Victory and Vexation in Science: Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Others

  • Gerald Holton
Harvard University Press: 2005. 244 pp. $35, £22.95 0674015193 | ISBN: 0-674-01519-3

In Victory and Vexation in Science, Gerald Holton, a physicist and historian of science at Harvard University, provides a series of illuminating historical and biographical essays on science and scientists in the twentieth century. This thought-provoking book mixes reminiscence with scholarly reflection, drawing on Holton's deep knowledge of scientists and their intellectual, religious and social engagements.

The 14 essays range over a variety of topics and are organized into two sections: ‘Scientists’ and ‘Science in context’. The first part covers, in addition to the icons in the book's subtitle, the physicists Enrico Fermi, Percy Bridgman and Isidor Isaac Rabi, and the psychologist B. F. Skinner. The subjects in the second section include innovation in science and art, policy for basic science, postmodernism and science, and women in science. The subjects are disparate, but several arresting topics appear and reappear in the volume.

Among them is the religious impulse that Holton finds behind the science of Einstein and Rabi. As a youth, Einstein was deeply religious in some profound non-sectarian sense, even though he was raised in an irreligious household. After the age of 12, when he began encountering science, his religious inclination was transformed into a strongly felt quest to comprehend the physical world. This drive, Holton says, constituted a flight from “personal, everyday life, with all its dreary disappointments, and escape into the world of objective perception and thought”. Indeed Einstein once remarked that the tenacious pursuit of a difficult scientific problem demanded “a state of feeling similar to that of a religious person or a lover”.

Einstein ultimately embraced a transcendent spiritualism, free of anthropomorphic and what he considered primitive elements. His views irritated the theologian Paul Tillich and angered clerics such as a Roman Catholic cardinal in Boston, who found intimations of atheism in Einstein's theories of space-time. Queried on the point, Einstein declared that he believed in “Spinoza's God, Who concerns Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind”.

Unlike Einstein, Rabi was raised as an orthodox Jew, but while he separated from orthodoxy, Holton notes that deep down he remained “God-struck throughout his life”. Like Einstein, Rabi saw science as a means of transcendence beyond the visceral concerns of the human species. He once recalled that physics filled him with awe and put him in touch with a sense of original causes. “Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, ‘Will it bring you nearer to God?’.”

The role that intuition plays in science is also discussed. Holton raises the issue in a captivating essay on the origins of the Fermi group's research with slow neutrons in Rome during the 1930s. The decisive experimental step was taken by Fermi himself, when he interposed paraffin between the fast-neutron source and the target. Fermi turned to the paraffin with neither forethought nor announcement. He was guided, Holton writes, by brilliant intuition, a speculative move “below the level of consciousness”. In the course of mathematical invention, Henri Poincaré knew similar moments of deep intuition that arrived unbidden, “a manifest sign”, he thought, “of long, unconscious prior work”.

Holton writes with relish of a conversation on the origins of the uncertainty principle between Heisenberg and Einstein in the mid-1920s that Heisenberg recounted to him in 1956. But Holton finds Heisenberg's politics appalling, and rebukes him for his willingness to collaborate with the Nazi regime and for issuing “astonishing exaggerations” about Einstein's role in the atomic-bomb project while claiming that he had declined on moral grounds to build an atomic bomb for Hitler. Holton rightly insists that the Heisenberg in Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, who said he knew how to build a bomb but refrained, is a fictional character and ought to be viewed as such.

Holton is dismissive of the postmodern critique of science, saying it holds that the aim of achieving objective truth is unrealizable “because there is no difference between the laws scientists find in nature and the arbitrary rules that govern baseball games”. He finds part of its roots in nineteenth-century European romanticism, which was at times scientifically productive. But he also sees shades of it in Hitler's declaration that “there is no truth, in either the moral or the scientific sense”. For Holton, truth emphatically exists in both senses. It is clear from these graceful essays that he stands with Rabi, admiring his insistence that science is an essential part of culture, an ennobling activity, a guide to objective thinking and a “unifying force for all of humanity”.