What happens when we tell stories about science?

What does happen when we tell stories about science? That was the question the panel of academics attempted to answer at the LSE/Imperial Literary Festival event last Wednesday evening. The aims described at the beginning were both ambitious and a bit vague. We were going to examine the relationship between science and narrative, and see science escaping from the lab into the ‘real’ world, where we would examine whether its ‘state’ was ‘altered’. What actually happened was that each panellist simply told a story of their own, giving a different perspective on science and technology, followed by a more general discussion.

Greg Artus, Imperial philosophy and ethics lecturer, recounted the activities of Annie Ducan, the infamous forensic chemist jailed for falsifying vast amounts of evidence. This example of a corrupt and criminal scientist was supposed to be a counterpoint to the ‘story’ we tell ourselves about how science is pure and rarified. There was maybe a bit of a lack of self-awareness here; does anyone really believe that scientists are anything but human? Could this itself be a ‘story’ that smug humanities types tell themselves? Where is the evidence that it’s true?

Next up, Richard Bronk from LSE’s European Institute was not the most charismatic or engaging speaker. Reading from notes, he sounded more like he was reciting an essay than telling a story. But he was well worth the effort of listening to, actually having some of the most profound insights. Stories, he said, are essential. They’re the way we make sense of the complex reality around us. They’re like lanterns illuminating the truth, but like real lanterns they only show us a limited area at a time. To see the full picture, you need more than one story, more than one viewpoint: sticking to one traditional narrative is not enough.

Aifric Campbell, novelist, ex-banker and creative writing lecturer at Imperial, showed us how storytelling was done, with a three-decade-spanning, second-person present-tense narrative about the emergence of complex mathematics in finance. The moral of the story was the way the language/culture divide between scientists and non-scientists hampers communication and understanding, and the very bad outcomes this can lead to.

Finally Imperial’s professor of surgery Roger Kneebone made everyone laugh with his misadventures in science engagement, specifically his controversial strategy of staging dramatized medical emergencies without the audience’s knowledge. The key message here seemed to be the importance of emotional engagement in science communication, but also how it can be a double-edged sword. Once the discussion was opened up to questions, things started to get more philosophical. Some scientists in the audience might have been starting to get uncomfortable at this point, with the tendency to equate science with stories, and it was a relief when someone raised the point that must have been on many people’s minds. Once we start talking about truth as narrative, scientific findings as stories we tell ourselves, how far does that take us down the road of postmodernism? Don’t we end up in the dubious position of arguing that truth is relative, science is only one way of viewing the world and no more or less valid than any other opinion or story?

Answering that was left to a final bit of stealth-eloquence from Richard Bronk. Quoting Wordsworth he described how we ‘half-create’ the world: that there is objective truth, but there are also stories, and together, inseparable, they make up our understanding of reality. And on that point, both scientists and philosophers can probably agree.