Mortality-Two Perspectives

When Thomas Gray wrote in a country churchyard the following lines:

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour,

The paths of glory lead but to the grave”,

he was echoing the general view of poets who more than any other category of persons are preoccupied with the ephemeral nature of human existence. Similarly James Shirley wrote that:

“The glories of our blood and state,

Are shadows, not substantial things;

There is no armour against fate,

Death lays his icy hand on kings.

Sceptre and crown must tumble down,

And, in the dust, be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade”.

This is not to belittle the triumphs of those in other knowledge domains like the scientists, who unravel nature’s secrets, and incidentally create technology that is of benefit to mankind. 

It is just that the very purpose, and nature of science impose limitations on its ability to solve certain issues.

Nor is this to paint the scientists as cold calculating persons. After all, a scientist loves his sweetheart as much as a poet does and is mentally shattered when a sweetheart, or a parent or a child dies. It's just that the very nature of his work does not permit him to ruminate about the death of a loved one.

This is to emphasise that a literary and artistic perspective of mortality is quite different from the way science perceives mortality.

Science is concerned with the ‘how’ of things and not the ‘why’. Most scientists themselves know this inherent restriction, and are not perturbed about it, just as the  driver of a railway engine would not sit and worry about his engine not being able to fly. Of course, they ask persons putting such questions to turn to philosophers or poets for ‘solace’ if not ‘answers’. 

If such an advice is ‘sincere’ there is no objection but scientists will have to be cautioned against any hint of a patronising suggestion that they are superior to anyone else. The popular image of an absent-minded scientist fumbling over test-tubes, not remembering whether he had his lunch, let alone not finding his way to his house, is totally without justification. On the contrary, the history of science is replete with examples of one scientist claiming credit for the work of another. This is best illustrated by the simultaneous discovery of the Raman effect by C.V. Raman and two Russian scientists Landsberg and Mandelstam.

Beginning in 1926, Mandelstam and Landsberg initiated experimental studies on the vibrational scattering of light in crystals at the Moscow State University. Their intention was to prove the theoretical prediction made by Mandelstam in 1918 regarding the fine structure splitting in Rayleigh scattering due to light scattering on thermal acoustic waves.

As a result of this research, Landsberg and Mandelstam discovered the effect of the inelastic combinational scattering of light on 21 February 1928 ("combinational" – from the combination of frequencies of photons and molecular vibrations).

They presented this fundamental discovery for the first time at a colloquium on 27 April 1928.

They published brief reports about this discovery (experimental results with theoretical explanation) in Russian and in German and then published a comprehensive paper in Zeitschrift fur Physik.

In the same year of 1928, two Indian scientists C.V. Raman and K.S. Krishnan were looking for the "Compton component" of scattered light in liquids and vapours. They found the same combinational scattering of light.

Raman stated that "The line spectrum of the new radiation was first seen on 28 February 1928".

Thus, combinational scattering of light was discovered by Mandelstam and Landsberg a week earlier than by Raman and Krishnan.

However, the phenomenon became known as the Raman effect because Raman published his results earlier than Landsberg and Mandelstam did.

Nonetheless, in Russian-language literature, it is traditionally called "combinational scattering of light".(The Prize was awarded only to Krishnan's mentor and research guide C.V. Raman in 1930.  A lot of controversies were raised and still continue to be raised on the point that K.S.Krishnan was not given due credit for his part in the discovery).

What this means is that the very rules of the game in Science promote such unhealthy rivalry. Obviously such competition does not exist among poets. There is no question of Byron or Keats claiming to be the true author of Shelley's Ozymandias. Nor would Shelley have claimed to be the true author of  Byron's Don Juan.

On the contrary, poets even at an early age are obsessed with death and existence and keep brooding and hovering around graveyards like Gray, or staring at the ocean like Byron. However to  a scientist death is a mere statistical event occurring every day in a hospital or a house. As against this let us have a look at what Byron wrote in The prisoner of Chillon:

“Oh! God ! It is a fearful thing "

To see the human soul take wing am.

In any shape, in any mood:

I've seen it rushing forth in blood,

I've seen it on the breaking ocean

Strive with a swoln convulsive motion,

I've seen the sick and ghastly bed

Of Sin delirious with its dread”:

The lines bring out the full pathos and horror of death.

Between the ages of 25 and 40 no scientist would think of death. He will be ‘ambitious’, wanting to discover a law of nature, and win prizes, whereas a Keats or a Shirley would be troubled by thoughts of mortality. 

In moments of triumph scientists pat each other on their backs and play bongo drums like Feynman  did to express his joy over solving an equation, or childishly run out of a tub into a street in the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily like Archimedes, shouting that he had discovered an important law in hydrostatics or  loudly proclaim like Crick and Watson did in the Eagle pub in Cambridge that they had discovered the secret of life. 

I cannot imagine Shakespeare running in Henley street, in Stratford upon Avon, or Fleet Street in London shouting that he had finished writing the greatest soliloquy in literature "To be or not to be" in Hamlet.

.The greatest of them all, ‘incomparable’ Shakespeare, wrote in Measure for Measure:

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling; ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death”.

The other side of mortality is immortality. Humans have always known the reality of mortality and have yearned for immortality in their hearts. It has been one of their species' characteristic to fantasise through supernatural magic immortality in unseen heavens. Albert Einstein however brings us an inspiring consolation from the wasteland scenario that mortality brings. Here is a quote attributed to him on immortality:

Immortality? There are two kinds.The first lives in the imagination of the people, and is thus an illusion. There is relative immortality which may conserve the memory of an individual for some generations. But, there is only one true immortality, on a cosmic scale, and that is the immortality of the cosmos itself. There is no other.' Though this is related to immortality - in its own way it shows that mortality of the human condition contains in it a seed of immortality but not in a supernatural way.

Let us conclude our explorations into mortality with a moving and appropriate anecdote:

In 1989 in a small town in America the elder of two brothers was dying of cancer. He wanted to have a Christmas party, as had been their custom every year. His brother who was a doctor and his wife both knew that his end was near. They arranged a party inviting many of their relations and friends. The party went off with Dickensian joviality, but when all the guests had departed, came the heart-rending realisation, that so many relations and friends of long years of association would never, ever meet again. This is the most tragic aspect of the human condition, the frightening thought of everlasting separation of loved ones, and intimate friends.

The above anecdote would inspire a poet to write an emotionally charged poem, but to a scientist it may not make much sense. And this to me represents the basic difference between poets and any one else—let alone scientists!