The Scientist as Rebel

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN COMBINED
better than anyone else the qualities of a great scientist and a great rebel. As a scientist, without formal education or inherited wealth, he beat the learned aristocrats of Europe at their own game. His victory encouraged him to believe that he and his fellow citizens in America, without much training in military strategy or international politics, could beat the aristocrats of Europe at warfare and diplomacy. Franklin’s triumph as a rebel resulted from the fact that his rebellion was not impulsive but was carefully thought out over many years. For most of his long life, he was a loyal subject of the British King. He lived for many years in London, representing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in dealings with the British government, calmly taking the measure of his future enemies.

While he was in London, Franklin was an active member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which still flourishes today. The society encouraged inventions and manufactures by offering financial subsidies and prizes to inventors and entrepreneurs. The prizes were usually available to all subjects of the King in England or America, but they were often targeted to subsidize colonial enterprises that the society considered desirable. When Franklin first joined the society in 1755, he was an enthusiastic
supporter of its efforts to encourage invention, which he saw as complementary to the efforts of his own Philosophical Society in America. But as the years went by, his attitude became more critical. He never openly disagreed with the society and remained a member in good standing, all through the War of Independence and afterward until his death. But he recorded privately, in the margin of a book, his true feelings about the system of prizes and subsidies offered by the society:

He wrote these words in 1770, five years before the outbreak of the war that ended British rule in the thirteen colonies.

Franklin became a rebel only when he judged the time to be ripe and the costs to be acceptable. As a rebel he remained a conservative, aiming not to destroy but to preserve as much as possible of the established order of society. As a diplomat in Paris, he fitted smoothly into the established order of prerevolutionary France. He would not have fitted so well into the France of Danton and Robespierre ten years later. The rebellion that Franklin embodied was a thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred.

In spite of its title, this book is mostly not about rebel scientists. It is a collection of book reviews, prefaces, and essays on a variety of subjects. The majority were published in
The New York Review of Books
. I am grateful to
The New York Review
for inviting me to collect these in a book, and for allowing me to supplement them with other pieces that were published in other places. The bibliographical notes at the end explain where each piece was published and how it originated.
The collection is divided into four sections according to subject matter, and arranged chronologically within each section. Section I deals with political issues arising out of science and technology. Section II deals with problems of war and peace. Section III deals with the history of science, and Section IV with personal and philosophical reflections. By accident rather than by design, at least one rebellious scientist appears in each section. But there are pieces about scientists such as John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton (
Chapter 21
) who were far from being rebels, and pieces such as the review of Max Hastings’s
Armageddon
(
Chapter 13
) that are concerned with soldiers rather than with scientists.

One of the pleasures of writing for
The New York Review
is the fact that it publishes long reviews. The reviewer is asked to write about four thousand words, which means that the review can be an essay reflecting on the subject matter rather than a simple appraisal of a book. The short reviews in this collection were published in other journals. If this book is a sandwich, the meat is the series of twelve long reviews from
The New York Review
, most of them appearing in Section III. There are four other meaty items that were not in
The New York Review
. One is the Bernal lecture (
Chapter 24
), which Carl Sagan whimsically published as an appendix to the proceedings of a conference on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. The other three (
Chapters 8
,
9
, and
10
) are chapters from my book
Weapons and Hope
, which is now out of print. The collapse of the Soviet Union made much of
Weapons and Hope
obsolete, but these three historical chapters may be worth preserving.

The essay “The Scientist as Rebel,” with which this collection begins, originated as a talk given at a meeting of scientists and philosophers at Cambridge, England, in November 1992. The talk was dedicated to the memory of Lord James of Rusholme, who had died six months earlier at the age of eighty-three, full of years and honors, having risen to the top of the British educational establishment. The obituary notices that were published in newspapers after
his death described him as a capable organizer and administrator who presided over the founding of York University and served as its vice-chancellor for the first eleven years of its existence, from 1962 to 1973. They said that he had conservative views on the subject of education, that he believed in old-fashioned scholarship and academic rigor, that he fought hard to make York University a community of scholars and an intellectual powerhouse on a level with Oxford. “Jude the Obscure,” he was quoted as saying, “need no longer look despairingly at the towers and spires of an inaccessible university, provided he has three good A-level passes, can satisfy one of a multiplicity of entrance requirements, and is prepared, if necessary, to do without spires.” He tried to make York University the home of an intellectual elite, an elite based upon brains and competitive examinations rather than money and social class. His elitist view of education came into collision with the dominant political currents of the 1950s and 1960s. The dominant view held that Jude should be enrolled in a university whether or not he was able to pass the A-level examinations. The dominant view held that higher education should be for everybody and not only for the bright. In the end, Lord James fought in vain against what he considered the folly of the politicians. Whenever he lost a battle in his campaign for strict intellectual standards, he liked to quote the lines of the poet Matthew Arnold:

I dedicated “The Scientist as Rebel” to Lord James because he was, like Benjamin Franklin, a scientist and a rebel. Like Franklin, he achieved great things as a rebel because he was aiming to build a new society rather than to destroy an old one. Like Franklin, he built institutions to last. After he had achieved his goal of building a new
university, he was a conservative administrator. But I knew him very well thirty years earlier, long before any of us dreamed that he might one day be sitting in the House of Lords. In those days he was plain Eric James, a teacher of chemistry in the school at Winchester where I was a boy. He had published a successful textbook,
Elements of Physical Chemistry
, that was widely used in schools. He was indeed a scientist, and he was a rebel and an outsider, who brought a draft of fresh air into the stuffy old chambers of Winchester College. But he also understood the value of tradition. He was big enough to see both sides of the picture. At Winchester, where intellectual traditions are taken for granted, we saw Eric the reformer. At York in the 1960s, when intellectual standards were everywhere under attack, we saw Eric the traditionalist. Between Winchester and York he spent seventeen years as high master of Manchester grammar school. At Manchester in the postwar years he occupied the middle ground in a society rebuilding itself. Manchester gave him the opportunity to combine the two main purposes of his life, the education of gifted children and the reform of society.

My most vivid memory of Eric comes from the summer of 1941. Since many of the regular farmworkers had been drafted into the army, schoolchildren and teachers were invited to help out on the farms during school vacations. We were encamped together for two rain-drenched weeks at Hurstbourne Priors in rural Hampshire, trying to rescue a sodden harvest of wheat and oats, with the grain already sprouting green out of the sheaves. In those days the farmers did not have heated drying sheds. A wet August meant a spoiled harvest. We worked in the fields all day and discussed the meaning of existence in our tents at night. Those two weeks were in retrospect the high point of my school days, breaking out of the academic cocoon and seeing something of the world outside, with Brechtian commentaries provided by Eric and his wife, Cordelia. Cordelia fought bravely for fifty years at Eric’s side against the forts of folly. At Hurstbourne
Priors Eric and Cordelia came into collision with Lord Lymington, who owned the land on which we were working. This was the same Lord Lymington who appears in
Chapter 17
of this book, the review of James Gleick’s biography of Newton. Lord Lymington had inherited Newton’s manuscripts and carelessly dispersed them all over the world by selling them at auction in small lots. Eric and Cordelia entertained us at night with accurate imitations of Lord Lymington’s high-pitched voice and fatuous oratory.