100 years after his birth, Kurt Vonnegut is more relevant than ever to science | Science

When American novelist Kurt Vonnegut addressed the Bennington College class of 1970—1 year after publishing his best-selling novel, Slaughterhouse-Five—he hit the crowd with his signature one-two punch.

“I fully expected that by the time I was 21, some scientist … would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine,” he said. “What actually happened … was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

This weary skepticism for the scientific endeavor rings through many of Vonnegut’s 14 novels and dozens of short stories. For what would have been the famed author’s 100th birthday, Science talked to literary scholars, philosophers of science, and political theorists about the messages Vonnegut left for the scientific community—and why he’s more relevant than ever.

Throughout his career, Vonnegut wrote about hypothetical technologies that foresaw not just emergent fields of science such as artificial intelligence and geoengineering, but the ways in which culture and politics shape their effect on society. In doing so, he provided thought experiments and planted seeds for dealing with modern ethical debates, says Peter-Paul Verbeek, a philosopher of science and technology at the University of Amsterdam and chair of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. “Fiction writers do philosophy by other means.”

As a philosopher, Vonnegut was no stranger to science. Under pressure from his brother, a renowned atmospheric chemist, he studied biochemistry at Cornell University in the 1940s before dropping out and enlisting in the Army during World War II. He later worked as an institutional writer for General Electric and, until his death in 2007, said he spent more time in the company of scientists than of writers.

Perhaps that’s why, beneath his persistent skepticism about science, there was always a deep appreciation for its potential. In the novel Cat’s Cradle, for instance, a dictator on the brink of death urges his people to embrace science over religion because “science is magic that works.” Even within ultimately dystopian tales, “you can see a sort of romanticization of the scientific endeavor,” says David Koepsell, a philosopher of science and technology at Texas A&M University, College Station.

Science never cheered up anyone.

But time and time again, the groundbreaking discoveries and newfangled gadgets in Vonnegut’s stories take a turn for the worse. For example, the invention the dying dictator in Cat’s Cradle refers to as “magic” is a crystalline compound that turns water to ice at room temperature. In the novel, samples of this chemical are passed around the world, and, following a series of accidents, end up freezing all of the water on the planet, to disastrous end. And in the short story The Euphio Question, an opportunistic businessman capitalizes on an astronomer’s bizarre discovery to create a “euphoriaphone” that hypnotizes society into complacency.

The deep distrust that haunts Vonnegut’s stories stemmed in part from his own traumatic experiences with products of modern science. His mother overdosed on sleeping pills in 1944. Months later, as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden that killed roughly 25,000 people. “So it goes,” as he said.

“I was sickened by this use of technology that I had had such great hopes for,” Vonnegut told journalist Robert Musil in 1980, “and so I came to fear it.”

Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Vonnegut’s scorn extended to humanity’s destruction of the environment—particularly later in his career, as social and political gathered steam. After speaking at the first Earth Day in 1970, Vonnegut made major revisions to prepublication drafts of Breakfast of Champions to focus the book more on pressing climate issues. He tucked in a tale about an extinct colony of automobiles that had squandered its planet’s resources, for instance. Word of these creatures spreads to Earth, where humans re-create them as idols and consequentially destroy their own planet.

“Vonnegut disarms us into imagining different kinds of futures,” says Christina Jarvis, a Vonnegut scholar at the State University of New York, Fredonia, and author of the new book Lucky Mud & Other Foma: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship. “He didn’t want to just merely predict the future; he wanted to prevent that future”—by warning of the dangers of a society blindingly bent on progress.

Koepsell believes Cat’s Cradle laid the groundwork for the precautionary principle—the idea that society should exercise restraint when introducing potentially harmful technologies. The principle has been readily adopted in Europe and guided policy on nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, and conservation efforts; various international environmental treaties reference the principle directly. But the United States has largely ignored Vonnegut’s message because it views precaution as “getting in the way of innovation,” says Sheila Jasanoff, a science studies scholar at Harvard University.

A virtuous physicist is a humanistic physicist.

• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

Vonnegut urged scientists themselves to step up to the plate. He believed a moral scientist was one committed to humanism, a philosophy he described as “trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” A humanistic physicist, he said, is one who “watches people, listens to them, thinks about them, wishes them and their planet well.”

The danger, Vonnegut explained, comes when scientists get so sucked into their work that they disregard their responsibility to humans and the planet. As an example, he pointed to Irving Langmuir, a chemistry Nobel laureate, colleague of Vonnegut’s brother, and the inspiration for the amoral physicist in Cat’s Cradle. In collaboration with the U.S. military, Langmuir attempted to seed hurricanes with silver iodide and dry ice—undeterred by the project’s potential to worsen storms, as it appeared to do in 1947. “Langmuir was absolutely indifferent to the uses that might be made of the truths he dug out of the rock,” Vonnegut told Musil.

We are what we pretend to be.

For many of the same fears that materialize in Vonnegut’s stories, Jasanoff believes “scientists should not be defining the ethical horizons of what we do.” Instead, she and colleagues advocate for a two-way “conversation between science and society,” using social values as a guide when carving out avenues of research.

As society grows more entwined with technology and the emerging ethical conundrums only become more complicated, philosophers and ethicists are increasingly turning to science fiction writers for guidance, Koepsell says. “Fiction has a certain license to get us to think about these issues,” he adds. “I’m grateful I have examples like those that Vonnegut and others provide us.”

When American novelist Kurt Vonnegut addressed the Bennington College class of 1970—1 year after publishing his best-selling novel, Slaughterhouse-Five—he hit the crowd with his signature one-two punch.

“I fully expected that by the time I was 21, some scientist … would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine,” he said. “What actually happened … was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

This weary skepticism for the scientific endeavor rings through many of Vonnegut’s 14 novels and dozens of short stories. For what would have been the famed author’s 100th birthday, Science talked to literary scholars, philosophers of science, and political theorists about the messages Vonnegut left for the scientific community—and why he’s more relevant than ever.

Science is magic that works.

Throughout his career, Vonnegut wrote about hypothetical technologies that foresaw not just emergent fields of science such as artificial intelligence and geoengineering, but the ways in which culture and politics shape their effect on society. In doing so, he provided thought experiments and planted seeds for dealing with modern ethical debates, says Peter-Paul Verbeek, a philosopher of science and technology at the University of Amsterdam and chair of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. “Fiction writers do philosophy by other means.”

As a philosopher, Vonnegut was no stranger to science. Under pressure from his brother, a renowned atmospheric chemist, he studied biochemistry at Cornell University in the 1940s before dropping out and enlisting in the Army during World War II. He later worked as an institutional writer for General Electric and, until his death in 2007, said he spent more time in the company of scientists than of writers.

Perhaps that’s why, beneath his persistent skepticism about science, there was always a deep appreciation for its potential. In the novel Cat’s Cradle, for instance, a dictator on the brink of death urges his people to embrace science over religion because “science is magic that works.” Even within ultimately dystopian tales, “you can see a sort of romanticization of the scientific endeavor,” says David Koepsell, a philosopher of science and technology at Texas A&M University, College Station.

Science never cheered up anyone.

But time and time again, the groundbreaking discoveries and newfangled gadgets in Vonnegut’s stories take a turn for the worse. For example, the invention the dying dictator in Cat’s Cradle refers to as “magic” is a crystalline compound that turns water to ice at room temperature. In the novel, samples of this chemical are passed around the world, and, following a series of accidents, end up freezing all of the water on the planet, to disastrous end. And in the short story The Euphio Question, an opportunistic businessman capitalizes on an astronomer’s bizarre discovery to create a “euphoriaphone” that hypnotizes society into complacency.

The deep distrust that haunts Vonnegut’s stories stemmed in part from his own traumatic experiences with products of modern science. His mother overdosed on sleeping pills in 1944. Months later, as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden that killed roughly 25,000 people. “So it goes,” as he said.

“I was sickened by this use of technology that I had had such great hopes for,” Vonnegut told journalist Robert Musil in 1980, “and so I came to fear it.”

Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Vonnegut’s scorn extended to humanity’s destruction of the environment—particularly later in his career, as social and political gathered steam. After speaking at the first Earth Day in 1970, Vonnegut made major revisions to prepublication drafts of Breakfast of Champions to focus the book more on pressing climate issues. He tucked in a tale about an extinct colony of automobiles that had squandered its planet’s resources, for instance. Word of these creatures spreads to Earth, where humans re-create them as idols and consequentially destroy their own planet.

“Vonnegut disarms us into imagining different kinds of futures,” says Christina Jarvis, a Vonnegut scholar at the State University of New York, Fredonia, and author of the new book Lucky Mud & Other Foma: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship. “He didn’t want to just merely predict the future; he wanted to prevent that future”—by warning of the dangers of a society blindingly bent on progress.

Koepsell believes Cat’s Cradle laid the groundwork for the precautionary principle—the idea that society should exercise restraint when introducing potentially harmful technologies. The principle has been readily adopted in Europe and guided policy on nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, and conservation efforts; various international environmental treaties reference the principle directly. But the United States has largely ignored Vonnegut’s message because it views precaution as “getting in the way of innovation,” says Sheila Jasanoff, a science studies scholar at Harvard University.

A virtuous physicist is a humanistic physicist.

• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

Vonnegut urged scientists themselves to step up to the plate. He believed a moral scientist was one committed to humanism, a philosophy he described as “trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” A humanistic physicist, he said, is one who “watches people, listens to them, thinks about them, wishes them and their planet well.”

The danger, Vonnegut explained, comes when scientists get so sucked into their work that they disregard their responsibility to humans and the planet. As an example, he pointed to Irving Langmuir, a chemistry Nobel laureate, colleague of Vonnegut’s brother, and the inspiration for the amoral physicist in Cat’s Cradle. In collaboration with the U.S. military, Langmuir attempted to seed hurricanes with silver iodide and dry ice—undeterred by the project’s potential to worsen storms, as it appeared to do in 1947. “Langmuir was absolutely indifferent to the uses that might be made of the truths he dug out of the rock,” Vonnegut told Musil.

We are what we pretend to be.

For many of the same fears that materialize in Vonnegut’s stories, Jasanoff believes “scientists should not be defining the ethical horizons of what we do.” Instead, she and colleagues advocate for a two-way “conversation between science and society,” using social values as a guide when carving out avenues of research.

As society grows more entwined with technology and the emerging ethical conundrums only become more complicated, philosophers and ethicists are increasingly turning to science fiction writers for guidance, Koepsell says. “Fiction has a certain license to get us to think about these issues,” he adds. “I’m grateful I have examples like those that Vonnegut and others provide us.”