Dreams of Earth and Sky

by Freeman Dyson

  Who never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one.

  Charles II had learned from his father’s mistakes not to take himself or his job too seriously. That was the background against which the Royal Society came into being.

  During the nine years of civil war and the years of Cromwell’s rule that followed, upper-class Englishmen found themselves divided, isolated, and insecure. These were the landowners and merchants and men-about-town who were accustomed to running their estates and businesses and also to running the country. Many of them had been friends of the king, others were friends of Cromwell. Gribbin gives us a vignette of Harvey, who was a friend of Charles I in 1642 when the war began. Charles was busy leading his troops in the first serious battle of the war at Edgehill, which ended in a draw. He left his two sons in the care of Harvey. So Harvey sat under a hedge on the battlefield with the two future kings, Charles, then aged twelve, and James, aged nine. All of them survived the battle, and it is possible that young Charles acquired from Harvey some of the interest in science that he put to good use when he became king eighteen years later. But Harvey had to pay dearly for his service to the royals. When Charles I was defeated and imprisoned, the parliamentary government stripped Harvey of all his honors and privileges.

  For others besides Harvey, science provided an escape from turmoil and insecurity. It provided a way for men possessing property and wealth to put their leisure to good use. It also provided a way for them to forget their differences, to come together and talk about questions having nothing to do with politics and theology. The group that eventually gave birth to the Royal Society started in Oxford in 1648 under the leadership of John Wilkins. Wilkins was an amateur astronomer and engineer with a secure base of operations as the warden of Wadham College in Oxford. He was a personal friend of Cromwell and afterward married Cromwell’s sister.

  He had published in 1641 a book with the title Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger: Shewing, how a Man may with Privacy and Speed communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at any Distance. This book described a system of rapid long-range communication based on bells. Using a series of relay stations, each station containing a human bell ringer with two bells of different pitch, messages could be coded and encrypted and transmitted over long distances at the speed of sound. In Oxford he started an “experimental philosophical club,” with emphasis on actually doing experiments rather than merely talking and writing. His own experiments were done with transparent beehives that he constructed so that he could observe in detail how the bees organized their activities. The two most important members of the club were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Boyle built a chemical laboratory in Oxford, and worked hard to separate the kernel of truth from the encrustations of myth in the processes studied by alchemists. He described his experiments in The Sceptical Chymist, the first account of chemistry written from a modern point of view. Hooke came to Oxford as Boyle’s paid assistant and was enormously helpful to the group, as he had a genius for building experimental apparatus that worked. He improved the performance and reliability of air pumps, pendulum clocks, and microscopes, the tools that made experimental science possible.

  While the members of Wilkins’s club were actively engaged in doing science in Oxford, another group of gentlemen were talking about science at Gresham College in London. The Oxford group were mostly Parliamentarians, the London group mostly Royalists. The London group did not contain scientists of the caliber of Boyle and Hooke, but it contained serious amateurs who had good personal contact with Charles II. One of them was Sir Robert Moray, an expert in chemistry who had spent some time with the king during his exile. After the king returned, Moray helped him to build a chemical laboratory at his palace in Whitehall, where the two of them worked together doing experiments. The diarist Samuel Pepys records that he once went with Moray “into the king’s laboratory under his closet; a pretty place; and there saw a great many chymical glasses and things but understood none of them.” Unfortunately, history does not record which of his chemical toys the king liked to play with.

  In November 1660 the time was ripe to heal the wounds of the civil war, to use the king’s genuine interest in science to bring Parliamentarians and Royalists together. A meeting was called at Gresham College in London to establish a new society combining the London and Oxford groups, with Wilkins as chairman. The society was duly established, “for the Promoting of Experimentall Philosophy.” At a second meeting a week later, Moray brought a message from the king officially approving the foundation. One year later, the king accepted his election as a fellow of the society. And in 1663 the society received the royal charter naming it “The Royal Society of London for Promoting Natural Knowledge.” Together with the charter came the Latin motto Nullius in Verba, which Gribbin unfortunately mistranslates as “Nothing in Words.” As any educated person in the seventeenth century would have known, the word nullius does not mean “nothing.” It is a genitive form meaning “of no one.” The motto is an abbreviated version of a well-known line from the Latin poet Horace: “Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri,” or in English, “Sworn to follow the words of no master.” It is a radical statement, a declaration of intellectual independence. It means that the society will pay attention to facts and not to scholastic or political or ecclesiastical authorities. The king was in his personal life a libertarian, sharing the subversive spirit that the motto expressed.

  Once the Royal Society was established with the king’s blessing, it quickly came under enormous pressure to admit noblemen and other wealthy people with no particular competence in science. The founders resisted this pressure as best they could. They were determined to maintain the core of the society as an active group of experimental scientists, while accepting a wide periphery of inactive fellows who only came to listen to lectures and provide financial support. The core of the society survived, largely due to the exertions of Hooke, who served as the curator of experiments for the society for more than twenty years, and kept experimental programs going in many fields. After Hooke, Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton in turn took responsibility for keeping the society active. Newton served as the president for more than twenty years and missed only three of the weekly meetings. Gribbin’s account ends in 1759 when Charles Messier, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, observed Halley’s comet return as Halley had predicted fifty-four years earlier. This event was recognized all over Europe as the final triumph of Newtonian physics.

  Was the founding of the Royal Society a major turning point in the worldwide history of science, or was it only a local event in the parochial history of England? This is the question that Gribbin’s book does not answer. He mentions that the French Academy of Sciences was founded four years after the Royal Society and performs many of the same functions. In 1660 the time was evidently ripe for science to become organized on a national scale. But the French Academy was different from the Royal Society in many ways. The French Academy was a government institution, financed and controlled by the state. The scientists who belonged to it were paid civil servants. The motto Nullius in Verba was not for them. The academies of science that arose later in Berlin and St. Petersburg followed the French rather than the English model. The unique feature of the Royal Society was that it attempted to perpetuate the tradition of the seventeenth-century philosophical club, accepting the king’s blessing but maintaining freedom from his control. The Royal Society aimed to keep science in private hands, hoping that there would always be enough talented individuals with wealth and leisure willing to devote their lives and material resources to experimental philosophy.

  Inevitably, the dream that science could remain forever a Baconian brotherhood of philanthropic explorers failed. In England, as in France and other countries, science grew rapidly and soon outgrew the resources of wealthy amateurs. In England as elsewhere, most scientists became professionals and worked in universities or government laboratories. But still, the Royal Society survived and maintained its independence, and the tr
adition of independent amateurs making serious contributions to knowledge also survived. In the nineteenth century, Lord Rosse, who discovered spiral galaxies at his private observatory in Ireland, and Lord Rayleigh, who discovered the inert gas argon in his private laboratory in Essex, were both amateurs, and so was Charles Darwin.

  The tradition set by the Royal Society has also survived in America. When Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia in 1743, he did not apply for a royal charter, but in other respects he followed the pattern set by the Royal Society. As the main business of his society he proposed, “All philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniencies or Pleasures of Life.” His members, like the early fellows of the Royal Society, would contribute cash to share the costs of experiments. When the US National Academy of Sciences was founded in 1863, it was given a statutory duty to advise the federal government concerning scientific questions, but it remained an independent institution with its own finances and its own administration.

  Finally, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the spirit of the early Royal Society is being revived by a new breed of technocratic billionaires in America. The most famous of the new followers of Bacon is Craig Venter, the biological entrepreneur who set up his own privately funded project to sequence the human genome in competition with the government’s Human Genome Project, and beat the government team at their own game. After that, he equipped his private yacht with apparatus to collect microbes from the ocean and sequence their genomes in bulk, so that he can now sail around the globe and begin the sequencing of the entire biosphere of the planet. Venter calculates that if the technologies of collection and sequencing continue to improve as expected, it should be possible within thirty years to obtain a digital blueprint of all existing forms of life. Other members of the billionaires’ club are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of the Google Corporation, who have set out to reorganize all human knowledge so that it will be accessible to everybody. They have been so successful that it is now difficult to remember how we used to live a few years ago without Google to answer our questions.

  Other young billionaires are starting private enterprises to explore and exploit space, with the aim of beating NASA at its own game, just as Venter beat the National Institutes of Health. These private space ventures may fail totally. They have enormous obstacles to overcome, and they are unable to agree on any clearly defined objectives. But it is still possible that one or more of them will succeed. Then a new era of exploration will begin, similar to the era of exploration that brought ships from Europe to all parts of the world in the sixteenth century. The improvement of the art of navigation was one of the central concerns of the founders of the Royal Society. Their leader, John Wilkins, wrote a book in 1638 with the title The Discovery of a World in the Moone, raising the question whether a voyage to the moon might one day be feasible. If our new space venturers should ever succeed in establishing a private moon base, the founders of the Royal Society will be there with them in spirit to share the glory.

  Note added in 2014: In the published review I said that Bacon never did an experiment. That statement was untrue, and I am grateful to Timothy Beecroft for pointing out the error. Griffin on page 85 quotes from a letter that Bacon wrote shortly before his death: “I was desirous to try out an experiment or two, touching the conservation and induration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well.” Bacon does not describe the experiment, but Gribbin conjectures that it involved inhaling vapors. Gribbin quotes from earlier writings of Bacon that express an interest in the inhalation of niter. Inhalation experiments were intended to be medical remedies rather than scientific investigations. Gribbin concludes that the experiment that “succeeded excellently well” may have contributed to Bacon’s death a few days later.

  *The Fellowship: Gilbert, Bacon, Wren, Newton, and the Story of a Scientific Revolution (Overlook, 2008).

  5

  WORKING FOR THE REVOLUTION

  DR. JOHANNES FAUST was a real person who has an entry in the German dictionary of national biography.* He was a professional astrologer and magician who spent his time wandering from town to town in Germany during the sixteenth century, providing horoscopes and astrological advice to bishops and princes as well as to the common people. He was famous enough to come to the attention of Martin Luther, who denounced him for making a pact with the devil. Whether Faust himself claimed any acquaintance with the devil is not clear. He became a legend soon after his death, when an account of his life was published in Germany, incorporating many fanciful tales borrowed from other sources.

  Less than a century later, Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, which gave the legend a dramatic form. Marlowe’s Faustus speaks the immortal lines “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” when the devil introduces him to Helen of Troy, and “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament” when his debt to the devil comes due and he is carried off to spend eternity in Hell. Two hundred years after Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote his Faust, an even more famous play that became required reading for every schoolchild in the German-speaking countries of Europe. Goethe’s Faust is a more complicated character than Marlowe’s Faustus. At the end of Goethe’s play, Faust is redeemed and his pact with the devil is broken. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Faust was the best-known work of German literature. In England, Marlowe was outshone by Shakespeare, but in Germany, nobody outshone Goethe.

  So it happened that a bunch of bright young physicists, assembled at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen in 1932 for their annual Easter conference, decided to entertain their elders by performing a spoof of Goethe’s Faust. German was then the international language of physics and the main working language at Copenhagen. Everyone at the conference was fluent in German and familiar with Faust. At the Easter conference in 1931 there had been a similar performance with the title The Stolen Bacteria, a spoof of a spy movie that had recently been playing in Copenhagen. The 1931 show was composed and directed by George Gamow, famous as a joker as well as a physicist. In late 1931 Gamow had unwisely returned to his native Russia, and the Soviet government had refused to let him leave. The job of composing and producing the 1932 show was taken over by Max Delbrück, a close friend of Gamow. Delbrück was then twenty-five years old and was soon to accept a position as an assistant to Lise Meitner in Berlin. Meitner was an experimental physicist, destined to become world-famous in 1939 for her share in the discovery of nuclear fission. Gamow’s performance in 1931 had been a great success. In 1932 Delbrück rose to the occasion and produced something even better.

  The founder and presiding spirit of the Copenhagen institute was Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who had developed the first quantum theory of atoms in 1913. By his success as a fund-raiser and administrator, as well as his outstanding intellectual and human qualities, Bohr had made his institute a world center of theoretical physics. Copenhagen was the place where the leaders of the quantum revolution in the 1920s met and argued and put it all together. Bohr was indefatigable in exploring and clarifying every detail of the new theory. In Delbrück’s version of Faust, the role of God would be played by Felix Bloch impersonating Bohr, and the role of Mephistopheles would be played by Léon Rosenfeld impersonating Wolfgang Pauli. Bloch and Rosenfeld were young contemporaries of Delbrück.

  Pauli was older. At thirty-one he was regarded by the irreverent younger generation as an elder statesman, past his prime as an original thinker but still formidable as a critic. Pauli was chosen as the model for Mephistopheles because he was famous for his sharp tongue. He was ruthless in criticizing people who did not speak or think clearly. He even dared to criticize Bohr. He was proud of the title “God’s whip,” which he had earned by giving tongue-lashings to people who
talked nonsense. In real life, Bohr and Pauli treated each other with guarded respect, like God and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s play.

  The model for Faust, the central role in Goethe’s play, was Paul Ehrenfest, a charismatic teacher who had settled at Leiden in the Netherlands and had propelled to greatness a succession of brilliant Dutch students. Ehrenfest was a tortured soul, at home in the comfortable old world of classical physics and feeling like an alien in the weird new world of quantum mechanics. He was fifty-one years old, five years older than Bohr, and unable to make the quantum leap that Bohr had successfully accomplished. Since Faust was also a tortured soul, it was dramatically right to give his role to Ehrenfest. But when Delbrück wrote the script, he did not know the depth of Ehrenfest’s pain. Delbrück gave him the lines:

  So I’m the critic, sad and misbegot.

  All doubts assail me; so does every scruple;

  And Pauli as the Devil himself I fear.

  These lines were unintentionally cruel. They fit too well the anguish that Ehrenfest was carefully concealing from his friends. If Delbrück had known how close to the edge of despair Ehrenfest had come, he would have found a way to give the role of Faust to someone else.

  In real life, Pauli and Ehrenfest were close friends, and Pauli encouraged Ehrenfest’s questioning attitude toward quantum theory. But Ehrenfest still felt inadequate, left behind by the younger generation of physicists who were writing papers faster than he could read them. He wrote letters to Bohr and Einstein telling them that he was thinking of committing suicide, but the letters were never mailed. A year and a half after the Faust performance, he killed himself in a park in Amsterdam.

  At the performance of the Delbrück version of Faust in 1932, no hint of impending tragedy was visible. Audience and performers alike enjoyed the show hugely. The script was full of clever inside jokes that only people familiar with Goethe’s play and with the personalities of modern physics could appreciate. The audience was expert in both matters. In the front row sat Bohr, Ehrenfest, Meitner, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Delbrück, all of them famous physicists, and all except Meitner having roles in the play. All of them, with the possible exception of Ehrenfest, laughed at the jokes and enjoyed seeing themselves and their colleagues lampooned. All of them carried away memories of an evening that was a high point of the Copenhagen institute and of twentieth-century physics.