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THE SCIENTIST AS REBEL
by Freeman Dyson
Copyright © 2006 by Freeman Dyson
Copyright © 2006 by NYREV, Inc.
All rights reserved.
This edition published in 2008 in the United States of America by The New York Review of Books
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition of this book as follows:
Dyson, Freeman J.
The Scientist as Rebel / by Freeman J. Dyson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59017-216-2 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59017-216-7 (alk. paper)
1. Science. 2. Physics. 3. Science—History. 4. Science—Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Dyson, Freeman J.—Biography. 6. Scientists—United States—Biography. I. Title. Q158.5.D977 2006
500—dc22
2006022081
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-881-2
v3.1
To my teachers,
Eric and Cordelia James
Great brow, frail frame—gone. Yet you abide
In the shadow and sheen,
All the mellowing traits of a countryside
That nursed your tragi-comical scene;
And in us, warmer-hearted and brisker-eyed
Since you have been.
—Cecil Day Lewis
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE
I CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN SCIENCE
1 The Scientist as Rebel
2 Can Science be Ethical?
3 A Modern Heretic
4 The Future Needs Us
5 What a World!
6 Witness to a Tragedy
II WAR AND PEACE
7 Bombs and Potatoes
8 Generals
9 Russians
10 Pacifists
11 The Race Is Over
12 The Force of Reason
13 The Bitter End
III HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS
14 Two Kinds of History
15 Edward Teller’s Memoirs
16 In Praise of Amateurs
17 A New Newton
18 Clockwork Science
19 The World on a String
20 Oppenheimer as Scientist, Administrator, and Poet
21 Seeing the Unseen
22 The Tragic Tale of a Genius
23 Wise Man
IV PERSONAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS
24 The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
25 Is God in the Lab?
26 This Side Idolatry
27 One in a Million
28 Many Worlds
29 Religion from the Outside
V BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Preface
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN COMBINED better than anyone else the qualities of a great scientist and a great rebel. As a scientist, without formal education or inherited wealth, he beat the learned aristocrats of Europe at their own game. His victory encouraged him to believe that he and his fellow citizens in America, without much training in military strategy or international politics, could beat the aristocrats of Europe at warfare and diplomacy. Franklin’s triumph as a rebel resulted from the fact that his rebellion was not impulsive but was carefully thought out over many years. For most of his long life, he was a loyal subject of the British King. He lived for many years in London, representing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in dealings with the British government, calmly taking the measure of his future enemies.
While he was in London, Franklin was an active member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which still flourishes today. The society encouraged inventions and manufactures by offering financial subsidies and prizes to inventors and entrepreneurs. The prizes were usually available to all subjects of the King in England or America, but they were often targeted to subsidize colonial enterprises that the society considered desirable. When Franklin first joined the society in 1755, he was an enthusiastic supporter of its efforts to encourage invention, which he saw as complementary to the efforts of his own Philosophical Society in America. But as the years went by, his attitude became more critical. He never openly disagreed with the society and remained a member in good standing, all through the War of Independence and afterward until his death. But he recorded privately, in the margin of a book, his true feelings about the system of prizes and subsidies offered by the society:
What you call Bounties given by Parliament and the Society are nothing more than Inducements offered to us, to induce us to leave Employments that are more profitable and engage in such as would be less so without your Bounty; to quit a Business profitable to ourselves and engage in one as shall be profitable to you; this is the true Spirit of all your Bounties.
He wrote these words in 1770, five years before the outbreak of the war that ended British rule in the thirteen colonies.
Franklin became a rebel only when he judged the time to be ripe and the costs to be acceptable. As a rebel he remained a conservative, aiming not to destroy but to preserve as much as possible of the established order of society. As a diplomat in Paris, he fitted smoothly into the established order of prerevolutionary France. He would not have fitted so well into the France of Danton and Robespierre ten years later. The rebellion that Franklin embodied was a thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred.
In spite of its title, this book is mostly not about rebel scientists. It is a collection of book reviews, prefaces, and essays on a variety of subjects. The majority were published in The New York Review of Books. I am grateful to The New York Review for inviting me to collect these in a book, and for allowing me to supplement them with other pieces that were published in other places. The bibliographical notes at the end explain where each piece was published and how it originated. The collection is divided into four sections according to subject matter, and arranged chronologically within each section. Section I deals with political issues arising out of science and technology. Section II deals with problems of war and peace. Section III deals with the history of science, and Section IV with personal and philosophical reflections. By accident rather than by design, at least one rebellious scientist appears in each section. But there are pieces about scientists such as John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton (Chapter 21) who were far from being rebels, and pieces such as the review of Max Hastings’s Armageddon (Chapter 13) that are concerned with soldiers rather than with scientists.
One of the pleasures of writing for The New York Review is the fact that it publishes long reviews. The reviewer is asked to write about four thousand words, which means that the review can be an essay reflecting on the subject matter rather than a simple appraisal of a book. The short reviews in this collection were published in other journals. If this book is a sandwich, the meat is the series of twelve long reviews from The New York Review, most of them appearing in Section III. There are four other meaty items that were not in The New York Review. One is the Bernal lecture (Chapter 24), which Carl Sagan whimsically published as an appendix to the proceedings of a conference on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. The other three (Chapters 8, 9, and 10) are chapters from my book Weapons and Hope, which is now out of print. The collapse of the Soviet Union made much of Weapons and Hope obsolete, but these three historical chapters may be worth preserving.
The essay “The Scientist as Rebel,” with
which this collection begins, originated as a talk given at a meeting of scientists and philosophers at Cambridge, England, in November 1992. The talk was dedicated to the memory of Lord James of Rusholme, who had died six months earlier at the age of eighty-three, full of years and honors, having risen to the top of the British educational establishment. The obituary notices that were published in newspapers after his death described him as a capable organizer and administrator who presided over the founding of York University and served as its vice-chancellor for the first eleven years of its existence, from 1962 to 1973. They said that he had conservative views on the subject of education, that he believed in old-fashioned scholarship and academic rigor, that he fought hard to make York University a community of scholars and an intellectual powerhouse on a level with Oxford. “Jude the Obscure,” he was quoted as saying, “need no longer look despairingly at the towers and spires of an inaccessible university, provided he has three good A-level passes, can satisfy one of a multiplicity of entrance requirements, and is prepared, if necessary, to do without spires.” He tried to make York University the home of an intellectual elite, an elite based upon brains and competitive examinations rather than money and social class. His elitist view of education came into collision with the dominant political currents of the 1950s and 1960s. The dominant view held that Jude should be enrolled in a university whether or not he was able to pass the A-level examinations. The dominant view held that higher education should be for everybody and not only for the bright. In the end, Lord James fought in vain against what he considered the folly of the politicians. Whenever he lost a battle in his campaign for strict intellectual standards, he liked to quote the lines of the poet Matthew Arnold:
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!
I dedicated “The Scientist as Rebel” to Lord James because he was, like Benjamin Franklin, a scientist and a rebel. Like Franklin, he achieved great things as a rebel because he was aiming to build a new society rather than to destroy an old one. Like Franklin, he built institutions to last. After he had achieved his goal of building a new university, he was a conservative administrator. But I knew him very well thirty years earlier, long before any of us dreamed that he might one day be sitting in the House of Lords. In those days he was plain Eric James, a teacher of chemistry in the school at Winchester where I was a boy. He had published a successful textbook, Elements of Physical Chemistry, that was widely used in schools. He was indeed a scientist, and he was a rebel and an outsider, who brought a draft of fresh air into the stuffy old chambers of Winchester College. But he also understood the value of tradition. He was big enough to see both sides of the picture. At Winchester, where intellectual traditions are taken for granted, we saw Eric the reformer. At York in the 1960s, when intellectual standards were everywhere under attack, we saw Eric the traditionalist. Between Winchester and York he spent seventeen years as high master of Manchester grammar school. At Manchester in the postwar years he occupied the middle ground in a society rebuilding itself. Manchester gave him the opportunity to combine the two main purposes of his life, the education of gifted children and the reform of society.
My most vivid memory of Eric comes from the summer of 1941. Since many of the regular farmworkers had been drafted into the army, schoolchildren and teachers were invited to help out on the farms during school vacations. We were encamped together for two rain-drenched weeks at Hurstbourne Priors in rural Hampshire, trying to rescue a sodden harvest of wheat and oats, with the grain already sprouting green out of the sheaves. In those days the farmers did not have heated drying sheds. A wet August meant a spoiled harvest. We worked in the fields all day and discussed the meaning of existence in our tents at night. Those two weeks were in retrospect the high point of my school days, breaking out of the academic cocoon and seeing something of the world outside, with Brechtian commentaries provided by Eric and his wife, Cordelia. Cordelia fought bravely for fifty years at Eric’s side against the forts of folly. At Hurstbourne Priors Eric and Cordelia came into collision with Lord Lymington, who owned the land on which we were working. This was the same Lord Lymington who appears in Chapter 17 of this book, the review of James Gleick’s biography of Newton. Lord Lymington had inherited Newton’s manuscripts and carelessly dispersed them all over the world by selling them at auction in small lots. Eric and Cordelia entertained us at night with accurate imitations of Lord Lymington’s high-pitched voice and fatuous oratory.
When Eric James died in 1992, the film Dead Poets Society was playing in movie theaters. It is a story about an upper-class American prep school and an English teacher who gets into trouble because he doesn’t stick to the established curriculum. The theme of the film is rebellion. The established curriculum is asinine, the headmaster is a stuffed shirt, and the only redeeming feature of the school is the English teacher and a bunch of rebellious boys whom he encourages to break the rules. The film was a fitting memorial to Eric. Our school in Winchester was like the school in the film. The atmosphere was the same, with the rebellious boys and the smooth-talking headmaster. Instead of holding meetings in a cave at night, we took advantage of the wartime blackout to climb over the rooftops and up the chapel tower. And instead of a subversive English teacher we had our subversive chemistry teacher. Like the teacher in the film, Eric James had a passion for poetry. He had a Ph.D. in chemistry, but he understood that it made no sense to bore us with formal lectures about chemical reactions which we could learn about much quicker from textbooks. So he put aside the ferrous and ferric oxides and read us the latest poems of Auden and Isherwood and Dylan Thomas and Cecil Day Lewis, the poets who were then speaking for the younger generation in the first desperate years of World War II.
Forty years later I met Eric James at a party at York University, after his retirement as vice-chancellor. It was the first time I had seen him since I was seventeen. I started the conversation with a quote from one of the poems he had read to us forty years earlier, a poem by Day Lewis about the war in Spain:
They bore not a charmed life.
They went into battle foreseeing
Probable loss, and they lost.
Eric continued without a break from his own memory:
The tides of Biscay flow
Over the obstinate bones of many, the winds are sighing
Round prison walls where the rest are doomed like their ship to rust,
Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.
Fortunately our headmaster, unlike the headmaster in the film, was wise enough to tolerate Eric James and give him a free hand. Eric was accepted into the English educational hierarchy, became a headmaster himself, founded a university, and was rewarded by a grateful government with a baronial title. It is hard to imagine a prep school chemistry teacher in the United States ending his career in so exalted a fashion. But Eric remained in his heart a rebel. Through forty years of active and creative life he remembered the sadness and the passion of the 1940s when we saw Hell break loose on Earth. That sadness and that passion are a part of our lives still. That sadness and that passion are what made Eric James a great teacher.
The life of Eric James demonstrates that there is no contradiction between a rebellious spirit and an uncompromising pursuit of excellence in a rigorous intellectual discipline. In the history of science, it has often happened that rebellion and professional competence went hand in hand. Several chapters in this book are devoted to famous scientists who were also famous rebels. Thomas Gold (Chapter 3) was a great astronomer with heretical opinions about many subjects. Joseph Rotblat (Chapter 12) was unique as a scientist who walked out of the wartime Los Alamos bomb project when he learned that the threat of a German atomic bomb had disappeared. Norbert Wiener (Chapter 22) was a great mathematician who refused on moral grounds to have anything to do with either industry or government. Desmond Bernal (Chapter 24) was one of the founding fathers of molecular biology, and also a faithful m
ember of the Communist Party and a passionate believer in Marxism. Three chapters (23, 25, and 26) are devoted to my teacher Richard Feynman, the physicist who most closely resembled Eric James. Feynman was another rebellious spirit who combined a serious dedication to science with joyful adventures in the world outside.
The scientist who described most eloquently the role of the rebel in science was the paleontologist Loren Eiseley. Unfortunately Eiseley does not have a chapter in this book. He was a wonderful writer, best known to the general public through his books The Immense Journey and The Unexpected Universe, which tell poignant stories about the creatures, living and dead, that Eiseley encountered in the course of his work as a naturalist and fossil hunter. The most personal of his books is his autobiography, All the Strange Hours. In it Eiseley explains why he is a rebel, why he is a poet, why he feels less kinship with his academic colleagues than with a doomed prisoner escaped from jail on a winter’s night and hunted to death in the snow. Eiseley’s image of the prisoner bleeding in the snow, Day Lewis’s image of the Spanish sailors rusting in Franco’s prison, both are images of the human condition as valid today as they were sixty years ago.
—Freeman Dyson, Princeton, 2006
I
Contemporary Issues in Science
1
THE SCIENTIST AS REBEL
THERE IS NO such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. The vision of science is not specifically Western. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of ancient science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it. And what is true of science is also true of poetry. Poetry was not invented by Westerners. India has poetry older than Homer. Poetry runs as deep in Arab and Japanese culture as it does in Russian and English. Just because I quote poems in English, it does not follow that the vision of poetry has to be Western. Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity.
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