Can a scientific experiment be regarded as a work of art? It’s a question that has re-occurred to me over the past week or so after reading about the work—to affix the laudatory adjective “pioneering” would be a laughable understatement—carried out in the Cavendish Laboratory by Ernest Rutherford and his exceptional team in the opening decade of the 20th century. Among the towering achievements of this group is the so-called “Gold Foil Experiment”—conducted 100 years ago—which upturned the prevailing theory about the structure of the atom and replaced it with the nuclear model, later confirmed and refined by another genius, Niels Bohr.

What is so appealing about the experiment, which was performed by Hans Geiger (of radiation counter fame) and Ernest Marsden, is that its conceptual elegance means the implications of its findings can be grasped even by someone whose eyes glazed over during school science lessons.

Some background: The previously accepted atomic theory posited that negatively charged electrons floated in an evenly distributed cloud of positive charge. This was J.J. Thompson’s “plum-pudding model,” with electrons as the “plums” embedded in the positively charged pudding. The gold-foil experiment set out to test this hypothesis by directing a stream of positively charged alpha particles through a slit onto a very thin sheet gold foil. The foil was surrounded by a zinc sulphide detector strip that would light up—producing, in Rutherford’s word, “scintillations”—whenever it was hit by an alpha particle. According to the plum-pudding model, the diffuse positive charge of the foil’s atoms would be weak enough to allow most of the positive particles to pass through the foil. A deflection of only a few degrees was expected for a small percentage of particles.

However, during the experiment the zinc-sulphide detector directly in front of the gold-foil scintillated on occasion, meaning that some particles (about 1 in 8000) actually bounced perpendicularly off the foil. As Rutherford famously observed:  

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

A positively charged particle that bounced off the foil did so because it collided with a nucleus, which contains all of an atom’s positive charge and most of its mass. (There’s a very accessible flash animation explaining the experiment available here.)

It could be argued that beyond the utilitarian exigencies of empirical research, the experimenters’ assemblage of discrete elements into a coherent system mirrors the writer’s or painter’s organization of structure or the canvas. Given the fact that the radius of a nucleus is approximately 20,000 times smaller than the radius of the atom, blind empirical testing might never have unlocked the atom’s secret. Despite Rutherford’s declaration of amazement at the experiment’s results, he must have nursed some shadowy inkling of an alternative to Thompson’s model as he contemplated the deployment of the various components in space. (After all, why position the detector before the foil if such an outcome was unthinkable?) This approach chimes with a vision of the creative process as a journey from an inchoate mental picture to a fully realized artefact.

One ascribed aim of art is to change the way we think about the world, to alter our perceptions. Rutherford and his team’s work undoubtedly fulfils that criterion. Indeed, the work in the Cavendish laboratory is just one, albeit glittering, mosaic in a tessellation of breakthroughs in the natural sciences in the decades that bracket the start of the 20th century. Indeed, it’s possible that the vertiginous vistas opened up by revolutions in the areas of relativity, subatomic structures, and quantum mechanics prompted a crisis of confidence in the contemporary arts.

It is often argued that the First World War destroyed the bourgeois certainties and values that had calcified over the course of the “long 19th century.” But the spirit of modernism was abroad even before the guns of August 1914 sounded—for example, Virginia Wolf famously remarked that “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” Could it be that the more attuned practitioners in the arts sensed that the job of illuminating the world could be carried out far more effectively, and with more radical results, by soberly clad lab technician than, for example, Bloomsbury bohemians? And that the discoveries made by these technicians and theoreticians would throw up philosophic challenges—for example, Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” regarding the limits of human observation—would match anything hatched in the cultural sector?

However, there is one, crucial aspect of Rutherford’s research that could be said to disqualify it as a work of art. One definition of art is that it has no function apart from being itself. The Aesthetic Movement’s rallying cry of “Art for Art’s Sake” was reformulated by Modernists such as Marcel Duchamp, whose work asserted that any object could be transfigured into a work of art by the artist labelling it as such. Hence, a urinal became a “readymade,” rechristened as “Fountain.” Duchamp’s mock-signature, “R. Mutt,” on the porcelain was sufficient alchemy.

While “big science” is often conducted without any immediate utilitarian end in view, breakthroughs and new knowledge are uniquely vulnerable to commercial and military exploitation. The world is first illuminated by scientific discoveries and then shaped by them. Rutherford’s experiment–propelled by the desire to crack a puzzle–was no exception: After all, I first read about the gold-foil experiment over a week ago in Richard Rhodes’s excellent book The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

In a diverting essay on the protean nature of “greatness” in the poetry world, David Orr remarks that, during the Cold War, poets in “the West”—sinecured and largely unread outside the academy—felt a degree of cultural cringe toward their counterparts who struggled to work, or even survive, under authoritarian regimes:

[A] peculiar development in American poetry that has more or less paralleled the growth of creative-writing programs: the lionization of poets from other countries, especially countries in which writers might have the opportunity to be, as it were, shot. In most ways, of course, this is an admirable development that puts the lie to talk about American provincialism. In other ways, though, it can be a bit cringe-worthy. Consider how Robert Pinsky describes the laughter of the Polish émigré and Nobel Prize-winning dissident Czeslaw Milosz: “The sound of it was infectious, but more precisely it was commanding. His laughter had the counter-authority of human intelligence, triumphing over the petty-minded authority of a regime.” That’s one hell of a chuckle.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent triumph of liberal capitalism (hah!), this modesty among English-language writers before the work of those creating outside the Anglophone domain appears to have faded. Undoubtedly, the dimming of interest in “foreign” cultures stems partly from the embarrassment of riches generated by the most globalized of world languages: one significant indicator—an estimated 60% of all translations are taken from English.

However, it’s arguable that a contributing factor to autarky in reading matter lies in certain assumptions that may have grown up alongside English being adopted as the lingua franca for international commerce. Just as business leaders from São Paulo to Saigon now espouse the anglo argot of MBA courses and management consultants, there is a perception that the wider societies steered by these elites will eventually be similarly homogenised. If every “foreign” culture is heading for a common destination (the consumerist utopia that we, perhaps only briefly, attained), why bother to learn about them?  

The arrogance that sees the rest of the world as a uniform market in which English speakers merely need to repeat themselves to be understood is at its most pernicious and baffling when we come to the attitude of the Irish and British to other countries in the European Union.  Enrolled in the same club (at least nominally), we appear to have little interest in the personalities of our fellow members. Moreover, when we hear that French and German delegates at EU confabs meet on the common ground of English conversation, it confirms us in our prejudice that incuriosity is no serious thing. 

Even among the better-educated tiers of the “Anglosphere,” there is a distinct distance from the cultural currents running through EU countries. For example, in a review of the recently translated Alone in Berlin, by Hans Fallada, James Buchan noted how the promotional blurb from a leading publisher betrays an ingrained insularity:   

For the British publisher, this book is a “rediscovered” masterpiece - a sort of German Némirovsky - and if that pitch finds readers in the English-speaking countries, so much the better. In truth, the book did very well in the Aufbau-Verlag edition, was filmed for television in both wings of divided Germany and then again for the cinema in the west in 1975 with Hildegard Knef and Carl Raddatz. I suppose by “rediscovered”, Penguin means “translated into English”.

Against a backdrop in which even educated readers who speak English as their first language are unfamiliar with authors writing in different ones, there is a handful of intellectuals who appear to move easily through the skeins of different cultures, seemingly indifferent to the supposed barriers of language and mores. For many years the effortlessly trilingual George Steiner was the epitome of the cosmopolitan thinker—indeed, the very breadth of his interests made him the object of suspicion among those who saw him as a portentous show-off.  Steiner’s equal as a polyglot, but working as a historian, Perry Anderson can also make even the better-read members of his audience occasionally feel like knuckle-dragging oafs. For instance, in a coruscating pair of essays on Italy’s political deriva for the London Review of Books, Anderson provides an example to demonstrate that, despite the peninsula’s chronic problems, there is a strength-in-depth that cannot be gainsaid: 

No country in Europe, indeed, has recently produced a monument of global scholarship to equal the five volumes on the international history and morphology of the novel edited by [Franco] Moretti, and published by Einaudi – an enterprise of peculiarly Italian magnificence, of whose scale the Anglophone reader gets only a glimpse in the hand-me-down version, parsimonious in sympathy and spirit, issued by Princeton.

Perhaps, in quotes such as the one above, Anderson sets an unreasonably high standard for the common reader—how many of us will ever find the time or the stamina to work through a five-volume history of the novel in the original Italian?—but it is chastening to know that there are still certain thinkers and writers out there who can restore some lustre to that tarnished epithet, citizen of the world.

Being a right-thinking person you probably find Mark Steyn’s political views (Islamofascism, “Eurabia,” the decline of the West, yadda, yadda, yadda) rebarbative or, even worse, démodé. But the guy occasionally says something interesting. During an interview available on YouTube, Steyn remarks that cocky young hacks are often mystified about why newspapers continue to employ fossils who churn out the same article over and over (a certain sighing host of a late-night Irish news programme comes to mind).

Steyn explains the reason is that the “middle-aged bores” are usually reliable, producing the necessary word-count according to deadline. The challenge is redoubled when the article required falls into the nebulous but important category of “analysis”: after all, placing messy and apparently random events into a reassuring context now represents newspapers’ sliver of a raison d’être.

In the United States, the king of the instant-analysis was R.W “Johnny” Apple Jr., “roving epicure” and political writer for The New York Times. Apple’s obituary in the Washington Post retells a famous anecdote that illuminates the skills that allowed Apple to make free with his expense account:

Within the Times, Mr. Apple was revered for his mastery of the “Q-head,” the paper’s name for the analytical sidebar to a major news event that adds historical context.

At 6 one night, he received an order from the foreign desk for a Q-head and was strongly urged to incorporate the phrase “Not since Versailles . . .” about the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Mr. Apple protested, saying his stepdaughter’s wedding rehearsal dinner was to start in 90 minutes. He then filed his article in an hour. “It was written in clear English,” his friend Calvin Trillin wrote in a 2003 New Yorker magazine profile of Mr. Apple. “It had historical references to Salt II and the Panama Canal treaties and the tension between Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge during the formation of the League of Nations. It was one thousand one hundred and seventy-one words long. Eleven of those words were, like a tip of the hat to [the editor], ‘Not since the Versailles Treaty was voted down in November 1919 . . .’ “

As editor of the Guardian for 20 years, Peter Preston undoubtedly became conscious of both the spuriousness of the contention that newspapers are history’s first draft and the necessity of promptly producing that draft. Indeed, in semi-retirement Preston now writes analysis pieces for the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section. But Sunday’s “think-piece”—appearing in the teeth of breaking news—that tried to place the killing of two British soldiers in Antrim within the wider content of Northern Ireland’s recent history exposed the dangers associated with delivering insight-on-a-deadline. Preston’s attempt at a wide-angle view of the incident seemed to lapse into the kind of “mad Ireland” tropes that characterised so much British coverage during the dark days of the 70s and 80s. What are we expected to make, for example, of the Celtic mist swirling around the following pronouncement?

Irish republicanism, primed with passions and delusions, is also Irish history: it measures time in centuries, not decades. Its violence comes and goes over generations.

The above quote appears to glance over the specific circumstances and factors that contributed to this atrocity, preferring to evoke the atavistic nature of the Irish “character.” If we are left in any doubt about Preston’s vision of an Ireland superficially “modern” but subterraneously undermined by primal violence and tribalism, an analogy further down the column clarifies the writer’s position:

The province, for those who do remember the 70s and 80s, is small and tightly knit. It has a porous border, just like Afghanistan, which can make life easy for killers on the move.

To react adequately to a “respectable” columnist comparing what is supposed to be part of his country to Afghanistan (and, by extension, another EU state to Pakistan) almost deserves the Internet’s favoured expression of disbelief: WTF?

I suppose one must swallow such lumpen treatment when you are at the unrequited end of what I call the chain of indifference. For example, the establishment in the United Kingdom seems to be keenly interested in what their counterparts in Washington make of them. The “special relationship” is endlessly invoked. But when, following President Obama’s recent fanfare-less reception of Prime Minister Gordon Brown for example, it is suspected that Americans don’t really think very often about Britain, much less about the “special relationship,” the expression of hurt feelings in the British press is almost touching. (One plank in the Daily Telegraph even blamed the “Lady Macbeth” influence of Michelle Obama for the perceived cool reception given to Brown.) 

Far further down the chain of insignificance, we in Ireland find our travails endlessly fascinating. Recently, we have exhaustively debated questions of leadership, social solidarity, who’s to blame for the crash, etc.—and these issues absorb us so much that we half-believe that all of Europe is similarly gripped by our plight. However, only when something truly egregious occurs on our island does the rest of the world rouse itself and throw a glance in our direction. But when we read the resulting media coverage, the hackneyed examples, the shop-worn analogies, and the usual talking heads trotted out indicate that nobody was really paying us any attention beforehand. 

Today’s post is written in the wake of the killing of a PSNI constable in Craigavon. And more articles similar to Preston’s—forcing a particular tragedy into a crude jigsaw of the Province’s politics—will doubtlessly appear over the coming hours. But unless they are produced by people who were paying attention during the “boring” years of choppy peace and begrudging compromise, the instant analyses served up will likely be as unsatisfying as instant coffee.

The mini-quest began when I read the following sentence in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (from the section that lives up to its foreboding title, The Part about the Crimes):

The events, according to the police investigation, revolved around a fight caused by Gabriela Morón’s refusal to immigrate to the United States.

Perhaps my mind was trying to latch on to a syntactical quibble as a distraction from what is basically a 300-page account of the discovery of the bodies of murdered girls and women among the precincts of a Mexican border town, but I felt that the above sentence seemed somehow off. If you’re living in Mexico and go to live in the United States, don’t you emigrate to America? Then I thought, well when do you use immigrate? They immigrated from Mexico, for example, didn’t seem entirely right either. Why not use emigrate again? For a sickening moment the fabric of the world threatened to unravel: a word, possibly even two, had slipped free of meaning. Moira tried to quell my angst over the possible superfluousness of “immigrate” (or “emigrate”) by suggesting that perhaps prepositions are the key: “immigrate to” but “emigrate from.”

Like I fool I ignored her, and leaved through copies of Fowler and Follett for some thread that would lead out of the labyrinth. After 11 seconds of fruitlessly hunting through the duo’s crabbed prose for enlightenment, I turned to the Web (surprise, surprise). As well as locating an answer to my question, I also discovered that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, all 989 pages of it, is available in full through Google Books. Which is nice to know. The book also confirmed my suspicions that “Emigrate and immigrate make a case in which English has two words where it could easily have made do with only one.” But the usage handbook holds out a branch to sanity by concurring with Moira’s suggestion (surprise, surprise): “To emphasize the notion of leaving, use emigrate with from; use immigrate with to or into.”

Now to figure out when to use “inflammable” rather than “flammable.”