GIGO

Dissecting the Unicorn?

Being a science enthusiast and a keen medievalist can lead to some interesting conversations. A friend of mine likes unicorns. I was studying her collection of unicorn postcards the other day and came across one which, while beautiful, was a tad annoying.

"That horn's ridiculous," I remarked. "It's far too long. It'd snap off the first time the unicorn tried spearing something with it."

My friend looked at me rather quizzically. "How can you, as someone who is so into science, accept the existence of something like a unicorn, yet quibble about the size of its horn?!"

It didn't seem so incongruous to me. But many people equate an interest in the sciences with a lack of imagination or creativity. Scientists are seen as stodgy people who would sooner dissect a unicorn than marvel at it. While the former action may very well appeal to the astonished biologist, I have no doubt that the latter emotion would be the more common reaction.

After all, it is often the case that imagination, creativity, flair serves to distinguish the scientific pathfinder from their more stolid counterparts. No-one ever said that you had to leave your enjoyment of the magical side of life at the laboratory door, nor subsume your wonder at the mysteries found at the heart of any scientific endeavour.

That creativity is well expressed in a book I've been reading recently, The Faber Book of Science. It's a collection of the writings of scientifically minded people from Galileo to Stephen Jay Gould, not forgetting keen observers of the human condition such as George Orwell and Mark Twain.

It's not just the creativity of the well-turned phrase, it's also the imagination implicit in the well-tuned mind that delights. Leonardo da Vinci was able to look at the bones of oysters and coral high up in the Apennines and see that "above the plains of Italy where flocks of birds are flying today, fishes were once moving in large shoals".

Ironically, given the then very strong social pressures against imagining a changing and changeable Earth, such a vision may well have been more difficult than seeing unicorns in the forests of Lombardy.

Vicki Hyde is the editor of New Zealand Science Monthly.