Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, contains 40 or so main characters and hundreds of minor characters. None of them is a physicist. What, if anything, are we to make of that vacuum?
Proust was familiar with science. His father, Achille Proust, was a prosperous pathologist and epidemiologist, who specialized in cholera and plague. Given the social circles that Marcel Proust frequented, the novelist could conceivably have met Louis de Broglie, who was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics for wave–particle duality, and his older brother Maurice, who was also a physicist. But according to Proust biographer Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust knew neither de Broglie brother. Proust was, however, good friends with another aristocratic scientist, Armand de Gramont, who did research in aerodynamics and founded a precision optics company.
Some of Proust’s most memorable characters are based on real people. The neurologist Jules Cotard (1840–89), for example, was the model for the pompous yet talented physician, Dr. Cottard. I speculate that Proust found no room for physicists in his 4200-page novel because either he didn’t know any or, if he did, he didn’t feel that a physicist’s presence would serve his novel’s plot.
Also devoid of physicists, despite their large casts and broad narrative sweeps through space and time, are Anthony Powell’s 12-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75) and Simon Raven’s 10-volume sequence Alms for Oblivion (1964–76).
The cover of the first UK hardback edition. CREDIT: Random House
By contrast, Ian McEwan’s satirical novel Solar (2010) has a physicist as the central character. What’s more, thanks to an interview that McEwan gave in January 2011, we know why he made that unusual and interesting choice.
Big beasts
Climate change and what to do about it provide Solar‘s backdrop. McEwan was inspired to tackle the topic following an all-expenses-paid trip that he and other writers and artists made in 2005 to the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Their host was Cape Farewell, a nonprofit that seeks a cultural response to climate change.
Ian McEwan on Spitsbergen in 2005. CREDIT: Cape Farewell
Although physicists are engaged in understanding climate change and in developing means to mitigate its effects, they are outnumbered in those efforts by atmospheric chemists, economists, meteorologists, materials engineers, oceanographers, and other scientists. Of all those vocations that his main character, Michael Beard, could follow, McEwan opted for physicist. As he recounted in the 2011 interview, he made his choice after attending a climate change summit that German chancellor Angela Merkel convened in Potsdam, Germany, in 2007. His reasoning is worth quoting in full:
The gimmick of the conference was that all the speakers were Nobel-Prize winners. Big beasts of the scientific jungle. All men. Super alpha males. Men of a certain age, too. And I was invited along really as a sort of after-dinner mint. My job was to give a little talk after supper.
So I found myself in a room with 35 Nobel-Prize winners, and it was like being in, say, a watering hole in Botswana. And here comes an elephant! And here comes a rhinoceros—a white rhinoceros! And here comes another magnificent beast! The egos!
These were men who had control not only of university budgets but also of big institutions, where government met science. But they weren’t doing any science, most of them. And most of their work was done in their 20s. That got them their gong, the planet’s biggest prize for any intellectual.
And so I thought how marvelous it would be to have a character who lived in his own shadow, who did his work 20–30 years ago and then becomes a minor celebrity and just coasts on this. And that gave me the sense that there would be a way into a novel that had climate change as its background noise—if I could only award him a Nobel prize.
I awarded him the prize and said airily to myself, and on the page, that he’d got it for modifying Einstein’s photovoltaics, for which Einstein got his prize. When I got to the end of the novel, I thought I still don’t know what he did to get this prize. And fortunately I met a mutual friend of ours, Graeme Mitchison, who is a biologist, a mathematician, and a physicist, and asked him if he would reverse-engineer for me this prize. And so he wrote a [Nobel Prize] citation, and I learned at last from Graeme Mitchison what Michael Beard had done.
The photoelectric effect, which Einstein explained as a quantum phenomenon, entails photons kicking out electrons from the surface of a metal. The photovoltaic effect entails photons kicking up electrons into an excited state within the surface of a semiconductor. Although the two phenomena share similarities, McEwan might be stretching things a bit to have his fictional physicist tie them together in a quantum field theoretic framework, the Beard–Einstein conflation of the novel.
That stretch aside, the Beard–Einstein conflation is plausibly invoked in the novel to describe quantum coherence in photosynthesis. The conflation is also, plausibly, the theoretical basis of a new and efficient way to catalytically split water with solar energy (hence the novel’s title).
Given that Beard’s life, past and present, occupies so much of the novel, how convincing a physicist is he? Before addressing that question, I should point out that most of the plot’s action takes place after Beard has all but retired from doing research. McEwan is free therefore to explore his main character’s other qualities, which are mostly loathsome.
Besides being lazy, Beard is duplicitous, venal, gluttonous, and philandering. At best he’s pitiable; at worst, despicable. If the novel weren’t satirical and funny, reading about Beard and his exploits would be trying.
But McEwan does manage to weave in observations and plot elements that are consistent with Beard’s profession. For example, while an undergraduate at Oxford, he bones up on the 17th-century poet John Milton to woo and bed Maisie, a student of English literature. Smugly, the young Beard observes that while he could pass off as literature maven after a month’s study, humanities students could never pass off as physicists no matter how hard they tried.
If you can stomach a physicist behaving badly, Solar is well worth reading.
Unusual Arctic fire activity in 2019–21 was driven by, among other factors, earlier snowmelt and varying atmospheric conditions brought about by rising temperatures.
January 06, 2023 12:00 AM
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