Mary Jo Nye
ISBN
255pp
0-674-01548-7
Hardback £29
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Blackett: Physics, War and Politics in the Twentieth
Century Mary Jo Nye | |
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Harvard University Press ISBN 255pp | 2004 0-674-01548-7 Hardback £29 | |
Reviewed by:
Emeritus Professor Derry W Jones
Chemical & Forensic Sciences, University of Bradford
Patrick Blackett (1897-1974) was a distinguished experimental physicist in particle physics, cosmic rays, geophysics, magnetism of rocks and the earth, as well as in wartime operational research (O.R.). He was a senior science adviser, during peace and war, to UK governments and during his presidency of the Royal Society 1965-70, his service to science was recognised successively by awards of Companion of Honour, Order of Merit, and a Life Peerage. Although he had never taken a doctorate, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948. Some indication of the spread of Blackett’s achievements is that each of two biographical volumes carries triple subtitles, between them embracing physics, the Royal Navy, war and politics.
Patrick Blackett: sailor, scientist, socialist (ed. Peter Hore; London, Frank Cass, 2003), a multi-authored collection of biographical articles stressing the nature and influence of a strict naval education, was reviewed in I.O.P History of Physics N/L No 22, 61-66 (Aug. 2007). Mary Jo Nye, a science historian, has published a more unified and reflective monograph, Blackett: physics, war and politics in the twentieth century.
In the past, Nye has researched and compared the careers of Blackett and his contemporary at Manchester in the 1930s and 1940s, Michael Polanyi, Professor of Physical Chemistry (a biography of Polanyi was reviewed in HoP Newsletter Issue No 20, pp 30-34 (July 2006)). Nye’s interest in the interaction between the scientific practice and achievements of these men and their politics (and, in Polanyi’s case, his philosophy of science) has led her to emphasise Blackett’s scientific leadership and his science-based political controversies in this book.
In six theme-based main chapters in roughly chronological sequence, Nye presents Blackett’s life and career in the context of education, science, and political attitudes of the day. These are preceded by a 12-page introduction, appropriately sub-titled a life of controversy, which ends with brief summaries of the aims of each chapter. There is a glimpse of Blackett’s happy family life and attention is drawn to his courage in championing causes, notably the inefficiency of aerial indiscriminate bombing in World War II, and the independent development by the UK of atomic weapons, unpopular with his political masters. More generally, Nye records the views of friends, colleagues and opponents, not all as favourable as those of Sir Edward Bullard (who, after being supervised by Blackett at Cambridge, became an Admiralty operational research colleague and later a critic of Blackett’s theory of the earth’s magnetism): ‘the most versatile and the best loved physicist of his generation’.
Blackett’s early life and naval education and experience, the subjects of the first few articles in Hore’s book, are covered in Nye’s first chapter ‘From the Royal Navy to the British left’, which also recounts Blackett’s Fabianism and association with the A.Sc.W. and anti-war groups in Cambridge (contrasting with the traditional separation of science from politics) and London. Despite differences over science policy and the supremacy of freedom rather than direction in research, Nye notes that Polanyi and Blackett and their wives remained close friends. With Blackett serving both as president of the A.Sc.W. and as a member of a Royal Society committee on post-war University planning, moderate consensus views about science organisation in the 1950s appeared to prevail.
In a chapter exploring Blackett’s leadership style and recognition, there is an interesting aside describing the international correspondence, discussion and process leading to his nomination as early as 1935 for the Nobel prize, ultimately awarded in 1948 in recognition of his inventions and discoveries in nuclear physics and cosmic radiation. The award preceded, of course, his researches on the earth’s magnetism and continental drift. Nye recognises that, in his later career, Blackett was content to conduct his experimental science in Manchester and London, at Imperial College, rather than Cambridge. At Manchester he was a successor to Ernest Rutherford and WL Bragg and would have been a prime candidate to replace Bragg at the Cavendish (not that geophysics there was seen to be a major branch of physics) and/or might have been a choice for Provost of Kings College, Cambridge. Instead, he deliberately chose to move to London in 1953; he was a Londoner by birth and was glad to enjoy the cosmopolitan life and be close to the power centres of science and government.
The bulk of Blackett’s physics is covered in four chapters. One has the title ‘Corridors of power’ and is a considerably amplified version of Nye’s article in Hore. The title is that of a 1964 C.P. Snow novel in which Snow has admitted that the politics of the physicist character Francis Getliffe are taken from Blackett, who had known Snow in Cambridge from the late 1920s. The two were agreed on the need to expand science and technology education at home and to utilise the scientific revolution in reducing the increasing disparity in wealth between the industrialised and underdeveloped countries. In this chapter, Nye describes Blackett’s support for radar defence from 1936, his development of O.R. (covered by several authors in Hore) in all three services during the war, and his unpopular post-war campaigning about nuclear weapons. She recounts some of the arguments with politicians and fellow scientists about carpet bombing of Germany (dealt with at greater length by Paul Crook in Hore) and defence policy during the Cold War. Perhaps Blackett’s most explicit participation in the corridors was as scientific adviser to Harold Wilson’s Ministry of Technology, 1964-69 (Blackett declined the post of Minister, while Snow, as a life peer, became Parliamentary Secretary), and as President of the Royal Society, 1965-70, culminating in his life peerage. Chapter 2 focuses on the experimental mastery achieved by Blackett with cloud chambers, Geiger counters and magnetic fields at the Cavendish until 1933 and then successively at Birkbeck and, pre- and post-war, at Manchester. His studies involved nuclear transformations, showers of cosmic-ray particles, and the emergence of strange V-tracks attributed to the decay of heavy neutral particles. Under the title ‘Temptations of theory’, chapter 4 narrates in some detail the 1947-52 period at Manchester when Blackett’s attention turns to the link between rotating bodies, such as the earth, and magnetic fields. Historically this was in the steps of a predecessor, Henry Schuster, who had, as early as 1912, questioned the origins of terrestrial magnetism. Blackett had noticed a parallel between the equations relating angular momentum to magnetic moment for the earth and sun which led him to an equation implying that a mass element in motion develops an intrinsic magnetic moment. Blackett had a long-standing interest in fundamental constants, and in cosmology and astronomy, but Nye quotes Clifford Butler as deducing that Blackett sought a research topic that, in contrast to cosmic rays, he could fit in by himself between (or during) his frequent trips to London. Nye outlines Blackett’s four strategies for testing his law and theory of the earth’s magnetism but, ultimately, it appeared that any magnetic field from the rotating mass was undetectably small.
Blackett’s development of a very sensitive astatic magnetometer led to studies of geomagnetism and palaeomagnetism and continental drift, initiated at Manchester and pursued further at Imperial College, as described in chapter 5. Some of the research on the earth’s field was in collaboration with Indian colleagues; a group set up in Bombay made the first palaeomagnetic survey of the sub-continent. Blackett made a dozen serious visits to India from 1947 onwards and formed close friendships with several Indians (often with a Cambridge background) influential in politics and science and technology. Jawahalal Nehru was sympathetic to Blackett’s attitude to state planning of research, the peaceful development of atomic energy, and the need for India to invest in modern technology. In his 1967 Nehru Memorial lecture, Blackett somewhat unpopularly advocated stronger links between laboratory science and its industrial application.
Blackett described the physicist Horu Bhaha, head of both the Tata Institute and the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, as ‘my best personal friend’. Nye deals adequately with Blackett’s affection for India and Indians and his science advisory role in her leadership chapters. However, in Hore, the science historian Robert Anderson goes into more detail about advice on industrial research and, especially, about Blackett as a military consultant in India.
Nye’s concluding chapter on style and character in scientific life emphasises the extent to which Blackett courageously put his reputation, whether in physics or in politics and scientific policy, at risk. She quotes Leon Rosenfeld, his theoretical physics colleague at Manchester, remarking that Blackett was undeterred by apparent failure, while he had overcome lamentable laboratory conditions encountered on arrival at Birkbeck. Scientists he greatly admired were Henry Tizard, a fighter pilot in World War I, and Frederic Joliot-Curie, courageous in World War 11. Tizard, with whom Blackett had worked on secret government advisory committees before and during World War II, shared scepticism about the effectiveness and morality both of wartime carpet bombing and of post war UK nuclear weapons policy. Joliot-Curie, an antifascist organiser in Paris from the 1920s, was respected as a friend, although a scientific competitor in nuclear and Cosmic-ray physics. Nye sums Blackett’s physics up as that of a gifted experimentalist: a master craftsman in instrumentation with theoretical acumen. ‘Exploration, discovery, discipline and courage were central to this controversial scientist’s life’.
Nye includes only a dozen photographs, although they illustrate most significant aspects of Blackett’s life; but nearly 900 notes, tidily correlated with text pages, are a testimony to thoroughness. One of the merits of a book of only moderate length is that, as each facet of Blackett’s career emerges and is highlighted, the background is sketched and brief pen portraits are given of the relevant scientists and politicians, whether historical or of the time. This self-contained, thoughtful and enjoyable biography is recommended.
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Max Perutz and the Secret of Life Georgina Ferry | |
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Chatto and Windus ISBN 352pp | 2007 9780701176952 Hardback £25 | |
Reviewed by:
Emeritus Professor Derry W Jones
Chemical & Forensic Sciences, University of Bradford
Max Perutz (1914-2002) began his scientific life as a chemistry student in Vienna and was a founder and head of the outstandingly successful Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. But for the first two decades of his X-ray crystallographic research on the structure of haemoglobin under J. Desmond Bernal (the Sage) and W. Lawrence Bragg, he was in or associated with a physics laboratory, the Cavendish (headed by Rutherford when Perutz arrived in 1936). Moreover, outside the protein field in which he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with the physicist John Kendrew in 1962, Perutz made significant contributions in the late 1930s and the 1940s to the physics of ice crystals and glacial flow. However, his lack of a strong mathematical background may account for his initial scepticism in the early 1950s about the potential of direct methods for structure solution (for which Herbert Hauptman and Jerom e Karle received the Nobel Prize in 1985).
Georgina Ferry is not a scientist but is the biographer of another crystallographic Nobel Prize winner, Dorothy Hodgkin [Granta, 1999], who was also apprenticed to Bernal for a time. Further, she is co-author of The Common Thread (Corgi, 2003) which is written in the form of an autobiographical account by Nobel Prize winner, John Sulston (a member of the LMB until the Sanger Centre was established) about science and politics in the project for sequencing the human genome. Ferry’s reputation and her grounding in the vocabularies of X-ray crystallography and molecular biology were such that Perutz asked her, almost on his deathbed, to be his biographer. Perutz’s fears about the availability of enough material proved unfounded and Ferry managed to trace much of his correspondence (retained by recipients, including his devoted wife Gisela) as well as calling on the recollections of an array of relatives, friends and scientists. The result is not only an intelligible account of Perutz’s skill, insight and determination in investigating the structure of haemoglobin and in negotiating for, establishing and leading the LMB but also provides a discerning examination of the life of a cultured, humorous and gentle person. Included are pictures of the principle characters, unostentatious page-by-page notes (instead of footnotes) and a good index.
Ferry’s book is broadly chronological with the first chapter devoted to Perutz’s upbringing in Austria. His affluent parents, with town and country homes, wanted him to read law rather than science at Vienna in 1932 as a preparation for running the family textile business in the present-day Czech Republic. Subsequently, they escaped to England as refugees with no financial resources so that their support was for long a concern to Perutz. They only reluctantly agreed, but then provided support, for him to transfer from Vienna in 1936 with an Absolutorum (i.e. not a degree) to Cambridge for research instead of staying for his Doctorandum.
Summarizing his knowledgeable and affectionate memoir [Biog. Mem. Fell. Roy. Soc., 50, 227-256 (2004)], David Blow said that it was largely written by Perutz himself. This was because, in his later life, Perutz was an accomplished and stylish expositor of science. His more popular books often had idiosyncratic titles such as ‘I wish I’d made you angry earlier’ (Oxford University Press, 1998), this one prompted by a remark of WL Bragg, Perutz’s stalwart champion at the Cavendish, about the discovery of the _-helix. Perutz’s summary of his 60 years work on haemoglobin, ‘Science is not a quiet life’ (ICP World Scientific, Singapore, 1977) opens with a chapter entitled ‘Diffraction without tears’ but is a compendium of papers 1938-1995, together with commentaries on progress and the people involved. The many stages of the haemoglobin story, both before and after the Nobel Prize, take p about half of Ferry’s book.
Perutz’s earlier collection of more general thoughts about scientists and their impact on society, ‘Is science necessary?’ (Barrie and Jenkins, London, 1989), consisted chiefly of essay book reviews. But the most poignant article in it was an autobiographical account of what happened to Perutz when, having been a research student for four years at Cambridge, he was declared an enemy alien in 1940. Ferry covers the World War II period in two chapters, one titled ‘The most dangerous characters of all’, Perutz’s ironic description of his fellow internees (including Hermann Bondi), who were mostly refugees from Nazi oppression. Perutz’s privations, in the Isle of Man and Canada, doubtless engendered the lifelong passionate concern for human rights. Eventually, he was able to return to England and participate, 1942-1943, in the Allied war effort through the Habbakuk project. This was the bizarre-sounding and ultimately rejected scheme for constructing a vast ice ship to act as a floating aerodrome in the ocean, a project which involved considerable high-level research and engineering. Participation in the Allied enterprise (sanctioned by Lord Louis Mountbatten who had Bernal as Scientific Advisor to Combined Operations) involved visits to Canada and the USA and so required Perutz’s rapid naturalisation to British citizenship in 1943.
Despite ill health in early life, Perutz became an enthusiastic and skilful mountaineer and skier (he kept a mountaineering diary), making a walking tour in the Arctic as a student in 1933. As late as the 1960s he contrived to hold protein structure workshops in an Austrian ski resort! At Cambridge in 1937 and 1938, the combination of experience in snow mountaineering and crystallography enabled him to join the glaciologist Gerald Seligman on the Jungfrau in a study of glacier formation and the physics of skiing.
Having chaired a Glacier Physics Committee, Perutz collected further inclinometer experimental data on glacier flow mechanisms under blizzard conditions in Switzerland and in a 1948 expedition. Ferry recounts in some detail the wartime consequence of the ice crystal background; a summons to Perutz, around the time of his marriage in 1942, by Bernal and the eccentric Geoffrey Pike to discuss first signalling in glaciers and then the practicalities of the above unsinkable iceberg floating airfield: Habbakuk. Perutz wrote up both the research on the glacier flow mechanism (Proc. Roy. Soc. (A) 172, 335-60, 1939 and Proc Phys Soc. 52, 132, 1940 and that on the properties of frozen wood pulp for construction of the refrigerated Habbakuk bergship (J.Glaciology 1, 95-104, 1947). Such was his standing that in 1947 he was invited to join an international Antarctic expedition as senior glaciologist, but declined.
Perutz’s dominant scientific achievements were in molecular biology in pursuit of which he had overcome many financial and scientific obstacles. Perhaps as significant as his persistent long-term hands-on research into the structure and, later, mechanism of haemoglobin was his relaxed chairing of the inter-disciplinary LMB. This institution in Cambridge had been born out of the MRC Research Unit on Molecular Structure of Biological Systems in the Cavendish under Bragg and yielded a clutch of Nobel prize-winners. One of them, the brilliant Francis Crick (Nobel prize also 1962) respected Perutz’s work and was a friend but somewhat unkindly described Perutz as a very persistent plodder.
James Watson’s depiction of the principal characters involved in ‘The Double Helix’ (Athenaem, 1968) led to considerable controversy about the use of Rosalind Franklin’s and Ray Gosling’s X-ray data. Although Maurice Wilkins (who shared the 1962 Nobel prize with Crick and Watson) showed Watson the data in January 1953 (and some may have been included in an earlier King’s College seminar attended by Watson), the subsequent debate was about the propriety of Perutz passing to Crick in February 1953 the content of an MRC report of which Perutz was the reviewer. John Randall, director of the King’s biophysics lab, regarded the report as confidential, whereas Perutz felt that it was for information of other MRC workers. Recent attempts to amend some of Watson’ s inferences and set out the interactions between the model builders at Cambridge and the more experimental workers at King’s between November 1951 and February 1953 include Brenda Maddox’s biography, ‘Rosalind Franklin; the dark lady’ (Harper Collins, 2003) and Watson Fuller’s article in Nature, 424, 876 (2003). Ferry suggests that Perutz’s long letter of justification to Science 164, 1537) in 1969 smacked of protesting too much about his behaviour. Thus, in this and other ways, she recognises that Perutz exhibited some of the weaknesses of other scientists; he would be aware, for example, that there was greater public recognition of Watson and Crick than of himself. Ferry also notes that, for a warm and generous person, Perutz had some surprisingly acrimonious scientific conflicts in the 1980s. Suffering from coeliac disease (intolerance to gluten in wheat flour) from 1954, he was exceedingly diet-conscious and something of a hypochondriac.
Perutz loved art, music and literature while knowledge of languages helped his appreciation of European culture. However his behaviour was in some ways that of an archetype charming, relaxed Englishman, complete with eccentricity, understatement and admiration for the Queen. His awards included a CBE (he politely turned down the knighthood as a potential barrier within the laboratory) and received the greater distinctions of Companion of Honour in 1975 and Order of Merit in 1988. In her final chapter called, after his last public talk, Truth always wins, Ferry notes Perutz’s ultimate elevation to British national treasure by being a guest on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.
This is a well-written and enjoyable biography of a dextrous, persistent and perceptive researcher, an influential scientist, and a compassionate, engaging and thoughtful man.
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* Peter Ford, our new chairman of the History Group of the Institute of Physics, has recently retired from the Physics Department of the University of Bath. His email will remain as given above for the time being. -Ed