The Super Priests

Professor John Lighten Synge (rhymes with ring) is a bald-domed, red-mustached Irishman whose English ancestors moved to the ould sod so long ago (1600s) that Red Hugh himself ought to forgive him their origin. For 22 years, off & on, he has taught physics and mathematics in the U.S. and Canada, long enough for his speech to lose all but a touch of brogue. But in his new book, Science--Sense and Nonsense (Norton; $2.75), he shows that he has hung on to more than his share of native wit and irreverence--qualities that made his playwright uncle, John Millington Synge, the darling of the Irish renaissance.

Very much aware of increasing government control over science, Author Synge is duly pessimistic about the place of scientists in the years to come. Says he: "The Archimedes and the Newton of the future will live under a benevolent paternalism. Their motives will be all wrong, socially . . . and unless under these conditions they prove completely barren they will sit on golden perches in golden henhouses fitted with microphones and peepholes in order that those who are responsible . . . for the expenditure of public money may hear and see and report events greatly wished. It is not a pleasant picture, but we shall get used to it." Fortunately, although Professor Synge professes to see no alternative, his book suggests a few.

If science and scientists are to maintain their freedom, says Synge, the layman must pitch in. He must put aside his fears and ask embarrassing questions with "the childish directness and simplicity which society and learning are so successful in eradicating."

And scientists must be willing to meet the public halfway. They must, like the artist, learn to communicate with people of little skill and less patience. They must do their share of searching for the never-never land where science and common sense meet. It will be a country where "the greatest scholar [will] confess himself the equal of the child." No mind will be so "debauched with learning" that it will shun the simple skepticism that blows the lid off everything.

"As long as science believes that what it explores is absolute (whatever that may mean)," Professor Synge is sure that scientists will be treated as a race of super priests, shut away to perform their rituals. "Only when the human element gains the upper hand . . . can [they] relax into something resembling a grin. If the mysterious face which we glimpse through the darkness is our own, we can no longer pay it the old reverence."

The truth is, Synge concludes, that science is "part-theater" and "part-church," and "the least desirable audience-congregation in this theater-church is one that sleeps through it all."

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