Rutherford: Difference between revisions
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He was a great man, a very great man, by any standards which we can apply. He was not subtle: but he was clever as well as creatively gifted, magnanimous (within the human limits) as well as hearty. He was also superbly and magnificently vain as well as wise — the combination is commoner than we think when we are young. He enjoyed a life of miraculous success. On the whole he enjoyed his own personality. But I am sure that, even quite late in his life, he felt stabs of a sickening insecurity. | He was a great man, a very great man, by any standards which we can apply. He was not subtle: but he was clever as well as creatively gifted, magnanimous (within the human limits) as well as hearty. He was also superbly and magnificently vain as well as wise — the combination is commoner than we think when we are young. He enjoyed a life of miraculous success. On the whole he enjoyed his own personality. But I am sure that, even quite late in his life, he felt stabs of a sickening insecurity. | ||
Somewhere at the roots of that abundant and creative nature there was a painful, shrinking nerve. One has only to read his letters as a young man to discern it. There are passages of self-doubt which are not to be explained completely by a humble colonial childhood and youth. He was uncertain in secret, abnormally so for a young man of his gifts. He kept the secret as his personality flowered and hid it. But there was a mysterious diffidence behind it all. He hated the faintest suspicion of being patronized, even when he was a world figure. Archbishop Lang was once tactless enough to suggest that he supposed a famous scientist had no time for reading. Rutherford immediately felt that he was being regarded as an ignorant roughneck. He produced a formidable list of his last month's reading. Then, half innocently, half malevolently: “And what do you manage to read, your Grice?” “I am afraid,” said the Archbishop, somewhat out of his depth, “that a man in my position really doesn't have the leisure | Somewhere at the roots of that abundant and creative nature there was a painful, shrinking nerve. One has only to read his letters as a young man to discern it. There are passages of self-doubt which are not to be explained completely by a humble colonial childhood and youth. He was uncertain in secret, abnormally so for a young man of his gifts. He kept the secret as his personality flowered and hid it. But there was a mysterious diffidence behind it all. He hated the faintest suspicion of being patronized, even when he was a world figure. Archbishop Lang was once tactless enough to suggest that he supposed a famous scientist had no time for reading. Rutherford immediately felt that he was being regarded as an ignorant roughneck. He produced a formidable list of his last month's reading. Then, half innocently, half malevolently: “And what do you manage to read, your Grice?” “I am afraid,” said the Archbishop, somewhat out of his depth, “that a man in my position really doesn't have the leisure...” “Ah, yes, your Grice,” said Rutherford in triumph, “it must be a dog's life! It must be a dog's life!” | ||
Once I had an opportunity of seeing that diffidence face to face. In the autumn of 1934 I published my first novel, which was called The Search and the background of which was the scientific world. Not long after it came out, Rutherford met me in King's Parade. “What have you been doing to us, young man?” he asked vociferously. I began to describe the novel, but it was not necessary; he announced that he had read it with care. He went on to invite, or rather command, me to take a stroll with him round the Backs. Like most of my scientific friends, he was good-natured about the book, which has some descriptions of the scientific experience which are probably somewhere near the truth. He praised it. I was gratified. It was a sunny October afternoon. Suddenly he said: “I didn't like the erotic bits. I suppose it's because we belong to different generations.” | Once I had an opportunity of seeing that diffidence face to face. In the autumn of 1934 I published my first novel, which was called The Search and the background of which was the scientific world. Not long after it came out, Rutherford met me in King's Parade. “What have you been doing to us, young man?” he asked vociferously. I began to describe the novel, but it was not necessary; he announced that he had read it with care. He went on to invite, or rather command, me to take a stroll with him round the Backs. Like most of my scientific friends, he was good-natured about the book, which has some descriptions of the scientific experience which are probably somewhere near the truth. He praised it. I was gratified. It was a sunny October afternoon. Suddenly he said: “I didn't like the erotic bits. I suppose it's because we belong to different generations.” | ||
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There, science itself was the greatest single force for change. The scientists were themselves part of the deepest revolution in human affairs since the discovery of agriculture. They could accept what was happening, while other intellectuals shrank away. They not only accepted it, they rejoiced in it. It was difficult to find a scientist who did not believe that the scientific-technical-industrial revolution, accelerating under his eyes, was not doing incomparably more good than harm. This was the characteristic optimism of scientists in the twenties and thirties. Is it still? In part, I think so. But there has been a change. | There, science itself was the greatest single force for change. The scientists were themselves part of the deepest revolution in human affairs since the discovery of agriculture. They could accept what was happening, while other intellectuals shrank away. They not only accepted it, they rejoiced in it. It was difficult to find a scientist who did not believe that the scientific-technical-industrial revolution, accelerating under his eyes, was not doing incomparably more good than harm. This was the characteristic optimism of scientists in the twenties and thirties. Is it still? In part, I think so. But there has been a change. | ||
In the Hitler war, physicists became the most essential of military resources: radar, which occupied thousands of physicists on both sides, altered the shape of the war, and the nuclear bomb finished large scale “conventional” war | In the Hitler war, physicists became the most essential of military resources: radar, which occupied thousands of physicists on both sides, altered the shape of the war, and the nuclear bomb finished large scale “conventional” war forever. To an extent, it had been foreseen by the mid-thirties that if it came to war (which a good many of us expected) physicists would be called on from the start. Tizard was a close friend of Rutherford's, and kept him informed about the prospects of RDF (as radar was then called). By 1938 a number of the Cavendish physicists had been secretly indoctrinated. But no one, no one at all, had a glimmering of how, for a generation afterwards, a high percentage of all physicists in the United States, the Soviet Union, this country, would remain soldiers-not-in-uniform. Mark Oliphant said sadly, when the first atomic bomb was dropped: “This has killed a beautiful subject.” Intellectually that has turned out not to be true: but morally there is something in it. Secrecy, national demands, military influence, have sapped the moral nerve of physics. It will be a long time before the climate of Cambridge, Copenhagen, Gottingen in the twenties is restored: or before any single physicist can speak to all men with the calm authority of Einstein or Bohr. That kind of leadership has now passed to the biologists, who have so far not been so essential to governments. It will be they, I think, who are likely to throw up the great scientific spokesmen of the next decades. If someone now repeated Gorki's famous question, “Masters of culture, which side are you on?” it would probably be a biologist who spoke out for his fellow human beings. | ||
In Rutherford's scientific world, the difficult choices had not yet formed themselves. The liberal decencies were taken for granted. It was a society singularly free from class or national or racial prejudice. Rutherford called himself alternatively conservative or non-political, but the men he wanted to have jobs were those who could do physics. Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, Georg von Hevesy, Hans Geiger were men and brothers, whether they were Jews, Germans, Hungarians — men and brothers whom he would much rather have near him than the Archbishop of Canterbury or one of “those fellows” or any damned English philosopher. It was Rutherford who, after 1933, took the lead in opening English academic life to Jewish refugees. In fact, scientific society was wide open, as it may not be again for many years. There was coming and going among laboratories all over the world, including Russia. Peter Kapitsa, Rutherford's favorite pupil, contrived to be in good grace with the Soviet authorities and at the same time a star of the Cavendish. | In Rutherford's scientific world, the difficult choices had not yet formed themselves. The liberal decencies were taken for granted. It was a society singularly free from class or national or racial prejudice. Rutherford called himself alternatively conservative or non-political, but the men he wanted to have jobs were those who could do physics. Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, Georg von Hevesy, Hans Geiger were men and brothers, whether they were Jews, Germans, Hungarians — men and brothers whom he would much rather have near him than the Archbishop of Canterbury or one of “those fellows” or any damned English philosopher. It was Rutherford who, after 1933, took the lead in opening English academic life to Jewish refugees. In fact, scientific society was wide open, as it may not be again for many years. There was coming and going among laboratories all over the world, including Russia. Peter Kapitsa, Rutherford's favorite pupil, contrived to be in good grace with the Soviet authorities and at the same time a star of the Cavendish. | ||