Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  “Literature of the Sort That Has Engaged Me Intellectually”

  In secondary school Wegener had read books of popular astronomy, and in his university years he still found them intellectually engaging and inspiring. Added to his old favorites, Max Meyer and Friedrich Diesterweg, were the popular works of one of Wegener’s teachers, the Berlin astronomer Wilhelm Förster, who wrote extensively for popular magazines and gave public lectures at Urania, the astronomical observatory he had helped to found. Förster periodically collected these lectures and articles and published them in book form, a practice as old (and effective) as popular science itself; he enjoyed a very wide circulation.22

  In his popular lectures as well as his university teaching, Förster was famous for his ability to interweave expert scientific knowledge with aesthetic and philosophical remarks and insights.23 A lecture might begin with an examination of our knowledge of some part of astronomy and end up with a meditation on freedom of the will, or some other philosophical point. Förster’s efforts, like most popular science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also aimed to encourage the educated public to support science, both intellectually and financially. Every article or lecture, no matter how varied in the astronomical novelties and curiosities it contained, always included obbligato reflections that we learn about ourselves by studying nature because we are a part of nature, that science is a grand adventure, that we are living in an astonishing time, and so on. The lectures had a moral tone and an idealism that sound a bit earnest to the modern ear, though they were perfectly ordinary for the time; readers of the many popular writings of Carl Sagan (1934–1996) would immediately recognize and be at home with the mix of astronomical fact and inspirational exhortation.

  Sometime around 1901–1902, Alfred began to read in another area of science: evolutionary biology. In a brief journal entry made a few years later while in the field, he recorded the following lament: “How I miss literature, especially the sort that has engaged me most intellectually, and that I believe to be perfectly suited to such expeditions, especially since one has the opportunity of an exchange of ideas afterward about what one has read. I mean principally Darwin, Haeckel, Chamberlain, Bölsche, Meyer (his popular astronomy), Diesterweg, Förster (several of his). I don’t think novels are similarly suitable—I find no release here in reading a novel.”24

  This brief remark provides one of the few clues Wegener bothered to leave about himself and his interests outside his technical scientific work and the only clues we have about Wegener’s early interests, other than school transcripts and the reminiscences of his brother Kurt and two or three fellow students. We can deal presently with the larger figures named in his list of authors, Darwin and Haeckel, and we have already looked into the popular astronomy works. Let us turn here to the less well known. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) was Richard Wagner’s son-in-law and is remembered today chiefly for the virulence of his anti-Semitism. In 1899 he published his best-known work, Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (The foundations of the nineteenth century). It was broadly influenced by Wagner’s ideas on the sources of human creativity and became an instant best seller in Germany: it sold out eight printings in ten years, upward of 60,000 two-volume sets.25

  The basic plot of Chamberlain’s Grundlagen is a Darwinian struggle emerging between two concepts of life: human knowledge and enterprise. On the one side was the dead hand of the past, of book learning, and the “repetition by rote of antiquated wisdom in dead, misunderstood languages.” On the other was scientific observation, discovery, poetic creation, and “all truth and all originality.”26

  What about this work engaged Wegener? Certainly from the standpoint of a young science student it would have been the exhortation to perform “great deeds in science and life.” Chamberlain was himself a failed scientist (botany), but unlike many failed scientists, he admired science and never turned against it. Among the “great deeds of thought” he proposed was the scientific comprehension of the world as a whole, an activity reserved for a great individual scientist who would also be an artist.

  Chamberlain characterized this scientific-poetic activity as the special genius of the Teutonic peoples, setting them apart not only from the Jews but from the ancient Greeks: Teutons were supposed to have a passionate impulse to pure intellectual discovery closely related to the artistic and religious impulse. As theorists they had no great claim to importance, but as discoverers they had no rivals.27 The secret of this gift for discovery lay in their nature, though this had long been masked, buried, and thwarted by classical education.28

  In addition to a genius for discovery, Teutons were supposed to have a special gift for organizing and combining the results of discovery and thus for science: “All scientific systematizing and theorizing is a fitting and adapting; of course it is as accurate as possible, but never quite free from error, and, above all, is always a humanly tinted rendering, translating, interpreting.” In contrast (once again), the Greeks were forestalled from much useful mathematics by a demand for geometrical perfection: “But for this introduction of approximate values our whole astronomy, geodesy, physics, mechanics … would be impossible.”29

  This concoction of national genius, rough-and-ready pragmatism, and poetical striving, taken together as legitimate and nearly essential elements of scientific work, got an even stronger push in the works of one of Wegener’s other inspirational guides, Wilhelm Bölsche (1861–1939), a pioneer of German naturalism who began a hugely successful career in the 1890s, popularizing natural science with a series of pocket editions aimed at workers and students, in books that always maintained the connection between poetry and science. Bölsche’s books were manifestos not only for realism and science but even more for the holiness of science. Like Chamberlain, he located the source of science in the soul, the same source as that of religion and of art, and he portrayed modern science as a dynamic outgrowth of religious evolution, in the spirit of Novalis.30 Science, specifically evolutionary naturalism, would be a “third testament,” attached to the first two, but moving beyond and correcting them.31

  In Bölsche’s Naturwissenchaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie (Natural scientific foundations of poetry, 1894) there is a chapter entitled “Darwin in der Poesie,” in which the struggle of poets and thinkers is declared a Darwinian contest between the young and strong and the old and weak. Moreover, to be a poet like Darwin is not merely to get the names of things right, or to shout slogans, but to make a serious study of how the world works. Poetry, like science, has its basis in the observation of the real and not in some fantasy world. One’s work—and poetry and writing are treated as real work—should develop organically, like the rest of the world of which it forms a part.32

  Less didactic and more “poetical” in its execution was Bölsche’s Die Abstammung des Menschen (The evolution of man, 1904). Like many of his other works, this is a “wandering through time.” He urges the reader to imagine himself (rifle in hand!), a million years ago, walking across the “immense prairies” of southern Europe (looking much like the interior of modern Africa), tramping for weeks across a “green ocean of grass,” then turning north and walking through “impenetrable, primeval forest” where today great civilizations rise.33 Then the reader is urged to set his footsteps back through time, past man’s anthropoid ancestors, searching for man’s deeper ancestors—where is man hiding, in what form is he concealed? The search takes us through changing climates and landscapes without moving from where we stand, past Neanderthals and Pithecanthropus, past the tarsiers, by comparative embryogeny down to fish, past amphioxus to the worms and to Hydra: “Might it be possible we could follow man down to this stage?”34 Apparently so, and on down through the protozoa to the origins of life. All of this is presented as a great poetic drama, with all intellectual invention and human understandings being emergent characteristics of natural evolutionary relationships.

  Chamberlain and Bölsche qualify as antiromantic realists not because of thei
r views of science but because of their views of art. The aestheticism of this movement—exaltation of vitality, holy science, science as art, science as poetry—was paired with its Faustian ambition to totality. Here is Bölsche, at the end of The Evolution of Man:

  Poetry did not die when it became known that it is not the sun which actually rises in the east, but the earth which revolves toward it. Genuine religious feeling is truly something very human.… A cold fact from the history of human evolution cannot dampen this spirit.… But we should not be worthy of this triumph if we did not have the strength to dominate the spirits of the past with the calmness of the master who can look at them serenely and say: “You are of the past and the struggles of the past belong to you; but I am, and above me are my stars.”35

  This sort of aestheticism was impressed on Wegener again and again in his reading, not least because it was an important part of the philosophical structure erected by Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), a figure inseparable from Darwin in the German imagination and in German cultural history. Haeckel, a marine zoologist, “converted” to Darwinism in 1859–1860, as soon as he read On the Origin of Species. He was a wide traveler, was physically robust and energetic, and illustrated the vividly written descriptions of his travels with his own watercolors. He was also an enthusiast of photography, especially microphotography, an endeavor that he proclaimed would open a new world and awaken a new aesthetic sense.36 He was part of the group of German theorists who took Darwinism out of biology and made it a dynamic principle of all cultural and social change.

  In 1899 Haeckel summed up his beliefs for his wide readership (Wegener included) in a book called Die Welträthsel (The riddle of the universe), a mix of biology, human cultural evolution, cosmology, psychology, and theology, intended as a worldview for a new century. It was unequivocal in its rejection of supernaturalism and revealed religion, but it was a credo nonetheless.37 Herbert Schnädelbach called it “the Bible of the Free-Thinkers” and noted that Haeckel’s group of monistic, vitalist, evolutionary metaphysicians would later be classified by the Nazis as Gottgläubig (believers in God) in spite of their nontheism, because of the spiritualistic flavor of their metaphysics.38

  Based more in observation than in theory (and in this sense like Chamberlain, who was also influenced deeply by Goethe), Haeckel’s was a philosophy for natural historians, for doers, not for armchair types—rejecting the reading room for the “room of nature.” While Haeckel’s views caused some very violent disputes at the time of their publication, they now form, as Rollo Handy first remarked, the basis of the worldview of many educated people, especially in their emphasis on seeing man as a part of the ecological web of nature.39

  We have begun here only with a list of names from a brief diary entry that Wegener made in 1907, but these authors and their works all point the same way. Taken together, they place Wegener, in his early twenties, within an optimistic “human-potential” movement in the sciences. Inside this movement, human life in both its biological and historical dimensions might be tragic—for life was brief and fraught with great difficulties—but it was something to embrace with energy and resolve, facing one’s responsibility to fulfill the creative destiny of the world by exploiting one’s own potential to the utmost. The movement’s biologism and flirtation with eugenics and race theory were a part of its embrace of human life as a Darwinian predicament.

  German Darwinism was determined not to accept alienation from life, and it would not postpone comprehension of the whole of the world: at every moment a synthesis of all of science was deemed possible and necessary. This required technical skill and knowledge, but even more, it needed courage and persistence, leavened with some good fortune. At this higher (if not quite transcendental) level all the really great achievements of science were to be found, and as Wegener returned to university life in the fall of 1902, this possibility was placed directly before him, and in a way that he had never before seen or imagined.

  Planck, Thermodynamics, and Theory

  Alfred was released from full-time military service in September 1902, on the completion of his “free-will” year. He still had to complete a series of six-week field courses before he could be commissioned as a lieutenant in the reserves, but he was confident that these could be fitted into the longer school vacations without slowing his scientific work. Taking home leave in August, he departed Berlin immediately for a holiday with the family at die Hütte; in October he returned to the university eager and rested, ready to resume his training as an astronomer.

  If the parade ground drill was finished, he found that in his scientific work the toil of “basic training” continued unabated. In this third year of university study Wegener was plunged into concentrated and highly technical studies in positional astronomy and data reduction, in the form of Julius Bauschinger’s “Seminar on Scientific Calculation,” where he learned the details of orbital calculations, perturbations of orbits, and the calculation of the timing and path of solar eclipses.

  Wegener was also finally able to take a course (the first of many) with Wilhelm Förster, on techniques for calculating meteor trajectories and cloud altitudes. This combination of objects today found in different sciences (meteors in astronomy and clouds in meteorology) preserves, as we have noted before, the sense of meteorology as the comprehensive study of all the phenomena that occur within the envelope of the atmosphere. Simultaneously with these technical courses, Alfred began his rotation as a student assistant in the Berlin observatory and center for popular astronomy, Urania (founded by Förster); this combination of observing and “public outreach” work at the observatory was expected of all the doctoral candidates.

  The observations Wegener participated in during his work at the Berlin observatory had a strong component of atmospheric physics and geophysics. Förster was deeply interested in the physics of the upper atmosphere—what we would now call “solar-terrestrial physics”—especially the study of Earth’s magnetic field by observations of the aurora borealis, a subject of much research in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. He had established a regular program of observations in the 1870s and had joined in the planning for the first International Polar Year (1882–1883) in cooperation with Georg von Neumayer (1826–1909), the founder of the German Marine Observatory at Hamburg. Förster was also interested in establishing the height of Earth’s atmosphere by whatever methods were available, and this led to a series of observations of the altitude of the aurora borealis.

  These studies of the upper atmosphere received a tremendous boost after the catastrophic explosion of Krakatoa in 1883 injected millions of tons of dust and gas into the stratosphere, leading Otto Jesse (1838–1901) in 1885 to the discovery of “noctilucent clouds.” These ghostly objects, visible at night because of their great altitude above Earth, could be photographed from astronomical observatories, and in the decade after their discovery many observers used these clouds to discover the “full” height of Earth’s atmosphere—which Jesse was able to establish by 1896 as near 100 kilometers (62 miles).40 In this context we can better understand Förster’s emphasis on “cloud altitudes” in conjunction with meteor paths—these were both upper atmospheric phenomena, to be studied in conjunction with the aurora.

  Förster’s program of atmospheric research at Berlin was an important stimulus to the field of aeronomy—the portion of geophysics devoted to the study of the atmosphere (the name is no longer in general use as a separate field). During Wegener’s time there, its observational arm, “aerology,” the investigation of the atmosphere by sending or carrying instruments aloft in balloons, was just becoming established in Berlin. It proceeded in conjunction with Förster’s work, though under the direction of others, and served to make Berlin a major center for atmospheric research through most of the 1890s.

  Along with his seminars in astronomy in 1902, Wegener signed up for Max Planck’s course of lectures on thermodynamics and thermochemistry. He had expected to study thermodynamics, and it was unt
hinkable that one could gain a degree in physics without it, but he had certainly not counted on this series of lectures becoming an experience that would profoundly and irrevocably alter his view of science and shape his scientific career, perhaps more than any formal study he ever undertook. In October 1902, when Wegener wandered into his physics lecture hall and opened a notebook, Max Planck was forty-five years old.41 A few years before, in 1897, he had gathered together his work on thermodynamics for the first time in the form of a textbook, Vorlesungen über Thermodynamik, which later went through many editions and was still the standard textbook thirty years after its initial publication. It was translated several times, including versions in Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and English.42 Perhaps as importantly, it also set a style of presentation and ordained a range of topics adopted by most subsequently influential thermodynamics texts, including, for instance, that published in 1937 by the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954).43

  If one looks at Wegener’s work in the decade that followed, one can see that he adopted into his scientific practice both Planck’s treatment of thermodynamics and the philosophical commitments that came with it (as a sort of scientific credo) in Planck’s introduction to the course of lectures. In the foreword to his lectures, Planck announced his decision to present thermodynamics without any reference to molecular or atomic motions—that is, to the kinetic theory of gases or the mechanical theory of heat. This was directly contrary to the position taken by Emil Warburg in Wegener’s first university physics course—Warburg had created a plausible mechanical story for every physical phenomenon he described. Planck, however, declined to employ even Herman von Helmholtz’s conservative version of the mechanical theory, in which heat was assumed to be a consequence of motions but the motions were not specified.

  Planck argued that since there were still formidable obstacles—both mathematical and theoretical—to the full integration of thermodynamics with the mechanical view of nature, there was no sense in pretending that it had been achieved. If Helmholtz’s approach had the satisfying effect of suggesting a linkage between them, it did not allow “a foundation of sufficient breadth on which to build a detailed theory.”44 That is, there was nothing to be gained in physics by adopting such a position: all you got was confirmation of some general laws that you had already deduced in other ways directly from experience.