The folklore of Western science is filled with solitary heroes and geniuses. After I read a book about Galileo while in fourth grade, I decided that science was the most noble profession. It was because I was inspired by a romantic idea: working alone, or with the limited contributions of much less brilliant minds, the “true” scientist discovers something which revolutionizes his (it’s usually a he) field, as well as the way humans look at the universe. The discovery is named after the scientist, and he achieves ever-lasting recognition, an immortality to rival that of kings. This is science as Western culture’s antidote to the problem of life after death.

The idea of the heroic scientist isn’t just my personal fascination. Science students everywhere, even the nonscientific masses, see science in terms of a handful of famous personas and its history as the legacy of revolutionaries: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Watson and Crick. The culture of scientists themselves–who have studied and understood the nameless concepts behind the equations–is also dominated by this pantheon of names. Maxwell’s equations, Pythagorean theorem, Mendelian genetics. We name discoveries after people as if gravity didn’t exist before Newton, as if the weirdness of space-time didn’t come into being until Einstein put pen to paper.

Now that I’ve kept that inspiration long enough to work in a lab and read multi-author papers, I’m starting to suspect that the “lone hero” is an illusion. Not only that, but that it was just as much of an illusion a century ago, in the great Romantic age of scientific achievement, as it is today, in the age of online connectedness and interdisciplinary research. Is it possible that the individual-centered view of science has always been nothing more than an artifact of our individual-centered cultural imagination?

But it gets more complicated–science isn’t the same today as it was for Newton and Einstein. There are more scientists now, more publication in journals, and more collaboration due to improved communications. Some fundamental technological or sociological shift could have made the hero-driven historiography of science obsolete, but not any less valid for a previous era. Even the nature of science could have changed–physics and biology have become mature disciplines, and new discoveries might call for a cumulative, prolonged effort instead of a single stroke of insight.

But even in the 19th century, scientists corresponded frequently, and made important discoveries via correspondence. And today, despite all the changes that have taken place in science, the public still views Nobel Prize winners and best-selling writer-scientists with unqualified respect and awe, a mixture that years from now could become the basis for beatification into scientific sainthood. What’s to say that the same disconnect between scientific practice and its mythification hasn’t always existed? Most likely our historiography was flawed in the first place.

Yet another possibility is that scientific heroes do exist, but for different reasons than the public — and my 4th grade self — might think. Malcolm Gladwell, in a recent essay on innovation, describes this idea to explain the phenomenon of “multiples,” or many people independently making a discovery or invention around the same time.

scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place. It should not surprise us, then, that calculus was invented by two people at the same moment in history. Pascal and Descartes had already laid the foundations…Leibniz and Newton may never have actually sat down together and shared their work in detail. But they occupied a common intellectual milieu…A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.
["In The Air" via The New Yorker]

If scientific genius can be boiled down to efficiency, then where did our idea of the transcendently insightful genius come from? Gladwell says, maybe we’re just confusing science and art, a very different beast.

You can’t pool the talents of a dozen Salieris and get Mozart’s Requiem. You can’t put together a committee of really talented art students and get Matisse’s “La Danse.” A work of artistic genius is singular, and all the arguments over calculus, the accusations back and forth between the Bell and the Gray camps, and our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples are the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn’t belong. Shakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him, as none other before or since could. Alexander Graham Bell owned the telephone only because his patent application landed on the examiner’s desk a few hours before Gray’s.

I think this “misplaced desire” to compare science to art has little to do with the nature of science itself — after all, what is more fact-based and less romantic than science? — and everything to do with the effect that science has had on our culture. Like art, science has brought profound changes in the way we view the world and our role in it. To write about something so influential on our society, the human penchant for storytelling kicks in. This is why, despite everything science would tell us about the impersonal nature of the universe and the cold rationality of its rules, a history of scientific discovery will inevitably focus on the human players. What good story doesn’t have heroes?

On some level, we want science to be like art, like literature–dramatic, tragic, emotional, deeply meaningful. In reality science is meaningful, but in the way that philosophy might be. The satisfaction of knowing is in how the details come together and produce something completely surprising–that’s all the drama that is needed. My 4th grade self aspired to dream as recklessly as Galileo did, all the while uncovering truths about the universe that no one else had known before. I was already searching for a good story and an underlying purpose in my future profession. Was that the scientist in me speaking, or some other vocation: a historian, an artist, a storyteller?

Image: “Orbitals, Variation B” via Complexification.net
Link to Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article: “In The Air: Who says big ideas are rare?”