Multitudinous and Minute”: Early Twentieth-Century Scientific, Literary and Psychological Representations of the Mass’ Winner of the Journal of Literature and Science and British Society for Literature and Science Essay Prize 2013

摘要

During his annus mirabilis of 1905, in addition to papers on the special theory of relativity and the quantum nature of light, Albert Einstein published a revolutionary paper on Brownian motion, following this up with four further papers on the subject over the following three years. Einstein's work in this area paved the way for the acceptance of the physical reality of atomic and molecular models, and can be seen as one of the most significant moments in the physical investigation of large numbers of molecules, an area of study which had come to the fore in the mid-nineteenth century. Physics was not the only field to be struggling with issues relating to large masses during this period: indeed, the emergence of social statistics in nineteenth-century France had already had a direct impact on scientific approaches to the mass (Porter 114). The ongoing social, cultural and political implications of such ideas outside of the purely scientific realm became particularly evident with Gustave Le Bon's 1895 declaration that "The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS" (xv). In turn, the urban focus of much modernist literature, and in particular its emphasis on the place of the individual within city crowds, stresses the resonance of such issues across traditional disciplinary divides. This article will consider the ways in which the disciplines of molecular physics, crowd psychology and modernist literature (represented here by the writings of Virginia Woolf) both overlapped with and drew directly on each other in their engagements with and treatments of large-scale populations, whether of particles, human beings or fictional characters. Moreover, it will show how, in N. Katherine Hayles's terms, each discipline was drawn to focus on this problem because the "concerns" underlying it were "highly charged within a prevailing cultural context" (xi), a context which comprised rapid population growth and mass urbanisation, and which raised the question of the nature of the relationship between the individual and the mass. Brownian motion is the name given to the movement exhibited by microscopic particles suspended in a medium made up of molecules of much smaller size and mass: in current GCSE science the examples most frequently used are pollen grains in water and smoke particles in air. Observed through a microscope, the individual pollen or smoke particles are each seen to be moving almost constantly in a random and "wholly haphazard" manner (Perrin, Atoms 83). However, as the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, after whom the phenomenon is named, proved in the 1820s, this motion is due not to living organisms, but rather "belong[s] to the particle itself