The Mad Men of Science: One kept a cow in his flat, another climbed trees to avoid
We are dealing, in this modestly titled book, not with inventors, engineers or technicians, all of whom make useful contributions to our way of life (by coming up with washing machines, say, or tin openers), but with physicists, an altogether more bonkers beard-tugging tribe, prone to illness, madness and early death.
Perhaps the problem is that in physics, so much is theoretical, abstract, subject to equations and formulae scribbled on the blackboard.
Nothing (literally) has solidity. Even an object such as an oak table, for example, is a pulsation of forces, whizzing atoms and thin mists, which are constantly mutating. Everything about the structure of reality, argue the boffins, trembles, dissipates, dissolves. Their word for it is entropy.
Womaniser: While hiding from the Nazis in Norfolk, Einstein was accompanied by ‘two young female bodyguards, attractive and armed with rifles’
It’s very unrelaxing, knowing all that. And if the one thing I do know (as a biographer) is that real life doesn’t have any shape (it’s a process of random jolts, jumps and starts), then my problem with physicists is they like to impose (or claim to find) patterns everywhere, determine geometric principles, hear secret harmonies, and reckon electromagnetic fields are busy repelling one another, and that clouds of plasma are at large.
Worse, when physicists start investigating what they see as universal rules, matters start tending towards the mystical, the religious – as Jonathan Black says, ‘behind the veil of the visible world lies some higher intelligence’, about which (or whom) the professors can be cavalier when it comes to the burden of proof.
When I told a Cambridge boffin his ideas seemed as daft as saying purple teapots orbited the planet Jupiter, the come-back was, ‘How do you know they don’t!’
One simply gives up – as I did long ago. In 1976, the Welsh Joint Education Committee awarded me a Grade U (Unclassified) in O-level Physics, which is even worse than a Grade F (Fail).
It is unsurprising, therefore, when Black looks at ‘the human and personal perspectives’ of genius-grade physicists, that he uncovers a lot of eccentricity, not to say lunacy.
Mathematician Georg Cantor, who played a pivotal role in the creation of set theory, believed Edward VII was head of a Freemasonic plot to take over the world. He was sectioned in an asylum. Ludwig Boltzmann, a professor of theoretical physics, kept a cow in his upstairs Vienna apartment and hanged himself from a curtain pole whilst on holiday.
Nikola Tesla, who was the first to see the potential of the alternating current and who foresaw wind turbines, the wireless and robots, was phobic about earrings. His hearing was so acute he could listen to a fly land and a pocket-watch ticking next door. Everything had to be divisible by three. Before entering a building, he’d circumnavigate it three times. Tesla ended up broke.
Kurt Godel – a logician, mathematician, cosmologist and philosopher – was so shy, if a guest came to call, he hid in the cellar, ‘crouching behind the boiler’. He thought ‘demonic creatures’ were after him, ‘trying to inject him with drugs’. He later succeeded in starving himself to death.
Avoidant: Paul Dirac would climb tress rather than talk to colleagues
Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 20th century, used a pyjama top as a shirt. Paul Ehrenfest, a theoretical physicist, murdered his son, then shot himself. Paul Dirac, who in 1933 shared the Nobel Prize with Erwin Schrodinger and was one of the founders of quantum mechanics, climbed trees to avoid talking to colleagues. The party trick of Peter Kapitsa (winner of Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work on low temperature physics) was swallowing knives.
Often, ‘lightning strikes of inspiration’ were connected with sexual frustration. Alan Turing, Bletchley codebreaker and father of modern computer science and AI, was tormented by his homosexuality. Wolfgang Pauli, who received his doctorate at 21, ran off with a nightclub singer. Erwin Schrodinger kept an erotic diary of his ‘explorations of female sensuality’, including the abuse of underage girls.
Einstein was a violinist and womaniser – the fiddle his instrument of seduction, E=MC2 not doing the trick. Fearing the Nazis, he hid in a hut in Norfolk, accompanied by ‘two young female bodyguards, attractive and armed with rifles’. He had an affair with a woman who turned out to be a Soviet spy. Bertrand Russell had three open marriages and countless affairs. ‘To demand faithfulness in love,’ he maintained, ‘is to misunderstand the nature of life.’ Which must mean at root there’s nothing but push, drive, ego.
That would certainly be the philosophy of Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the manufacture of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer may well have possessed an ‘extraordinarily mercurial intelligence’, but he was also sociopathic. He tried to strangle a friend who’d announced his engagement to be married. He gave one of his Cambridge professors an apple laced with cyanide.
Explosive: Robert Oppenheimer, the man in charge of building America’s atomic bomb, gave one of his Cambridge professors an apple laced with cyanide
And this was the man in charge of the Manhattan Project, when many of the characters mentioned by Black, all these experts in fission and fusion, came together to create a weapon of mass destruction, which ‘surpasses the explosive power of the strongest explosive materials by several orders of magnitude’, as was shortly demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From what I can see by looking at the evidence marshalled with wit and gusto in The Secret History Of The Universe, the sum of what physics and mathematics have achieved is thermonuclear and neutron bombs and, latterly, the ‘irreversible and uncontrollable’ horror of AI, both of which will destroy the world. Physicists couldn’t even be trusted with the discovery of radiation, which was believed to be beneficial to health. It was once possible to purchase radioactive toothpaste, chocolate, matches and even suppositories.
Black ends his panoramic study with science blending into sci-fi, even into a blockbuster Hollywood sci-fi movie. Looking out for ‘objects floating in the air and strange light phenomena’, physicists were always keen on Hinduism, Buddhism, alchemy and ‘other aspects of the occult’.
The Secret History of the Universe is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Marie Curie attended seances and the telephone was reckoned a champion means of receiving messages from the dead, radio waves picking up voices in the ether.
Now we have these new-fangled ideas about black holes and time bending, it is thus conceivable, says Black, that ‘aliens living in the far future may be able to influence what is happening to us now’.
As I suspected when I sat my O-level back in the boiling hot summer of 1976, I do wonder if somebody somewhere, one of the nutty professors, is pulling our leg, taking the mick, having a laugh? I’m afraid I must be literal-minded, as I require (like Philip Larkin) things to be in every sense empirically true.
Otherwise, knickers to it.