Maintaining mental balance

I will freely admit that, as I write this column, my nerves are not at their most steady. I will not be getting into the political reasons for this – they aren’t difficult to guess. But what I learned in 2016–2020 was that I needed to pace myself, so that’s what I’m trying to do right now. And I am hoping that being a scientist makes that easier to do.

In some ways it can make it harder, such as when you see public figures blithely sounding off on scientific topics that they clearly know nothing about. Actually, sometimes they technically know less than nothing, by my estimates, because it is obvious that some of them need to first work on clearing out unsightly piles of misconceptions before they can even work back up to a blank-slate starting point. There’s a special sort of irritation in knowing enough about a complex subject that you can see, in detail, just what a tangled mess someone is turning it into. At this point I feel as if I should borrow Mark Twain’s approach, and say that if I had any suspicion that readers here had ever encountered such a feeling of irritation themselves, then I wouldn’t even bring it up. But since it is such a rare and strange event, I feel I should mention it so that others can stretch their imaginations to include such remote possibilities.

There’s a special sort of irritation in knowing enough about a complex subject that you can see, in detail, just what a tangled mess someone is turning it into

But there are ways that a scientific worldview can alleviate the symptoms as well. I truly enjoy dealing with the physical world and trying to make it reveal its hidden rules (and if that’s not science, then what is?) It’s a comfort to me that such rules exist (both the ones we’ve discovered and the ones we haven’t yet), and that it is indeed possible to discover them. It’s the very independence of natural laws from human concerns that makes them a welcome refuge. The Ideal Gas Law was not decided by who had the catchiest slogans, who spent the most money on commercials, or who twisted enough arms or called in enough favours to make everyone agree that pV =nRT. The glorious deep blue of copper sulfate hydrate was not focus-grouped in trial markets before its colour was rolled out as part of an ad campaign for some big-budget film.

Similarly, the double stars and nebulae that I saw as a child through my first telescope in 1972 are all still right there in the sky, ageless compared to us human beings and utterly indifferent to our concerns. If the weather were not so hideous this week I would be out there looking at some of them right now, and when I do it’s like visiting old friends. I have the same feeling when I look through a microscope: the protozoa are still down there doing their protozoan things, just as they ever were, and I can pick up with them right where I left off any time I wish to visit. They don’t realise that any time has passed, and sometimes it can feel that way to me as well. I look up from the eyepiece, startled to see what room I’m in and what year it really is.

The common thread here is a lack of connection to human affairs. I can say with deep sincerity that there are (and will be) times when that is exactly what I am looking for – and exactly what I need to maintain my own mental equilibrium. There are greater things than any of us out there, though some of them are light-years across and others need powerful magnification just to see them right in front of our eyes. We can learn about them and learn from them, and if we’re clear-sighted enough, we can thus add to our own understanding of the universe as we find it. I am very happy indeed to live in a time and in a place where I can experience such things, and that’s a thought that I intend to hold on to for as long as I am able to hold on to anything at all.