Today, we wonder about mad scientists. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The laboratory is down the
stairs -- out of the light. It's equipped with
bubbling glassware and arcane electromechanical
machines. The scientist himself is lonely, naive,
and egomaniacal. He tells "The Foundation" about
his humanitarian aims, while something in his
animal nature drives him to darker things.
The picture of the mad scientist is too strong. We
can't shrug it off as just another piece of popular
fiction. It's the image of science and technology
we revert to when we let down our guard. We have to
ask where it comes from and what it means.
Physicist Spencer Weart thinks it comes out of the
Faust story, and I think that makes a lot of sense.
The real Faust was a shadowy figure in early
16th-century Germany -- a kind of self-styled
magician and hell-raiser. One place he shows up is
in the records of the city of Ingolstadt -- the
same town Mary Shelley used as the home of Victor
Frankenstein.
Storytellers took up the legend of this character
and recast him in the language of the Protestant
Reformation. The Faust we know -- the Faust who
sold his soul for knowledge -- was given his
present form in 1607, in Christopher Marlowe's
book, The Tragicall History of Dr.
Faustus. That's about the same time that
modern science was taking shape as the companion of
technology.
200 years later, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein took
Faust a step further. Knowledge alone wasn't enough
for Frankenstein. He had to create life as well as
understand it. The evil force that served Faust was
alchemy. Frankenstein rode electrochemistry on his
trip to Hell. Later in the 19th century, Faustian
mad scientists added hypnotism and then the
mysterious new forces of radiation -- X-rays and
radium. The early 20th century gave us Faustian
technologists -- Captain Nemo and the huge
soul-eating mechanical city of Metropolis. And, of
course, today's mad scientist is wed to his
computer.
Each new scientific or technological discovery
calls forth new fears -- fears that we won't be
able to control it. Each new discovery brings out
Faust or Frankenstein or the mad scientist in some
new incarnation. Robert Louis
Stevenson added a new twist. The monster Mr.
Hyde emerged from his gentle Dr. Jekyll when Jekyll
lost control of his knowledge. Jekyll and Hyde
touched something about our nature that we all
understood instinctively.
The Faustian mad scientist is a fictional shorthand
for describing our potential lack of control -- not
so much of our science-based technology as of
ourselves. He's a sort of warning light for all of
us to think about.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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