by C. P. Snow
Copyright & Information
The Physicists
First published in 1980
© Philip Snow; House of Stratus 1980-2010
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This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
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ISBN: 0755120175 EAN 9780755120178
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About the Author
Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester, on 15 October 1905. He was educated from age eleven at Alderman Newton’s School for boys where he excelled in most subjects, enjoying a reputation for an astounding memory and also developed a lifelong love of cricket. In 1923 he became an external student in science of London University, as the local college he attended in Leicester had no science department. At the same time he read widely and gained practical experience by working as a laboratory assistant at Newton’s to gain the necessary practical experience needed.
Having achieved a first class degree, followed by a Master of Science he won a studentship in 1928 which he used to research at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. There, he went on to become a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1930 where he also served as a tutor, but his position became increasingly titular as he branched into other areas of activity. In 1934, he began to publish scientific articles in Nature, and then The Spectator before becoming editor of the journal Discovery in 1937. However, he was also writing fiction during this period, with his first novel Death Under Sail published in 1932, and in 1940 ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was published. This was the first of eleven novels in the series and was later renamed ‘George Passant’ when ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was used to denote the series itself.
Discovery became a casualty of the war, closing in 1940. However, by this time Snow was already involved with the Royal Society, who had organised a group to specifically use British scientific talent operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour. He served as the Ministry’s technical director from 1940 to 1944. After the war, he became a civil service commissioner responsible for recruiting scientists to work for the government. He also returned to writing, continuing the Strangers and Brothers series of novels. ‘The Light and the Dark’ was published in 1947, followed by ‘Time of Hope’ in 1949, and perhaps the most famous and popular of them all, ‘The Masters’, in 1951. He planned to finish the cycle within five years, but the final novel ‘Last Things’ wasn’t published until 1970.
He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950 and they had one son, Philip, in 1952. Snow was knighted in 1957 and became a life peer in 1964, taking the title Baron Snow of the City Leicester. He also joined Harold Wilson’s first government as Parliamentary Secretary to the new Minister of Technology. When the department ceased to exist in 1966 he became a vociferous back-bencher in the House of Lords.
After finishing the Strangers and Brothers series, Snow continued writing both fiction and non-fiction. His last work of fiction was ‘A Coat of Vanish’, published in 1978. His non-fiction included a short life of Trollope published in 1974 and another, published posthumously in 1981, ‘The Physicists: a Generation that Changed the World’. He was also inundated with lecturing requests and offers of honorary doctorates. In 1961, he became Rector of St. Andrews University and for ten years also wrote influential weekly reviews for the Financial Times.
In these later years, Snow suffered from poor health although he continued to travel and lecture. He also remained active as a writer and critic until hospitalized on 1 July 1980. He died later that day of a perforated ulcer.
‘Mr Snow has established himself, on his own chosen ground, in an eminent and conspicuous position among contemporary English novelists’ - New Statesman
Dedication
TO
MY NIECE, STEFANIE
The First Excitement that Knowledge Gives
Most of us can remember the first time we heard or read something which seemed to throw a new light upon the world. In my own case, it comes back with extreme clarity. I was a child of eight or nine, and I had got hold of a bound volume of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia. It was a dark afternoon, and I was sitting by the fire. Suddenly, for the first time, I ran across an account of how atoms were supposed to be built up. The article had been written before Rutherford had discovered the nucleus, although by the time I read it the nuclear atom must have been well known. However, I was innocent of all that, I had never seen the word ‘atom’ before; this article – it was quite short and was contained, I think, in a section called the Child’s Book of Wonder – explained that its descriptions were only a guess, that no man knew the truth, and yet it seemed to open up a new sight of the world.
It told me that if you could go on cutting up any sort of material, you would arrive at atoms in the end. These atoms were so small that no one would ever see them and you could crowd countless millions on to a pin point. There were different sorts of atoms: and yet, if you cut up the atoms themselves, you found in some mysterious way that they were made of the same stuff. That idea probably came more easily to a child than to an adult, and I swallowed it whole.
The actual description of these atoms was rather quaint, in the light of later knowledge. Small as they were, they were packed with much smaller things called electrons (which, of course, had been known about since J J Thomson’s work in the nineties). According to the article, these electrons were like tennis balls in a cathedral; and, again according to the article, the tennis balls were in violent and random motion across the interior of the cathedral. It is a little difficult nowadays to see how that picture was ever conceived; I found it very easy to unlearn a few years later.
Yet, though so much of that article could not endure, it gave me the first sharp mental excitement I ever had. Somehow it gave me the heightened sense of thinking and imagining at the same time. And one is lucky if those exalted moments visit one more than ten or twenty times in a whole life…
Taken from ‘The First Excitement that Knowledge Gives’: editorial by the author in Discovery, April 1939
Introduction
The Physicists is a first draft, completed just before his death on 1 July 1980, of a book which C P Snow intended to write at greater length – he planned in particular to put more material in the last chapte
rs. However, written as it was, straight off and at great speed, it has an unimpeded narrative impulse together with a completeness over the period of time, which simply ask for it to stand on its own as a literary work.
When he first told me about the book, I said: ‘Good God, you’ll have to do some research for that, won’t you?’ To which he replied: ‘I’m writing it largely from memory.’ I was silenced. He had one of the most remarkable memories I’d ever come across, a constant source of envy to me. Furthermore, we’d been close friends for nearly fifty years – in fact ever since the time when I was a Cambridge undergraduate reading physics, sent to him, then a Research Fellow of the College, to be taught – and so I was qualified to understand that he didn’t always do exactly what he said he was doing, not absolutely exactly. Wrong again! When I read the draft I recognized that it actually had been written largely from his memory. It’s odd – memory, even a memory as comprehensive as his, has its selectiveness, its patches, its things that stand out for reasons of other than factual importance. When an artist calls upon memory, what he writes has a life and a moving quality which scarcely ever infuses the product of the filing cabinet which we nowadays refer to as researched information.
A la recherche du temps perdu the book naturally took me straight back, at the beginning, to the days in the early 1930‘s when I myself was going to lectures by Rutherford and Dirac and Kapitsa, days so glorious that even my memory recalls something of their heroes. Rutherford, big and fresh-complexioned, his spectacles shielding light, transparent eyes, was indeed boomingly Jehovianic, albeit in an attractive way – one could see how the physicists near to him came to give him such devotion. Looking back on it, one is tempted to speculate on how far the aggressive boom, like Anthony Trollope’s aggressive boom, had grown as an outer protective shell – Snow remarks on this in the book – for a more sensitive, delicately responding nature. (Actually Blackett, in later years, always struck me as more Jehovianic – tall, thin, high-shouldered, with wavy hair and a flashing eye, in manner altogether loftier, nobler, graver: more of a Jehovah’s Jehovah, perhaps.)
Dirac was very, very different – taciturn in both languages, as Snow remarks. Quantum mechanics, whether one could understand it or not, was clearly the creation of a remarkable mind; but at five o’clock of a winter’s evening in an overheated lecture-room, one would have given anything for the exposition of a remarkable mind’s creation to be illumined by just the occasional human spark of temperament. Kapitsa, on the other hand, provided a running succession of human sparks of temperament, a lot of them of a wonderfully clowning kind, typically Russian, and typically deceptive – struggling with the English language, he appeared to keep getting things wrong and having to put them right. His broad face was smiling, his hair sticking straight out from its parting, and his nose, blunt and fleshy, making one wonder if that was the sort of nose Dostoievsky described as ‘plum-shaped’. Everyone loved going to Kapitsa’s lectures.
But I’m writing about Snow and his Weltanschauung, not embarking on a supplement of my own to The Physicists. (I’m tempted to make a quip to the effect that his Weltanschauung – a good word from the 1930s – seemed to me as comprehensive as his memory, with insights penetrating the worlds of science, of literature, of human affairs.) I’d recently been reading through some of the public speeches he made throughout the latter half of his life, about science and scientists, human affairs and human beings: reading through The Physicists I was frequently reminded of them; a sentence in the book setting up a resonance – one of his favourite words – with the beginning of a train of thought that he had followed at length, elsewhere on some other occasion, to a revealing conclusion.
A first case in point – his reference in the book to Arthur Schuster’s deliberate resignation from the Chair of Physics at Manchester University, in order to make way for Rutherford, resonated with his account of an incident three hundred years ago, when the Cambridge Professor of Mathematics, named Barrow, resigned his Chair on condition that his pupil was appointed to it, his pupil being Isaac Newton – an account with which Snow began his 1962 Rectorial Address to the University of St Andrews, ‘On magnanimity’. The essence of the address was a plea for magnanimity in our use of scientific and technical knowledge for ‘seeing to it that the poor of the world don’t stay poor...’
The great majority of the world’s population don’t get enough to eat: and from the time they are born, their chances of life are less than half of ours. These are crude words: but we are talking about crude things, toil, hunger, death. For most of our brother men, this is the social condition. It is different from our social condition. That is one reason why there is a direct call upon our magnanimity. If we do not show it now, then both our hopes and souls have shrivelled. It may be a longish time before men at large are much concerned with hopes and souls again.
I have quoted the passage because to my mind it illustrates Snow’s realistic view – some people, myself included, would call it a dark view – of human nature, counterbalanced as it was in his own nature by another strong element, that of hope; and a belief that our hope’s coming to fruition depends on men’s magnanimity. He was one of the most magnanimous of men, in all senses, public and private, I’ve ever known. I venture to suggest that the dark view, the hope, and the magnanimity all shine through The Physicists.
And, by God, when he comes in his story to The Bomb, the hope and the magnanimity are more than necessary. (The dark view comes, as it were, in the package.) Incidentally, it’s fascinating to note, à propos his remarking in the book that the scientific facts essential to making the bomb were commonly known among scientists before the war, the publication in Discovery (a scientific journal Snow edited) of a notice in April 1939 of Hahn’s discovery in Berlin of uranium-splitting, and in May 1939 of Joliot’s discovery in Paris of what were subsequently called chain-reaction neutrons. Snow himself in the May 1939 issue wrote an editorial, ‘Science and air-warfare’, in which he attempted to reduce the then current hysteria about the excessively destructive effects of air-attack with TNT bombs – about which, as those were the attacks we subsequently survived, he turned out to be correct. But in September 1939 his editorial was entitled ‘A new means of destruction’. The world had changed. (Just to put things into perspective, it’s also fascinating to recall that in 1913 H G Wells, in The World Set Free, had forecast something like an atomic bomb.)
The world had changed, and after 1945 it was riven by the moral issue arising in the first instance from the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There may have been some justification for Hiroshima: for Nagasaki I, like many of the physicists, believe there was none. If ever the dark view of human nature had a profound source, the destruction of Nagasaki touched that source. The book tells the story of how the physicists understood and responded to the moral situation they were in, tells it movingly and magnanimously. The issue in a broader sense has since become, and remains today, one of such emotional, intellectual and moral significance to everybody, scientists and non-scientists alike, that I am including at the end of his book a speech in full, called ‘The moral un-neutrality of science’, which Snow delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1960. Snow’s view of science as an intrinsically moral activity (in the sense that it is an undeterred search for observable truth), which has a moral influence on the men and women who engage in it, is a view which we talked about and which meant a great deal to him. It strengthened his belief that it was through science and technology that we could, and must, ‘see to it that the poor of the world don’t stay poor.’
Yet ‘The moral un-neutrality of science’ doesn’t say the last word about the dilemmas in which physicists, and scientists in general, found themselves after the war. Up till 1945 dilemmas were well below the surface: the Hitler war, as Snow calls it, had to be won. And for that purpose the bomb had to be made and secrecy had to be kept, and there was no difficulty about it. In those days Snow and I were hiving off selec
ted physicists into what was artfully called the Directorate of Tube Alloys, of whose function I had only the vaguest intimations to begin with. Then, along with the intimations taking clearer, fearful shape, there was a half-saving grace which I always remember being expressed by F Simon, another distinguished Jewish refugee physicist, holding a Chair at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford: a dark, starless night, and Simon walking with us to the gateway of the Clarendon – we had been working late – and he said: ‘I hope it won’t work…’ Spoken with great prescience and deep emotion; yet I felt sure that au fond he knew it actually was going to work.
It did work, and after 1945 the physicists were burdened with the moral dilemma over the making and the using of the bomb; and on top of that the dilemma over secrecy – which in effect meant keeping things from the Russians. That latter dilemma sharpened as the Cold War came into being, sharpened as the conflict between loyalty to the nation-state and loyalty to the individual conscience became absolutely explicit. That dilemma, too, may be one to which there is no solution in the abstract; and Snow himself seems to recognize that. In ‘The moral un-neutrality’ his view appears to go one way: in another speech, called ‘State v. individual’ it appears, if not to go the other way, at least to be unresolved.
Human affairs, it seems to me, depend upon a degree of trust. If, within one’s own society and state, one can’t rely on that degree of trust, the social life becomes, to put it mildly, precarious. Individual conscience is essential and mustn’t be denied. But often it isn’t a sure guide to action. As a general rule, it isn’t a guide sure enough to let one break one’s obligations and one’s oaths. That, for me at least, is a general rule. Clearly there are situations when it wouldn’t be overriding. The problem is, as in all ethical problems in real life as opposed to the textbooks, where the line is drawn.
