Introduction

Abstract

In Ian McEwan’s novel, The Child in Time (1987), a physicist upbraids a fiction writer.

A scientific revolution, no, an intellectual revolution, an emotional, sensual explosion, a fabulous story just beginning to unfold for us, and you and your kind won’t give it a serious minute of your time. People used to think the world was held up by elephants. That’s nothing! Reality, whatever that word means, turns out to be a thousand times stranger. Who do you want? Luther? Copernicus? Darwin? Marx? Freud? None of them has re-invented the world and our place in it as radically and bizarrely as the physicists of this century have… What a stupendous shake-up, Stephen. Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery. And they would have educated their audiences too. But you ‘arts’ people, you’re not only ignorant of these magnificent things, you’re rather proud of knowing nothing. As far as I can make out, you think that some local, passing fashion like modernism — modernism! — is the intellectual achievement of our time. Pathetic! (44–5)