Last September I wrote about the tendency of contemporary historians, novelists and philosophers to ignore the impact of science on human life. I called this condition “anosognosia”, from the Greek for “without knowledge”.

To illustrate the condition, I cited Howard Zinn’s influential book A People’s History of the United States. A supposedly progressive history, it almost totally ignores the effects of science and technology on American life. I asked Physics World readers to submit further examples of science being cast aside. I received many, but was also sent some interesting counterexamples to my claims.

Short shrift

John Wesson, a theoretical physicist based in the UK, cited Simon Schama’s 1500-page History of Britain, which all but fails to mention the massive contributions of UK scientists and engineers in transforming the world. Wesson noted that the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia devotes less space to Michael Faraday – whom he dubs “the most outstanding experimental scientist the world has known and a great benefactor of mankind” – than to James Curley, a mayor of Boston.

Robert Frenkel, of the National Measurement Institute of Australia, devised a crude numerical measure of anosognosia. Frenkel took the bestselling A Short History of the World by the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, counted the number of proper names in the index (160) and found 46 scientists (though not Einstein). He defined the “anosognostic ratio”, or AR, of Blainey’s book to be 46/160, or about 30%. Frenkel then wondered about the minimally acceptable AR value for a book on general history.

Other respondents mentioned novel and movie plots. Damien Conroy, an Irish graphic designer working in Sweden, cited the “inexplicably popular” 2002 movie Grabben i graven bredvid (or The Guy in the Grave Next Door). Although its action unfolds in the present, nobody uses mobile phones and the plot would collapse if they did.

“At the end of the film,” says Conroy, “the lovers can’t find each other and drive around town missing each other like headless chickens.” Where, Conroy asked, are the text-messaging and GPS-equipped phones that would surely have enabled the characters to avoid this situation? “Lack of knowledge as a plot device”, he observes, “is becoming a thing of the past.” But not quite yet.

Mark Sugrue, a PhD physicist at Royal Holloway, University of London, cited the often-overlooked role of improved technology in the development of popular music. On 1940s valve-radio technology, he claims, albums like Radiohead’s OK Computer are indistinguishable from static.

Several people mentioned the summer 2005 issue of The American Scholar – one of the US’s leading forums on intellectual and cultural affairs. This issue was unusual in that it contained several articles about science. Editor Robert Wilson seemed nonplussed that his journal had positive articles about science, and that the political right was attacking science over issues like intelligent design.

“The attack on science has always been our game,” Wilson wrote, meaning, it appears, the duty of the humanities. “There’s nothing wrong with science, of course,” he continued, “except that it can’t answer any of the important questions.” But when he concluded that “science matters, friends, although it pains me to say so”, he left readers to puzzle out why a profession that answers unimportant questions matters, and why it pained him so much.

Several respondents objected to my claim that most modern thinkers ignore science. David Brandon, a materials engineer at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, cited Sinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith as displaying “a remarkable understanding of the nature of scientific motivation and the passion that drives so many of us”.

Marshall Spector – a philosopher and colleague of mine – also pointed out that histories of man’s influence on the environment take science and technology very seriously. He showed me a passage from Clive Ponting’s book A Green History of the World, which bypassed a period of several thousand years – starting in Mesopotamia and Egypt in about 3000 BC – when technological advances made the pattern of human life essentially stable. Ponting thus saw no need to pick up the story of human history until major technological developments altered it again. In a breathtakingly audacious phrase – “various states and empires rose and fell” – Ponting dismissed thousands of years of social, political and military movements that usually comprise the entire stuff of world history.

Sean Hartnoll, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, warned against “humanities bashing”. While some scholars may be ignorant of key scientific facts, he wrote, at least they try to address such questions as who controls knowledge, how it is implemented, and who benefits from it. These extra-scientific issues, he continued, are what interests historians like Zinn.

The critical point

Few people took me up on my request to identify the causes of anosognosia. I count three.

The first is drama. Technological change tends to lack the exciting settings of other historical turning points. It is not generally heralded by bloody battlefields or by clashes of titanic personalities, and it unfolds in a way that is difficult to dramatize. A second is the hope that we can reinvent ourselves and remake the world, Marxian-style, achieving liberation at a revolutionary stroke. To admit that we depend on science and technology dampens such hopes.

Wilson’s editorial in The American Scholar illustrates the third reason. Scholars in the humanities often see themselves as having a critical function – they ask the “important questions” that help humanity navigate the world’s dangers. But if our fate is linked as much to science and technology as it is to ideologies, then this leading role is blunted, or at least shared with scientists.

All these causes can be overcome if we admit that a truer picture of humanity may be less dramatic than we hope. But we also need to curb our fascination with short-cuts to liberation, and accept that humanity’s important questions are addressed by a variety of disciplines – including science.