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Authors: David Pratt
The Impossible Takes Longer
THE IMPOSSIBLE TAKES LONGER
The Impossible Takes Longer
THE 1,000 WISEST THINGS EVER SAID
BY NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATES
Compiled by
DAVID PRATT
Copyright © 2007 by David Pratt
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ISBN-10: 0-8027-1637-7
eISBN:978-0-802-71887-7
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First U.S. edition 2007
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CONTENTS
F
or more than a century, the Nobel Prize has been the hallmark of genius. The lives and the work of the 768 men and women who have won the prize since the first prizes were awarded in 1901 show that this popular impression is not misplaced. What makes the Nobel laureates not merely interesting but inspiring is the fact that their intellectual brilliance is commonly accompanied by qualities of humanity and idealism. Not only are they extraordinary minds; they are extraordinary people, whose observations on a wide range of issues are of intrinsic interest.
The Nobel Foundation has, over the past century, carried out Alfred Nobel's wishes to honor "those who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." The benefits that this group of less than a thousand people has conferred on humanity are prodigious. Millions of lives have been saved or bettered by the work of Nobel laureates in medicine who gave us radium therapy, antibiotics, insulin, antidepressants, bone marrow and organ transplants, cardiac catheterization, the diphtheria serum, and the measles vaccine. Nobel Peace Prize winners played important roles in ending both World Wars, as well as the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. Less historically visible are the tragedies and conflicts that have been prevented by the dedicated work of individual laureates and of Nobel Prize-winning organizations such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, and Médecins Sans Fronti?es.
Nobel laureates pioneered many technical inventions, often persevering for years in the face of apathy or derision by colleagues and the public. Their inventions include X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, transistors, semiconductors, integrated circuits, lasers, and the electron microscope. And the world would be spiritually and aesthetically poorer without the writers who gave us such works as
Lord of the Flies, Dr. Zhivago, Waiting for
Godot, The Tin Drum, The Waste Land, The Forsyte Saga, The Old
Man and the Sea, The Jungle Book, Man and Superman,
and
Of Mice
and Men.
In many of the quotations in this collection, Nobel laureates speak about their specialized work. Physicists comment with perception or irony on physics, poets on poetry. But laureates also address, often with great insight, issues outside their immediate specialization—in fact, they tend to be versatile in their interests. The conventional image of the Nobel Prize winner as an absentminded genius, eccentric in habits and solitary in lifestyle, fits hardly any of them.
A number of laureates were publicly prominent in their time. They include three presidents of the United States and numerous presidents and prime ministers of other nations. When they speak of public events, they do so from a privileged position. "History will be kind to me," Winston Churchill averred, "for I intend to write it."
1
Music may serve as an example of the versatility of many laureates. Among the physicists, for example, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg were both concert-level pianists. Gerald Edel-man played the violin in a symphony orchestra, Gerhard Herzberg was a noted bass-baritone, Albert Einstein's attachment to his violin is well known, and Richard Feynman would, at every opportunity, exercise his virtuosity on the bongo drums. Other Nobel laureates have excelled in sports. Niels Bohr was a soccer player, Dudley Herschbach a high school football star, Philip Noel-Baker ran in three Olympic Games, Max Perutz was a skier and mountaineer, and Henry Kendall was a scuba diver who lost his life on a
National Geographic
diving expedition. Ernest Hemingway once remarked, "My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything."
2
With their high energy and restless minds, Nobel laureates are people whose tastes and interests are rarely limited to a single field. Thus we find the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa remarking, "Ah, but it's impossible to live without poetry."
3
Or Einstein rushing to embrace the young violinist Yehudi Menuhin after a concert in Berlin in 1930 and saying, "Now I know there is a God in Heaven."
4
Einstein is the best-known science laureate, and his many observations, both whimsical and profound, are frequently quoted in anthologies. Otherwise, the scientists tend to be neglected in such collections in favor of a few well-known Literature laureates. In this collection, close to half of the laureates represented earned the prize in one of the sciences.
The Impossible Takes Longer
includes quotations from 73 laureates who won the prize for Literature, 53 for Peace, 45 for Physics, 43 for Medicine, 24 for Chemistry, and 18 for Economics. As will be seen from the quotations from the science laureates, many of them are highly articulate individuals who think deeply about matters of general concern. Working as they do at the frontiers of knowledge, exploring the mysteries of the cosmic, the subatomic, and the organic worlds, they have much to tell us not only about science but about many of the significant issues of our time.
In these pages laureates from different fields share their views on such topics as belief and religion, good and evil, joy and grief, ethics and morals. Many thousands of documents were perused in the compilation of this collection: novels, plays, and poetry; biographies and autobiographies; scientific papers and monographs; newspaper reports and interviews; letters, journals, lectures, and Web pages.
Anyone who studies the lives of the laureates quickly recognizes that they do not escape the hardships and tragedies that are the lot of humankind. Indeed, they often seem to have suffered more than their share of difficulties. Several lost one or both parents in childhood, and a sizable minority grew up in poverty. The wars of the twentieth century took beloved sons from Theodore Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, William Henry Bragg, and Robert Aumann. A large number of the scientists became refugees from Nazi Germany, and many others became exiles from their homelands. Of the 259 laureates represented here, at least 30 endured the experience of prison, whether as prisoners of war like Konrad Lorenz and Jean-Paul Sartre, civilian internees like Albert Schweitzer or James Chadwick, prisoners of conscience like Bertrand Russell and Aung San Suu Kyi, or inmates of concentration camps like Roald Hoffmann and Elie Wiesel. Almost all of them, at one time or another, experienced discouragement or setbacks in their careers.
When Nobel laureates write of their work in literature, peace, economics, or science, they write of what they know firsthand. But very often, when they speak of prison and exile, communism and fascism, war and terrorism, success and failure, duty and courage, or dreams and nightmares, they likewise speak not from theory or speculation but with the voice of experience. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are the beneficiaries of a hundred years of insights and discoveries that Nobel laureates achieved with pain and effort. They constitute a source of wisdom that compels our attention.
