Jacob Bronowski: Boldly on BBC4

Jacob Bronowski

Airing tonight at 21.00 on BBC4 is My Father, The Bomb and Me, a documentary by the academic Lisa Jardine devoted to her father, that truly great scholar of science Jacob Bronowski. The shadow of the atom bomb, which looms over the story of science in the 20th century like a black cloud occluding the sun, will clearly be a powerful image for Jardine, just as it was for her father, who witnessed the shattering reality of the bomb’s power in the aftermath of Nagasaki.
Bronowski remembers what he saw in the opening pages of his Science and Human Values, available (as are several other titles of his) in Faber Finds:
“On a fine November day in 1945, late in the afternoon, I was landed on an airstrip in Southern Japan. From there a jeep was to take me over the mountains to join a ship which lay in Nagasaki Harbour. I knew nothing of the country or the distance before us. We drove off; dusk fell; the road rose and fell away, the pine woods came down to the road, straggled on and opened again. I did not know that we had left the open country until unexpectedly I heard the ship’s loudspeakers broadcasting dance music.
Then suddenly I was aware that we were already at the centre of damage in Nagasaki. The shadows behind me were the skeletons of the Mitsubishi factory buildings, pushed backwards and sideways as if by a giant hand. What I had thought to be broken rocks was a concrete power house with its roof punched in. I could now make out the outline of two crumpled gasometers; there was a cold furnace festooned with service pipes; otherwise nothing but cockeyed telegraph poles and loops of wire in a bare waste of ashes. I had blundered into this desolate landscape as instantly as one might wake among the craters of the moon…”
The fiery genius of science enabled the Bomb and all its desolation: after such knowledge, what forgiveness? Such is the accusation Bronowski weighs up in Science and Human Values (originally delivered in lecture form at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, published 5 years later.) With care and erudition and great skills of communication, Bronowski seeks to impress on us that scientific endeavour is an essentially creative act, part of a great shared human interest in ourselves and the world around us; and an often haphazard/trial-and-error process, the end of which is not – cannot be – preordained.
But Bronowski sees art and science as being on a shared search for value, a quest to understand and express the world, using different tools but shared concepts – one of these being metaphor. “What is a poetic image,” he asks, “but the seizing and the exploration of a hidden likeness, in holding together two parts of a comparison which are to give depth to each other?… There are discoveries to be made by snatching a small likeness from the air too, if it is bold enough… The scientist looks for order in the appearances of nature by exploring such likenesses.”
BBC4 will also be screening Bronowski’s landmark BBC series The Ascent of Man, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to remind oneself that this most brilliant intellectual had a power to communicate complex but vital ideas to a mass audience through the medium of television. As a culture we should always have such powers at our disposal, and if today’s channel-hopping TV-viewing experience seems rarely to offer us a successor to Bronowski, engagingly exploring the foundation of our shared humanity… well, BBC4 nonetheless deserves every credit for giving us back the Real Thing…

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