- Email: [email protected]
Elegant observations
Perspectives
to accommodate it. She is interested in having an artistic representation of something deeper within the body, such as the heart and liver. However, just like me, you might find this intimacy just a little unsettling. The importance of skin has often been neglected. It protects us, keeping our body fluids in, preventing the ingress of harmful agents such as bacteria, and insulating us from heat and cold. It provides us with exquisite sensations and we use it to attract mates and to express our religious and cultural roots. All of these facets have been captured in this wonderful exhibition and I encourage everybody of whatever age to go and visit Skin.
Wellcome Library, London
collaboration between the Spanish dermatologist José Eugenio Olavide and the sculptor Enrique Zofio, were not only used for teaching purposes but also to instruct the public about the risks of venereal disease and exhibited on streets such as Barcelona’s Ramblas to discourage the use of prostitutes. Throughout history there have always been salesmen able to convince us that “snake oil” can reverse the ageing process of wrinkled skin. The exhibition devotes attention to how the marketing of cosmetics and surgery has developed to encourage us that the fountain of youth and clean, unblemished skin can be maintained. Various events and competitions are associated with Skin. For instance, you could design a tattoo for Caisa Ederyd who has donated a portion of her body
Iain Hutchison [email protected]
An écorché figure by Charles Landsee (1813)
In brief Book Elegant observations Around 1803, the newly qualified physician and budding polymath Thomas Young thought up an experiment that in its modern form was voted the most beautiful experiment in physics by readers of Physics World in a poll 200 years later. Using just a candle, two slits, and a screen, Young demonstrated the interference of two light beams, and showed beyond reasonable doubt that light could act as a wave, in opposition to Isaac Newton’s corpuscular theory. Not surprisingly, Young is a key figure in Ian Glynn’s Elegance in Science. Other stars of his eclectic study include William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, Newton, Michael Faraday, and Gregor Mendel, whose lives he sketches appealingly while describing their crucial discoveries in medicine, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. No attempt is made to be complete and Glynn warns, “It is likely that many
www.thelancet.com Vol 376 July 17, 2010
readers will find favourite examples not mentioned”. Inevitably, given the preoccupation of mathematicians with elegance, the book starts with some simple geometrical proofs of the kind that have entranced many young would-be researchers. Can science ever match the degree of lucidity, economy, and certainty of mathematics? On the whole not, Glynn seems to conclude; but the aspiration to elegance remains important. As the physicist John Herschel said in 1827 of Young’s stillcontroversial undulatory theory: “It is…in all its applications and details, one succession of felicities, insomuch, that we may be almost induced to say, if it be not true, it deserves to be so.” Newton, by contrast, felt profound dissatisfaction with his inelegant concept of “action at a distance”, necessary to his theory of gravity, terming it in a letter of 1693 “so
great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Francis Crick and James Watson’s revelation of the structure and role of DNA in 1953 may come closest to capturing the drive for elegance. Not only did their double-helix model account most convincingly for the diverse experimental data, it also, unexpectedly, explained the mechanism of inheritance with equal conviction. But in a cautionary epilogue, Glynn points to the elegant code hypothesised by Crick and colleagues in 1957, showing how four bases and 64 base triplets might code for the 20 different kinds of aminoacid in proteins, which turned out to be entirely wrong. So we must not be seduced into thinking that elegance necessarily equates with the truth.
Elegance in Science: the Beauty of Simplicity Ian Glynn. Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp 271. £16·99. ISBN 978 0 19 957862 7.
Andrew Robinson [email protected]
157
to accommodate it. She is interested in having an artistic representation of something deeper within the body, such as the heart and liver. However, just like me, you might find this intimacy just a little unsettling. The importance of skin has often been neglected. It protects us, keeping our body fluids in, preventing the ingress of harmful agents such as bacteria, and insulating us from heat and cold. It provides us with exquisite sensations and we use it to attract mates and to express our religious and cultural roots. All of these facets have been captured in this wonderful exhibition and I encourage everybody of whatever age to go and visit Skin.
Wellcome Library, London
collaboration between the Spanish dermatologist José Eugenio Olavide and the sculptor Enrique Zofio, were not only used for teaching purposes but also to instruct the public about the risks of venereal disease and exhibited on streets such as Barcelona’s Ramblas to discourage the use of prostitutes. Throughout history there have always been salesmen able to convince us that “snake oil” can reverse the ageing process of wrinkled skin. The exhibition devotes attention to how the marketing of cosmetics and surgery has developed to encourage us that the fountain of youth and clean, unblemished skin can be maintained. Various events and competitions are associated with Skin. For instance, you could design a tattoo for Caisa Ederyd who has donated a portion of her body
Iain Hutchison [email protected]
An écorché figure by Charles Landsee (1813)
In brief Book Elegant observations Around 1803, the newly qualified physician and budding polymath Thomas Young thought up an experiment that in its modern form was voted the most beautiful experiment in physics by readers of Physics World in a poll 200 years later. Using just a candle, two slits, and a screen, Young demonstrated the interference of two light beams, and showed beyond reasonable doubt that light could act as a wave, in opposition to Isaac Newton’s corpuscular theory. Not surprisingly, Young is a key figure in Ian Glynn’s Elegance in Science. Other stars of his eclectic study include William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, Newton, Michael Faraday, and Gregor Mendel, whose lives he sketches appealingly while describing their crucial discoveries in medicine, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. No attempt is made to be complete and Glynn warns, “It is likely that many
www.thelancet.com Vol 376 July 17, 2010
readers will find favourite examples not mentioned”. Inevitably, given the preoccupation of mathematicians with elegance, the book starts with some simple geometrical proofs of the kind that have entranced many young would-be researchers. Can science ever match the degree of lucidity, economy, and certainty of mathematics? On the whole not, Glynn seems to conclude; but the aspiration to elegance remains important. As the physicist John Herschel said in 1827 of Young’s stillcontroversial undulatory theory: “It is…in all its applications and details, one succession of felicities, insomuch, that we may be almost induced to say, if it be not true, it deserves to be so.” Newton, by contrast, felt profound dissatisfaction with his inelegant concept of “action at a distance”, necessary to his theory of gravity, terming it in a letter of 1693 “so
great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Francis Crick and James Watson’s revelation of the structure and role of DNA in 1953 may come closest to capturing the drive for elegance. Not only did their double-helix model account most convincingly for the diverse experimental data, it also, unexpectedly, explained the mechanism of inheritance with equal conviction. But in a cautionary epilogue, Glynn points to the elegant code hypothesised by Crick and colleagues in 1957, showing how four bases and 64 base triplets might code for the 20 different kinds of aminoacid in proteins, which turned out to be entirely wrong. So we must not be seduced into thinking that elegance necessarily equates with the truth.
Elegance in Science: the Beauty of Simplicity Ian Glynn. Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp 271. £16·99. ISBN 978 0 19 957862 7.
Andrew Robinson [email protected]
157