杏吧原创

THERE is something ruthless about science, beautifully ruthless. Nature doesn鈥檛 care what we believe, who鈥檚 asking, or what stories we hope to tell. Did the universe have a beginning? Is space-time infinite? The answers are the same for me, for you, or for any sentient beings on the other side of the cosmos. Frankly, I love the ruthlessness of science. It is at the core of the subject鈥檚 humility and trustworthiness. I want to know what is true and I don鈥檛 want to be placated with fictions. The facts of the world are not mauled by our petty concerns or our small dramas. In the search for scientific truth, it is fact versus fiction.

So imagine my surprise when I set out to write about mathematics and I wrote a novel. Don鈥檛 get me wrong 鈥� lover of science that I am, I鈥檓 also a greedy consumer of works of fiction. Still, I didn鈥檛 expect to write one. Yet there it is on one of the opening pages of my book, the disclaimer, 鈥淭his is a work of fiction鈥�Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental鈥�, which raised the issue: what place does fiction have in a search for scientific truth? Throughout the writing of the book, my editor Dan Frank and I discussed mathematics, philosophy and form, but not until the end did we ask ourselves whether this was a work of fiction or non-fiction. Bookstores need to know on which shelf to place the book. The practical necessity to categorise gave us no end of grief. We argued back and forth for weeks.

Fair enough, writers should have to declare their work fiction or non-fiction. As a reader, I want to know if what I鈥檓 reading is truth or fantasy. Then again, all books have elements of both. When, for example, author and journalist James Gleick writes a biography of Isaac Newton (Isaac Newton, Vintage, 2004), he must choose what to include, what to exclude and how to phrase it. When he writes an engaging story, we know it could only have been done in that particular way by that particular author, so it is not strictly a biography of Newton but Gleick鈥檚 telling of Newton鈥檚 biography. A list of biographical facts 鈥� English, born in 1643, invented the calculus while home on the farm during the plague 鈥� does not make a biography. What do we really have without a story told by a great storyteller?

If non-fiction writers can be great storytellers, the converse has also to be acknowledged. Fiction writers are master observers, great collectors of data. All fiction writers draw from primary experience to combine the observed and the imagined. They create tensions that deliver a more visceral impact than the raw data alone.

The boundaries blur, but we all get the gist of what is meant by non-fiction and by fiction. Each includes both truth and invention, and the distinction we make depends mostly on how much of each ingredient has gone where. We know that Gleick will not alter one date or one fact in his faithfulness to reality, and we know that novelists, in their own brand of faithfulness to reality, will necessarily alter dates and facts.

Yet when it comes to science, non-fiction might seem like the only vehicle. 杏吧原创s 鈥� myself included 鈥� resist any invasion of the author into our formal papers. There is a phrase that is so painfully overused I have the paranoid impression it begins nearly every technical article: 鈥淚n this paper we show that鈥︹�� It is a social agreement to use this same dry phrase with the royal 鈥渨e鈥�. The focus is entirely on conveying the facts regardless of how ugly the phrasing, as if to say: there are no individuals here, no personalities, just data, just calculations, just truth.

鈥淪cience without storytelling collapses to a set of equations or a ledger full of data鈥�

That is how it should be when we are making scientific discoveries, gingerly uncovering those raw facts that connect us. 杏吧原创s have to believe that they do not matter. If they had not made the discovery, it would have been someone else. Science is ruthless.

When it came to writing a book, though, I had to admit that it was impossible to remove myself entirely. We are in the questions we ask. We are there, implicitly, in the search for meaning. And our stories do matter. Science without storytelling collapses to a set of equations or a ledger full of data. We are after more than that. For all of the respect paid to objectivity, science is ultimately a human endeavour embroiled in our complex themes. Stripping our discoveries of their narrative thread might lubricate scientific progress, but lending our discoveries to fiction gives our suppressed stories a chance to bloom.

I set out to write a book about two ingenious mathematicians, Kurt G枚del and Alan Turing. Taken together their work proves that there are fundamental limits to what we can ever know 鈥� that even mathematical truth can be elusive. Their work is a mathematical equivalent to the liar鈥檚 paradox, wherein the liar says: 鈥淭his is a lie.鈥� If it is true, it is false. If it is false, it is true. In short, they discovered mathematical facts whose truth or falsity cannot be decided. Yet by stepping outside mathematics, we can see that at least some of these mathematical facts are indeed true 鈥� true statements that can never be proven to be true. In the wake of their massive blow to knowledge, Turing became an atheist who believed that we are no more than soulless biological machines, while G枚del believed in the reincarnation of the soul.

These are remarkable stories, and I suppose I could have written the book as non-fiction. But this other possibility emerged, the mathematical idea driving the narrative. The liar says, this is a lie. That鈥檚 me, the liar, inventing a fiction out of the facts. There was some truth that I couldn鈥檛 get at by logically connecting a list of events. I didn鈥檛 want to just record the date and place of G枚del鈥檚 self-starvation sitting upright in a hospital chair, or Turing鈥檚 suicide through a fairytale-inspired bite of a poison apple. Instead of compiling a ledger of biographical facts, as though truth would emerge as a theorem, I wanted to step outside that adherence to logic, just as G枚del stepped outside a formal logical system to recognise some truth. I was willing to lie to tell a true story, to preserve more faithfully the strange facts of a strange world.

After lengthy, heated discussions over the categories of fiction versus non-fiction, all became clear. The book I had written is a novel. Still, the biggest lie in the story is printed on an opening page: 鈥淎ny resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.鈥�