The Scientist as Rebel (2 page)

When Eric James died in 1992, the film
Dead Poets Society
was playing in movie theaters. It is a story about an upper-class American prep school and an English teacher who gets into trouble because he doesn’t stick to the established curriculum. The theme of the film is rebellion. The established curriculum is asinine, the headmaster is a stuffed shirt, and the only redeeming feature of the school is the English teacher and a bunch of rebellious boys whom he encourages to break the rules. The film was a fitting memorial to Eric. Our school in Winchester was like the school in the film. The atmosphere was the same, with the rebellious boys and the smooth-talking headmaster. Instead of holding meetings in a cave at night, we took advantage of the wartime blackout to climb over the rooftops and up the chapel tower. And instead of a subversive English teacher we had our subversive chemistry teacher. Like the teacher in the film, Eric James had a passion for poetry. He had a Ph.D. in chemistry, but he understood that it made no sense to bore us with formal lectures about chemical reactions which we could learn about much quicker from textbooks. So he put aside the ferrous and ferric oxides and read us the latest poems of Auden and Isherwood and Dylan Thomas and Cecil Day Lewis, the poets who were then speaking for the younger generation in the first desperate years of World War II.

Forty years later I met Eric James at a party at York University, after his retirement as vice-chancellor. It was the first time I had seen him since I was seventeen. I started the conversation with a quote
from one of the poems he had read to us forty years earlier, a poem by Day Lewis about the war in Spain:

Eric continued without a break from his own memory:

Fortunately our headmaster, unlike the headmaster in the film, was wise enough to tolerate Eric James and give him a free hand. Eric was accepted into the English educational hierarchy, became a headmaster himself, founded a university, and was rewarded by a grateful government with a baronial title. It is hard to imagine a prep school chemistry teacher in the United States ending his career in so exalted a fashion. But Eric remained in his heart a rebel. Through forty years of active and creative life he remembered the sadness and the passion of the 1940s when we saw Hell break loose on Earth. That sadness and that passion are a part of our lives still. That sadness and that passion are what made Eric James a great teacher.

The life of Eric James demonstrates that there is no contradiction between a rebellious spirit and an uncompromising pursuit of excellence in a rigorous intellectual discipline. In the history of science, it has often happened that rebellion and professional competence went hand in hand. Several chapters in this book are devoted to famous
scientists who were also famous rebels. Thomas Gold (
Chapter 3
) was a great astronomer with heretical opinions about many subjects. Joseph Rotblat (
Chapter 12
) was unique as a scientist who walked out of the wartime Los Alamos bomb project when he learned that the threat of a German atomic bomb had disappeared. Norbert Wiener (
Chapter 22
) was a great mathematician who refused on moral grounds to have anything to do with either industry or government. Desmond Bernal (
Chapter 24
) was one of the founding fathers of molecular biology, and also a faithful member of the Communist Party and a passionate believer in Marxism. Three chapters (
23
,
25
, and
26
) are devoted to my teacher Richard Feynman, the physicist who most closely resembled Eric James. Feynman was another rebellious spirit who combined a serious dedication to science with joyful adventures in the world outside.

The scientist who described most eloquently the role of the rebel in science was the paleontologist Loren Eiseley. Unfortunately Eiseley does not have a chapter in this book. He was a wonderful writer, best known to the general public through his books
The Immense Journey
and
The Unexpected Universe
, which tell poignant stories about the creatures, living and dead, that Eiseley encountered in the course of his work as a naturalist and fossil hunter. The most personal of his books is his autobiography,
All the Strange Hours
. In it Eiseley explains why he is a rebel, why he is a poet, why he feels less kinship with his academic colleagues than with a doomed prisoner escaped from jail on a winter’s night and hunted to death in the snow. Eiseley’s image of the prisoner bleeding in the snow, Day Lewis’s image of the Spanish sailors rusting in Franco’s prison, both are images of the human condition as valid today as they were sixty years ago.

—Freeman Dyson, Princeton, 2006

THERE IS NO
such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. The vision of science is not specifically Western. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of ancient science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it. And what is true of science is also true of poetry. Poetry was not invented by Westerners. India has poetry older than Homer. Poetry runs as deep in Arab and Japanese culture as it does in Russian and English. Just because I quote poems in English, it does not follow that the vision of poetry has to be Western. Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity.

For the great Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam,
a rebellion which he expressed more directly in his incomparable verses:

For the first generations of Japanese scientists in the nineteenth century, science was a rebellion against their traditional culture of feudalism. For the great Indian physicists of this century, Raman, Bose, and Saha, science was a double rebellion, first against English domination and second against the fatalistic ethic of Hinduism. And in the West, too, great scientists from Galileo to Einstein have been rebels. Here is how Einstein himself described the situation:

Einstein was glad to be helpful to the teacher. He followed the teacher’s advice and dropped out of school at the age of fifteen.

From these and many other examples we see that science is not governed by the rules of Western philosophy or Western methodology. Science is an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children. Insofar as I am a scientist, my vision of the universe is not reductionist or antireductionist. I have no use for Western isms of any kind. I feel myself a traveler on the “Immense Journey” of the paleontologist Loren
Eiseley, a journey that is far longer than the history of nations and philosophies, longer even than the history of our species.

A few years ago an exhibition of Paleolithic cave art came to the Museum of Natural History in New York. It was a wonderful opportunity to see in one place the carvings in stone and bone that are normally kept in a dozen separate museums in France. Most of the carvings were done in France about 14,000 years ago, during a short flowering of artistic creation at the very end of the last ice age. The beauty and delicacy of the carving is extraordinary. The people who carved these objects cannot have been ordinary hunters amusing themselves in front of the cave fire. They must have been trained artists sustained by a high culture.

And the greatest surprise, when you see these objects for the first time, is the fact that their culture is not Western. They have no resemblance at all to the primitive art that arose 10,000 years later in Mesopotamia and Egypt and Crete. If I had not known that the old cave art was found in France, I would have guessed that it came from Japan. The style looks today more Japanese than European. That exhibition showed us vividly that over periods of 10,000 years the distinctions between Western and Eastern and African cultures lose all meaning. Over a time span of 100,000 years we are all Africans. And over a time span of 300 million years we are all amphibians, waddling uncertainly out of dried-up ponds onto the alien and hostile land.

And with this long view of the past goes Robinson Jeffers’s even longer view of the future. In the long view, not only European civilization but the human species itself is transitory. Here is the vision of Robinson Jeffers, expressed in different parts of his long poem “The Double Axe.”

Robinson Jeffers was no scientist, but he expressed better than any other poet the scientist’s vision. Ironic, detached, contemptuous like Einstein of national pride and cultural taboos, he stood in awe of nature alone. He stood alone in uncompromising opposition to the follies of the Second World War. His poems during those years of patriotic frenzy were unpublishable. “The Double Axe” was finally published in 1948, after a long dispute between Jeffers and his editors. I discovered Jeffers thirty years later, when the sadness and the passion of the war had become a distant memory. Fortunately, his works are now in print and you can read them for yourselves.

Science as subversion has a long history. There is a long list of
scientists who sat in jail and of other scientists who helped get them out and incidentally saved their lives. In our century we have seen the physicist Lev Landau sitting in jail in the Soviet Union and Pyotr Kapitsa risking his own life by appealing to Stalin to let Landau out. We have seen the mathematician André Weil sitting in jail in Finland during the Winter War of 1939–1940 and Lars Ahlfors saving his life. The finest moment in the history of the Institute for Advanced Study, where I work, came in 1957, when we appointed the mathematician Chandler Davis a member of the institute, with financial support provided by the American government through the National Science Foundation. Davis was then a convicted felon because he refused to rat on his friends when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He had been convicted of contempt of Congress for not answering questions and had appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court.

While his case was under appeal, he came to Princeton and continued doing mathematics. That is a good example of science as subversion. After his institute fellowship was over, he lost his appeal and sat for six months in jail. Davis is now a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto and is actively engaged in helping people in jail to get out. Another example of science as subversion is Andrei Sakharov. Davis and Sakharov belong to an old tradition in science that goes all the way back to the rebels Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, to Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the seventeenth and sixteenth. If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children. I was lucky to be introduced to science at school as a subversive activity of the younger boys. We organized a Science Society as an act of rebellion against compulsory Latin and compulsory football. We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

The vision of science as rebellion was articulated in Cambridge with great clarity on February 4, 1923, in a lecture by the biologist J.B. S. Haldane to the Society of Heretics. The lecture was published as a little book with the title
Daedalus
. Here is Haldane’s vision of the role of scientist. I have taken the liberty to abbreviate Haldane slightly and to omit the phrases that he quoted in Latin and Greek, since unfortunately I can no longer assume that the heretics of Cambridge are fluent in those languages.