The Sachins, Dravids and Dhonis of Science

Analogies and comparisons are always interesting, even if not useful!

From declaring poetically that life is a bed of roses to calling Rajnikanths and Bachchans 'superstars'- analogies are omnipresent. So when I read somewhere about scientists who 'played' with machines in their childhood and sportspersons who get 'scientifically' trained, the analogy between the two instantaneously pops up in my mind. Sportspersons vie for cups and medals just like scientists who strive to grab a Nobel or a Fields medal. Sports and science both have had prodigies come up. Both have had the stories of some prodigies end up as tragedies. In sports, among the prodigies some fulfill their promise and dazzle others with their flamboyance and are revered as geniuses. And there are others, less prodigal but industrious, who methodically come up the ladder and stand up to the prodigies as equals. And there are champions of   a third kind, ones who have limited capabilities but are present in the right place and right time and rise to occasion (No prizes for relating this to the article's title!). Sports have innumerable examples for each of these categories- the geniuses, the workhorses and the finishers. Does this apply to science as well? What is the secret ingredient that a phenomenally successful scientist has? 

The turn of the 19th century was a nail biting period for the scientific community. From aircrafts, telegraphs, theory of relativity, to topology and genetics, many breakthrough developments that would define 20th century world and science came of age during this period. Year after year, old theories were rubbished, reformed, or reinvented at an incredible pace.  A generation of stalwarts across disciplines were dropping behind the horizon and a slew of younger stars were emerging across the world. We pivot our story on two of these younger scientists- Guglielmo Marconi and Albert Einstein.

Marconi and Einstein were personalities so different, yet so alike. One was barely educated, and the other was a graduate of a top notch institute. One was a born experimentalist and other a purebred theorist. Yet, they had much in common- they both had their first big break around the age of 25 and both went on to win the Nobel Prize. And most importantly, both of them have their scientific ancestry fork from one great physicist of the older generation- James Clerk Maxwell.

By 1850's, it was understood that electric and magnetic field were something like a conjoined twins. Michael Faraday, another great experimentalist with hardly any mathematical training, had established this idea relying only on his intuition and painstaking experiments. But without a convincing mathematical framework, electromagnetism maintained a ghost like presence in scientific world - perceived but intangible.

Maxwell, like Einstein was a trained theorist. He absorbed the ideas of Faraday and others, gave them a rigorous mathematical foundation and proved the intimacy between electricity and magnetism once for all. If we stop here, it would seem that Faraday was the real pioneering genius, and Maxwell a less original but highly effective disciple who used his mathematical prowess to improve upon Faraday. But it wasn't Maxwell's knowledge alone that helped him make a breakthrough. To put Faraday's ideas in mathematical language, Maxwell's technical prowess wasn't enough- it was his intuition, polar opposite of Faraday's, which gave him success where other mathematical physicists had faltered.

Faraday had approached the idea of force fields, magnetic or electric, from a perspective of stress in a solid under the action of a force. Imagining that the magnetic effect would be transmitted across a medium just like stress would be transmitted across a solid, he built a new perspective for understanding these phenomena. Mathematicians from Newton's days and even before were comfortable with the idea of an instantaneous action of a force due to a body on another one at some distance from it. To a practical man like Faraday, this was too much to digest. In Maxwell's own words, 

"He (Faraday) saw lines of force traversing all space where mathematicians saw centres of forces acting at a distance. Faraday saw a medium where they saw nothing but distance"

Developing the idea further, Faraday proclaimed that magnetic fields could induce electric current.

Maxwell took it up from where Faraday had left. Maxwell, in contrast to Faraday, drew an analogy between Faraday's lines of force and 'streamlines' in fluid flow. Thus in one stroke, many the mathematical theories applicable to fluid flow could be extended to lines of force. With this, he could give a convincing mathematical framework for electromagnetism. Using the same analogy, he predicted that the electromagnetic had a wave nature. Since light had properties similar to electromagnetic waves, Maxwell could even speculate that light was actually a wave!

With a paradigm shift in physics being created, scientists of all kind flocked into studies on electromagnetism. One man stood tall among all of them- Heinrich Hertz. Around 1879, Hertz started attempting to prove Maxwell's theories. With a decade long patient experimenting, he could prove Maxwell's theories and later utilise it to develop the first ever apparatus to produce electromagnetic waves. He followed with some advancement on photoelectric effect. When asked about the possible impact of his work, he is said to have replied, “Nothing, I guess". Two decades later, Marconi and Einstein proved how wrong- fortunately - he was.

At this point, the road ahead split into two. One group of scientists kept refining Maxwell's theories. Another group started labouring to find some practical use for Maxwell's theories.

In the hands of Faraday, Maxwell and Hertz, electromagnetic theory blossomed resting heavily on the mechanical principles. Beyond a point, this proved counterproductive. An idea appealing to experimentalists like Faraday and Hertz, and Maxwell who had a strong affinity to fluid mechanics- was not at all to the liking of more abstract mathematicians. The analogies, incredibly useful so far, were now like an albatross around the theory's neck. The time was ripe to give the theory an exclusively mathematical footing. The famous Michelson- Morley experiments of 1887 conducted to support Maxwell's idea of a medium for electromagnetic waves to pass through ('ether') ended up posing many questions. To address the discrepancies posed by it, mathematical physicists like Hendrik Lorentz, George FitzGerald and others propounded ideas that would later form the bedrock of theory of relativity.

So, what was Einstein's contribution to the theory? In fact, by 1905, relativity was already anticipated by physicists- only that they couldn't prove it using assumptions like the existence of ether. Einstein, on the other hand, took a different route. Since ether couldn't be established after so much effort, it didn't make sense to build entire theories based on this shaky assumption. Assuming that Maxwell's theory need not follow the assumptions involved in classical mechanics, Einstein derived the results obtained by others over a decade. That he extended this to account for gravitation (general relativity theory) and went on to win Nobel Prize in 1921 is another story.

On the other hand, William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, Nikola Tesla, J.C. Bose, Edouard Branly and others were trying to generate electromagnetic waves and use them for practical purposes like wireless signalling, wireless lighting etc. How could a young, hardly educated Marconi compete with this illustrious crowd? In a moment of inspiration, eerily similar to that of Einstein, Marconi started focussing on commercial wireless telegraphy-something which other researchers hadn't focussed much on. In a way, Marconi was the nineteenth century counterpart of Steve Jobs. Building upon what others had done, Marconi dramatically improved the scales at which these waves could be used. A lot of accolades followed, including a Nobel Prize in 1909- 12 years before Einstein could grab one!

So what does this story have to deal with the title of this article? Just as in sports (say, cricket), in science too people of different abilities, personalities, expertise and approaches succeed in their own way. In cricket, a prodigal batsman would provide inspiration and rally the team around him, a gritty team mate would hold one end safe and provide platform for others to shine, while a third one would continue their work and 'finish' things in style. Similarly, in the history of science, we can see that imagination or intuition, sheer hard work, meticulous data collection, technical mastery- all are involved at different stages of development of any discipline. Many times, the data collector (usually experimentalist/empiricist like Tycho Brahe in astronomy) would provide the first impulse. The intuitive men (like Copernicus) would speculate on ideas that would explain the data. The technically strong formalists would then meticulously clarify and prove these ideas. And then the theory would hit a roadblock and the cycle would be repeated multiple times, not necessarily in the order given above. As it happens often, most path breaking scientists usually have at least two of these qualities in them. Henri Poincare suggested this succinctly, 

"It is through science we prove, but through imagination we discover"

Science, fortunately, does not have superheroes- though we always like to believe it does. The story of every great discovery/invention is the story of many brilliant minds- playing the game by their own strengths- approach one idea from many sides, fail, complicate, then clarify, organize and finally establish it near perfectly. Imagination that leads to eureka moments sometimes has its origin in knowledge, like how it was in the case of Maxwell. Knowledge sometimes has its genesis in intuition/imagination, like in the case of Faraday. And success sometimes lies in being the right person in the right place- arguably as in the case of Hertz. And of course, there are always Marconis and Einsteins who deservingly walk away with most of the glory, because they could steer the boat in a different direction with great skill just when it seemed to collide onto a rock. Beneath all these characteristics, there is one common factor - it starts with a P and has seven letters. In it, lies the secret ingredient of success in science!