Margaret Wertheim: when science and crocheting collide

Margaret Wertheim, 48, might technically fall under the oh-so-banal title of a science communicator. But this fiery Australian native has roamed far beyond the standard definition of one who just talks about science. In the late ‘90s Wertheim explored how physics and Western religious culture impacted each other in a pair of books, Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. She has published widely in top newspapers and magazines on scientific subjects ranging from the timely to the timeless.

In order to focus the spotlight on scientific topics which are not newsworthy but rather “aesthetically enchanting” in their mathematical or conceptual beauty, Wertheim founded the Institute For Figuring (IFF) in 2003 in Los Angeles where she lives. Through June 17, 2007, the Institute’s “Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef” is on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh as a centerpiece of the exhibition “Six Billion Perps Held Hostage: Artists Respond to Global Warming.”

After admiring her in person at the AAAS meeting in San Francisco this February and adoring her from afar for the better part of a decade, I was thrilled at the chance to interview Wertheim on the phone. Though the depth of knowledge and ideas in her writing might seem intimidating, we chatted merrily on why particle physics experiments are immoral, how science is the new religion and being famous for crocheting. 

You are a physicist by training and yet a critic of public funding for enormous physics experiments. Why?
I studied theoretical physics, and it was my dream to be a theoretical physicist. I love theoretical physics, I really do. I speak as someone who loves the subject. I hope that I might live to see the synthesis of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

But I’ll put it like this: How much is it worth it to society to have that happen? We’re talking now about the Large Hadron Collider [at CERN in Geneva] – the cost is something like £3 billion. And there’s a consortium proposing to put together the International Linear Collider, which is conservatively estimated to cost about $6 billion. It would exceed energies of the LHC and be able to hopefully find the Higgs boson if the LHC doesn’t.

I think this is immoral. It’s playtime for a very elite group of people, which happens to include me. But just because it interests me and just because I would like to see this knowledge, doesn’t mean that I or anyone else has the right to say that society should be spending tens of billions of dollars on it.

I don’t suppose the other physicists agree with you.
Whenever I talk about this, there will be a physicist in the room who will get up and have an absolute fit and say, “But we need to be free to do anything we want!” And I say, “But why? Why should you be free to do anything you want as opposed to any other group of people?” Every group of people is limited by the resources available. Why should science be different? “Because we’re finding the truth! This is the truth, this is the ultimate purpose!”

It’s an aspect of the truth. There are many aspects of truth that we can investigate. We can’t investigate them all. We do have to decide. And anyway, decisions are being made. They’re being made on an ad hoc basis. They’re being made by who lobbies the hardest to Congress.

So how do you think we should make science funding decisions?
We have to have social mechanisms for making choices about which bits of the scientific enterprise to fund at any point in time. It’s not for me, or anyone else, to say we should fund this bit or that bit. I believe we should have a societywide discussion about it.

How come we’re not hearing more of that questioning from the science journalists?
The science journalism world is, too often in my view, the cheer squad for the science community. It is right and proper that in some instances we champion science as an excellent activity to society at large.

But we should be critical champions. We should be able to look at science and say, “it is brilliant, it is wonderful, it has realized all kinds of fabulous practical applications for humanity, but it also has problems.” An uncritical acceptance of science is just as damaging to the world as an uncritical acceptance of religious dogma.

Are you saying that science is like the new religion?
There is a huge internal dogma in the science community. It has been unacceptable to question the claim that fundamental physics is the ultimate truth. Right now it’s particularly verboten to engage in such criticism because science is perceived to be under threat by religious conservatism. If any critique is seen as attack then you’re at the position of a form of fascism.

I guess it’s kind of fitting, then, that your first book was about the relationship between physics and religion.
The history of physics is deeply entwined with the history of the Catholic Church. That’s neither good nor bad, it simply is. When I wrote Pythagoras’ Trousers, I didn’t set out to write a book about physics and religion at all, and it was as much a surprise to me that that’s what the book became.

So what was the original reason you wanted to write your first book?
All I wanted to do was write a book that would explain contemporary physics to my friends because I got sick of people saying they’d bought A Brief History of Time and couldn’t get past chapter two.

Most of my friends are in the arts of one form or another – they’re writers, or filmmakers, or painters – these are smart, sophisticated people, and I thought, it has to be possible to explain physics to them. I thought the reason that people don’t understand science books, particularly physics, is because all they’re ever given is the answers. I had to show people why we came to be asking these questions at all, and what is at stake in these questions. I had to put physics within a cultural historical context.

How did the religion aspect come into it?
Four years after I began, I had an epiphany. It became so apparent that questions of theological import were absolutely intertwined with discussions of what physicists thought they were doing at that time. And I thought, nobody had connected this across history from Pythagoras to Stephen Hawking. The fact that Hawking is talking about “the mind of God” doesn’t come out of nowhere, it’s deeply embedded in all eras in the history of physics. It’s only been a very brief aberration in the twentieth century where we’ve seen science and religion as divorced.

And I thought, this is astonishing! This is the story that I have to tell. So I actually threw away a manuscript that I’d thought I’d almost finished and rewrote the book completely. In the last nine months, I completely rewrote the book from scratch.

And it seems like Pearly Gates grew out of Pythagoras’ Trousers.
Yes. I wrote that book because in writing the first book, I became fascinated by that transition from the cosmology of Dante to the cosmology of Newton. It happens really very quickly, in the space of 200 years. You have this monumental shift in our conception of the cosmos as a space of being. When you read histories of science, it just sort of comes out of nowhere. Of course, you can trace developments in mathematics and developments in astronomy, but culturally, where did the desire come from to suddenly start rethinking the world? I thought, “I don’t believe this is just about what’s going on in the minds of scientists, it’s got to be about why the cultural movement fits into that.”

Now I just have to be patient and wait for your next book.
At least there seem to be people who genuinely want to hear it. Like the fact that I got that American Institute for Biological Sciences award [for excellence in journalism] last year. I was just amazed. The citation was for all of the reasons that I could have hoped. It meant so much to me that they did that, because I have not had any acknowledgement from the American scientific community for what I’ve been doing. It meant an enormous amount to me, the gesture of it, that they saw what I was doing and said, we want to recognize this.

How did you come to found the Institute for Figuring (IFF)?
I’ve been pursuing all these other avenues of science communication out of frustration. It seemed to me there were these other fabulous things going on in the science and math world that, again, the science magazines weren’t writing about. And I said look, I think these things are fabulous. If the New York Times and Discover magazine aren’t going to write about them, then I’ll just do my own thing.

And the funny thing is, with a number of the things the IFF have done, then the newspapers and magazines have gone straight to the scientists and mathematicians and said, OK, we think this is cool, we’ll write about you. And they know about it because of the IFF’s work, but they don’t mention us in the article. They just go straight to the scientists. There are two ways of responding here. One is to be angry, and the other is to take it as a form of flattery, even if you’re not acknowledged. It means what you’re doing is cool, even if you’re not given the credit for it.

And let’s not forget that you are in an exhibition at the Warhol Museum. The coral reef looks like a whimsical extension of the crocheted hyperbolic planes featured at the IFF a couple of years ago.
I’m thrilled about the Warhol show, because when my sister Christine and I – she’s my twin and cofounder of the IFF – sat down to do this, we were inspired by the fact that coral reefs are dying out. We grew up in Queensland [where the Great Barrier Reef is located], and we thought we would crochet a coral reef.

My sister and I have done 90% of the crochet, but we’ve always wanted it to be a collective project. I posted on our website about a year ago calling for participants, and gradually people are coming into it. We have about eight or nine serious collaborators, in Australia, LA, and a couple of other cities. It is our dream that ultimately we’ll have a whole vast cohort of crocheting women all around the world. We’ve also done workshops about hyperbolic space where we get these women crocheting away and learning about higher geometry. It’s a wonderful way to get this intersection of higher mathematics and feminine handicraft.

So we sat down to grow a coral reef, and one day you find that it’s taken over your life. It’s so funny, because here am I, thinking I’m a serious science writer, and it’s crocheting a coral reef that seems to have catapulted me onto the national stage.  I think it’s just so funny, because to me, it’s like, I’ve written these serious books, I’ve been a serious commentator for science in this country for 15 years and what it takes is doing a bit of crochet. And I think, whatever.