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Good Reading : November 2004
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goodreading 19 up close And yet at the heart of modern physics is a language most of us still find boring, baffling or terrifying: mathematics. I spoke to three writers and mathematicians – Margaret Wertheim, Robyn Arianrhod and Clio Cresswell – about their books and their passion for maths. Margaret Wertheim lives in Los Angeles, where she recently established the Institute for Figuring (www.theiff.org) to showcase the ‘aesthetic and enchanted’ constructs of science, mathematics and technology. Her bestselling book Pythagoras’Trousers: God, physics and the gender wars (1996) is a radical rereading of the his- tory of physics, maths and religion. Her second book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:A history of space from Dante to the Internet (1999), tracks Western conceptions of space, both physical and spiritual, from medieval times. In the opening paragraph of Pythagoras’Trousers, Wertheim refers to a mystical experience she had in a maths class aged ten. This is so tantalising that my first question is about her early expe- rience of maths. One day when she was in Grade 6 her teacher, Mr Marshall, gave a lesson on circles. He told his students about ‘a number hidden in the circle which is the secret of its properties’, then conducted some exercises so they could discover pi for them- selves. Some did, and Wertheim was one of them. ‘It was an extraordinary experience,’ she says in her rich, earthy voice over the phone. ‘I remember being struck forcefully by what we call Platonism (the belief that there is a transcendent math- ematical reality beyond the physical world) – that hidden in the physical circles which we see manifested in physical objects around us, there was this transcendent mathematical entity called pi.’ When she left school Wertheim completed degrees in phys- ics (University of Queensland), and maths and computing (University of Sydney). But she began to feel she was living one life at university and another life beyond it, and these two lives became increasingly difficult to reconcile. So after university Wertheim worked as an assistant film editor for a year. Then she read Chaos by James Gleick, which inspired her to become a science writer. Her articles have since appeared in a range of publications, from The NewYork Times to Vogue.When Wertheim moved to LA – ‘to be with the man who eventually became my husband’ – she decided to write the accessible book on physics she’d been planning to write for her friends. Four years later she completed Pythagoras’Trousers, a very different book from the one she had set out to write. Like many people,Wertheim had believed that science and religion were ancient adversar- ies. But quite unexpectedly her research uncovered a Western mystical tradition that dated back to Pythagoras, a fusion of religion and mathematically-based science that proved her belief to be wrong – and Wertheim found it had been incorporated into Christianity during the Middle Ages and sub- sequently ‘woven into Christian thinking’. According to Wertheim, this is why physicists like Hawking can talk so freely about the mind of God. As she points out, ‘when scientists talk about God, a lot of people who wouldn’t dream of hearing a priest talk about God will pay attention.Why? Because I think our culture has been very receptive to the conception that the mathematical relations in the world around us are transcendent, divine, eternal truths.’ Wertheim’s discovery of this connection between maths, physics and God led her to another unexpected insight: that women’s absence from physics has been profoundly shaped by their exclusion from the Church. ‘I stumbled across something that I think was a real insight into why it has been so difficult for women to break into this field,’ she says. The role of the imagination in theoretical physics is the sub- ject of Wertheim’s next book. She believes Hawking’s brilliant imagination is what has made him ‘the most famous living scien- tist on the planet’. As she says, the imaginative universe Hawking presents ‘gives us the power to dream’ – and physics has become ‘in some sense a new form of fiction.Through the language called mathematics we bring fabulous worlds into being.’ Which is just how Robyn Arianrhod sees mathematics – as an ‘amazing and elegant’ language. Arianrhod’s book Einstein’s Heroes: imagining the world through the language of mathematics was published in 2003. Einstein’s Heroes tells the story of maths through the life and revolutionary work of the 19th-century mathematical physicist Robert Clerk Maxwell, a legendary mathematician. Also present in this comprehensive book are the two men whose work made Maxwell’s discovery possible: Michael Faraday and Isaac Newton. And woven throughout is a lucid history of maths from ancient to modern times. Arianrhod and I met at the Sydney Writers’ Festival to talk about her work. Petite and fair, Arianrhod is as dreamy-faced as any poet or novelist.Which is appropriate, because one of the most striking things about Einstein’s Heroes is the consider- able novelistic talent of its author. ‘I’ve always loved writing and language,’ Arianrhod says. At school, she dreamt of writing like Grahame Greene or Tolstoy. ‘Then in about Year 11, when I first encountered mathematical proof in the algebraic, linguistic sense, I was entranced.’ Robyn Arianrhod
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