Terribly inspiring lecturers...?

Is there an incompatibility between great visionary science and good teaching of science? I started to wonder about this yesterday as I read about a couple of the 'greats' of the past and their purported ineptitude in the lecture theatre. (Much of the detail below I owe to > G. Crowther's 1968 book 'Scientific Types'.) Perhaps there are lessons we can learn here.

Take the great experimental physicist C. T. R. Wilson--inventor of the so-called cloud chamber. Wilson was a wiry, quiet-spoken Scot who has a good claim as the father of all particle physics experiments. His invention of 1911 allowed the tracks of atoms and sub-atomic particles to be seen directly for the first time. (This only a few years after 'proof' that atoms existed at all came from Jean Perrin's experiments on the Brownian motion of much larger particles in liquids--see Middle World for that whole story!)

But Wilson, it seems, was a terrible lecturer. He would stand facing the blackboard (ah, those were days, 'I love the smell of chalkdust in the morning' etc), mumbling more or less inaudibly, and as he came to the key points his voice would drop even lower, as if forcing the audience to strain to hear might also force them to listen. (Maybe there's some logic in that, now I come ot think of it...) After Wilson gave a Friday evening lecture at the Royal Institution the organiser took him aside and told him he had 'made just about every mistake it is possible to make when giving a lecture'.

And yet, funnily enough, many of Wilson's later-to-be-illustrious students at the Cavendish in Cambridge, while admitting how terrible a lecturer he was, also report how inspiring he was. Lawrence Bragg, for instance, later to be Nobelised for his perfection of the technique of using X-rays to measure the atomic structure of materials (work which, it has been said, led to the whole of molecular biology, starting with Crick & Watson's DNA helix): according to Bragg, Wilson's lectures 'were the best, and the delivery was the worst, of any lectures to which I have been...'

The great 'father of quantum physics' Niels Bohr was apparently a similar lecturing basket-case, being described in action as 'almost inaudible and unintelligible, yet in effect very inspiring.. Bohr had an extraordinary power of conveying to his hearers that they were in the presence of profound insight, and in direct contact with the inner workings of nature, whether they could follow his argument or not...'

I also remember the famous story at Edinburgh, where I did my PhD, of how James Clerk Maxwell (the true Daddy of 19th century physics, second only, or rather third only, to Newton and Einstein in all the history of physical scientists) had been turned down for a job at Edinburgh--not because he was anything other than a frighteningly clever genius, but because he apparently wasn't very good at teaching. Good call, Edinburgh--down at the Cavendish Maxwell went on to create the theory of electromagnetism on which most of modern life is based (see David Bodanis's recent book). (At the same time Maxwell actually designed and built the Cavendish lab itself, too.)

Another example is Osborne Reynolds, one of the first engineering professors in the UK, whose work on liquid flow and turbulence was the basis of most 'big engineering' of the later Industrial Revolution--steam turbines, propeller-driven ships and aeroplanes, you name it. One of Reynolds' pupils in the 1870s at Owens College in Manchester (later Manchester Uni) was J. J. Thomson (subsequently to discover the electron--science really was a pretty small club of high achievers in those days...) Thomson described Reynolds' style: he would rush into the lecture room, open a textbook at random, declare a formula he found to be wrong, write it out on the blackboard, proceed from first principles to prove it wrong, and finally after many false starts and crossings-out announce at the end of the lecture that the formula was right after all.

Doesn't sound a very efficient way to learn--yet Thomson reportedly found Reynolds' lectures strangely educative: perhaps it was because Reynolds exposed the tangled undergrowth of much 'accepted' science, demonstrating that a real scientist never really accepts anything without trying to tear it apart first.

So what's the moral here? Perhaps the real eye-openers of science aren't the best people to be teaching 'the masses'--I mean those of us who are destined to be little more than footsoldiers in the War On Ignorance? I'm not sure. Teaching these days is in danger of getting caught in the politico-economic tug of war between tabloid government and cost-cutting business. Tony Blair wants to tell us what we should be teaching, and so do the business organisations. Shame that few on either end of this tugging rope have a real concept of what it means to try to understand nature--to see something in front of you and want to find out for yourself what it is and how it works and how it might be used.

What these 'terrible lecturers' such as C. T. R. Wilson, Niels Bohr, Osborne Reynolds, etc, had was the ability to inspire. The human brain--even the student brain, oversteeped in alcohol and playstationol though it sometimes is--is the most powerful learning technology we have. What we need to do as teachers is simply find out how to switch it on. I mean inspire it.

And thus start those brilliant brains on their own journey out into the mysterious world around us...