Fracture

by Philipp Blom

  Hubble’s discovery had revolutionized humanity’s conception of its place in the world, and it is difficult to overestimate its long-term effects. Over three millennia, from an essentially local idea of Earth as a disc, the planet had become round and had been dislodged from its position at the center of the universe to be a mere satellite of a sun, which in turn had been found to be one of many in a galaxy of suns, the Milky Way. Now this galaxy was no longer a universe—the only universe—but merely one among countless galaxies in the immense, fathomless, and expanding darkness of space, and Earth had become an infinitesimal dot in a world of unimaginable magnitude. It was the last and perhaps greatest blow to humanity’s narcissism, which Shapley had identified in his letter, writing about the caveman who believes himself to be the center of the universe. Humanity was not at the center, and not even prominently placed in the periphery; it appeared to be lost, cast into the darkness and void of deep space as a tiny speck inside the vast apparent emptiness of the universe.

  Alice-in-Wonderland Physics

  WHILE IN CALIFORNIA the world was shown to be infinitely larger than previously thought possible, scientists in Europe were investigating the strange world of matter at the subatomic level. Their findings and theoretical models of the smallest building blocks of our material reality were disorienting, even deeply shocking.

  Perhaps for the first time in modern history, these findings were more of a collaborative endeavor than a story of individual intellectual heroism, as it had been up to Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity. Several scientists throughout Germany and elsewhere in Europe discussed and elaborated hypotheses that would change the very nature of how we look at the physical universe. One of them, the German professor Werner Heisenberg, was still in his twenties when he made his revolutionary contributions to quantum physics, the next frontier of science after relativity.

  Physicists had long been puzzled by the fact that light appeared not only to behave as a smooth, immaterial wave, as expected, but also under certain circumstances to show characteristics expected from particles, despite the fact that according to classical, Newtonian physics it could only be either one or the other, never both wave and particle at the same time. As early as 1900 the German theoretical physicist Max Planck had posited that electromagnetic energy such as ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, or visible light was composed of multiples of a discrete and indivisible energy unit, the quantum. Against all appearances, light had to be looked at not as an immaterial wave but as a wave pattern consisting of individual units of energy.

  Planck’s hypothesis provided an explanation for some of the questions that were being discussed at the time, but it failed to address others. A new solution came from a revolutionary suggestion by Heisenberg, whose ideas completely upended the traditional understanding of physics. The brilliant young scientist worked with Max Born in Göttingen and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, where he developed crucial aspects of a new model of the world at the atomic and subatomic levels.

  A light quantum (or electron), Heisenberg claimed, was neither a particle nor a wave; rather, it could behave like either, depending on the circumstances and on the moment of observation. It had no fixed observable identity. Indeed, the role of the observer became paramount in physics, as the natural world at once revealed itself and shrouded itself in impenetrable mystery. “Modern atomic physics does not deal with the essence and structure of atoms,” he wrote in 1931, “but with what we perceive when we observe them; the emphasis always lies on the concept of the ‘process of observation.’ The process of observation can no longer be simply objectified, and its result cannot be directly made into a real thing.”4

  The scientist as observer could do no more than record his or her perceptions, but in doing so was further limited by the eccentricities of nature. The act of observation itself, Heisenberg argued, altered the system observed, and to some degree even created it. What was more, at the subatomic level the movement of individual particles (or waves) was essentially random and could not be predicted with any degree of certainty. Even causality, the cornerstone of Newtonian physics, was rejected in favor of mere probability.

  The trajectory of an electron around the nucleus of an atom is not a stable path, and in measuring it one can only determine either its position or its impulse, never both. It is not possible to ascribe a particular speed and a particular location to any subatomic particle. Any prediction made about its behavior is therefore based purely on probability. At the macroscopic level—the level of human experience—this makes no difference to the prediction of future events because the aggregation of an immense number of probable outcomes at the subatomic level results in near certainty, but at the level of individual particles no outcome is ever certain from one moment to the next.

  Germany’s strong culture of public lectures by scientists as well as popular scientific literature, much of it written by leading research scientists, meant that Heisenberg’s theses were hotly debated among physicists as well as in a wider context. The disturbing implications of his ideas were clear, and they attacked the very foundations of science and of Western thought.

  It is worth staying with this idea for a moment. In the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton formulated a series of laws that ever since had been regarded as an accurate and objective description of the physical universe. According to this set of principles, every object had a clearly definable identity and behaved lawfully under all circumstances, according to its motion, its inertia, its gravity, its energy. Everything was either one thing or another, either here or there, either wave or particle. The world functioned like a gigantic clockwork mechanism, chiming the hours with unerring precision.

  The concept at the core of Newton’s physics, however, was much older and reaches via the Middle Ages straight to ancient Greek philosophy, the authors of the Bible, and the mythical narratives of Mesopotamia. The ideas at stake were identity and duality, the irreducible bedrock of Western thought. Biblical symbolism is dualist, with its heaven and hell, sun and moon, day and night, good and evil, clean and unclean. This had been the matrix of a way of thinking that divided the world into lords and servants, believers and infidels, and it was just as essential that every element in this chain had a fixed identity that might be transformable but would always be one or the other. Christian thought had enthusiastically made use of this principle, which was compromised only by the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, in which a single being was supposed to be both three and one, depending on the perspective and the situation—a quantum God, in a way.

  Perhaps the stubbornly illogical doctrine of the Trinity (from its inception nothing but a theological compromise) kept open intellectual windows for a more flexible kind of logic in the medieval monks struggling to understand how three could be one. This was church doctrine, but it flatly contradicted the basic three laws of logic coming down from Plato: the law of identity (everything is identical to itself and nothing else), the law of the excluded middle (of any proposition it must be true that either it or its negation is true), and the law of noncontradiction (nothing can be true and not true at the same time). An entire philosophical canon had been constructed on these laws, and what Newton had done was simply apply them to nature. As an ethical principle, this exclusive and dualist logic had been at the heart of the self-perception of people in the West. As a philosophical principle, this had blossomed into scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. As a scientific and finally also economic principle, it proved capable of creating a new world within less than four centuries.

  Quantum physics and other theoretical developments overturned the cumulative result of a millennium-old tradition by claiming that the very matter of the universe was unlike anything Newton had imagined, and that at its heart lay states of radical uncertainty in which particles could be two different things, had no fixed identity, had contradictory characteristics, and were governed not by laws but by simple chance. The new physics argued that there are no absolute l
aws in nature, only statistical probabilities.

  Before the war, Einstein had shown Newtonian physics to be a subset of laws he had described in his theory of relativity, a subset that was valid only within a small spectrum of physical phenomena that happened to coincide with human experience. The closer any object approached the speed of light and the longer the distances it traveled, the more Newton’s laws appeared to be no more than approximations. To understand this cosmic dimension, the observer had to understand that no position was ever fixed, that every movement was relative to others.

  Even physicists balked at such a radical abolition of the laws that seemed to describe the universe so well. Albert Einstein was the most famous opponent of Heisenberg’s radical conclusions, just as he opposed the idea of an expanding universe and the conclusions it invited. “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing,” he wrote in 1926 in a letter to Max Born. “But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us closer to the secret of the ‘Old One.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing dice.”5 Other eminent physicists, Max Planck among them, agreed with him.

  How German Is Real Science?

  THE DEEP PROBLEM underlying both quantum physics and cosmology was the loss of any intuitive understanding of the world. With every new advance, science made the universe a more unfamiliar, less homelike place in which countless galaxies are hurtling through eternal darkness while the building blocks of matter are mysterious units of no certain identity, ruled only by chance, and objective knowledge becomes an impossible aspiration.

  Einstein and Planck were among the most prominent scientists to revolt against this alien and counterintuitive understanding of physics, but while their aversion to the probability-based approach of quantum physics originated in their ultimately religious worldview, which could not reconcile the idea of the “Old One” with a universe built on random events, German scientists soon found themselves embroiled in a very different debate concerned with the supposedly racial character of such a theory. Could it be that scientific theories had become so disorienting simply because so many Jews had had a hand in formulating them?

  This jump may seem surprising, as ethnicity does not appear to have any causal link with higher mathematics, but a disproportionately high number of theoretical physicists, from Max Born to Einstein and others, were of Jewish descent. Sociologically, the reason for this lay simply in the fact that during the late nineteenth century, standard physics (which was still overwhelmingly Newtonian) was believed to be a theoretical model of the world that had almost reached completion. Theoretical physics, by contrast, was a marginal research area for cranks and lonely eccentrics, and it offered little funding, little prestige, and few career opportunities. While ethnic Germans were commonly allotted the most prestigious chairs and research positions in standard physics, work in theoretical physics was often left to Jews, or to women such as the brilliant Lise Meitner.

  As often in the history of anti-Semitism, the result of social need and pressure was turned against those who had successfully accommodated to it. During the nineteenth century, Jews had been accused of possessing a sharp and “corrosive” intellect, but no creative genius. Now modern science was portrayed as a Jewish invention designed to sap the lifeblood from German culture. Even Heisenberg, who refused to emigrate when Hitler came to power and whose role during the Third Reich continues to be hotly debated, would be attacked as a “white Jew,” a gentile carrying the “bacillus” of Jewish thinking, in a 1937 article in the SS newspaper Das schwarze Korps.

  During the 1920s the debate about “Aryan physics” was in full swing, as its main proponent, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Philipp Lenard, was to explain in his four-volume Deutsche Physik (1936):

  “German physics?” one will ask.—I could equally have spoken of Aryan physics or the physics of peoples of Nordic character. . . . The current literature suggest that we may already be able to speak of the physics of the Japanese; in the past there was a physics of the Arabs. A physics of the negroes is unknown to me; but there has been a broad development of a particularly Jewish physics, . . . Jews are everywhere, and if anyone still defends the idea of an internationalism of the natural sciences, he must subconsciously mean the Jewish ones, which the Jews are creating everywhere and in an interchangeable way.6

  The noble German physics was to be built on Anschaulichkeit, on the intuitive understanding of physical processes with a basis in classical, Newtonian physics. While “Jewish physics” was decried as rationalistic and dogmatic, its Aryan counterpart was to privilege an investigation focusing on the categories of “energy” and “force.” More than a scientific disagreement, this was a moralizing crusade against the intellectual freedom and speculative creativity associated with some outstanding Jewish scientists.

  Lenard was not alone in his rabid anti-Semitism, but the debate about a “German physics” also stood for a wider concern: a revolt by a traditional concept of physics against the counterintuitive arrogance and opacity of modern physical thinking. Quantum physics came to symbolize a modern world that was becoming uncanny to its inhabitants, a world that had abandoned empirical evidence and immediate understanding for arcane theory. This revolt went beyond the image of the sciences—throughout Europe and particularly in Germany the advocates of Lebensphilosophie, a holistic “philosophy of life,” attacked what they saw as the coldly mechanistic rationalist worldview underpinning society.

  Being and Time

  TERMS SUCH AS “energy,” “power,” and “life” were at the very heart of a cultural debate that went far beyond the confines of science. It was framed by the oracular Oswald Spengler, whose own thought on the dichotomy between pulsating, primeval life and dead, abstract reason owed much to the father of all antirationalist thought of this period, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s subtle, poetic, and entirely unsystematic attacks on academic style and thinking were predestined to be quoted out of context, and his pithy and often sarcastic observations could be put in the service of a wider assault on rationality itself. To Spengler, the domination of scientific thinking was nothing less than a sign of cultural decadence, as he outlined in his immensely influential Decline of the West: “All art, all religion and science, become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to the peasant of the soil. With civilization, decline begins. The unfathomably old roots of Being are dried up in the stone-masses of its cities.”7

  A rational, theoretical understanding of the world, Spengler claimed, was possible only at the price of deadening the world and by “forcing the voices of the blood to be silent,” voices that connected every individual to the chain of ancestry and to destiny. Abstract thought, by contrast, was chronically unable to grasp what is truly important, namely, “the when and wherefore, Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths.”8 Modernity, then, was a race toward death, a sign of a culture having reached the end of its term. “Cinema, Expressionism, Theosophy, boxing contests, nigger dances, poker, and racing—one can find it all in [ancient] Rome,” he wrote, somewhat improbably. “The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live.”9

  Spengler’s very German conception of history and culture stood in a context of broadly similar ideas. With the notable exception of the Vienna Circle, which devoted itself to exactly the kind of positivist philosophy so despised by Spengler, philosophers at German-speaking universities turned away from the clarity and rationalism of thinking in the tradition of the Enlightenment and toward different forms of exploration of lived experience and immediacy, be it in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Wilhelm Dilthey’s philosophy of life, the impenetrable grammatical games of Martin Heidegger’s ontology, or the works of the many disciples of Henri Bergson, a French thinker whose distinction between duration as lived experience and clock time as mechanized measurement divorced from life made him one of the most widely read philosophical authors of his generation.

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p; To a considerable extent this rejection of rationalism was a consequence of experiencing the war. For the postwar generation, reason was no longer the beacon of great things to come, extolled since the Enlightenment; it had darkened, turned against its creators, and shown its potential for utter destruction and insanity. The results of rational inquiry had rocked the civilized world to its foundation and turned men into savages. All values appeared debased, all certainties shaken, all hope perverted. As reason had failed to create the glorious future it had promised, it was time to turn elsewhere. “We are generally experiencing today a full rejection of positivism,” wrote the sociologist Alfred Vierkandt in 1920. “We are experiencing a new need for unity . . . a type of thinking which primarily emphasizes the organic rather than the mechanical, the living instead of the dead, the concepts of value, purpose, and goal instead of causality.”10

  This rejection of reason seems almost willfully opposed to science, but it quite arguably played an important role in shaping some of the most creative scientific ideas of its time, notably quantum mechanics, as Werner Heisenberg himself would later write: “It is not by chance that the development that led to this end no longer took place in a time of belief in progress. After the catastrophe of the First World War one understood outside of scholarship as well that there were no firm foundations for our existence, secure for all time.”11