too with the books of science I've outlined here. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the ideas are the message. Hopefully, the success of Gaarder's work, as well as the hoped-for readership of The Cambridge Quintet, will encourage authors more skillful than myself to join in the fun. The world of science and philosophy has lots of stories to tell, and 'scientific fiction' is a new way to tell them.

References
[1] Allen, Steve. Meeting of Minds. Series 14. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989.
[2] Casti, J. The Cambridge Quintet. London: Little, Brown & Co., 1998 (American edition: Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1998).
[3] Hofstadter, D. Godel, Escher, Bach. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
[4] Hawking, S. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam, 1988.
[5] Updike, J. Roger's Version. New York: Knopf, 1986.
[6] McEwen, I. Enduring Love. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
[7] Djerassi, C. Cantor's Dilemma. London: Macdonald, 1989.
[8] Turing, A. 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence.' Mind, 59 (1950), 433460.
[9] Gaarder, J. Sophie's World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.


John L. Casti received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Southern California. In 1974 he began work in the area of systems modeling and analyisis as one of the first members of the research staff at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analyisis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. He now serves as Professor of Operations Research and Systems Theory at the Technical University of Vienna. In addition to his Vienna post he has also served on the faculties of New York University and Princeton and currently belongs to the faculty of the Santa Fe Institute where his focus is on biological metaphors in the mathematical modeling of economics and other social phenomena. His numerous publications range from technical monographs on mathematical modeling to popular books on complexity and the limits of knowledge and recently a work of "science fiction" entitled The Cambridge Quintet, Little Brown, London, 1997. Additional titles include Complexification, HarperCollins, New York, 1994; Would-Be Worlds, Wiley, New York, 1997; and Paradigms Regained, Morrow, New York, 2000. His current research interests center on the use of large-scale microsimulation to study the properties of complex, adaptive systems, such as stock markets, the business world, and road-traffic networks. He is also engaged in exploring the question of whether or not there are limits to our ability to answer questions in the natural sciences by scientific means. This work involves making a bridge between the "impossibility'' results of Turing, Gödel and Chaitin in mathematics and questions in physics, biology and economic.