The Scientist as Rebel (4 page)

Many years ago, when I was in Zürich, I went to see the play
The Physicists
by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The characters in the play are grotesque caricatures, wearing the costumes and using the names of Newton, Einstein, and Möbius. The action takes place in a lunatic asylum where the physicists are patients. In the first act they entertain themselves by murdering their nurses, and in the second act they are revealed to be secret agents in the pay of rival intelligence services. I found the play amusing but at the same time irritating. These absurd creatures on the stage had no resemblance at all to any real physicist. I complained about the unreality of the characters to my friend Markus Fierz, a well-known Swiss physicist, who came with me to the play. “But don’t you see?” said Fierz. “The whole point of the play is to show us how we look to the rest of the human race.”

Fierz was right. The image of noble and virtuous dedication to truth, the image that scientists have traditionally presented to the public, is no longer credible. The public, having found out that the traditional image of the scientist as a secular saint is false, has gone to the opposite extreme and imagines us to be irresponsible devils playing with human lives. Dürrenmatt has held up the mirror to us and has shown us the image of ourselves as the public sees us. It is our task now to dispel these fantasies with facts, showing the public that scientists are neither saints nor devils but human beings sharing the common weaknesses of our species.

Historians who believe in the transcendence of science have portrayed scientists as living in a transcendent world of the intellect, superior to the transient, corruptible, mundane realities of the social world. Any scientist who claims to follow such exalted ideals is easily held up to ridicule as a pious fraud. We all know that scientists, like television evangelists and politicians, are not immune to the corrupting influences of power and money. Much of the history of science, like the history of religion, is a history of struggles driven by power and money. And yet this is not the whole story. Genuine saints occasionally play an important role, both in religion and in science. Einstein was an important figure in the history of science, and he was a firm believer in transcendence. For Einstein, science as a way of escape from mundane reality was no pretense. For many scientists less divinely gifted than Einstein, the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature.

Both in science and in history there is room for a variety of styles and purposes. There is no necessary contradiction between the transcendence of science and the realities of social history. One may believe that in science nature will ultimately have the last word and still recognize an enormous role for human vainglory and viciousness in the practice of science before the last word is spoken. One may believe that the historian’s job is to expose the hidden influences of power and money and still recognize that the laws of nature cannot be bent and cannot be corrupted by power and money. To my mind, the history of science is most illuminating when the frailties of human actors are put into juxtaposition with the transcendence of nature’s laws.

Francis Crick is one of the great scientists of our century. He has recently published his personal narrative of the microbiological revolution that he helped to bring about, with a title borrowed from Keats,
What Mad Pursuit
. One of the most illuminating passages in his account compares two discoveries in which he was involved. One
was the discovery of the double-helix structure of
DNA
, the other was the discovery of the triple-helix structure of the collagen molecule. Both molecules are biologically important,
DNA
being the carrier of genetic information, collagen being the protein that holds human bodies together. The two discoveries involved similar scientific techniques and aroused similar competitive passions in the scientists racing to be the first to find the structure.

Crick says that the two discoveries caused him equal excitement and equal pleasure at the time he was working on them. From the point of view of a historian who believes that science is a purely social construction, the two discoveries should have been equally significant. But in history as Crick experienced it, the two helixes were not equal. The double helix became the driving force of a new science, while the triple helix remained a footnote of interest only to specialists. Crick asks the question, how the different fates of the two helixes are to be explained. He answers the question by saying that human and social influences cannot explain the difference, that only the transcendent beauty of the double-helix structure and its genetic function can explain the difference. Nature herself, and not the scientist, decided what was important. In the history of the double helix, transcendence was real. Crick gives himself the credit for choosing an important problem to work on, but, he says, only Nature herself could tell how transcendentally important it would turn out to be.

My message is that science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practice it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. If we try to squeeze science into a single philosophical viewpoint such as reductionism, we are like Procrustes chopping off the feet of his guests when they do not fit onto his bed. Science flourishes best when it uses freely all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions of what science ought to be. Every
time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s imagination is richer than ours.

This essay was originally written as a lecture addressed to a meeting in 1992 that was supposed to discuss “the continuing primacy of reductionism as a key to understanding nature as we approach the twenty-first century.” That explains why I devoted so much time to attacking reductionism. It turned out that many of the other participants at the meeting shared my views.

After the essay appeared in
The New York Review
, I received many good letters in response, some agreeing with me and some disagreeing. The best of them was from Saunders Mac Lane, a legendary figure in the world of mathematics. His letter and my reply were published in the October 5, 1995, issue of the
Review
. He objected vehemently to my statement that the later years of the great mathematician Hilbert were sterile. He had known Hilbert personally and professionally. His letter concludes, “Dyson simply does not understand reductionism and the deep purposes it can serve. Hilbert was not sterile.” In my reply I said, “I too was exhilarated and inspired by the enormous deepening of mathematical understanding that grew in the 1930s out of the ruins of Hilbert’s program of formalization. Only, Mac Lane would use the words ‘upon the foundations’ where I say ‘out of the ruins.’ Solid foundations and ruined hopes are not incompatible. Both were essential parts of the legacy that Hilbert left to his successors.… I do not deny the power and the beauty of reductionist science, as exemplified in the axioms and theorems of abstract algebra.… But I assert the equal power and beauty of constructive science, as exemplified in Gödel’s construction of an undecidable proposition.… Hilbert himself was, of course, a master of both kinds of mathematics.”

ONE OF MY
favorite monuments is a statue of Samuel Gompers not far from the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Under the statue is a quote from one of Gompers’s speeches:

Samuel Gompers was the founder and first president of the American Federation of Labor. He established in America the tradition of practical bargaining between labor and management which led to an era of growth and prosperity for labor unions. Now, seventy years after Gompers’s death, the unions have dwindled, while his dreams—more books and fewer guns, more leisure and less greed, more schoolhouses and fewer jails—have been tacitly abandoned. In a society without social justice and with a free-market ideology, guns, greed, and jails are bound to win.

When I was a student of mathematics in England fifty years ago, one of my teachers was the great mathematician G. H. Hardy, who wrote a little book,
A Mathematician’s Apology
, explaining to the general public what mathematicians do. Hardy proudly proclaimed that his life had been devoted to the creation of totally useless works of abstract art, without any possible practical application. He had strong views about technology, which he summarized in the statement “A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.” He wrote these words while war was raging around him.

Still, the Hardy view of technology has some merit even in peacetime. Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth. And the technologies of lethal force continue to be as profitable today as they were in Hardy’s time. The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do. But always, even for the most brilliantly successful technology, an ethical question lurks in the background: the question whether the job the technology is designed to do is actually worth doing.

The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people. Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs. For my father ninety years ago, technology was a motorcycle. He was an impoverished young musician growing up in England in the years before World War I, and the motorcycle came to him as a liberation. He was a working-class boy in a country dominated by the snobberies of class and accent. He learned to speak like a gentleman, but he did not belong in the world of gentlemen. The
motorcycle was a great equalizer. On his motorcycle, he was the equal of a gentleman. He could make the grand tour of Europe without having inherited an upper-class income. He and three of his friends bought motorcycles and rode them all over Europe.

My father fell in love with his motorcycle and with the technical skills that it demanded. He understood, sixty years before Robert Pirsig wrote
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, the spiritual quality of the motorcycle. In my father’s day, roads were bad and repair shops few and far between. If you intended to travel any long distance, you needed to carry your own tool kit and spare parts and be prepared to take the machine apart and put it back together again. A breakdown of the machine in a remote place often required major surgery. It was as essential for a rider to understand the anatomy and physiology of the motorcycle as it was for a surgeon to understand the anatomy and physiology of a patient. It sometimes happened that my father and his friends would arrive at a village where no motorcycle had ever been seen before. When this happened, they would give rides to the village children and hope to be rewarded with a free supper at the village inn. Technology in the shape of a motorcycle was comradeship and freedom.

Fifty years after my father, I discovered joyful technology in the shape of a nuclear fission reactor. That was in 1956, in the first intoxicating days of peaceful nuclear energy, when the technology of reactors suddenly emerged from wartime secrecy and the public was invited to come and play with it. This was an invitation that I could not refuse. It looked then as if nuclear energy would be the great equalizer, providing cheap and abundant energy to rich and poor alike, just as fifty years earlier the motorcycle gave mobility to rich and poor alike in class-ridden England.

I joined the General Atomic Company in San Diego, where my friends were playing with the new technology. We invented and built a little reactor which we called the
TRIGA
, designed to be inherently
safe. Inherent safety meant that it would not misbehave even if the people operating it were grossly incompetent. The company has been manufacturing and selling
TRIGA
reactors for forty years and is still selling them today, mostly to hospitals and medical centers, where they produce short-lived isotopes for diagnostic purposes. They have never misbehaved or caused any danger to the people who used them. They have only run into trouble in a few places where the neighbors objected to their presence on ideological grounds, no matter how safe they might be. We were successful with the
TRIGA
because it was designed to do a useful job at a price that a big hospital could afford. The price in 1956 was a quarter of a million dollars. Our work with the
TRIGA
was joyful because we finished it quickly, before the technology became entangled with politics and bureaucracy, before it became clear that nuclear energy was not and never could be the great equalizer.

Forty years after the invention of the
TRIGA
, my son George found another joyful and useful technology, the technology of
CAD-CAM
, computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing.
CAD-CAM
is the technology of the postnuclear generation, the technology that succeeded after nuclear energy failed. George is a boatbuilder. He designs seagoing kayaks. He uses modern materials to reconstruct the ancient craft of the Aleuts, who perfected their boats by trial and error over thousands of years and used them to travel prodigious distances across the northern Pacific. His boats are fast and rugged and seaworthy. When he began his boatbuilding twenty-five years ago, he was a nomad, traveling up and down the north Pacific coast, trying to live like an Aleut, and built his boats like an Aleut, shaping every part of each boat and stitching them together with his own hands. In those days he was a nature-child, in love with the wilderness, rejecting the urban society in which he had grown up. He built boats for his own use and for his friends, not as a commercial business.