The Physicists is a first draft, completed just before his death on 1 July 1980, of a book which C P Snow intended to write at greater length – he planned in particular to put more material in the last chapters. However, written as it was, straight off and at great speed, it has an unimpeded narrative impulse together with a completeness over the period of time, which simply ask for it to stand on its own as a literary work.
When he first told me about the book, I said: ‘Good God, you’ll have to do some research for that, won’t you?’ To which he replied: ‘I’m writing it largely from memory.’ I was silenced. He had one of the most remarkable memories I’d ever come across, a constant source of envy to me. Furthermore, we’d been close friends for nearly fifty years – in fact ever since the time when I was a Cambridge undergraduate reading physics, sent to him, then a Research Fellow of the College, to be taught – and so I was qualified to understand that he didn’t always do exactly what he said he was doing, not absolutely exactly. Wrong again! When I read the draft I recognized that it actually had been written largely from his memory. It’s odd – memory, even a memory as comprehensive as his, has its selectiveness, its patches, its things that stand out for reasons of other than factual importance. When an artist calls upon memory, what he writes has a life and a moving quality which scarcely ever infuses the product of the filing cabinet which we nowadays refer to as researched information.
A la recherche du temps perdu the book naturally took me straight back, at the beginning, to the days in the early 1930‘s when I myself was going to lectures by Rutherford and Dirac and Kapitsa, days so glorious that even my memory recalls something of their heroes. Rutherford, big and fresh-complexioned, his spectacles shielding light, transparent eyes, was indeed boomingly Jehovianic, albeit in an attractive way – one could see how the physicists near to him came to give him such devotion. Looking back on it, one is tempted to speculate on how far the aggressive boom, like Anthony Trollope’s aggressive boom, had grown as an outer protective shell – Snow remarks on this in the book – for a more sensitive, delicately responding nature. (Actually Blackett, in later years, always struck me as more Jehovianic – tall, thin, high-shouldered, with wavy hair and a flashing eye, in manner altogether loftier, nobler, graver: more of a Jehovah’s Jehovah, perhaps.)
Dirac was very, very different – taciturn in both languages, as Snow remarks. Quantum mechanics, whether one could understand it or not, was clearly the creation of a remarkable mind; but at five o’clock of a winter’s evening in an overheated lecture-room, one would have given anything for the exposition of a remarkable mind’s creation to be illumined by just the occasional human spark of temperament. Kapitsa, on the other hand, provided a running succession of human sparks of temperament, a lot of them of a wonderfully clowning kind, typically Russian, and typically deceptive – struggling with the English language, he appeared to keep getting things wrong and having to put them right. His broad face was smiling, his hair sticking straight out from its parting, and his nose, blunt and fleshy, making one wonder if that was the sort of nose Dostoievsky described as ‘plum-shaped’. Everyone loved going to Kapitsa’s lectures.
But I’m writing about Snow and his Weltanschauung, not embarking on a supplement of my own to The Physicists. (I’m tempted to make a quip to the effect that his Weltanschauung – a good word from the 1930s – seemed to me as comprehensive as his memory, with insights penetrating the worlds of science, of literature, of human affairs.) I’d recently been reading through some of the public speeches he made throughout the latter half of his life, about science and scientists, human affairs and human beings: reading through The Physicists I was frequently reminded of them; a sentence in the book setting up a resonance – one of his favourite words – with the beginning of a train of thought that he had followed at length, elsewhere on some other occasion, to a revealing conclusion.
A first case in point – his reference in the book to Arthur Schuster’s deliberate resignation from the Chair of Physics at Manchester University, in order to make way for Rutherford, resonated with his account of an incident three hundred years ago, when the Cambridge Professor of Mathematics, named Barrow, resigned his Chair on condition that his pupil was appointed to it, his pupil being Isaac Newton – an account with which Snow began his 1962 Rectorial Address to the University of St Andrews, ‘On magnanimity’. The essence of the address was a plea for magnanimity in our use of scientific and technical knowledge for ‘seeing to it that the poor of the world don’t stay poor...’
The great majority of the world’s population don’t get enough to eat: and from the time they are born, their chances of life are less than half of ours. These are crude words: but we are talking about crude things, toil, hunger, death. For most of our brother men, this is the social condition. It is different from our social condition. That is one reason why there is a direct call upon our magnanimity. If we do not show it now, then both our hopes and souls have shrivelled. It may be a longish time before men at large are much concerned with hopes and souls again.
I have quoted the passage because to my mind it illustrates Snow’s realistic view – some people, myself included, would call it a dark view – of human nature, counterbalanced as it was in his own nature by another strong element, that of hope; and a belief that our hope’s coming to fruition depends on men’s magnanimity. He was one of the most magnanimous of men, in all senses, public and private, I’ve ever known. I venture to suggest that the dark view, the hope, and the magnanimity all shine through The Physicists.
And, by God, when he comes in his story to The Bomb, the hope and the magnanimity are more than necessary. (The dark view comes, as it were, in the package.) Incidentally, it’s fascinating to note, à propos his remarking in the book that the scientific facts essential to making the bomb were commonly known among scientists before the war, the publication in Discovery (a scientific journal Snow edited) of a notice in April 1939 of Hahn’s discovery in Berlin of uranium-splitting, and in May 1939 of Joliot’s discovery in Paris of what were subsequently called chain-reaction neutrons. Snow himself in the May 1939 issue wrote an editorial, ‘Science and air-warfare’, in which he attempted to reduce the then current hysteria about the excessively destructive effects of air-attack with TNT bombs – about which, as those were the attacks we subsequently survived, he turned out to be correct. But in September 1939 his editorial was entitled ‘A new means of destruction’. The world had changed. (Just to put things into perspective, it’s also fascinating to recall that in 1913 H G Wells, in The World Set Free, had forecast something like an atomic bomb.)
The world had changed, and after 1945 it was riven by the moral issue arising in the first instance from the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There may have been some justification for Hiroshima: for Nagasaki I, like many of the physicists, believe there was none. If ever the dark view of human nature had a profound source, the destruction of Nagasaki touched that source. The book tells the story of how the physicists understood and responded to the moral situation they were in, tells it movingly and magnanimously. The issue in a broader sense has since become, and remains today, one of such emotional, intellectual and moral significance to everybody, scientists and non-scientists alike, that I am including at the end of his book a speech in full, called ‘The moral un-neutrality of science’, which Snow delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1960. Snow’s view of science as an intrinsically moral activity (in the sense that it is an undeterred search for observable truth), which has a moral influence on the men and women who engage in it, is a view which we talked about and which meant a great deal to him. It strengthened his belief that it was through science and technology that we could, and must, ‘see to it that the poor of the world don’t stay poor.’
Yet ‘The moral un-neutrality of science’ doesn’t say the last word about the dilemmas in which physicists, and scientists in general, found themselves after the war. Up till 1945 dilemmas were well below the surface: the Hitler war, as Snow calls it, had to be won. And for that purpose the bomb had to be made and secrecy had to be kept, and there was no difficulty about it. In those days Snow and I were hiving off selected physicists into what was artfully called the Directorate of Tube Alloys, of whose function I had only the vaguest intimations to begin with. Then, along with the intimations taking clearer, fearful shape, there was a half-saving grace which I always remember being expressed by F Simon, another distinguished Jewish refugee physicist, holding a Chair at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford: a dark, starless night, and Simon walking with us to the gateway of the Clarendon – we had been working late – and he said: ‘I hope it won’t work…’ Spoken with great prescience and deep emotion; yet I felt sure that au fond he knew it actually was going to work.
It did work, and after 1945 the physicists were burdened with the moral dilemma over the making and the using of the bomb; and on top of that the dilemma over secrecy – which in effect meant keeping things from the Russians. That latter dilemma sharpened as the Cold War came into being, sharpened as the conflict between loyalty to the nation-state and loyalty to the individual conscience became absolutely explicit. That dilemma, too, may be one to which there is no solution in the abstract; and Snow himself seems to recognize that. In ‘The moral un-neutrality’ his view appears to go one way: in another speech, called ‘State v. individual’ it appears, if not to go the other way, at least to be unresolved.
Human affairs, it seems to me, depend upon a degree of trust. If, within one’s own society and state, one can’t rely on that degree of trust, the social life becomes, to put it mildly, precarious. Individual conscience is essential and mustn’t be denied. But often it isn’t a sure guide to action. As a general rule, it isn’t a guide sure enough to let one break one’s obligations and one’s oaths. That, for me at least, is a general rule. Clearly there are situations when it wouldn’t be overriding. The problem is, as in all ethical problems in real life as opposed to the textbooks, where the line is drawn.
Nevertheless, although during the Hitler war secrecy obtruded in the lives of professional scientists who until then, especially during the Golden Age, had never given a thought to it; although it has still not been cast out – as well as national secrecy we now have commercial secrecy, God wot – Snow still considered the scientific profession to be the one that offers its members the greatest freedom. (He did not die – as Wells did, seeing many of the things he’d hoped for not having come to pass – in despair, far from it.) In 1970 he delivered a speech at Loyola University in Chicago, ‘Freedom and the scientific profession’, in which realistic acquiescence to the way the world was going is uplifted by hope. As I have used the word ‘freedom’ myself, I must quote his menacing opening paragraph about it.
Freedom is a word that needs using carefully. Too often we have used it as a political slogan and done ourselves no good in the process. If you use words for political purposes, they soon lose whatever meaning they may have had. If you are tempted to brandish the word ‘free’, remember that over the gates of Auschwitz there stretched – and still stretches – the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei. Language is the most human thing about us: in a sense, the invention of language made us human: but language, perhaps for the same reason, is the greatest expression of human falsity, or if you like, of original sin.
So much for the word ‘free’. Snow excludes both the political and metaphysical usages, and concentrates on its usage in our day-to-day living, particularly in our working-lives.
It was in order to avoid that kind of subjectivity that I chose some questions which we can all answer. They are matter-of-fact questions, just as the freedom to which they refer is a matter-of-fact freedom. I don’t apologize for this. Unless we know what being free means in our working-lives, we aren’t likely to be specially sensible about what being free means anywhere else. Well then. How free are you to choose your work? From day to day? From year to year? How free are you to explain it? To say what you think about it? How free are you to earn your living through your work? In your own country? In other countries? Anywhere in the world?
And then in answer:
Of all the people I’ve known, the only group who would say ‘Yes’ to that whole set of questions are the professional scientists. Even then not without qualification and distinctions, which I shall come to presently. But, by and large, professional scientists have the possibility of acting more freely than any other collection of human beings on earth. Answering my simple questions, they can say – at least as soon as they are out of their apprenticeship or training for research – that they can choose what kind of work to do. Their subject for research – that is at their own disposal, just as much as what a writer selects to write about or a painter to paint. Very few of us have that degree of freedom: certainly no politician has, though the more inflated may fool themselves that they have. And the scientists are entirely free to publish what they have done, how and where they please: they are under no constraints: they can publish the results of their work however they like. Unlike other kinds of creative person, they are normally not interested in any kind of commercial influence. There is another fact which separates them decisively from the rest of us. Their skill is international in the fullest sense. No other group of professional people (except perhaps musicians and ballet dancers) can say as much. A scientist has the potential to earn his living, and to do his proper work, anywhere. Many have demonstrated this.
The qualifications have to be taken seriously. Especially in the physical branch of the scientific profession, for those physicists who have remained or become soldiers-not-in-uniform: they are restricted in their choice of work, in their movement from country to country, and in their right to publish. The next restriction upon physicists comes with the necessity, as Snow remarks in the book, to work, if they want to choose particle physics, in teams and wherever the necessary large machines happen to be. The third comes from safety: that is a restriction that is looming ever more ominously over the work of molecular biologists, and genetic engineers.
Yet, realistically acquiescing to the increasing articulation of society and conceding the restraints that arise therefrom, Snow still sees the scientific profession as the one to which the replies to his questions come nearest to a universal ‘Yes’ – a ‘Yes’ that is strengthened by the increasing importance of science in the post-industrial society, by the expansion of its scope and the funds devoted to it. And even in an era when nationalism is having a grisly recrudescence everywhere, science remains above all international. The great majority of scientists have a wider choice than the rest of us, in our professions, of what topic they’ll work on: they are freer than the rest of us to move to any country where that work is going on; and when they publish the results of their work, it can be, and it is, read all over the world. From this Snow in the speech draws his conclusion:
I have been speaking, deliberately, about one of the most privileged groups of human beings – in my view the most privileged group bar none in the world today. I have no doubt that they will continue to be as privileged, relative to the rest of us. So that they set a kind of limit when we think of what we others can realistically expect of free behaviour in an increasingly interlinked society. That is why I have talked so practically and prosaically. Free behaviour, being free, acting freely in our existential choices, freedom – they are not usually helpful concepts in our life as we live it. What we need, I think, especially when we are young, is a sense of non-utopian expectations: of measuring our expectations against what people are doing in their professional existence. The professional existence I have selected is the one which most clearly points towards the future. In some ways, as I have said, its members will by the end of the century not have the option to behave as freely as they do now. In some ways they have increased degrees of freedom. There is nothing to be pessimistic about. If our expectations are anywhere near right, the scientific profession will still provide a desirable life, within the human limits. If we hold up that model as something which other working-lives can aspire to, we still won’t do badly. It is a better model than other ages have had: much better than that of the Homeric warriors or the Norman pattern of chivalry or the philosophers of the Early Church: much better, and believe it or not, much more genuinely free.
William Cooper
LONDON, DECEMBER 1980