Literature and Science

Abstract

At the start of the twentieth century, our picture of reality and our notions of how we come to know reality changed. Scientists revealed that time slows down when one moves faster, matter bends space-time, gravity deflects light, and God (if ‘He’ is not yet dead) is a gambler. ‘I don’t see that it would be possible to live in a more exciting age,’ says Huxley’s character, Calamy, in 1925. He records, ‘The sense that everything’s perfectly provisional and temporary — everything, from social institutions to what we’ve hitherto regarded as the most sacred scientific truths — the feeling that nothing, from the Treaty of Versailles to the rationally explicable universe, is really safe’ (Barren 34. 1925). Huxley was a spokesman for an era which institutionalized doubt (Giddens 176). Absolutes had fallen, axioms had collapsed and centuries of science were shown to be fundamentally inexact, with the result that nothing was certain, Huxley concluded, except change (Olive 299. 1936). In the novel Time Must Have a Stop (1944), De Vries thus argues that the most noteworthy events of the twentieth century have not been political but scientific. He regards the ‘Einsteinian revolution’ as ‘Incomparably more important than anything that … happened in Russia or Italy’ (86).¹ As the century advanced, physicists had been going further and further into the realms of vast outer space or the subatomic world of fundamental processes. This exploration, Huxley realized, had a very important consequence: it provided a clear demonstration of the conventionality and limitation of human perception, both in range and degree of objectivity.