1960- 1979: IDEOLOGY and PRACTICE in a UNITED NATIONS INSTITUTION for SCIENTIFIC CO-OPERATION and THIRD By

Home , Giuseppe Occhialini, Lewis Wolpert, Paolo Budinich, Robert Marshak, Samuel Devons, Stevan Dedijer

T h e International C e n t r e f o r T h e o r e t ic a l P h y s ic s, 1960- 1979: IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE IN A UNITED NATIONS INSTITUTION FOR SCIENTIFIC CO-OPERATION AND THIRD W o r l d development

A Dissertation Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Alexis Hjalmar Alberto De Greiff Acevedo

University of London

Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine

December 2001 BRITISH JSHäoian Page 2 is blank in the original. inthe blank is 2Page www.bl.uk LS23Yorkshire,West7BQ BostonSpa,Wetherby IMAGINGNORTHSERVICES Abstract

In this work the history of the establishment of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste is studied with particular attention to its first director Abdus Salam and the dynamics of international co-operation in science during its foundation and early years. Some aspects of Salam's social, religious and cultural background, as well as his Cambridge training in physics and mathematics are discussed as essential elements in motivating and enabling his career as a scientific diplomat and administrator. It is argued that although Salam managed to provide an effective justification for the creation and existence of the Centre, the majority of the industrialised countries, as well as the Socialist countries, opposed the initiative. The negotiation process for the creation of the ICTP is studied in detail highlighting the crucial role played by Italy and Trieste. It is also argued that institutional instability created by a lack of both financial support and a permanent scientific staff recognised by the scientific elite undermined the status of the institution as well as the work carried out within its walls. Two contrasting images of the Centre prevailed throughout the period studied: for the elite among the scientific community in the industrialised countries, it was a United Nations development institute for the education of Third World scientists, whereas in the developing countries it was perceived as a scientific centre for mainstream research. The fund-raising strategies, based on the cultivation of a network of personal contacts around the world are discussed, focusing on the relation between the ICTP and the Ford Foundation. Finally, the everyday operation of the ICTP as an academic institution is studied. This entails a discussion of the scientific population of the Centre as well as an analysis of the activities carried out there in terms of training and research. The effect of the ICTP on Salam’s scientific work and the influence of Salam on some features of the ICTP’s scientific practices are also discussed in detail. The history of the ICTP stands as an excellent case study in the contrast that can exist between public rhetoric regarding scientific collaboration between unequal international partners and the reality of that collaboration. Contents

Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 8

INTRODUCTION 14

CHAPTER 1. A bdus Salam 's Life Before T he Creation Of T he International Centre For T heoretical Physics 53

1.1 Salam in Pakistan: Early years and Education 60

1.1.1 Early years 60 1.1.2 Salam’s Education in Pakistan 67

1.2 The First Cambridge Years 70

1.2.1 Undergraduate studies 70 1.2.2 Research Student 76 1.2.3 Yukawa theories and QED in the 1950s 77 1.1.4 Salam’s PhD problem 79

1.3 Salam at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Princeton 83

1.4 Salam’s return to Pakistan and back to England: first.academic and political appointments 86

1.4.1 Pakistan 1951-1954 86 1.4.2 Back in Cambridge and Abdus Salam’s missing Nobel Prize 93 1.4.3 First Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London 106 1.4.4 First Steps towards a Political Career 110

1.5 Conclusion 117

4 CHAPTER 2. Salam ’s Discourse On Science And T hird World Development 122

2.1 Breaking the barriers of isolation: “The Gondasipur and Toledos of today” 129

2.2 The science versus technology transfer debate 148

2.3 The leading role of theoretical physics 159

2.4 Conclusion 167

CHAPTER 3. T he T ale Of T wo Peripheries: T he Creation Of The International Centre For Theoretical Physics In T rieste 172

3.1 Trieste: internationalist dreams of an orphan city 177

3.1.1 The decline of the border city 182 3.1.2 The internationalist tradition in Trieste 187

3.2 Two figures: Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz and Paolo Budinich 189

3.2.1 Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz 189 3.2.2 Paolo Budinich 190

3.3 The Negotiations: the Trieste-Rome-Vienna triangle 194

3.3.1 The first contacts and the idea of an international centre 195 3.3.2 Trieste’s candidature: October 1960-March 1961 199 3.3.3 The negotiating at the IAEA (1961 -63) 202

3.4 Conclusion: Effective networks and propitious environments 237

CHAPTER 4. Striving To S urvive W ith Private Funds : T he N egotiations With T he Ford Foundation 251

4.1 Resistance to support of the ICTP 259

5 4.2 Motivations for supporting a young centre 268

4.3 Conclusion: from Europe to the Third World 283

CHAPTER 5. T he International Centre For T heoretical Physics A s A T raining Institution 288

5.1 The ICTP demography: visitors, “Associates” and permanent scientific staff 289

5.1.1 The Visitors 290 5.1.2 The Associates 293 5.1.3 Geographical distribution of Associates 298 5.1.4 The Permanent Scientific Staff 304

5.2 Courses and Workshops 312

5.2.1 Workshops 312 5.2.2 Courses 314 5.2.3 Expansion of the ICTP activities 322

5.4 Conclusion 330

CHAPTER 6. R esearch Patterns At T he International Centre For T heoretical Physics 332

6.1 Putting the ICTP on the map 335

6.2 The publishing pattern of the ICTP 347

6.3 The High-energy Physics “November Revolution” and the Exclusion of the ICTP 354

6.4 Conclusions 368

CONCLUDING REMARKS 372

APPENDIX 1 . Financial Contributions to the ICTP 381

6 APPENDIX 2. ICTP A ssociates 383

SOURCES CITED 396

7 Acknowledgements

This dissertation could be done thanks to the generous help of a number of people who patiently accompanied me in this intellectual and human experience. Trying to express my gratitude to all of them is simply an impossible task in this or any

'»ther language. If this thesis has any merit, it is largely because I had the fortune of benefiting from their advice and support, and, conversely, they of course are completely innocent of its faults and inaccuracies.

First and foremost, I want to thank Andrew Warwick who has been my tutor and friend. Andy’s works in history of science have been an example to me, and having being his student has been one of the great fortunes of coming to

London. The careful way in which he read my work has taught me an essential lesson: that the “exact sciences” do not have a monopoly on rigorous reasoning.

I i\s support has meant to me an enormous encouragement throughout these years.

Andy also gave me the opportunity to teach in his history of science course, a great opportunity. I hope to be able to transmit to my students the enthusiasm for the history of science he inculcated in me.

The ever-increasingly stimulant environment of the London Centre for the

History of Science has been crucial in my training as a historian of science. At

Imperial College, David Edgerton has been a good friend and a great teacher. I would also like to thank Rob Iliffe and Hasok Chang for their continuing encouragement. The Imperial College drinks parties were a fundamental part of

8 Alexis De Greiff Acknowledgements my social experience in London, so I thank the Pub-goers. Aisnlee Rutledge provided me invaluable assistance, many thanks.

The community of students, and former students, provided me new ideas, suggestive readings and, above all, vital comradeship. I thank Mauricio Nieto, who in the first place convinced me that I could become a professional historian of science (and for guarding my library), and Olga Restrepo, who convinced my boss in Colombia of the same thing. My gratitude also to Professor Jorge Arias, and to the colleagues of the Observatorio, for their support. The London

Postgraduate Science Studies Seminars was a very helpful discussion forum, and I am grateful to its participants. Special thanks to Sam Alberti, Clint Chaloner, Karl

Calle, Mike Hawkins, Georgia Petrou and John Waller. Alexandra Guaqueta has been incredibly supportive both emotionally and professionally during my stay in the United Kindgon. In Cambridge (Massachusetts) I learned a great deal from the

Harvard Physical Sciences Working Group. I have an enormous debt with David

Kaiser, for rich and enlightening conversations, and for his comments, suggestions and advice on earlier drafts. His friendship has been one of the most rewarding “by-products” of this PhD experience. At Harvard I want to thank very specially Jacques Hymans, Edward Jones-Imhotep and Elizabeth Paris, and, at

MIT, Mazyar Lotfalia, who introduced me to the development studies and to the problems of technoscience in modem Islamic countries.

While doing this research, I have had the opportunity to meet several scholars with whom I have been able to discuss different aspects of my work. I want to thank my good friend Ron Doel, for his encouragement and support during all these years. I am especially grateful to Itty Abraham, Gianni Battimelli,

9 Alexis De Greiff Acknowledgements

Mimmo De Maria, Peter Galison, Giuliana Gemelli, Anna Guagnini, John

Heilbron, Sheila Jasanoff, Dong-Won Kira, Mauricio Nieto, Gianni Paoloni, Mark

Solovey, Abha Sur, and Hebe Vessuri. For their valuable comments of preliminary and partial versions of this work, I want to thank Deirdre Bair, Jimena

Canales, David Edgerton, John Krige, Ritu Menon, Guy Ortolano, and Olga

Restrepo.

Not being English my first language, I am in debt with those who helped me to improve my writing. Many thanks to Margarita Plaza, Rebekah Higgitt,

Lucretia Steward, Emily Mayhew and Alexandra Guaqueta. Their editing often went beyond pure grammar and style and their critical reading allowed me to clarify and rectify odd passages and ideas. Again, those parts that remained obscure are my entire responsibility.

The assistance of staffs of the libraries and archives where I worked was essential. I am grateful to the archivists of the National Cataloguing Unit for the

Archives of Contemporary Scientists, at Bath University; the Archives of the

Imperial College, London; the Ford Foundation archives in New York; the library and archives of the “Abdus Salam” International Centre for Theoretical Physics in

Trieste; the Edoardo Amaldi Archive at the Department of Physics of the

University of Rome, La Sapienza; the International Atomic Energy Agency archives; the UNESCO archives; and the Niels Bohr Library of the American

Institute of Physics. Professor Tom Kibble, Dr. A. M. Hamende and Signor L.

Stabile have been extremely generous in giving me access to their personal archives. I was able to locate invaluable material and interview several people

10 Alexis De Greiff Acknow ledgements

thanks to the efficient help of Rosita Glavina and Serena Viezzola, at the Physics

Department of the University of Trieste.

Conducting interviews provided me the opportunity to understand the

perspective of some of the key protagonist of the history of the International

Centre for Theoretical Physics. Some this people spent several hours telling me

their version of the facts, explaining their views about the Centre and Abdus

Salam; and discussing my hypotheses and version of the facts. I am especially

grateful to Professors Tom Kibble and Chris Isham at Imperial College, for their

collaboration throughout the elaboration of this project. I was able to travel and

make several interviews thanks to two grants from the Friends of the Centre for

History of Physics, American Institute of Physics, for which I am grateful. Licia

Chersovani and Faheem Hussain talked to me informally and drew my attention to

episodes and relevant material. I feel honoured by their friendship and am glad of

having found two idealists who believe that a different world is still possible.

I have a debt with several institutions for their support and assistance.

Above all, the Universidad National de Colombia, and especially the

Observatorio Astronômico National, which allowed me a leave of absence during all these years. My PhD studies were financed by the Instituto Colombiano de

Ciencia y Tecnologia “Francisco José de Caldas” (COLCIENCIAS). I have received financial support at various stages of my research from the following bodies: the University of London Central Research Fund; the Imperial College

Hardship Fund; the Royal Historical Society of London; and the Churches

Commission on Overseas Students. I also should like to thank the “Abdus Salam”

International Centre for Theoretical Physics, and especially its Director, Professor

11 Alexis De G re iff Acknowledgements

Miguel Angel Virasoro, and his secretary Ms Anne Gatti. The Bogliasco

Foundation allowed me to spend three months at the beautiful Ligurian Riviera,

where I wrote, in a peaceful and stimulant environment, a substantial part of this

work. I wish to thank the staff and the other fellows for this unforgettable

experience. I will remain in debt with Pasquale Tucci and the staff of the Sezione

di Storia della Fisica of the Istituto di Fisica Generale Applicata of the University

of Milan, who hosted me during the final year of my dissertation. I am also

grateful to the “David Rockefeller” Centre for Latin American Studies and to the

Centre for the History of Science at Harvard University for their hospitality during

one of the most fruitful and enjoyable semesters I had as a graduate student.

I have “had” to travel a lot. This would have been impossible without the

logistic help of several friends around the world. Toya and David Coe (in

London), Kike and Angelika Chaux (in Cambridge, MA), Leonardo De Maria (in

T'-ieste), Alejandro and Claudia Castillejo (in New York), and Sergio and

Margarita Torres (in Washington D.C.) made me feel at home with their

hospitality and love.

Trying to express my feeling of gratitude to Eduardo Ortiz is an

intimidating task. Since the beginning of my PhD, Eduardo has not stopped believing in the potential of this project and in my work. Eduardo’s intellectual honesty, lucidity, and generosity have been and will continue to be an inspiration to me. It has been a great privilege to work with him and to count on his

unconditional friendship. Many, many thanks.

12 Alexis De Greiff Acknowledgements

When I began my PhD someone told me that if my marriage survived to my dissertation, it could survive anything. Thanks to Stefania’s patience we have passed this proof successfully. Not only she has been a loving and understanding partner, but also a sharp reader and an intellectual sparring from whom I continue to learn. In her double function of wife and colleague she has no parallel. Thanks

Ste for your complicity.

Last, but by no means least, voglio ringraziare la “Fondazione Gallini-

Guadagnini,” che mi ha accolto e mi ha offerto la possibilità di vivere tranquilla e felicemente a Milano. Grazie Ettore e Isa per l’incondizionato appoggio emozionale e materiale che mi avete dato.

A mis padres, Marta y Hjalmar, y a mis hermanos Kristian y Andrea, sin cuya comprensión, apoyo, e infinito amor nunca habría llegado a Gran Bretaña para continuar con la plácida vida del estudiante. Después de tantos años de dura separación, a ellos les dedico el fruto de este trabajo.

13 Introduction:

Creating a N ew Space for International

Science in Post-C olonial Times

his dissertation is about the politics of science in a United Nations (UN) Tscientific institution, the (Abdus Salam) International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP).1 It focuses on the establishment and early years of

the Centre, covering the two decades between 1960 and 1980, from the beginning

of negotiations to create the Centre to the conferral of the Nobel Prize upon its

director. The ICTP was officially inaugurated in Trieste (Italy) in 1964 and operated under the aegis of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).2 Its first director was the late Abdus Salam, Professor of Theoretical Physics at

Imperial College, London, who remained in this office for almost 30 years. The

Centre aimed to promote collaboration in theoretical physics between North and

South, as well as between East and West,2 and was conceived as a pilot project for

In 1997, shortly after Abdus Salam’s death, the Centre was renamed “The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics.” In this work I use the original name, ICTP. 2 The IAEA is one of the technical agencies of the United Nations. See David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: The First Forty Years (Vienna: IAEA Pub, 1997). J I will use the terms North-South and East-West in the way they are currently used in politii al science. North refers to the industrialised countries, some times also called “Atlantic countries”; East to the Soviet bloc; West to the United States and Europe; and South to the “Third World.” The term, “Third World,” which I personally find more accurate, was coined by the French demographer and economic historian Alfred Sauvy in 1952: “This Third World [is] unknown, exploited, despised like the Third State; it, too, wants to be something”, he wrote (Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète,” L'Observateur, 14 August, 1952). The term was catch on after the Afro-Asian Conference in Badung in 1955, in a book in honour to Sauvy and in a Journal (Tiers Monde) (Joseph L. Love, “'Third World'. A response to Professor Worsley,” Third World 14 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

similar UN-sponsored initiatives. The Centre’s pedagogical function was served

by a number of activities, including short or long courses, and workshops. A small

scientific staff carried out research in high-energy physics, and an important

fraction of the scientists who visited the ICTP also focused on research, although

not exclusively in the field of particle physics. Thirty years later, the Centre has expanded significantly not only in the number of annual visitors and meetings, but also in the scope of its research.* 4 * After 1979, when Abdus Salam shared the Nobel

Prize in physics with the Americans Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, the

ICTP’s funding increased substantially,''' and the ICTP is now a reference point to virtually all physicists and a significant portion of the scientific community, in the

Third World. The Centre estimates that at least one member of each Third World scientific institution devoted to theoretical physics has visited the institution.

However, it is arguable that its impact went well beyond the sphere of Third

World scientific development. Some of the ICTFjmost frequent visitors were to be appointed scientific advisors to their governments, and in 1997, Professor Rexhep

Mejdani, a regular visitor, was elected President of Albania. The Centre’s visitors

Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1980): 315-317). The notion of a Third World was closely associated to the Non-Alignment Movement. Nonetheless, as Joseph Love pointed out, Sauvy’s words expressed not only neutrality but also neglect, exploitation and revolutionary potential. It is this dialectics between neutrality and revolution what dominated much of the political life in the new states. This is one of the reasons why the “First” (Europe and USA, i.e. “The West”) and the “Second” itl-.e Communist Bloc) Worlds approached the “Third World” with distrust and fear. 4 See tables in A.M. Hamende, ed. From a Vision to a System (Trieste: Fondazione Intemazionale Trieste per ¡1 Progresso e la Liberia della Scienza, 1996), 439-470. , Luciano Bertocchi, “The International Centre for Theoretical Physics: Historical Developments and Present Status,” in From a Vision to a System. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (¡964-1994), edited by A.M. Hamende, 38-61 (Trieste: International Foundation Trieste for the Progress and the Freedom of Sciences, 1996), 41.

15 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

were not only Third World physicists, but included several Nobel Laureates and

other prominent physicists from industrialised countries.

This dissertation is situated at the intersection between institutional

history of science, historical analysis of the ideology of Third World development,

and the history of physics. It is concerned with the following kinds of questions:

What does an institution created to promote theoretical physics for Third World

development actually do? What was the discourse deployed to justify its creation

and existence? How did the institutional context of the UN constrain or redirect

this discourse and the practice of science during the so-called “development decades” (1960-1980)? To what extent could North-South scientific co-operation be, as Abdus Salam held, a force for emancipat ionof the Third World? What version of scientific internationalism prevailed during the post-colonial period?

Thus, this work is aimed at historians of science, as well as at historians of international relations and students of the United Nations system. There are also three specific reasons for studying the ICTP. Firstly, it was the initial and most important United Nations institution entirely devoted to scientific training and research. Secondly, it provided the model for several institutions that now play an important role in science, technology and development policies in the Third

World.6 Thirdly, it was seen by several Third World physicists as an entrance to mainstream research.

6 For instance, the Centro Internacional de Física in Santafé de Bogotá (Colombia), and the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The ICTP was also instrumental for the creation of other undertakings in Trieste such as: the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) (1978); the Trieste International Foundation for Scientific Progress and Freedom (1980); 16 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

However, I also had political motivations for embarking on this project.

During the 1950s and 1960s, large portions of the world’s population strove to

build a national identity within the context of international tension, national class

struggles, and ideological debate. Although the state of revolt is a well-known face

of the Third World, it is just one aspect of these nations’ history. As Arturo

Escobar and others point out, this period was marked by the construction of the

"development discourse” as a new form of domination over the new nations and,

more generally, over the so called “developing countries.”7 International

institutions, notably the World Bank and the United Nations technical agencies,

played a central role in nurturing the discourse and practice of development

programmes. The effect of these programmes has meant the creation of ever-

greater gaps between rich and poor countries, the widening of the internal social,

cultural and economic contrasts, the deprivation of the environment and so forth.

. ne workings of public rhetoric and practice of development are still largely

unexplored in current historiography, although some efforts have been made to

investigate the phenomenon in studies of discrimination through literary analysis,

and anthropological works on modernisation and resistance, especially in Asia and

the Third World Academy of Sciences (1981); the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and tti.' iechnology (1982); and the International Centre for Science and High Technology ( 1988). 7 From a Foucaultian perspective, Escobar analyses discourses about development and their relation to institutional practices in the second half of the twentieth century. Escobar observes that “Thinking of development in terms of discourse makes it possible to maintain the focus on domination - as earlier analyses, for instance, did - and at the same time to explore more fruitfully the conditions of possibility and the most pervasive effects of development” (Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking o f the Third World (Princeton: Priceton University Press, 1995), 5-6).

17 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

Africa, and Latin America.8 Curiously, not even these works have tackled the

;ssue of science and development to the extent that some historians have studied

the close link between colonial domination, science and technology. An important

lesson to leam from these works is the necessity of shifting the object of study

"from the people to be ’developed’ to the institutional apparatus that is doing the

‘developing’,” a principle that is followed in this dissertation.9 Therefore, this

work can be located in the context of critiques of development. These works are

now beginning to circulate in the West, perhaps more in the United States than in

Europe. Although they can bring some light also to problems in the West, there is

a reluctance on the part of scholars to recognise the value of Third World

contributions. As Escobar has pointed out, there is a responsibility that lies on

Western audiences: “If Third World intellectuals who travel to the West must

position themselves in a more self-conscious manner vis-à-vis both Third World

constituencies and their First World audiences - that is, with respect to the

political functions they take on - European and American audiences must be more

self-critical of their practices of reading Third World voices.”10

8 These works are classified among the post-colonial studies. See, for instance, V.Y. Mubimbe, The invetion o f Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics o f Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Homi Bhabha, The location o f culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1994); Arturo Escobar, “Discourse and Power in Development,” Alternatives 10, no. 3 (1984): 377-400; Vananda Shiva, Staying Alive. Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed Books, 1989); see also some of the papers contained in John Beverley, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna, eds. The Postmodernism debate in Latin America (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1995). ° Escobar, Encountering Development, 107. Idem, 224.

18 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

The creation of the ICTP meant the emergence of a space for international

science, for collaboration in theoretical physics, and for high standard scientific

research conducted by Third World scientists.11 The multi-dimensional character

of the Centre raises several questions and problems, regarding not only the history

of theoretical physics but also, and foremost, the role ascribed to pure research

within the formula “science and technology for Third World development.”

Salam’s writings on science and development have been widely translated and distributed across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, becoming a central part of the intellectual and ideological background for at least two generations of scientists of these continents.12 Because of the massive distribution of these works and other hagiographic material, Salam and the ICTP became, in view of Third World scientists, a demonstration of the claim that, in the words of former ICTP fellow,

“when [Third World people] have the right conditions, [they] can do as well as anybody.”Ij By scrutinising a centre promoting international co-operation in physics I hope to increase the understanding of the role of scientific institutions in the construction of development programmes and, concomitantly, leam about the global distribution of knowledge.

* * *

" For the role of physical, epistemological and social “spaces” in science see Crosbie Smith, and Jon Agar, eds. Making space for science: territorial themes in the shaping o f knowledge (¿asingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 1 Abdus Salam, Ideals and Realities. Selected Essays of Abdus Salam, Edited by C.H Lai and A. Kindwai, Third ed (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1989) counts at the moment on three editions and has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, French, Mandarin, Urdu and Rumanian.

19 Alexis De Greiff introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

The ICTP was, by definition, an international institution, visited by scientists

from different countries, operating under a variety of socio-economic and political

systems. It was. therefore, conceived, presented and viewed in certain scientific

and political circles as a manifestation of the new scientific internationalism that it

was hoped would be established in the post-colonial period. Therefore, studying

the history of the ICTP will allow us to examine what kind of scientific

internationalism emerged when Third World scientists aspired to be integrated into the international scientific community. Concomitantly, this study offers the opportunity to analyse the varying reactions of governments to the idea of establishing a United Nations institution devoted to science and Third World development.

The problem of nationalism and internationalism in science has long intrigued historians.* 14 Internationalism arose with unprecedented strength in the mid-nineteenth century. The advances of communications and transportation granted an international dimension to virtually every aspect of human activity,

11 Angela Camacho, the quotation was published in the ICTP website (' www.ictp.trieste.if) in 1097. l4In his seminal book The Social Function o f Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press., 1964 [1939]), J.D. Bernal dedicated one chapter to this issue identifying four chief “scientific circles” according to the barriers of language: the Anglo-American, the German, the French, and the Soviet. In commenting on non-western science and technology, Bernal stressed the constraints imposed by local cultures in Latin America, India, and the Islamic World. Following the Marxist tradition, Hillary Rose and Steve Rose pointed out that internationalism is a privilege restricted to a small elite “of those who regard themselves-and are regarded as-scientists" ( Science and Society (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1969), 181). Despite Bernal’s suggestion that epistemic communities can be defined by language domains, history of science, by and large dominated by Anglo-Saxons, take for granted that English is the “international language.” Nevertheless, this is not an obvious question “for Spanish-speaking countries to be low in science perhaps because of the inadequacy of international scientific literature in what is nevertheless a major world language,” as Derek De Solla Price pointed out (Derek De Solla, Little Science, Big Science... and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 192).

20 t\!e>:is De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

from the coffee industry to chess. Science, with its alleged universal character,

seemed to epitomise this international spirit, and both it and its practitioners were

repeatedly seen as potential agents for the promotion of the peaceful resolution of

conflicts.1' Some of the most enthusiastic and outspoken proponents of this

notion of science, and scientists - as internationalist, civil, and peace-creating -

were intellectual scientists themselves. Such propaganda was based on what Paul

Forman defined as the tenets of scientific ideology, that is “the propositions and

rhetoric asserting the reality and necessity of supranational agreement on scientific doctrine, of transnational social intercourse among scientists, and of international collaboration in scientific work.”15 16 However, as David Edgerton has pointed out in the case of British scientific intellectuals, their version of the facts was often profoundly unhistorical.17

It is perhaps not surprising that the literature on scientific internationalism has focused either on the first liberal globalisation period (1870-1914), and the crisis generated by the Great War and the inter-war years.18 This was partly

15 Lawrence Badash, “British and American Views on the German Menace in World War I,” Noies cmd Reports o f the Royal Society of London 34 (1979): 91-121.; Brigitte Schroeder-Guhedus, “Nationalism and Internationalism,” in Companion to the History o f Modern Science, edited by R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie and M.J.S. Hodge, 909-919 (London: Routledge, 1990). 16 Paul Forman, “Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists: The Ideology and Its Manipulation in Germany after World War I,” Isis 64 (1973): 151-180. 17 David Edgerton, “British Scientific Intellectuals and the Relations of Science, Technology and War,” in National Military Establishment and the Advancement o f Science and Technology, edited hy Paul Forman and José Manuel Sânchez-Ron (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub, 1996). ! See, for instance, Daniel Kevles, “'Into Hostile Political Camps': The Reorganization of International Science in World War I,” Isis 62, no. 211 (1971): 47-60.; Brigitte Schroeder- Gudehus, Les scientififiques et la paix: la communauté scientifique internationale au cours des annes 20 (Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1978);Forman, “Scientific Internationalism”; Badash, “British and American Views...”; Idem “Division of labour and the common good: the International Association of Academies, 1899-1914,” in Science, technology,

21 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

because war exacerbated national sentiments, providing an ideal social laboratory

to test the strength of scientific internationalism. The result was that, "[sjince

scientists in all countries at war aligned themselves very much in the same way as

the educated population in general, their attitudes attracted the historians’ interest

mainly in so far as these attitudes were unexpected or deviant, that is. in contrast

to what were supposed to be the principles of scientific internationalism.”19

It is more difficult to explain why the historiography of science has shown

such little interest in these issues in relation to political attitudes after 1940. One

could argue that, especially after 1945, there was a trend towards the

V ationalisation of science,” apparent in the establishment of national science

polic.es, especially concerned with the role of science in national security issues.20

However, the period after the Second World War witnessed the emergence of

several international initiatives for scientific co-operation led by multinational

organisations such as the United Nations (and its international technical agencies)

and society in the time o f Alfred Nobel: Nobel symposium 52, held at Bjorkborn. Karlskoga, Sweden, 17-22 August 1981, edited by Carl Gustaf Bernhard, Elisabeth T. Crawford and Per Sflrbom, 3-20 (Oxford ; New York: Published for the Nobel Foundation by Pergamon Press, 1982); E. Crawford, The Beginnings of the Nobel Institution: The Science Prizes, 1901-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 1984). For a review of the problem of nationalism and internationalism in science see Idem “Nationalism and Internationalism;” Ron Doel, “Intenationalism After 1940,” in The Cambridge History o f Science, Pol. 8: Modern Science in National and International Context., edited by D. N. Livingstone and R. L. Numbers (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Idem and Zuoyue Wang, “Science and Technology,” in Encyclopedia o f American Foreign Policy, edited by Alexander DeConde, Richard Dean Burns and Fredrik Logevall (New York: Scribners, forthcoming). 10 Shroeder-Gudehus, “Nationalism and Internationalism,” 917. *° E. Crawford, T. Shinn, and S. Sflrlin, “The Nationalization and Denationalisation of the Sciences: An Introductory Essay,” in Denationalising Science: the Context o f International Science Practice, edited by E. Crawford, T. Shinn and S. Sflrlin, 1-42 (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).

22 A'i.'ds De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU).21 In the same period,

some national academies set up foreign offices to promote international co

operation projects.-2 Nonetheless, even though international stability prevailed

throughout this period, the Cold War, the emergence of new states after anti

colonial struggles, and the increasing gap between poor and rich nations, produced

an acute tension in the international arena.23 Science, however, continued to be

invoked as a fundamental means of solving some of the most urgent problems,

including underdevelopment, political intolerance, and international conflicts.24

The rhetoric of scientific internationalism took a new and perhaps more dramatic turn after the war because of the increasing importance attributed to science and technology, catalysed by the threat of a nuclear conflict. Hence the post-cob'mal period offers an excellent and under-used context in which to study the

In 1947, the French delegation to the UN-Economic and Social Council proposed the creation of research laboratories in Europe as a way of “using science to improve living conditions of mankind;” a few years later, it became the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) (Dominique Pestre, “The First suggestions: 1949-June 1950,” in History o f CERN., edited by A. Hermann, J. Krige, U. Mersits and D. Pestre, 63-96 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1987), 65). In 1955, Eisenhower set up the “Atoms for Peace” initiative under the banner of the United Nations. In 1957, in another effort to promote international co-operation, the ICSU co-ordinated the International Geophysical Year (Frank Greenaway, International Council of Scientific Unions, Science International: a History o f the International Council o f Scientific Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 1996)). " Ron Doel, “Scientists as Policy Makers, Advisors and Intelligence Agents: Linking Contemporary Diplomatic History with the History of Contemporary Science,” in The Historiography on Contemporary Science and Technology , edited by T. SOderqvist, 215-244 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Pub, 1997). Eric Hobsbawm, Age o f Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century (London: Michel Josep, 1994), 225-256. ■ ' The most evident example is the kind of motivations aduced to create the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (Julian Huxley, Memories II (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1973); Aant Elzinga, “Unesco and the Politics of Scientific Internationalism,” in Internationalism and Science, edited by Aant Elzinga and Catharina LandstrOm, 89-131 (London: Taylor Graham, 1996)).

23 Alexis De GreifF Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

phenomenon of international science and the ideology of scientific

internationalism.2'''

Indeed, as some studies suggest, in areas such as nuclear armament and

space research after 1957, the role of scientists in the formulation of foreign policy

was crucial.-6 Although there is an extensive literature on the impact of the Cold

War on basic science in universities, at least for the United States, we know little

about the impact of the Cold War on the development of international science and

multinational collaboration.* 27 * * * One * 21* of the most interesting aspects in this regard is

5 Donald Doel defines international science as the “individual collaboration and participation in iiuemational scientific unions as well as deliberate efforts by governments to utilize science and scientists to reach foreign policy goals" (“Scientists as Policy Makers,” 216). This is a different notion from Forman’s definition of the tenets of scientific ideology, which is part of the scientists’ own rhetoric. Doel’s is a historiographic concept aimed to describing the actual purpose of the scientific internationalism, whereas Forman’s is a historical term, useful to describe the discourse by scientists in specific historical contexts. "6 On the nuclear disarmament movement see Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash: the First Ten Years. History o f the Conferences o f Science and World Affairs (London: Heinenmann, 1967); L. Wittner, One World or None. A history o f the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1993); Idem Resisting the Bomb. A history of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1997)). On the United States space policy see R. Bulkeley, The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press., 1991); Walter MacDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History o f the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985). On the European space programme see John Krige, A. Russo, and L. Sebesta, A History o f the European Space Agency 1958-1987., Vol. I and II (Noordwijk (TheNetherlands): ESA Publications Division, 2000). Fora review of some of the major issues concerned with science, scientists and foreign policy in the United States case between 1945 and 1960 see Doel, “Scientists as Policy Makers.” 21 On the industrial-academic-military complex in the United States see S.W. Leslie, “Playing the Education Game to Win: The Military and Interdisciplinary Research at Stanford,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987): 55-88.; Paul Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940- 1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987): 149-229.; Paul Forman, “Inventing the Maser in Postwar America,” , edited by A. Thackray, 105-134, 1992); Daniel Kevles, “Kl S2: Korea, Science and the State,” Big Science. The Growth o f Large-Scale Research , edited by P. Galison and B. Hevly, 312-333, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Peter Galison, “Physics between the War and Peace,” in Science, Technology and the Military , edited by E. Medelsohn, E. Smith and P. Weingart, 47-85: Dordrecht, 1988). For a more international set of papers on the relation of the military and science and technology, see Paul Forman, and José Manuel Sânchez-Ron, eds. National Military Establishment and the Advancement o f Science and Technology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academy Pub, 1996). The only Third World country studied in this volume is Argentina in Eduardo L. Ortiz, “Army and Science in Argentina: 1850-1950,” in National Military Establishment and the Advancement o f Science and Technology, edited by Paul Forman and José Manuel Sânchez-Ron (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academy Pub, 1996). On the early nuclear projects in Argentina see Mario Mariscotti, El secreto atômico de 24 /\ 'exis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

the establishment of international scientific forums. Creating environments for scientific exchange between the superpowers was never a trivial problem either for foreign policy makers or for scientific advisors concerned with issues of national security.28 There are several open questions regarding similar tensions in other multinational spaces, and this dissertation is an effort to shed light on some of them. They will include: what was the position of different governments towards initiatives sponsored by a neutral organisation such as the United Nations? What kind of political dividends or costs did they see in this kind of initiative? What was the role played by scientists attached to foreign or diplomatic services in assessing international activities? To what extent those scientists who acted as advisers to international forums reflected the interests of their own delegations?

The “prehistory” of the ICTP - that is, the period commencing with the first presentation of the idea at an international conferences and ending with the

Centre’s provisional establishment - is illuminating for three reasons. The first of these concerns the geopolitics of Trieste. In historical studies on international organisations, if any role is given to the local political and intellectual elite at all, it is a minor one. It is taken for granted that the city would be interested in hosting the organisation, but very rarely are their reasons and actual role in the negotiations spelled out. Local authorities and scholars from Trieste eagerly

!h:.:vv! (Buenos Aires: Suramericana-Planeta, 1985). On the Argentinean nuclear policy in the I r>?0s, see Jacques Hymans, “Of Gauchos and Gringos: Why Argentina Never Wanted The Bomb, and Why America Thought It Did,” Security Studies 10, no. 2 (2001 (forthcoming)). On post- World War II science and politics see Cathryn Carson, Ethan Pollock, Peter Westwick, and James Williams (eds), Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30 Part I (1999).

25 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

lobbied to host the new Centre. The end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire led the

city to an economic and a cultural decline, and according to the historian Ara and

tne writer Magris, after the experience of two World Wars the geopolitical

situation of Trieste engendered in the Triestini the sense of living in a peripheral

centre.29 Trieste, they argue, developed a “border identity” (un ’ identità di frontiera ), in contrast to a “national identity.” The negotiation between Italy and

Yugoslavia (1945-1954) is referred to in Italian history as the question of Trieste

(La questione di Trieste), and is a central event in the history of diplomatic and international relations. Consequently, the historiography of Trieste and the Istria oeninsula focuses almost exclusively on that period and only makes a few remarks about the 1960-1980 decades.30 However, as I shall argue, the 1945-54 events prepared the ground for the emergence of several international scientific activities in the city. The creation of the ICTP cannot be understood without reference to geopolitical context of the host-city. Furthermore, during this phase of the story

Salam seems to play a minor role, a point which will allow us to discuss the problem of memory and the writing of Whig institutional histories.

The second reason for studying the origins of the ICTP is that scientists were an essential part of the delegations to the IAEA. A selected group of scientists also formed the IAEA’s Scientific Advisory Committee. These actors, who we could call the “scientific diplomats,” deserve careful examination if we

's Y. Rabkin, Science between the Superpowers (New York: Priority Press., 1988); see also MacDougall, The Heavens and the Earth. Angelo Ara, and Claudio Magris, Trieste. Un'identità di frontiera Torino:( Ed. Laterza, 1987).

26 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science wish to understand the interplay of science and political power in the international arena.31 In spite of historians’ arguments to the contrary, the idea that the interactionsbetween scientists and politicians are weak, and even conflicting, still prevails. I believe that this image is deeply rooted in the anti-historical version of scientists by C.P. Snow, and still contested by only a few historians of science.32

According to this tradition, the British ‘'decline” throughout the twentieth century was due to the absence of scientists in the civil service.33 Not surprisingly, the scientists have used Snow’s arguments in order to enhance their political influence.

The public rhetoric about the marginality of scientists in national and international affairs constitutes an important element in the construction of their own identity.

Instances of scientists being involved in international politics are seen as exceptional, a belief that could be genuinely held only by those scientists who, as

Traweek says, are “in the margins of power - students, disconnected postdocs, physicists at less-than-central universities, those in less-than-central-countries, and those in less-than-central positions at major laboratories.”34 Those scientists who are in central institutions, positions and countries know that their political

50 Elio Apih, Trieste (Roma. Bari: Editori Laterza, 1988). 51 Some examples of scientific diplomats are the following: the explorer and Nobel Laureate F. Nansen (Ronald Huntford, Nansen: the explorer as hero (London: Duckworth, 1997)); the astronomer George E. Hale (Kevles, ‘“Into Hostile Political Camps’”); the biologists and first director of UNESCO Julian Huxley (Greenway, Science International)', Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat and others involved in the disarmament movement. 32 In particular see David Edgerton, “C.P. Snow as Anti-Historian of British Science,” Paper presented at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting (Leeds, September i v97). " C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 4 Sharon Traweek, “Border Crossing: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan,” in Science as Practice and Culture, edited by Andrew Pickering, 429-465 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19992), quotation is on page 422. 27 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

marginality is relative, probably similar to that of other members in the civil and

diplomatic services, but certainly not greater than that of other intellectuals, let

alone other citizens. Ironically, some of these scientists are among the most

outspoken on the subject of scientists’ endemic political isolation, Snow being

perhaps the most eloquent example of this gap between ideology, in the Marxist

sense of false consciousness, and reality.

The third reason concerns the hostility of most industrialised countries and

the Socialist bloc toward the proposal. This is another example of the difficulty of

setting up projects aiming to foster multinational co-operation during the Cold

War. The analysis of this episode allows us to discuss in detail the different

conceptions of the role of science and technology in Third World development.

Scientific and technological co-operation has been a major political instrument in

international relations, as was apparent during the Cold War when, for instance, the US encouraged the scientific and technological development in the Third W orld as an integral component of the war against communism.35 In January 1954, on the

’ The Point Four provisions of the Marshall Plan stated that “we [the United States of America] must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits for our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” (the complete text is reproduced in Gilbert Rist, The history o f development. From Western origins to global faith , translated by Patrick Camiller (London, New York, Cape Town: ZED Books, University of Cape Town Press, 1999), Appendix 1). US concern with the role of science and technology in the Post War foreign policy was stated in 1950 in the State Department report Science and Foreign Policy (Doel, “Scientists as Policy Makers”). To what extent this affected foreign policy or science in other parts of the globe is not clear yet. As to whether CERN was created as another “American Puppet", Krige and Pestre have pointed out that this is not completely unreasonable for every action at the time was permeated by the Cold War (John Krige, and Dominique Pestre, “The how and the why of the birth of CERN,” in History o f CERN. Vol. /, edited by A Hermann, J. Krige, U Mersits and D. Pestre, 523-543 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1987), 540). The access to new material has enabled scholars of Cold War science to consider how the Cold War reconfigured, redirected or distorted scientific practices in the United States and the USSR (see Mark Solovey (Ed.), Social Studies o f Science. Special Issue on Science in the Cold War. Vol. 31, no. 2 (2001)). See also Carson, Cathryn, Ethan Pollock, Peter Westwick, and 28 lexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

eve of President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech, Nelson A. Rockefeller,

the US President’s special adviser, conceived the idea of an “Atomic Marshall

Plan” for the world. According to this plan, the US would pay US $15m for at

least forty research reactors to be exported to “friendly” nations, in particular to

India, Japan and Brazil where elections were pending, as well as to Italy, but the

proposal was not approved.36 The UK Atomic Energy Commission promoted

collaboration in nuclear research after 1955 especially with India as well as the

countries of the Baghdad Pact (Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey). Kennedy’s “Alliance

for Progress’ , designed as a deterrent to Latin American countries tempted to

follow tine Cuban example, coincided with the reshuffle of scientific faculties in

Latin American universities and the establishment of national and regional ag. -.ties

modelled on the National Science Foundation. It has been suggested that ties

between the US and sub-Saharan Africa were relatively weak, because scientists

from that region did not compete within existing imperial networks.37 When the

new African nations emerged, the US Agency for International Development promoted “higher education for development” in the region.38 Similarly, the Soviet

Union knew that science and technology were important instruments of foreign policy. The USSR model of academies was copied, with more or less success, by 18 *

James Williams (eds). Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30 Part 1 (1999). ,b R. Hewlett, Hol I, J., Anders, R., Atoms for Peace and War: Eisenhower and the Atomic :>ergy Commission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 245. Doel, “Internationalism after 1940.” 18 In Africa institutionalisation and professionalisation came after de-colonisation, mainly in the 1960s and even 1970s (T.O. Eisemon, “The Implantation of Science in Nigeria and Kenya,” Minerva 17 (1979): 504-526).

29 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

the countries within its sphere of influence.39 According to Pallo, as a result of

Soviet political dominance in Eastern Europe, Eastern scientists were

ivstematically isolated from their Western peers, which he argues created a

"world-science” behind the iron curtain, a notion drawn from Immanuel

Wallerstein's concept of "world-economy.”40 Unfortunately, North-South

scientific co-operation, as a case study of international science, has been largely

neglected. The confrontation between the “developing” and the “developers”

during the ICTP negotiations show how national interests guided the constitution

of international co-operative programmes for development in the second half of

the twentieth century. In the same vein, the negotiations that took place between

the ICTP and the Ford Foundation reveal the difficulties philanthropic bodies

found in meeting the demands of Third World scientific intellectuals. Here, again,

the problem concerns the role ascribed to science in different socio-political

contexts.

The ICTP, and Salam in particular, were crucial participants in the debate

about the role of science and technology in Third World development, which was

10 Loren Graham, “The Formation of Soviet Research Institutes: A Combination of Revolutionary Innovation and International Borrowing,” Social Studies o f Science 5 (1975): 303-329. 40 The “world-economy” introduced in 1. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalism agriculture and the origins o f the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press., 1974), is used to differenbate it from “world economy;” the latter refers to the economic system of exchange at a global scale, whereas the former describes the kind of economies that are self-contained within their own geo-political boundaries. Palló extends this notion to argue that the Socialist bloc had a self-contained world of science in terms of content as well as of institutional exchange (G. Palló, “Internationalism in Soviet World-Science: the Hungarian Case,” in Denationalising Science: the Context o f International Science Practice, edited by E. Crawford et al„ 209-232 (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993)).

30 /\¡tx¡s De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

to be central to several scenarios after the Second World War.41 Since this

dissertation analyses Salam’s view of the problem and the type of model

promoted by the ICTP, it seems appropriate to situate the discussion historically

by introducing voices that expressed different opinions. The promotion of science

and technology became, at least in theory, an integral element of the economic

models advanced by various organisations. The United Nations Economic Council

for Latin America (ECLA, created in 1947) led by the economist Raul Prebisch is a

case in point.42 The “developmentalist” doctrine ( desarrollismo) advanced by the

ECLA was to inspire the dependency theorists - who created the most original and

fruitful theoretical framework that came from the South in the second half of the

twentieth century, to which I will return. In a different context, in 1960 the

Weizmann Institute convened the first Rehovolt Conference to discuss “the role of science in the advancement of the new states.”43 Similar endeavours were

■mdertaken by the United Nations which, in 1964, set up UNESCO’s “Science for

41 The problem of science and technology and development had been a major concern among colonial powers, which appointed special committees to study the matter. In the British case for example, it was of particular significance the study prepared in 1938 by Lord Hailey, and expanded as a report in 1956 at the request of the Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa South of the Sahara and the Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara. Interestingly, these studies stressed the importance of developing “pure” science instead of mere technology. However, in this context “science” meant vast surveys of African natural and human resources. See E.B. Worthington, Science in the Development o f Africa. (Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, LTD; CCTA; CSA, 1958). For a survey study of the mechanisms and main organisations committed with North-South co-operation see Jacques Gaiilard, “North-South Research Partnership: Is Collaboration Possible between Unequal Partners?,” Knowledge and Policy: the International Journal o f Knowledge Transfer and Utilization 7, no. 2 (1994): 31-63, although he focuses mainly on the period 1980-1995. For a historical and sociological debate about the North- South collaboration see Idem ed. Coopérations Scientifiques Internationales , Edited by Roland VVaast, Vol. 7, Les Science Hors D'Occident an XXe Siégle (Paris: ORSTOM Éditions, 1996). 4'Hodara, Prebisch y la CEPAL: Sustancia, trayectoria y contexto institucional (Mexico City: Colegio de Mexico City., 1987); L. Soils, Raúl Prebisch at ECLA: years of creative intellectual effort (San Francisco: International Centre for Economic Growth., 1988). 41 Ruth Gruber, Science and the New Nations (New York: Pyramid Books, 1960).

31 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

Development” programme based on the “Lagos Plan.” After these preparatory discussions and initiatives, in 1979 the “United Nations Conference on Science and Technology” was held in Vienna. In the late 1960s the ICSU also set up a

Committee on Science and Technology in Developing Countries, chaired by

P.M.S. Blackett.44

There were as many points in common as differences among the opinions held by those who actively participated in these meetings. There were heated discussions about whether poor countries should carry out scientific research or, alternatively, buy the available technology on the international market. The

. .’btlelies of these discussions have by and large been overlooked or ignored in the literature on development. In general, the image has been that the 1950s and 1960s were characterised by general agreement on the imperative of modernisation through technology transfer, whereas in the 1970s there was an awareness of the necessity of developing an endogenous scientific community (a doctrine led, among others, by the dependency theorists).45 The reality, however, was somewhat more complex, and a systematic analysis of the various lines of thought is badly needed. I hope that the deconstruction of Salam’s discourse will open the way for further monographic studies, that eventually lead to comparative analyses.

44 G. Jones, The Role o f Science and Technology in Developing Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). 45 Gai I lard, “North-South Research Partnership.”

32 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

The dependency theory, which can be placed among the “dissident voices”

of development,46 led to a debate that was particularly fruitful in Latin America.47

The central thesis was that “underdevelopment” in the periphery was inseparable

from capitalist development in the metropolis, where the metropolis referred to

the Western imperialist (and, after decolonisation, Neo-imperialist) powers and

the periphery to the colonies (and the Third World). In their view, local élites

acted as agents of neo-colonialism and underdevelopment. Third World economic

and cultural dependency and social crisis was due to collusion between external

actors, the colonial powers, and internal ones, the local élites, and by extension,

scientific and technological development in peripheral economies was severely

limited by external interests defended by the local elite.48 While these studies nave

Among the non-dependentist dissidents François Perroux and Dudley Seers deserve a special mention. >ee, for instance, F. Cardoso, and E. Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, translated by M. Urquidi (Berkeley: University of California Press., 1979); Celso Furtado, La economía Latinoamericana (Mexico City: Siglo XXL, 1976); Oswaldo Sunkel, and Pedro Paz, El subdesarrollo latinoamericano y la teoría del desarrollo, 9th ed (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores S.A., 1976); Celso Furtado, El subdesarrollo latinoamericano (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económico, 1982). The school was “popularised” by A.G. Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan., 1978) in the United States. The school has roots in the United States (Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy), in Chile (ECLA and Oswaldo Sunkel), in Brazil (Cardoso, Faletto and Celso Furtado), in Colombia (Orlando Fais Borda), and in Mexico (Rodolfo Stavenhagen). Other intellectuals joined this first group, among them Samir Amin (Africa), Pierre Jalée, Dieter Senghaas and others. For a review see Rist, The History of Development, Chapter 7. 48 For a review of the debate about science, technology and dependency see Hebe Vessuri, “The Social Study of Science in Latin America,” Social Studies of Science 17 (1987): 519-554.; Thomas G lick, “Science in twentieth-century Latin America,” in The Cambridge History o f Latin America, vol. 4, Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth Century Latin America, edited by L. Bethel I, 287-360 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 347-355. On the tension between the universality of science and national interests see Hebe Vessuri, “Universalismo y nacionalismo en la ciencia moderna. Una aproximación desde el caso venezolano,” Quipu 8, no. 2 (1991): 255- 27! . On the role of the international. On science in Spain studied from the point of view of the centre-periphery dichotomy, see María Jesús Santesmases, and Emilio Muñoz, “Scientific Organizations in Spain (1950-1970): Social Isolation and International Legitimation of Biochemists and Molecular Biologists on the Periphery,” Social Studies o f Science 27 (1997): 187-219. For a reconsideration of the science and development question see J.J. Salomon, The Uncertain Ouest: Science, Technology and Development (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1994).

33 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

been praised for stimulating a critical discussion of capitalist development at the

periphery, they have equally been criticised for their “ideological” bias and lack of

empirical evidence.49 Irrespective of their merits and flaws, which I do not intend

to discuss, these studies marked a turning point in the history of ideas in Latin

America in particular, and the Third World in general.50

The process of institutionalisation and professionalisation of science in

Latin America preceded and was instrumental in the establishment of national

scientific policies in the 1960s (and 1950s in the case of Argentina and Brazil).51

At the same time, sociological and economic studies stimulated by the dependency

theorists provided thoughtful analyses of the problems of science and technology

in peripheral countries.52 Geologist Amilcar Herrera, in his influential book

JQ Among the critiques to the dependency theory from the economic history point of view see John Coatsworth, Alan M. Taylor, and David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies., Latin America and the world economy since 1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University/David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 1998). For a general critique see Dudley Seers, Dependency theory : a critical reassessment (London: Pinter, 1981); B.N. Ghosh, Dependency theory revisited (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), which includes a complete bibliography. 50 Joseph L. Love, “Economic Ideas and Ideologies in Latin America since 1930." in The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. Vf. Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth Century Latin America., edited by L. Bethell, 207-274 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 51 The process of institutionalisation began in the 1940 and 1950s when the inaccessibility of European scientists meant that US universities received Latin American fellows in their place. Since the late 1940s, scientific communities in countries like Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela pushed for the creation of national scientific councils. Such ideas came to fruition, in the majority of cases, in the 1960s. The Organization of American States co-ordinated some of these activities and carried out surveys of the scientific and technological facilities in the region. The Inter-American Development Bank provided infra-structural aid. All these organisms had very similar objectives and structures. On this process see Glick, “Science in Twentieth Century Latin America,” 348-349. On science in Brazil see Simon Schwatzman, A Space for Science. The Development o f the Scientific Community in Brazil (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). ” Celso Furtado was among the most influential scholars who argued that the introduction of heavy technology in Latin America forced these countries to specialise in exporting raw material rather than in fostering local development (Celso Furtado, La economía Latinoamericana (Mexico City: Siglo XXL, 1976)). Other studies strongly influenced by the dependency school were the following: Oswaldo Sunkel, “Underdevelopment, The Transfer of Science and Technology, and the Latin American University,” Human Relations 24 (1970): 1-18. Also, Francisco Sagasti, “Underdevelopment, Science and Technology: The Point of View of the Underdeveloped 34 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

Ciencia y Politico en América Latina , developed a socio-historical analysis of

scientific research of Latin America. He criticised the contradiction between what

he called the "explicit” and the '‘implicit” science policies operating in the South.

The former, the rhetoric of science for development, was the façade covering the

local elite s lack of commitment to national development, a disinterest which, according to Herrera, characterised the implicit policy.53 In the late 1960s and

!970s, the Argentinean mathematician Oscar Varsavsky (1920-1976) stressed that independence from neo-colonialist powers would be impossible to achieve without developing a “new science”, a “politicised science” ( ciencia nueva, ciencia politizadcif4 ready to fight against:

[the] researcher who has adapted himself to the scientific market, who chooses to ignore the social meaning of his activity, removing it from the political problems, and who devotes himself fully to his “career”, accepting the norms and values of the large international centres, as crystallized in the academic hierarchy.55

Dependency theory was perhaps the most original contribution to science studies by and about Third World scientists. Several scientists and intellectuals in this region rebelled against the assertiveness of the North, and demonstrated the

Countries,” Science Studies 3 (1973): 47-59.; Idem, “Towards Edogenous Science and Technology for Another Development,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 16 (1980): 321-340; Jorge Sábato, La ciencia y la tecnología en el desarrollo futuro de América Latina (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos Documentos Teóricos., 1970); Idem, ed. El pensamiento latinoamericano en la problemática Ciencia-Tecnología-Desarrollo-Dependencia (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1975). For an interesting discussion among the main representatives of the dependency theory, including some scientists, on the role of science and technology in Latin American “independence,” see Severo Fagundes Gomes, and Rogelio Cerquira Leite, eds. Ciencia, Tecnología e Independencia (Sao Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1978). ' ’ Amilcar Herrera, Ciencia y Politico en America Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Eds., 1971). J rollowing this thesis, a popular journal was published by a group of people linked by the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales in Buenos Aires (cited by Vessuri, “The Social Study,” footnote 25). 55 Vessuri, “The Social Study,” 529. See also Oscar Varsavsky, Ciencia, política y cientificismo (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1969). 35 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

possibility of offering alternative solutions to the problem of the role of science in

the Third World.36 Dependency theory also produced a lively debate within the

scientific communities, particularly on the question of the social use of “pure”

science in developing contexts.

During the 1970s, politicians and administrators, eager to cut funds for

research in universities, and to close or reduce other research institutions,

strategically invoked the irrelevance of pure science for Third World development.

In several Third World countries, resources for research for pure science, already

scarce, were radically reduced and the research that did continue was redirected

towards projects with “a social utility.” Repressive and populist regimes saw

•^¡.cntific intellectuals and even science as a potential source of social disorder and

ideological alienation.37 In Pakistan, where Salam was a scientific advisor, the

populist regime of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto questioned the relevance of “pure” science

to an underdeveloped and basically agrarian country. Several scientific intellectuals

felt that populist discourses by the dependentists were detrimental to national

science. After all, this kind of argument had severely damaged their professional

lives by raising doubts on their actual role in national development. 57*

T. Shinn, J. Spaapen, and V. Krishna, “Science, Technology and Society Studies and Development Perspectives in South-North Transactions,” in Science and Technology> in a Developing World. Sociology o f Science Yearbook 1995, edited by T. Shinn, J. Spaapen and V. Krishna, 1-34 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub, 1997). 57 An extreme case was the 1978 “vector affair”, in Córdoba, Argentina, in which “abstract science” was associated with particular “subversive” ideologies, in particular secularism and Marxism. The provisional authorities prohibited the “new math” adducing, among other things, that: “Some themes of mathematics use words such as vector and matrix, which are typical of a Marxist or typically subversive vocabulary. The same happens with set theory which evidently tends to massify [masificar] and evolve multitudes” (quoted by Glick, “Science in twentieth- century Latin America”, 355). However, the real problem the militaries perceived in the new

36 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

Salam's discourse and the ICTP activities represented the antithesis to the

claims of scientists like Varsavsky. As we shall see, Salam stressed the importance

of "pure" science and of strengthening relations with scientists and institutions in

Europe and the United States. In his view, limiting funds for fundamental research

entailed a narrow conception of the problem, for scientific underdevelopment was

the first cause of dependence, and therefore, scientists were crucial agents for

national independence. Salam also maintained that science was an inherently a-

p. = litical endeavour, and that scientists were thus mere technicians, or at best

members of the technocratic apparatus. Moreover, one of the ICTP’s goals was to

train scientists to serve as scientific advisors to their governments, and combat the

“politicisation of science.” However, the formula “science and technology for development” is in itself a political and an ideological instrument, rooted in a particular notion of history according to which science and/or technology drive human societies; in other words, it is an expression of the positivist ideal. Thus the ICTP was essentially a political project which must to be seen and studied as such. By analysing Salam’s thought we will be able to discover the intellectual tradition behind his apparently original theses and thus disclose the assumptions and political models that shaped his conception of the relation of science and society. This study is pertinent for the historiography of North-South relations because the technocratic justification of scientific development in the Third World

mathematics was actually that it opened up the possibility of having multiple alternative systems which in political terms represented a threat to the stability of the ruling class.

37 Alexis De Greift" Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

has been deeply influenced by Salam’s arguments, largely via the scientists who

visited the ICTP.

* * *

Another very important strand of investigation are the issues surrounding training, diffusion and reception in theoretical physics. The way in which pedagogical and research practices have shaped scientific knowledge has begun to be recognised as a fruitful field of research in the historiography of theoretical physics.58 However, while these studies are an important step towards understanding the stabilisation and diffusion of scientific theories, methods and practices, these authors focus exclusively on American and European scenarios - a critique that can, of course, be applied to the new historiography of twentieth-century science in general. Indeed, most historians, philosophers and sociologists of twentieth-century science are entirely oblivious to the problems associated with the globalisation of knowledge.

While there is an extensive literature on the centre-periphery relationship in the context of imperialism and science, very little has been written about the movement of knowledge after the emergence of the Third World.59 In particular,

s Kathryn Mary Olesko, Physics as a calling: discipline and practice in the Königsberg seminar for physics , Cornell history of science series, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); David Kaiser, “Making Theory: Producing Physics and Physicists in Postwar America” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2000); Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory. A Pedagogical History o f Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, 1760-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). ^ On science and imperialism the literature is huge. Several of these studies in the 1970s were influenced by George Basal la, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611-622. Basalla’s model was later criticised in A. Lafuente, A. Elena, and M. Ortega, eds. Mundializacion de la Cienciay la Cultura Nacional (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1993). For a review and a bibliography on science and imperialism see Lewis Pyenson, “Science and Imperialism,” in Companion to the History o f Modern Science, edited by R.C Olby, G.N Cantor, J.R..R Christie and M.J.S. Hodge, 920-933 (London: Routledge, 1996). A special mention deserves Roy 38 Alexis De Greift' Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

we know virtually nothing about the role of training in the establishment of a

common knowledge shared by selected social groups in Latin America, Asia,

Africa, Europe and North America. Such globalisation was possible thanks to the

globalisation of intellectual resources. However, in contrast to what the liberal

doctrine claims, having technical competence is a necessary but not a sufficient

condition to enable participation in global enterprises; it is necessary to have

access to the ongoing research problems, and this is granted only by direct contact

with other actors in the global network. Hence one of tire aims of this dissertation

is to show how the ICTP became a central factor for the universalisation of

theoretical physics. By using the neologism universalisation I want to stress the

now widely accepted fact that science becomes universal only through pedagogic

McLeod, “On Visiting the moving Metropolis: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records o f Australian Science 5, no. 3 (1982): 1-16. On the Latin American case see Juan José Saldaña, ed. Cross Cultural Diffusion o f Science: Latin America (Mexico City: Cuadernos de Quipu 2, 1987). Attempts to discuss the problem of the centre-periphery relation in twentieth-century physics are L. Pyenson, and M. Singh, “Physics on Periphery: A world survey, 1920-1929,” Scientometrics 6, no. 5 (1984): 279-306 and Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences: German Expansion Overseas, 1900-1930 (New York: P. Lang., 1985), although it would unfair to consider these studies contributions to the new historiography of science. On the scientific exchange between Latin-America and North-America see Eduardo L. Ortiz, “La conexión Harvard: La política interamericana de Buena Vecindad de Roostvelt y su impacto en el desarrollo de las ciencias exactas en América Latina,” Paper presented at the Jumadas de Historia de la Ciencia Argentina (Buenos Aires 2001). On the transmission of mathematical knowledge between European peripheral countries and Argentina, see Idem “Una alianza por la ciencia: las relaciones entre Argentina y España a principios de este siglo,” Llull 11 (1988): 247- 261, and Idem “The nineteenth-century international mathematical community and its connection with those on the Iberian periphery,” in L'Europe mathématique - Mythes, histoires, identités. Mathematical Europe - Myths, History, Identity, edited by C. Goldstein, J. Gray and J. Ritter (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences des l'homme, 1996); Idem, “Transferencia de Matemática Pura y Física Teórica de Portugal a Argentina en 1943-58: Beck, Monterio y Ruy Gomes,” in Un dia com o Centro de Estudos Matemáticos do Porto, edited by Maria de Ceu Silva, 1-24 (Porto: Universidade do Porto, 2001) and Idem, “Ciencia y Técnica en Argentina y España,” Revista de la Sociedad de Historia de la Ciencia 12 (1989): 33-150. On “peripheral science” in Latin America see Marcos Cueto, “Andean Biology in Perú. Scientific Styles on Periphery,” Isis 80 (1989): 640-658; Elena Diaz, Yolanda Texera, and Hebe Vessuri, eds. La ciencia periférica: ciencia y sociedad en Venezuela (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1984). See also Lea Velho, “Science on the Periphery: A Study of the Agricultural Scienfic Community in Brazilian Universities” (DPhil dissertation, University of Sussex, 1985). On the participation of Latin American countries in Big Science see Idem and O. Jr. Pessoa, “The Decision-Making in the

39 Alexis De Greift" Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

institutions dedicated to teaching a standard set of techniques, concepts and

practices; a process that seems with interesting parallels to the spread of religion

and the role of missionaries and ecclesiastic institutions.60

The ICTP was created as a new space both for training and for research in

theoretical physics. The political conditions in which the Centre had to operate

made this double function problematic in terms of the image it projected. While the

ICTP had to show itself to be an excellent research centre, the heterogeneity of the

visitors forced it to provide training for research. In other words, the ICTP was an institution for continuing education aimed at Third World physicists, and consequently, they viewed it as a iheir research centre, achieving probably the same level of excellence of other research centres such as MIT or CERN.

Conversely, scientists in the North perceived it as a centre that fostered science in the Third World, and therefore of little relevance for the advancement of scientific knowledge in theoretical physics. In the same way the Third World is labelled the

‘ developing world,” the ICTP was seen as a centre for “developing scientists.”

For Third World scientists, the ICTP represented an institution where they could conduct mainstream research because it was a place in which they could learn from senior physicists in the North what were considered pertinent problems by the international scientific community, a process Salam called “breaking the barriers of isolation.” I suggest that isolation is actually a phrase used to express the

Construction of the Synchrotron Light National Laboratory in Brazil. Social Studies of Science,” Social Studies o f Science 28. no. 2 (April) (1998): 195-219. 00 The analogy has been made, for instance, in John Heilbron, “The earliest missionaries of Copenhagen spirit,” Reveu d' historie des sciences etleurs applications 38 (1985): 194-230.. 40 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

awkwardness of every non-European, non-American cultural manifestation. The

current use of this phrase, by Third World scientists themselves describing their

working conditions, reveals their difficulty of finding a social role in local as well

as international contexts.* 61 The notion of isolation implies that they accept that

their research requires the help of the developed scientists. This kind of discourse

also denotes an asymmetric relation that has been analysed by sociological studies

oi international collaboration between “unequal partners,” but rarely addressed in

the history of science.62

With the emergence of quantum mechanics in the first three decades of this

century, theoretical physics spread slowly but surely first in Europe and then in

the United States. New chairs were created in the late 1920s and 1930s to

accommodate theoretical physicists most of whom had been trained in Gottingen

and the now legendary Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.63 The subject acquired

61 1 am using the term role here in the sense attributed in Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's role in society. A comparative study (London: Prentice-Hall International Inc., 1971). s' V. Shiva, and J. Bandyopadhyay, “The Large and Fragile Community of Scientists in India,” Minerva 18, no. 4 (1980): 575-594.; Jacques Gaillard, Scientists in the Third World (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991); Idem, “The behaviour of scientists and Scientific Communities,” in The Uncertain Quest: Science, Technology and Development, edited by J. J. Salomon, 201-236 (Tokyo: United Nations University Press., 1994). 61 About the origins and early developments of theoretical physics see C. Jungnickel, and R. McCormmach, Intelectual Mastery o f Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein (Chicago: [S.l]: American Institute of Physics, 1986). On mathematical physics in nineteenth- century Cambridge University see Warwick, Masters o f Theory. On the emergence of quantum mechanics see for example J. Hendry, The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli Dialogue (London: Bantham Books, 1984). Among the many internal histories see M. Jammer, The conceptual development of quantum mechanics (Dordrecht: Reidel., 1991). On the emergence of theoretical physics in the US see S. Coben, “The scientific establishment and the transmission of quantum mechanics to the United States, 1919-32,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 442-466; Silvan Schweber, “The empiricist temper regnant: theoretical physics in the United States 1920-1950,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17, no. I (1986): 55-98; Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: the History o f a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press., 1995). On the emergence of theoretical physics in Japan see Dong-Won Kim, “The Emergence of Theoretical Physics in Japan: Japanese Physics Community Between the Two World Wars,” Annals of Science 52, no. 4 (1995): 383-402. On 41 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

an unprecedented status through the prestige achieved by the Theoretical Division

at Los Alamos led by Hans Bethe.64 After 1945, the expansion of physics

departments became apparent in the number of theoreticians and graduate students

they accommodated, especially in the US.6' Collaboration between

experimentalists and theoreticians increased in both laboratories and universities.66

The scale on which physics developed in the second half of the twentieth century

also reconfigured pedagogical practices.67 Meanwhile, the public image of science

was represented by theoretical physicists, epitomised by Julius Robert

Oppenheimer (scientific director of the Los Alamos project) and, of course, Albert

Einstein.

Despite the important role played by theoretical physicists in twentieth-

century history, historians of science have been primarily concerned with the

history and sociology of laboratories,68 and the massive literature on this topic

Bohr’s institute see P. Robertson, The Early Years: The Niels Bohr Institute, ¡921-1930 (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1979); for an excellent analysis of the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in re-directing Bohr’s institute to nuclear physics, see Finn Aaserud, Redirecting Science: Niels Bohr, philanthropy, and the rise o f nuclear physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). M For histories of theoretical physics after the Second World War see Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson, eds. Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1930s: based on a Fermilab symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Silvan Schweber, QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga (Princeton, N.J.: IAP Press, 1994); Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Michael Riordan, and Max Dresden, eds. The Rise o f the Standard Model. Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 65 See DaviJ^Making Theory,” Chapter 1; see also Schweber, 1994, 144-145. 66 Peter Galison, Image and Logic. A Material Culture o f Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press., 1997). 67 Kaiser, “Making Theory.” 68 Warwick provides reasons for this in his Masters o f Theory, chapter 1. Institutional historiography of science in general is huge although mainly concentrated in the period before 1940. However, see A. Hermann, J. Krige, U Mersits, and D. Pestre, eds. Histoiy o f CERN. Vol. I (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1987): A. Hermann, and L. Weiss, eds. History o f CERN. Vol. 2, 42 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

has. in general, paid little attention to theoreticians. There are important works about the social construction of facts in laboratories through alliances with external actors and noil-human actors;69 data massaging and tacit knowledge in experiments;70 the role of interests and negotiations around experimental results;71 the connection between theory and experiments to separate noise and signal in

Voi. 2 (Amsterdam: North-Holland., 1990); John Krige, ed. History o f Certi. Voi. 3 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1996); J. Krige, A. Russo, and L. Sebesta, A History o f the European Space Agency 1958-1987., Voi. I and II (Noordwijk (The Netherlands): ESA Publications Division, 2000); Giovanni Battimelli, ed. L'Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare - Storia di una comunità di ricerca (Roma, Laterza: Editori Laterza, 2001). See also the articles in T. Frangsmyr, ed. Solomon's house Revised: The Organization and Internationationalization o f Science. Nobel Symposium 75 (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1990). On science and technology research institutions before 1940 see for instance: P. Alter, The Reluctant Patron. Science and the State in Britain 1850-1920 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1987); J. Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution (the genius o f man and place) (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1991 ); D. Cahan, An Institute for an Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 1871-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989); John Heilbron, and Robert Seidel, Lawrence and his Laboratory>: a history of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 1989). On learned societies see for example: Roger Hahn, The Anatomy o f a Scientific Institution: the Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666-1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press., 1971); R. McLeod, and P. Collins, eds. The Parliament o f Science: The British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1981 (Northwoods: Science Reviews, 1981); M. Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows, 1660-1700: the morphology o f an early (Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1994). On institutions and professionalisation of science in the periphery see Nancy Stepan, Beginning of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research, and Policy, 1890-1920 (New York: Science History Publications., 1981); Hebe Vessuri, “The Universities, Scientific Research and the National Interest in Latin America,” Minerva 24, no. 1 ( 1986): 1 -38.; B. Subbarayappa, The Pursuit o f Excellence: a history o f the Indian Science (New Delhi: Tata-MacGraw-Hill., 1992); Diego Becerra, and Olga Restrepo, “La Universidad Colombiana: actividades científicas y formación de investigadores,” Quipu 10, no. I 75-108 (1993); A. Botelho, “The Professional isation of Brazil Scientists, The Brazilian Society the Progress of Science (SBPC)', and the State, 1948-1960,” Social Studies o f Science 20 (1990): 473-502.; Schwartzman, A Space for Science ; T.O. Eisemon, “The Implantation of Science in Nigeria and Kenya,” Minerva 17 (1979): 504-526. For a study of the institutional practices in two Third World countries see Larissa Lomnitz, “Hierarchy and Periphery: the Organization of a Mexican Research Institute,” Minerva 17 (1979): 527-48, and Stephen C. Hill, “Countrary Meanings of Science: Interaction Between Cultural and Personal Meanings of Research in a Developing Country Scientific Institution,” Perspectives in the Sociology o f Science, edited by S. S. Blume, 195-230 (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1977). On institutions in the revolutionary USSR see Graham “The formation of Soviet research institutes;” Vera Tolz, Russian academicians and the revolution : combining professionalism and politics, Studies in Russian and East European history and society. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). For institutional theory in general see D. North, Institutions, Institutional change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: v-iunbrdge University Press.. 1990); R. Scott, “The adolescence of institutional theory,” Administrative Science Quarterly 32 (1987): 493-511. 69 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press., 1987). 70 Harry Collins. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (Chicago: Chicago University Press., 1992).

43 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

physics experiments;71 72 and processes of adaptation by scientists engaged in

interpreting experimental results, and so forth.73 In the majority of these works,

theoreticians and the practice of theoretical scientists are marginal in the

production of natural knowledge; the crafting of their intellectual tools remains as

an unproblematic product of isolated individuals.74 *

Yet the history of scientific theories and their relation with the social and

intellectual environments is an essential part of the seminal works by T.S. Kuhn

on the scientific revolution,73 Bowler on the theories of human evolution76 and

Bloor on the sociology of mathematics.77 Some philosophers of science since Imre

l ...ikatos have realised the importance of taking into account the historical

dimension.78 Attempts to make science available to a wider public have

71 Trevor Pinch, Confronting Nature: the sociology o f Solar Neutrino (Dordrecht: Reidel., 1986) 7" Peter Galison, How Experiments End (London: Unwin Hyman., 1987). 73 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle o f Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago: Chicago Univesity Press., 1995). See also the essays contained in JedZ. Buchwald, ed. Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of doing Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). u An important exception is Galison’s Image and Logic. In the last chapter of this monumental work he suggests how the notion of trading zone can be applied to theoretical physics. However, since the book focuses on instrumentation in the history of physics, his references to theoreticians are still marginal. ' T.S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution. Planetary astronomy in the Development o f Western Thought (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1957), Idem Kuhn, The Structure o f Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 76 P. Bowler, Theories o f human evolution: a century o f debate, 1844-1944 (Oxford: Blackwell Ltd., 1986). 77 David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Chicago: Chicago University Press., 1991) 7! See the classic book on the debate about history and philosophy in science studies, Imre Lakatos, and Alan Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth o f Knowledge. Proceedigns o f the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science., Vol. 4 (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1970). Among the historically informed works in the philosophy of science see, for instance, Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: introductory topics in the philosophy of science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics lie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Philip Kitcher, The advancement o f science: science without legend, objectivity without illusions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Deborah G. Mayo, Error and the growth of experimental knowledge, Science and its conceptual foundations. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Arthur Fine, The shah’game : 44 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

concentrated in the history of “geniuses,” focussing primarily on their scientific

theories.79 Nevertheless, theoreticians do consider social interaction an essential

part of their everyday work. Although they are less attached to physical spaces than experimentalists, theoreticians visit other research centres and attend conferences in order to avoid total isolation. The electronic network constitutes another space of interaction among theoreticians, but although they see the advantages of this system, they perceive this kind of long-distance contact as insufficient to keep them fully informed and to collaborate effectively.80 This dichotomy between isolation and collaboration, individual and collective enterprise, located spaces and “disembedded laboratories”81 constitutes some of the most obvious elements of the little studied “culture of theoreticians.”

Interestingly, analyses of the relations between twentieth-century theoretical physics and its socio-economic and political contexts are rare. Instead, the i'ierature focuses on micro-sociological analysis, which leads to a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, science studies assume that scientific knowledge is not differentiable from other kinds of knowledge, but on the other, scientists appear in these studies as completely disembodied from the rest of society, institutional constrains, political ideologies, and, more broadly, the cultural milieu. Yet

Einstein, realism, and the quantum theory, 2nd ed, Science and its conceptual foundations. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For a discussion see Warwick, Masters o f Theory, Chapter 1. 8,1 M. Merz, “'Nobody can Force You When You are Across the Ocean-Face to Face and E-Mail Exchanges Between Theoretical Physicists,” in Making space for science: territorial themes in the shaping o f knowledge, edited by Crosbie Smith and John Agar, 313-329 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 319-321. 31 Idem, 327.

45 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

sociologists of science embarked on historical projects call their studies '‘social

histories." which suggests that there is a misleading identification of micro

sociology with social history.82

Andrew Pickering’s work on the “social construction” of quarks is a case

that deserves some comments here. “The world of HEP [High-Energy Physics]

was socially produced,” he argues, and was the result of a “symbiosis” between

theoreticians and experimentalists.83 Through a process of resistance, adaptation

and “opportunism in context,” physicists established the concept of quark as the

best explanation for micro-physical processes.84 In his account, the definition of

“context” seems to overlap that of “tradition.” If an experiment is seen as a

discovery, and a theoretical conjecture is considered to be a genuine basis for its

explanation, we would expect “further generations of experimentation and

theorising to take place, elaborating the founding experimental and theoretical

achievements into what I [Pickering] am calling [a] research tradition:' Then he

adds: “[...] each generation of practice within one tradition provides a context

wherein the succeeding generation of practice in the other can find both its justification and subject matter."85 We must therefore conclude that context is an epistemological notion, not a social category; despite his effort to write a social

Si Edgerton’s comments briefly this issue in his “British scientific intellectuals.” Andrew Pickering, Constucting Quarks: A Sociological History o f Particle Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press., 1984), 406 (italics in the original). See also Idem, “The role of insterests in High Energy Physics: The Choice between Charm and Colour,” .edited by K. D. Knorr and et al., 1981). 84 Idem, 11. 88 Idem, 10, italics in the original.

46 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

constructivist history, Pickering succumbed to a (good) internal history. A similar

thing happens with the notion of “shared resources.” Once a “tradition” has been

"already established” one can overpass the “micro-level of the individuals” and, he

contends, confine oneself "to aggregated, macro-level analysis in terms of shared

resources and contexts.”86

Two things must be noticed about Pickering’s history. First, the extent to

which the entire scientific community shares resources cannot be taken for

granted. Due to the social and political character of scientific research, individuals

who have access to certain resources constitute an elite affiliated to few

institutions. Pickering dismisses this fact perhaps because his study focuses on

this small group of individuals, thereby identifying the scientific community with

that group. Furthermore, being concerned only with the micro-level of the

individual, his story ignores important categories of analysis such as gender, class,

and ethnicity. If those categories are irrelevant in the social history of physics,

Pickering does not explain why this is so. In this regard Pickering’s stance

contrasts with Sharon Traweek’s work in which national and gender issues play a central role in high-energy physics labs in the United States and Japan.87

Pickering’s history, in spite of his claims of being consonant with the “strong programme” of Edinburgh, is a study in which a sociological analysis is oblivious

86 Therefore, experimentalists would have the laboratories’ facilities and the data generated by “experimental traditions,” while the theoretical equivalent would be “the computing facilities” and the “intangible resources of theoretical expertise.”Idem, 11-12. s’ Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes. The World o f High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). In contrast to Pickering’s work, what results a little bit disappointing in Traweeks book is the complete absence of science in it.

47 Alexis De G re iff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

to the political dimension. As I will show in the present study, there is also a

history of power within the scientific community that affects those who are out of

the circuit of the "‘shared resources,” but strive to participate in big science.

The second aspect to be noted, closely related to the first, is that

Pickering’s focus on the elite is apparent in the actors as well as in the institutions he mentions. His account takes place in centres of research and universities in

Europe and the United States. Surprisingly, this remarkable feature in the establishment of the contemporary physicists’ “world-view” remained unnoticed in Pickering’s social history. Of course, one could object to this criticism by showing that only those institutions had the financial resources necessary to carry out this kind of research. This is evident in experimental physics, but, if theoretical physics requires only pencil and paper, as theoreticians claim, then why should contributions outside the elite institutional circle be so rare? In this regard Andrew Warwick has pointed out that a “theoretical technology” is an essential component of the theorists’ resources and that such technology is inherently linked to specific institutional pedagogical traditions.88 Therefore, even when material resources are not necessary, location is crucial to effective participation in theoretical developments.

The idea that location is of secondary importance for contributing to theoretical science contrasts with other accounts of episodes in the history of

88 Andrew Warwick, “Cambridge Mathematics and Cavendish Physics: Cunningham, Campbell and Einstein's Relativity 1905-1911. Part One: The Uses of Theory, Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci,” 23, no. 4 (1992): 625-656.. See also his Masters of Theory.

48 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

science. Schweber, in his study of integration of scientific émigrés into the United

States in the 1920s and 1930s, pointed out that institutional factors as well as personal collaborations influenced the style in which physics was done.89 Glick has analysed the role of national styles in the reception of scientific theories.90

Harwood’s work on German geneticists stresses the importance of local * styles, pointing out that the apparent homogeneity of scientific research is mainly due to the lack of comparative studies and their high concentration in the USA.91

Warwick questions the relevance of the national boundaries as suitable units of analysis in the reception of theories. He suggests that smaller units such as groups within institutional frameworks with specific pedagogical traditions may be more appropriate.92

Scientists themselves are aware of the importance of their institutional affiliation. For instance, in his account of the history of the Theory Division of

CERN, theoretical physicist Ioannis (John) Iliopoulos discusses an influential paper by the Italian physicist Gabriele Veneziano, pointing out that prefers not to comment because “Veneziano arrived at CERN from the Weizmann Institute with the manuscript essentially ready.”93 Therefore, it is clear that scientists do mind where papers are written, and are concerned about which institution should be

80 Schweber, "The empiricist temper.” 00 Thomas Glick, Comparative Reception o f Relativity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub., 1987). 01 J Harwood, Styles o f Scientific Thought: The German Genetics Community, 1900-1933 (Chicago: The Uniersity of Chicago Press, 1993), 1-10. ,J Warwick, “Cambridge Mathematics.” J. Uio* 1 poulos, “Physics in the CERN Theory Division,” in History o f Cern. Vol. 3, edited by John Krige, 277-326 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1996), 323.

49 Alexis De Greitf Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

credited for their work. It may also be the case that physical marginalisation affects the reception of results.94 However, the problem of location poses a more profound question. The scientists’ sense of isolation seems crucially to depend on where they carry out their research. This is a factor that is essential to the case of the ICTP because it was created precisely to help reduce the isolation of Third

World scientists. But, what is the meaning of scientific isolation? For instance, in the work cited above, Iliopoulos asserts that he “tried to show that the Standard

Model was discovered mainly by individuals often working in relative isolation.”93

I should like to underline the qualifier relative, because it denotes that a certain degree of interaction is necessary and, therefore, that science is neither produced by totally isolated individuals (the liberal ideal of “genius”) or through collective dunking (the communist ideal). The picture of the scientist investigating the mysteries of the universe in the solitude of his office, portrayed by artists and hagiographers, can only be partially true. Reports, notes, books and papers can be, and usually are written in solitude. Nevertheless, if we look carefully at a scientist’s daily life as a member of an academic community, at their relationship with individuals with similar backgrounds, technical skills and interests, at the network of literary and material resources to which they have access in their institutions, then the picture changes drastically. Irrespective of formal collaboration with colleagues, institutions are crucial in creating an adequate

1)4 Russell Olwell. “Physical Isolation and Marginalization in Physics: David Bohm's Cold War Exile," /S/S, no. 90 (1999): 738-56. 05 llliopoulos, “Physics in the CERN,” 304.

50 Alexis De Gieiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

environment in which scientists are permanently stimulated by new problems,

other groups working on similar questions, suggestive results, and debates with

colleagues who can understand their work and act as devil’s advocate before

confronting with external competitors. The goal of the ICTP was to recreate this

kind of environment and establish a new Copenhagen Institute aimed at Third

World physicists. This dissertation reconstructs the ICTP’s struggle to create an

intellectual tradition and a synergetic environment in order to demonstrate that under the "right conditions” Third World scientists could compete with their peers

in Europe and the United States.

¥ * *

This dissertation is organised in the following manner. The first chapter characterises Salam’s life and career in the period before the creation of the TCTP.

It will identify those actors who were to be instrumental in the development of his political and scientific career, and analyse the factors and elements that shaped his conceptions of the centre and scientific collaboration. In Chapter 2 ,1 examine

Salam’s public rhetoric on science, technology and Third World development, situating this in its specific historical and ideological context. Chapter 3 focuses on the negotiations that took place at the IAEA between 1960 and 1963, and on the role played by Italy and Trieste. In Chapter 4 I analyse the interaction of the Ford

Foundation and the ICTP, laying particular emphasis on the strategies used by

Salam to engage the Foundation’s support, and the motivations that prompted it to respond to these favourably. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the ICTP as an academic

51 Alexis De Greiff Introduction: Creating a New Space for Science

institution, studying its activities both in terms of training (chapter 5) and research

(chapter 6). This will illustrate the institutional and professional relations engendered by collaborations between unequal partners. The last chapter will present some conclusions. I have added two appendixes that I hope will be useful to other historians of physics, one detailing the financial resources of the ICTP, and the other providing a complete list of the “Associates” of the ICTP.

52 Chapter 1

Abdus Salam's Life before the

C reation of the International

Centre for Theoretical Physics

[Abboneda] Eda, for instance. Here he was, the great physicist, the discoverer of what was called superunification - one elegant theory, which included as special cases physics that ran the gamut from gravitation to quarks It was an achievement comparable to Isaac Newton’s or Albert Einstein’s, and Eda was being compared to both. He had been born Muslim in Nigeria, not unusual in itself, but he was an adherent of an unorthodox Islamic faction called Ahmadiyah, which encompassed the Sufis. The Sufis, he explained after the evening with Abbot Utsumi, were to Islam what Zen was to Budd hism. Ahmadiyah proclaimed “a jihad of the pen, not the sword.

Carl Sagan, 19871

bdus Salam is well known as director of the International Centre for

Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial

College, the first Muslim to win the Nobel Prize and one of the creators of the theory of unification of the Weak and Electromagnetic interactions. However, little is known about his life and how he got to those remarkable achievements. In particular, his early years in Pakistan and education there, and in Cambridge later,

1 Carl Sagan, Contact (London: Arrow Books, 1987), 312. 53 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life have never been discussed in detail. Further information is available only in scattered sources. This important phase of his life will be the focus of this chapter. It is my contention that his background and experiences before 1960 are important for understanding Salam’s motivations for founding the ICTP, as well as to learn about the scientific and political network where Salam operated as a scientific diplomat.

To give a better idea of the nature of my contribution in this chapter, let me introduce briefly the way in which Salam is mentioned by various kinds of works. There are three kinds of printed sources where Abdus Salam is introduced: popularisation of contemporary physics; histories of theoretical physics after

1050; and material especially devoted to his life and/or work.

A substantial subset of the prolific literature on popularisation of science is devoted to the structure of matter (particle physics) and its connection with the origin and evolution of the universe (cosmology). In virtually any of these works

Abdus Salam is mentioned only for his contribution to the unification of forces.

Let me illustrate this by examining some of the most celebrated books by distinguished theoretical physicists. Steven Weinberg, in his widely read The First

Three Minutes, only refers to Salam in relation to the independent character of their proposals: "[a] field theory which unifies these two forces was proposed in

1967 by myself, and independently in 1968, by Abdus Salam."2 No reference was

2 Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A modern View o f the Origin of the Universe (London: Flamingo, 1993 [1977]), 139, my italics.

54 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

made to their collaboration on related topics during a sabbatical year Weinberg

spent at Imperial College, London; nor did he comment on his visit to the ICTP in

1968. In Paul Davies’s best-seller Superforce, Salam is mentioned just once. The

author points out, again, how Weinberg and Salam worked independently,

highlighting the role of individual work in theoretical physics. “The electroweak

theory in its final form, he writes, was largely the work of two men working

independently, Steven Weinberg of Harvard University and Abdus Salam of

Imperial College, London, though they built upon earlier work by Sheldom

Glashow ,”3 In Stephen Hawking’s best-seller A Brief History of Time, Salam

appears exactly in the same way: “The weak nuclear force was not well

understood until 1967, when Abdus Salam at Imperial College, London, and

Steven Weinberg at Harvard, both proposed theories that unified this interaction

with electromagnetic force.”4 Although Salam commuted between London and

Trieste, the ICTP is completely ignored by the Lucasian Professor. R. Crease, and

Ch. Mann told the story of the “theory of everything” based on a series of

interviews with some of its protagonists.5 Salam is one of the interviewees.

Although compared with other popular science books this one provides more

information about his career, it is a good example of an uncritical narrative of

Salam’s own recollections. When we compare it with other sources, such as his

Paul Davies, Superforce: The search for Grand Unified Theory of Nature (London: Penguin Books, 1995 [1984]), 117. 4 Steven Hawking, A Brief History of Time: from the big bang to black holes (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988) 71; my italics. R. Crease, and Ch. Mann, The Second Creation. Makers o f the Revolution o f the Twentieth- Century Physics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).

55 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

autobiographical writings (see below), nothing new seems to emerge. The list may

go on and the picture is the same:6 Salam’s background and previous scientific

works are implicitly irrelevant according to these accounts; Salam’s contribution to

unification was a fruit of his genius working in relative isolation.

Historically informed literature on theoretical physics after 1950 is scanty.

Schweber’s work on quantum electrodynamics makes reference to Salam’s contribution to the “renormalization” programme.7 As Crease and Mann, Brown et al.’s volume provides no new information.8 Pickering's “social history” of high- energy physics refers to Salam not as director of a research centre, a Third World scientist or a Muslim working in a British university. It only comments on

Salam’s models. On his contribution to the electroweak model, Pickering says:

"Working independently, Weinberg and Salam took over the unified electroweak gauge-theory model proposed by Glashow in 1961.”9 Once again, although this seems to be an obvious case in which the notion of independence needs to be

" See, for instance Dennis Overbye, in his Lonely Hearts oj me ^osmui. the Story o f the Scientific Quest for the Secret o f the Universe (London: Picador, 1991), refers to Salam as follows: “[Glashow’s] theory languished for most of a decade until his old classmate Weinberg and a Pakistani named Abdus Salam came in their separate ways to its rescue” (on page 226). It is interesting to note that biographies and autobiographies of contemporary scientists related to Salam seldom contain any reference to him neither from the personal point of view, nor m his scientific career. See Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (London: Penguin Books., 1979); Richard Feynman, Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman: adventures o f a curious character (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984); Idem, What do you care what other people think?: Further adventures o f a curious character (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Rudolph Pierls. Atomic Histories (College Park: IAP Press, 1997). 7 Silvan Schweber, QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga (Princeton, N.J.: IAP Press, 1994). Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson, eds. Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s: based on a Fermilab symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ’ Andrew Pickering, Conslucting Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1984). 171.

56 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

refined, virtually nothing is said about the links between Salam’s research

programme at Imperial and Trieste and Weinberg’s work since the early 1960s.

There are three biographies on Salam. All of them were intended for similar

purposes.10 These are popularisations of Salam’s theories and some of his ideas,

rather than biographical analyses. Kidwai’s book, which was published by the

1CTP, is an example of Plutarch’s model of biographies as moral builders. Salam is

presented as the archetype of the successful individual from a poor family in a

P' -or country. The book is part of a series “designed in such a way that a teenager

of the Third World gets inspiration from the greats [sic] in science in the poor

developing countries.”11 Salam’s life is used to show that, in principle, talent and

hard work are the key to membership of the scientific community. Although

Singh’s biography was written for an older audience, its apologetic tone and -he

longer sections on the popular version of Salam’s theories did not leave much space tor an analytical and critical view. Perhaps the reason can be found in the

Prologue: “My sole qualification [to write the biography] is that I had written, over a decade ago, a short piece popularizing his new theory unifying two of the four fundamental forces of nature.... Since then I have had the honour and the happiness of receiving from him, material for writing his biography.”12 Singh’s book is Salam’s authorised and official biography for an international audience of mainly Third World readers. Singh seems to rely for his work on another book by

Shorter accounts about Salam’s life are based on these hagiographies. Azim kidwai, The Greats. In Science from the Third World (Trieste: Third World Academy of Sciences, 1989), 6.

57 Alexis De Greift' Chapter I: Abdus Salam’s life

Dr. Abdul Ghani. Unfortunately, Ghani’s biography, published by the Defence

Housing Society in Karachi, is not easy to find outside (or, due to the controversies around Salam for his religious affiliation, in) Pakistan. Singh’s book is virtually the only one available, and the one which this chapter has used as an important source of biographical data.

Some obituaries have been written since Salam’s death in 1996, but most of them are based on the above material and on personal recollections.1-’ Some of

Salam’s recollections of his life can be read in the volume Ideals and Realities, widely distributed in the Third World (three editions and translated into many languages).14 It contains some of his writings on science in the Third World, which are useful material by which to study his thought. Some interviews therein provide i.i ;o an insight into his life and his ideas about science, research and development

(see next chapter).

Bearing in mind the material which exists on Abdus Salam,15 the aim of this chapter is twofold. First, I intend to give a contextual account of Salam’s life between 1926 and 1960. This will serve us in the rest of the work as the

i: Jagjit Singh, Abdus Salam: A Biography (Calcutta: Penguin Books., 1992), xii. ‘ ; Tom Kibble, and Chris Isham, “Abdus Salam 1926-1996,” Physics World,, 1997, 54, and idem “Muhammad Abdus Salam. 29 January--21 November 1996,” Biographical Memoirs o f Fellows o f the Royal Society 44 (1998): 385-401. See also Idem, “Genesis of Unified Gauge Theories-Personal Recollections from Imperial College,” in Selected Papers o f Ahdus Salam (with Commentary)), edited by A. Ali and et al., 592-603 (Singapore: World Scientific. 1994). A collection of Salam’s scientific works with comments can be found in A. Ali, C. Isham, T. Kibble, and Riazzuddin, eds. Selected Papers o f A. Salam (with Commentary) (Singapore: World Scientific, 1994). M Abdus Salam, Ideals and Realities. Selected Essays of Ahdus Salam, Edited by C.H Lai and A. Kindwai, Third ed (Singapore:’ World Scientific Publishing Co., 1989). ' Unfortunately, I do not have access to the literature in Urdu. So this survey only covers English, Spanish and Italian sources. 58 Alexis De G re iff Chapter I: Abdus Salam’s life

background to his extraordinary career.161 have carefully crossed the available

information with interviews and other historical material. Second, I shall discuss,

against that background, some of his views about the practice of theoretical

physics. Both the information about his early years and an analysis of his

education and first research works offer a valuable insight about the foundation of

the ICTP. This provides Salam's motivations, his scientific and political contacts,

and his professional reasons for setting up the Centre.

In particular, 1 draw attention to the competitive-collaborative dichotomy

in Salam's education. I shall contend that his Muslim origins are central to an

understanding of his education. As we shall see, from his early years and

throughout his education, Salam was trained through personal coaching, on a one-

to-one basis with his teachers. As a result, collaboration through direct discussion

emerges as a crucial element in his intellectual development as well as in his

conception of scientific research. A deep sense of competition was also present

since the early years. This tension between co-operation and competition, apparent in the period studied, is essential to an understanding of Salam’s later

patterns of research.

On the role of Islamic culture in Salam’s persona, I intend to show, firstly, that it was an essential part of his cultural heritage and, secondly, that Salam’s heritage also entailed links to his Islamic sect network. In particular, I shall show

' Pnrt of this material has been kindly provided by Prof. Tom. Kibble from his papers on Abdus Sa:am (personal archive).

59 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

how his association with an influential Pakistani foreign officer, who eventually

would become crucial to his diplomatic career, had its origins in their religious

affinity.

1.1 Salam in Pakistan: Early years and Education

1.1. ’ Early years

On 25 September 1925. Chaudhri Muhammad Hussain17 recorded in his personal

diary that, while praying, he had the following vision: “A baby, a boy, was handed

over to me. by an Angel whom I saw with my own eyes. I enquired the name of

the baby boy. I was told (by the Angel) that his name is Abdus[salam] at this I

offered my thanks to Allah.”18 “Servant of God, who is Peace” was then the name

“given by God” as he wrote to the Spiritual leader immediately after the birth.19

/..though it is a unitary name, in the West it was divided into Abdus Salam and

hence Mr. Salam, losing thereby any strict meaning, as Abdussalam himself tried

to explain in several occasions. Later in his life he added also ‘Muhammad’ as a

sign of his faith and as a political act in support of his sect when it was officially

banned in Pakistan in the mid 1970s.

As was the custom of some families in the Indo-Pakistani sub-continent,

Hajira Begun, Chaudhri Hussain’s second wife (the first had died), went to his

17 Chaudhri is a title which shows caste. IS A. Hamid, “Notes on Abdus Salam.” Manuscript presented at the Abdus Salam Memorial Meeting, Trieste, 19-22 November 1997, TKP. |l) C. Hussain, “Transcription from Biography of Abdus Salam by Chaudri Muhammad Hussain. Translated verbally by AS [Abdus Salam] and recorded by LNJS,’’[Unknown date], TKP.

60 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

parents' home to the birth of her first child. Abdus Salam was bom on 29th

January 1926 in Santokh Das, District of Sahiwal, where his grandfather was an officer in the Revenue Department of Government,20 not in Jhang as has often been asserted. Forty days after the birth, as was also the tradition, Hajira returned with little Salam to Jhang in the province of Punjab, then part of British India later

Pakistan, where Salam's father's family had its ancestral roots.

The family history claims a royal ancestor, the Hindu prince Saad Budhan from Rajputana, converted to Islam around 1160 and settled in Jhang. However, by the first half of the twentieth century, Salam’s family - his parents, six brothers and a sister - lived modestly in a two-room house with no electricity or running water. In the hot months they used to sleep on the roof. Hamilda, the girl, had to leave school at thirteen to look after her younger brothers.21 Although the family lived in a small village and later bought a small piece of land, it was not a typical peasant family. His grandfather. Hakeem Gul Muhammad, practised herbal medicine. Chaudhri Ghulam Hussain, Salam’s uncle, graduated in 1899 from uTtmiya College, Lahore. He worked in the Education Department of the

Government of Punjab, retiring as District Inspector of Schools in 1932. Salam’s father started his career teaching English and Mathematics at Jhang but later also became Head Clerk (office Superintendent) at the office of the District Inspector of Schools (the largest of the undivided Punjab Province). This office had control

A. Hamid, “Notes on Abdus Salam,” , Tom Kibble, “Muhammad Abdus Salam. 29 January-- 2 1 November 1996,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 44 ( 1998): 385-401. ’' Anon., “Muhammad Abdus Salam,” [Unknown date], TKP.

61 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

of the education system in the region, including the administration of

appointments, transfers, and so forth, of all the High School teachers." The most

important influence in Salam's early years, and through his life, was his father - a

man who prayed for his son every night at 3 a.m., as Salam would recall later.

Salam’s father decided that his son should enter the Indian Civil Service, a

profession that carried higher social status and economic stability. The aim of

Salam's education was to pass the Indian Civil Service exam. As a teacher,

Chaudhri Muhammad started to stimulate Salam very early by bringing home

stories which Salam had to read and then summarise. “The purpose behind this

exercise”, wrote his father in his diaries, “was to develop his power of retention

and expression.”* 23 At the age of six, Salam went to the primary school, but a few

months later his father took him to the headmaster of the middle school. After a

personal evaluation, he entered the fourth class without formal examination.

Chaudhri Muhammad also tried to instil in the boy a strong spirit of

competition with a good dose of self-confidence: “On his way to school the young

Salam had to pass a Hindu school where children in preparation for their work as assistant tradesmen would recite tables up to 40x40. He soon learnt these tables”.

Salam's brother reminisced many years later about Chaudhri’s education methods:

" A. Hamid, “Notes on Abdus Salam.” A. Hamid, “Notes on Abdus Salam.”

62 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

“He used to give some money to his teachers for paying it as prize to the student who stood first in the class. Little Salam invariantly brought that money home.”24

This encouragement to compete and to gain recognition merits attention because it was a distinctive mark of Salam's career. Rather than discuss its effects here, I shall look for possible causes. Rivalry between Hindus and Muslims was a crucial element in the fate of India and the eventual partition of the sub-continent in 1947. By the turn of the century, the British had delegated some state and administrative functions to the indigenous élite. Special provisions, such as reserved quotas in the public services and the legislature for Hindus, were interpreted by Muslims as overt discrimination.25 In 1909 separate electorates for the Muslims were implemented. However, the tension between the Hindu and the

Muslim élite led to a relationship marked by mutual distrust. The dominance of

Hindu personnel in the Indian Civil Service served to deepen that tension.

The mood of defeat and impotence that prevailed during the first fifty years of the nineteenth century motivated the Islamic modernist movement. By the mid-nineteenth century, these revivalist movements called for the acceptance, not the rejection, of the achievements of Western thought. It was not the first revivalist movement in the history of Islam. According to the doctrine, every century a gifted person should come to Earth to re-interpret the Holy Koran. The

Holy Book should accordingly be a better means to face reality as well as a way to

24 Hussain, •'Transcription from Biography of Abdus Salam.” 25 0. Noman, Pakistan: a Political and Economic history since 1947 (London: Kegan Paul International., 1990), 4. 63 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

find the path to salvation. However, the emphasis of the nineteenth century movements on education, and on Western education in particular, in order to improve the socio-economic situation of the Muslim community, and hence the place of Islamic culture as a whole, introduced an innovative element. It was not an abstract nor an idealistic doctrine, but a concrete strategy that offered an alternative to break the social and economic marginality of the community.

Moreover, the main exponent of this movement in India (similar movements existed in the Middle East), Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), founded the

Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College at Aligdli (Aligarh Muslim College) which was modelled on Cambridge University. He had a profound influence on the education of the Muslim élite and on the emergence of a modem intellectual core.

Aligah College was the bridge between Islam and the modern Western world.

Muhammad Iqbal (1875-1938), who was educated in Germany and England, also flayed a central role in Indian Islam as a philosopher and a politician.26 As Sayyid said, ¡n the modern world, it was essential to “bring the tenets of [modem science] into harmony with the doctrines of Islam.” 27 Nevertheless, my emphasis here is on the fact that the concept of education and learning as a means to overcoming a

2I’ Both Sayyid and Iqbal proclaimed a re-approach to the Western thought, though their attitudes towards the British domination differed notably. While the former opposed to any confrontation against the British Raj, given the political reality, Iqbal preached independence and national identity. "7 Quo ed by J. L. Esposito, Islam: the straight path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 136-145, and for modernist movements i.t Islam see bibliography there. See also D. Waines, Introduction to Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 222-225 and Steve Fuller, Science (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), 106-121.

64 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

situation of discrimination and marginality was a scheme that had already been in existence for at least fifty years when Salam started his education.28

Salam's father was a devout Muslim and his faith and heritage was part of the education of the young Salam. It seems convenient to point out some relevant elements of his cultural, religious and social background. First of all. Salam’s family belonged to an Islamic movement founded in the nineteenth century by

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908), the Ahmadiyya-Jammat (Ahmadiyya

Movement, or Ahmadiyya Society). Although since the mid-twentieth century the

Movement has been fiercely persecuted in Pakistan, it was mostly tolerated at the turn of the century. Its spiritual leader was sent to various parts of the subcontinent to defend Islam against external attacks of non-Muslim particularly the missionary programmes of the Hindu Arya Samaj and various Christian organisations.29 The Ahmadiyyah Movement gained adherents, especially among the intellectual castes. It established its headquarters in Qadiyan, near a small village called Faizullah Chak where Salam's mother had been bom. From there, it expanded through groups of missionaries to the West African Coast, particularly to Nigeria, another British colony.30

:s I should return to this matter when I analyse Salam’s ideology of the role of science for development and renaissance of the Islam. Some of Salam’s writings on it are collected in H.R. Dalafi, and M.H.A. Hassan, eds. Renaissance o f Science in Islamic Countries: Muhammad Abdus Salam (London: World Scientific, 1994). A.R. Gualtieri, Conscience and Coercion. Ahmadi Muslims and Orthodox in Pakistan (Montreal: Guernica, 1989), 18. " That is why it is also known as the Qadiyani movement. On the Ahmadiyya-Jammat in Pakistan see S.N. Kaushik, Ahmadiya Community> in Pakistan. Discrimination, Travail and Alienation (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1996). See also H. J. Fischer, Ahmadiyyah: a study in Contemporary> Islam on the West African Coast.London: Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research., 1963).

65 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Yet the tenets of this doctrine are very controversial for orthodox Islam.

According to the orthodoxy there is no successor to Muhammad (although it accepts Jesus as a prophet). Ahmad claimed that, according to his interpretation of the Koran he could “prove" that Jesus Christ had died a natural death. Then, in

1889, he proclaimed himself the Promised Messiah (. Mahdi).31 The 'ulamas accused Ahmad of heresy and apostasy.

Among the most prominent Ahmadiyyas, was Sir Chaudhri Zafrulla Khan

( 1893-1985), a barrister educated in Cambridge, who had a brilliant career as Judge of the Supreme Court of India (1941-1947), as a diplomat and as Vice-president and President of the International Court in The Hague. Between 1926 and 1935

Zafrulla was a Member of the Punjab Legislative Council and one of the most respected members of the community. In a homage which Salam paid him, he recalled his first encounter with Zafrulla in 1933 when Salam was just eight year old: “I can still see him in my mind’s eye - a very handsome figure with a most impressive bearing.”32 As we will see, Salam kept contact with Zafrulla throughout his life. Zafrulla was a model and an important ally for Salam’s diplomatic career. Some thirty years after their first encounter, both Ahmadiyyas would represent Pakistan in different multinational fora. Sir Zafrulla was

Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations (1961-1964), Abdus

'' Mohammad Zafrulla Khan, Deliverance from the Cross (London: London Mosque, 1978). 0 Abdus Salam, “Homage to Chaudhri Muhammad Zaffulla Khan,” Transnational Perspectives ,, 1 ■■v-k reproduced in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 481 -487. Zafrulla was a public figure not only in the political sphere. He was an active defender and a prominent exponent of the Ahmadiyya movement from the beginning of his public life. See, for instance, Mohammad Zafrulla Khan,

66 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Salam was part of Pakistani Delegation to the International Atomic Energy

Agency (1960-1964).

1.1.2 Salam's Education in Pakistan

When Salam entered Jhang High School, his father’s supervision continued through his teachers. ‘‘Whenever [he] left for work [he] used to talk to the teachers” asking them to pay particular to Abdus. And, of course, competition continued: “There were two Hindu boys who were very good and clever. They were always competing," his father reminisced.33

In 1940, when Salam had to take exams for matriculation in the College, his father did a survey of Salam’s level in all subjects. He found out that Salam’s level was unsatisfactory particularly in “practical sciences,” Urdu and Arabic translation. Chaudhri therefore approached the Principal of the school and demanded extracoaching for his son. The teacher agreed reluctantly.34 At graduation Salam came first in the District and his marks achieved a new record in the Province. Salam described the significance of this achievement to his biographer:

I distinctively recall that those Hindu merchants who normally would have closed their shops due to the afternoon heat, were standing outside their shops to pay homage to me. Their respect for me and their patronage education [sic] has left an indelible impression on my mind.

Message of Ahmadiyyat. Speach delievered on the 2nd of March 1933 in the YMCA Hall Lecture, Lahore (Qadian: Nazir-Dawat-o-Tabligh, 1970). ” C. Hussain, “Transcription from Biography of Abdus Salam.” C. Hussain, “Transcription from Biography of Abdus Salam.” ’5 Quoted in Singh, Abdus Salam , 4.

67 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

For Chaudhri Muhammad, it was thanks to his prayer that his son had gotten such results. That same year, he wrote to Zafrulla Khan seeking his advice on Salam's future career. If Chaudhri expected Salam to enter the Indian Civil

Service, the advice of an influential Ahmadiyya civil servant would certainly help.

Zafrulla wrote in reply that he would pray for the boy and advised three things: look after his health, prepare all lectures that he should attend the day before, and revise the same day whatever he had learned.36

After the success of 1940, Salam continued to get top marks in all his examinations. In 1942, he graduated from Government College Jhang with the highest marks in the Province and went to Government College, Lahore. Two years later, he got another record. He did an M.A. in mathematics, coming first in mathematics and in English.37

During these years, Salam showed an active interest in science and literature, but also in politics. In 1943, he published his first paper in mathematics in a student journal simplifying a method used by the famous Indian mathematician S. Ramanujam to solve a system of quadratic equations. He also made time for literature and particularly Urdu and Arabic poetry, one of his lifelong passions. At Lahore he became editor of the college magazine “Ravi,” and published an article on the great Urdu poet Asad Aur Ghalib in a journal edited by

' Salam, “Homage to Chaudhri Muhammad Zafrulla Khan.” ' C. Hussain, “Transcription from Biography of Abdus Salam.”

68 Alexis De Gre iff Chapter I: Abdus Salam’s life

the late Mian Bashir Ahmad. His first experience with political life came when he was elected President of the Government College Students Union.38

Salam's reconstruction of the facts of his life after 1946 is typical of a teleological narrative in which he seems destined to become a scientist. Salam - and his biographers following him - presented them as a series of “accidents” that deflected (or should we say maybe delayed) his career as a Civil Servant. By 1946

Salam was ready to take the exams for the Civil Service. However, since 1942 the exams had been cancelled , and they were not reopened until the independence of

India and Pakistan. That was the first accident. The second one was that the

Indian Government had raised some funds to support the Allies and, with the end of the war, the Government decided to offer a small programme of scholarships for the sons of small farmers. Salam's father had acquired some land a few years before, which made his son eligible; that was the third “accident”. Salam described this “trilogy of accidents” as “something of a miracle” through which Allah saved him.31’

In the meantime in Cambridge, a post-graduate Indian student withdrew unexpectedly in August, leaving a vacancy in St. John’s College. The Indian High

Commission offered to nominate another candidate, but the College preferred an undergraduate and, on 3rtl September 1946, Salam received news about a place in

,l' M. Kamran. “Abdus Salam- The Human Side,” The New Concept. April, 1994, 9-38, in TK.P. Later Salam would translate several poems into English. None of them are published. See Robert Walgate, “Man of Two Worlds,” New Scientist, no. 26 August (1976): 444-446: 444-446, in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 451-456. See also Singh, Abdus Salam. 7. Gualtieri also

69 Alexis De Gre iff' Chapter 1: Abdus Saiam’s life

Cambridge.40 The term started in October, so Salam sailed immediately on the P.

& O. Franconia Bombay to Liverpool. In Liverpool, Zafrulla was waiting his

nephew who was on the same ship. Salam was accompanied to London by the

Judge. In London Salam slept in the Mosque. On 8th October 1946, he arrived at

St. John's College, Cambridge, and occupied room C5 New Court. The following

year. Pakistan emerged as a new state and Sir Muhammad Zafrulla became her first

Foreign Minister.

1 2 The First Cambridge Years

1.2.1 Undergraduate studies

Cambridge had already a long tradition of cosmopolitanism by the time Salam

arrived to the University. In the Cavendish Laboratory, since the late nineteenth

century, posts had been available to individuals such as the New Zealander Ernest

Rutherford. During the first three decades, the laboratory was considered a major

•entre for quantum physics, a privilege shared by Bohr’s Institute (in the 1920s)

and Gottingen. The presence of international students was not limited to

Europeans or Americans, although for obvious reasons they constituted the

majority. The flow of Japanese physicists was stable during the first decades of the century.41 The number of British Indian students that came to Cambridge since

observed the Ahmadi reliance on a living God as a distinctive feature of the sect (Gualtieri, Conscience and Coercion, 86-88). ^"•Anon., “Muhammad Abdus Salam,” TKP. Dong-Won Kim, “Two Influences on the Japanese Physics Community in the Early Twentieth Century,” Historici Scieniarum 2-7 (1997): 125-136..

70 Alexis De Greift' Chapter I: Abdus Salam’s life

the late nineteenth century increased in the 1920s and 1930s, a trend not exclusive to the natural sciences. As one historian explains, “the fashion for rich Indians and others under the British Raj to seek education in England made Cambridge a breeding ground for the movements fostering Indian independence in the 1920s and

There are. nevertheless, some remarks to be made about the conditions in which Salam lived in Cambridge. Firstly, we must consider that Salarn did not come from an urban élite family, as the majority of Indian students did (Nehru and

Homi Bhabha are two cases in point). His family could not afford to pay for his studies in Cambridge; moreover, those were not the original plans for Salam.

Secondly, there was the religious affiliation of Salam. It is plausible that Salam had suffered some kind of social exclusion for his social origins. This is not to suggest that he was victimised by some kind of religious rivalry between Hindus and

Muslims in Cambridge. The Indian élite was largely secular in its convictions and attitudes, especially the Hindus.43 However, I suggest that Salam suffered social exclusion in Cambridge as a result of his social and ethnic origin. As we have seen,

Salam grew up in the Muslim tradition. In Cambridge he remained faithful to this tradition. Fred Hoyle, in his comment to Salam’s obituary published by The

Eagle , St. John’s College journal, recalls the following illustrative anecdote:

"l2 C. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, 1870-1990, Voi. IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.. 1993), 519. 4j Despite the political discourse and ideology around the “Islamic Principles” secularism dominated government affairs in Pakistan as an explicit decision of the political elite S.N. Kaushik, Ahmadiya Communin' in Pakistan. Discrimination, Travail and Alienation (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1996), 3-8.

71 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1 : Abdus Salam’s life

What I also heard about Abdus from Howarth was that he had the embarrassing habit of greeting his readers in the John's Courts with a fully pledged Muslim salute, practically going down on the cobble stones with his knees. It must have taken for Leslie, or for Peter White I suppose, to inform Abdus that such reverences was not considered necessary in Cambridge. At any rate the full Muslim greeting had been reduced to a wave of the arm and a cry - or shout as we would say - by the time it came to my turn in Lent Term to have Abdus for supervision on a one-to-one basis.44 This description of a seemingly ridiculous attitude denotes a substantive difference between Salam and his Indian fellows. We would never expect to find such an

“embarrassing habit” in Homi Bhabha, who was repeatedly described as

“cultured", “wealthy”, "proud”, and “a fairy tale prince.”4"'1 And the Indian élite

(and presumably the English too) did prefer to avoid such embarrassment.

Whatever kind of social contacts Salam had with his peers during this period, it is remarkable that we do not know of close or lifelong friendships from his undergraduate years. It suggests that the undergraduate Cambridge years were the beginning of a lonely life in terms of personal (not professional) relations.

Life in Cambridge after the war was as austere as it was in the rest of the country. Salam noted immediately after his arrival that there were no porters or servants, as was common in India. There was no heating, either. Yet, Salam’s room, in a fifth floor of the New Court, consisted of two rooms with a beautiful view of one of St. John’s gardens. It was certainly more than his whole family had in terms of space and comfort. 15 *

Peter Goddard. "Professor Abdus Salam, 1926-1996" http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/publications/eagle97/Eagle97-Professo-2.html , 1997 [cited 2001], 15 Ittv Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb. Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (London: Zed Books, 1998), 36-43.

72 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Salam was particularly fortunate in being accepted at St. John's, also

because of the special conditions it offered to mathematicians; the College was the

only one that maintained four Lecturers in Mathematics, more than anywhere else

in the University. There were two in “pure mathematics” (Peter White and Frank

Smithies) and two in “applied mathematics” (Leslie Howarth and Fred Hoyle).

bach student had two hours of supervision each week. The tradition of careful

supervision and personal contact with his teachers that he had enjoyed in Pakistan

persisted, or even improved, in Cambridge. When Salam entered his second year

(Tripos year) he was trained by Hoyle. Now, Hoyle is well known for being a

theoretical physicist noted for his independent thought and heterodox theories.

Some of them have proved to be successful, others less so 46 Some of his ideas

have been well received and developed, others vigorously attacked and rejected. To

say the least, Hoyle's reputation was that of a controversial figure in the scientific

community. It is difficult to know what exactly Hoyle’s influence on Salam was.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to read what Cambridge physicist John

Polkinghorne, Salam’s PhD student in the 1950s, comments about his mentor:

Salam was a prolific generator of ideas. Salam has about him an air of uncontrolled intellectual fertility. Some of his ideas have been very good indeed - he is a Nobel Prize - but some of them have been, shall we say, less inspired. People with this kind of gift and temperament - I think Fred Hoyle is another - function best when they have in their neighbourhood a strong

in the late 1940s and during the 1950s and part of 1960s, with H. Bondi, T. Gold and especially in collaboration with his Indian pupil J.V. Narlikar, he proposed and vehemently defended the “steady state theory of the universe.” Although the model was finally defeated by the “big bang” theory (paradoxically named so by Hoyle), Hoyle and Narlikar provided ingenious alternative explanations to the experimental evidence given against their model (Helge Kragh, Cosmolog)’ and Controversy: The Historical Develpment o f two theories of the universe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Alexis De Greiff, “How to Kill a Theory: A Case Study in Modern Cosmology” (MSc. Dissertation, University of London, 1997)).

73 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

and more cautious personality, able to say ‘Wait a minute’ and to act as an intellectual filter and scientific conscience.47 Hoyle, on the other hand, has pointed out an interesting difference between himself and Salam. Salam came from the “Ramanujan school,” where “knowing what is true takes first priority, with knowing how to prove it a definitive second,” while Hoyle came from the Cambridge tradition with exactly the opposite philosophy. Hence, the first encounter was, in Hoyle’s words, a “crash of cultures.” Salam’s pragmatic philosophy, as we will see in following chapters, prevailed in his future collaborations.48

In 1948, Salam got a first in Part II of the Mathematics Tripos. He had completed the required cycle in two years instead of three. As a result, his scholarship allowed him to stay one more year. Salam wrote to his father asking if he had to return. His father consulted the Spiritual leader who considered that “it would amount to an act of cowardice if [Abdus]Salam abandons one year’s scholarship and returns home.. ,.”49 Salam remained in Cambridge.

There was another important decision to make concerning whether to pursue mathematics or (theoretical) physics. Hoyle’s testimony about Salam’s pragmatic view of science may be a clue to understanding his shift. Salam discussed the matter with Hoyle, who advised him to choose physics. Years later

Salam told Hoyle that had been “the most critical conversation of his life.”50 44 *

17 John Polkinghorne, Beyond Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ,41. 4,1 Goddard, “Professor Abdus Salam.” 44 A. Hamid. “Notes on Abdus Salam’'. ■" Goddard, Professor Abdns Salam.

74 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Possibly this statement is another manifestation of Salam’s tendency to flatter his colleagues.5lAt any rate, it was the presence at St. John’s College of P.A.M. Dirac that definitively attracted Salam to physics. That is not surprising, for Dirac's pedagogic skills were exceptional. He also enjoyed the reputation of one of the most sophisticated mathematical minds in the physics community. Those who attended Dirac’s lectures on quantum mechanics in Cambridge describe them as

" e xceptionally clear and one was carried along in the unfolding of an argument which seemed as majestic and inevitable as the development of a Bach fugue.”52

Salam referred to those lectures when Wolpert and Richards asked him about his involvement with theoretical physics at Cambridge.53 Dirac became Salam’s icon of a theoretical physicist, although their epistemological approaches to theoretical physics were markedly different.54 In later chapters we will see the development of their friendships over the years and the crucial role played by Dirac in Salam’s career. Finally, to complete this picture of the scientific environment which surrounded Salam when he decided to leave mathematics, I should mention that during this time (between 1947 and 1948) Heisenberg spent a long period in St.

John’s.

M One might speculate about possible tensions the decision could have caused between Salam and his father, who had different plans for Salam’s career. Unfortunately, I do not dispose of evidence about how his father assessed Salam’s shift to physics, and later to an academic career. Richard Ede and John Polkinghorne, quoted by Helge Kragh, Dirac: a scientific biography (Cambridge; New York: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 253. ’ Lewis Wolpert, and Alison Richards, A Passion for Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16. 'J This is specially clear in their views about the renormalization programme in quantum field theory. While Salam adopted a pragmatic stance, as most physicists did, Dirac never approved this approach hoping that a finite field theory would be discovered for all processes.

75 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Leaving mathematics constituted a major challenge. Firstly, because he would try to do a two-year programme in just one; secondly, because he had no training in physics, particularly in the laboratory; and thirdly and connected with the latter, his skills in experimental sciences had been rather poor since his College years in India. In 1949, Salam was awarded a degree from Cambridge University with a double first in mathematics (Wrangler) and physics. However. Salam observed many years later that preparing for learning physics made that year “the hardest year of my student days.”55

1.2.2 Research Student

In 1949, Salam got married in Pakistan. Immediately after, thanks to an extension of his scholarship, he returned to the Cavendish to pursue a PhD. By this time, he had discarded the Civil Service, at least in the way his father had imagined it.

Salam was chosen to do experimental physics, as were the majority of the students in Cambridge who had a first class degree in physics. For a few months he worked under Samuel Devons on hydrogen-deuteron collisions, but in

December that year he quit, asking Devons for permission to do theoretical physics. “I sadly lacked the sublime quality of patience.... Reluctantly, I turned my papers in, and started instead on quantum field theory, with Kemmer, in

Dirac’s exciting department,” he recorded later.56

” Quoted Wolpeit and Richards, A Passion for Science, 16. >h Abdus Salam, "Physics and the Excellences of the Life it Brings,” in Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s: based on a Fermilab symposium, edited by Laurie Brown, Max Dresden and Lillian Hoddeson, 525-535 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 530.

76 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

In order to understand the kind of problems given to Salam, and to assess his contribution, I need to discuss briefly the situation in nuclear physics in the early 1950s.

1.2.3 Yukawa theories and QED in the 1950s

In the 1930s, the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa suggested that interactions in the nucleus (between protons and neutrons) were mediated by a (yet undetected)

I; rticle called meson. The meson should play, therefore, a similar role for nuclear forces as the photon in electromagnetism, except that the new particle had (a small) mass (of 140 MeV) to account for the shortrange of nuclear forces. In 1938, at Imperial College, London. Kemmer wrote a paper classifying Yukawa interactions on the basis of the spin and parity of the particles involved in the process. These works remained suspended for nearly ten years because of the war, but in 1947 Cesar Lattes. Cecil Powell and Giuseppe Occhialini, doing observations of cosmic rays carried out in Brazil, discovered the rc-p-e decay chain. The Tt-meson, or pion, was then identified with the particle postulated by

Yukawa, opening up the possibility of extending the quantum methods used in electromagnetic phenomena to the atomic nucleus.57 Yukawa and Powell both received the Nobel Prize, in 1948 and 1949 respectively.

for a complete history of the pion theory see the volume edited by Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson, eds. Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s: based on a Fermilab symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

77 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 1 : Abdus Salam’s life

In 1947, the so-called renormalized theory for quantum electrodynamics

(QED) became the standard theory of electromagnetism. Since the 1930s, quantum field theory applied to electromagnetism (quantum electrodynamics) had been successful in explaining experimental results in spectroscopy, as well as re conceptualising atomic interactions, in particular Fermi's theory of (3-decay (weak interactions) and Yukawa's theory of nuclear forces (strong interactions). On the other hand. Dirac’s “hole theory” in the late 1920s posed serious challenges to the theory. They were finally settled with the detection of the positron simultaneously by C.D. Anderson, and P.M. Blackett and G. Occhialini in the early 1930s. Thus, Dirac’s theory became a serious alternative to the quantum

••:!

This problem discouraged physicists about the possibilities of QED until Richard

Feynman and Julian Schwinger, in conjunction with the earlier studies of Sin-itiro

Tomonaga and his co-workers in Japan, invented a method to avoid the infinities, the so-called renormalization.59 In 1949, Freeman Dyson unified these three

^ It is said that a sum or an integral are “divergent” when it is infinite. Renormalization is one of the most difficult aspects in quantum field theory. It is not only a conceptual problem in the sense of the physical phenomena involved. Moreover, Dirac consistently opposed to the renormalization programme because of its unsatisfactory conceptual grounds. Roughly speaking, the idea is that the infinities that appear at higher orders of approximation in the solution of the Lagrangian, a function from which one can derive the

78 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

approaches and Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga were awarded the Nobel

Prize in 1965. This achievement revived the hope of using quantum field theory

effectively to tackle problems relating to the explosion of particles coming from

cosmic rays and the new accelerators. Particularly important was their

classification according to known interactions (electromagnetic, weak and meson-

nucleon, later called strong).60

1.2.4 Salam ’s PhD problem

The story of Salam’s first important contribution has been told by Sam Schweber

in connection with his study on Dyson’s contribution to the creation of QED. The

account is based on Salam’s recollection of those events.61 Thus, I just intend to

highlight, on the one hand, the significance of these events on Salam’s future career

and, on the other, point out his attitude towards research as a social practice.

When Salam came to Kemmer asking for a problem on quantum field theory, the latter replied that he could not accept further research students and

dynamics of the system, could be absorbed by the mass and the charge of the particle involved in the process (electrons in QED, mesons in Yukawa theory). The assumption is that the sum of the “bare” mass (and charge) of the particle and the other contributions (the divergent terms) to its “self-energy” (i.e. its energy due to its mass and electric charge, without necessity of interacting with external fields) is a finite quantity. The theory predicts that such a sum is the “physical” mass (and charge). Therefore, the mass measured in the laboratory should be the classical (Maxwellian) mass (and charge) plus these contributions. Applied to QED, this is one ofthr. most accurate theories in physics in terms of its predictions (e.g. Lamb Shift effect). The reader interested in the subject see Silvan Schweber, QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga (Princeton, N.J.: IAP Press, 1994), 527-544, but this is far from being an easy exposition of the problem. Another attempt was made by Andrew Pickering, Constucting Quarks: A Sociological Histor)> of Particle Phn’sics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 60-68. I do not know of any non-technical introduction to the topic. 60 On the divergence problem see Schweber, QED, 76-129. ’ Schweber, OED, 542-543. A shorter and readable account can be found in Tom Kibble, “Muhammad Abdus Salam. 29 January^ 1 November 1996,” Biographical Memoirs o f Fellows of the Royal Society 44 (1998): 385-401.

79 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

advised him to move to Birmingham. Rudolf Peierls and Dyson were there. But,

Salam explained later, he could not bear to leave Cambridge. Thus, Salam persisted with Kemmer, who finally sent him to Paul Matthews, a protégé of Kemmer’s.62

Kemmer had given Matthews the problem of investigating the application of renormalization methods to meson theories. By April 1950, when Salam came to Matthews looking for a problem, Matthews was about to finish his PhD dissertation, in which he had proven, among other things, that zero-spin theories required the introduction of an additional interacting term. That implied the introduction of a new fundamental constant - an unpleasant assumption if the aim was to reduce the number of parameters. He had worked solely with the so-called

' "»re-loop diagrams,” that is the first order of approximation, because more complex diagrams involved serious problems regarding renormalization, namely the

'‘overlapping divergences.” Hence, Matthews’s work was in the front line of meson physics. In fact, in 1950 he was invited to spend time at the prestigious

Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

Matthews suggested Salam attack the problem which he had left, that is whether meson theory for zero-spin particles was renormalizable at higher orders.

This came to be known as the “overlapping infinities problem.” The deal was that if Salam made no progress during that summer, Matthews would take over the problem again to work on it in Princeton.

b: Abdus Salam, “Physics and the Excellences of the Life it Brings,” in Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s: based on a Fermilab symposium, edited by Laurie Brown, Max Dresden and Lillian Hoddeson, 525-535 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 530.

80 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Salam's first strategy in tackling his first research project was to seek

direct contact with other researchers; he knew that that was the most effective

way to learn, at least, the state of the art and the possibilities for solving the

problem. He called Dyson who, as was said earlier, was one of the leading experts on the subject. Salam remembered the episode as follows:

I thought that the best thing for me would be to ask Dyson’s direct help. So I rang him. I said: ‘I am a beginning research student; I would like to talk with you. I am trying to renormalize meson theories, and there is this problem of overlapping divergences which you have solved. Could you give some time?6'1 Dyson told Salam he was about to leave for the USA the following day. Salam travelled to Birmingham that same evening. The next day they met for the first time in the university.

In his paper, Dyson noted that the problem of “overlapping divergences” was present in QED. Dyson had provided a possible method to overcome the difficulty but gave no proof of it, and without proof it was not possible to know whether one could generalise the algorithm to other interactions. Salam assumed that Dyson had demonstrated it. When he asked Dyson how the problem could be solved, Dyson replied that he had no proof at all of his assertion, that he only had made “a conjecture.” Many years later Salam said that Dyson’s answer was a

“terrible shock”: “Dyson was our hero. His papers were classics. For him to say that he had only made a conjecture made me feel that my support of certainty7 in the subject was slipping away.”64 On the other hand, this experience might have

’’ Salam, “Physics and the Excellences of the Life it Brings,” 532, my italics. oA Salam “Physics and the Excellences of the Life it Brings,” 532.

81 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

taught a young theoretical researcher an essential lesson. In theoretical physics,

speculation was as important as the skills required to solve an equation or to

demonstrate a theorem. Therefore, an important element in the art of doing

theoretical physics consisted in the ability to refine the intuition to recognise

which speculation may be plausible, to evaluate it in the light of the accepted

theories and the experimental evidence, and to have access to the scientific circles

in which it could be developed, or discarded. For Salam, the experience with

Dyson meant convincing himself that anyone with that kind of intuition was

capable of mainstream research in physics.

Furthermore, it was a demonstration that theoretical physics was another

human activity; demystification of scientific practice is a prerequisite to active

participation. It was essential for Salam to realise that the practice of scientific

research in the metropolis and the periphery did not differ much in terms of the

necessary theoretical resources: mathematical training, social contacts and

“intuition.’* Therefore, in principle nothing prevented an Indian or a Pakistani from participating in the construction of scientific knowledge. The main constraint was

access to the appropriate training, contacts and information.

Obviously, Dyson’s conjecture had a solid basis. The objective of the

discussion was precisely to unravel such assumptions in order to proceed to its

mathematical formulation. In this respect Salam commented later:

But he [Dyson] was being characteristically modest about his own work. He explained to me what the basis of his conjecture was. What he told me was enough to build on and show that he was absolutely right. I travelled with him to London that afternoon. ... I think it was during that train journey, in conversation with Dyson, that I appreciated for the first time how weak the

82 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

weak forces really are (Salam, 1989b, p. 532).6:>

Indeed, "amid the summer roses behind the college,” and while maintaining a vigorous correspondence with Dyson, and discussions with Kemmer, Salam demonstrated that the zero-spin meson theories were renormalizable to all orders.

In the paper, Salam acknowledged Dyson “for indicating the considerations of Sec.

II in an extremely helpful discussion, without which this work would not have been possible.”* 66

i.3 Salam at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Princeton

Salam’s paper was published in April 1951, though the pre-print was circulated from September 1950. As a result, Abdus Salam became a famous name practically overnight. Salam’s paper had succeded in applying the new renormalization methods to various meson theories. In January 1951 Salam was invited to join the

Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, which was, by this time, interested in attracting a young generation of physicists.67 Cambridge regulations prescribed that a student could not visit another institution for an extended period of time unless a qualified Cambridge fellow was there to supervise his work. Hence,

Matthews, who was at the Institute, supplanted Kemmer as Abdus Salam’s official supervisor. At Princeton, Salam and Matthews continued working on

Salam “Physics and the Excellences of the Life it Brings,” 532. 66 Abdus Salam, “Overlapping Divergences and the S-Matrix,” Phys. Rev. XI, no. 1-2 (1951): 217-227, reproduced in A. Ali, C. Isham, T. Kibble, and Riazzuddin, eds. Selected Papers o f A. Salam (with Commentary) (Singapore: World Scientific, 1994), 8-18.

83 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life renormalization applied to other theories, including interactions between scalar, pseudoscalar and spinor fields and the electromagnetic field.68 Salam also had some collaboration with Jos Rest, from Switzerland. Apart from the scientific productivity, these months in the United States were decisive for various reasons.

Firstly, it was a rite of initiation into the international scientific community. At the age of twenty-five, and still a PhD student, he became part of the community.

Secondly, the Institute was a unique place devoted to theory, while theoretical physics was not independently institutionalised yet.69 Thirdly, he met some of the brightest young names that would be crucial for Salam as a physicist as well as a scientific diplomat. Among them I should mention Chinese theorists T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang, who shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for their prediction of the. violation of parity conservation (see below). Salam also met some of the most influential theoretical physics of the day in the United States. In particular Hans

Bethe, Victor Weisskopf and Oppenheimer became very fond of Salam for his qualities as a physicist and his extraordinary charisma. Some years later, these 60 *

The emphasis in youth was due to J.R. Oppenheimer who took over the directorship of the Institute in 1947 (E. Regis, Who got Einstein's Office?: eccentricity and genius at the institute for Advanced Studies (London: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1988), 137-141). ',s See A. Ali, J Ellis, and S. Rabjabar-Daemi, eds. Salamfestschrift. A Collection of Talks from the Conference on Highlights of Particle and Condensed Matter Physics CC Singapore: World Scientific, 1994). 60 For a journalistic story about the Institute see Regis’ Who got Einstein's Office?. The rise of theoretical groups, departments and institutions, independently from mathematics departments was a process that took place mainly in the 1950s and 1960s.

84 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life relations would prove vital for the future of the International Centre for

Theoretical Physics.70

Being in Princeton, Salam was visited by Sir Chaudhri Muhammad

Zafrulla, who was attending the General Assembly of the United Nations as

Foreign Minister of Pakistan. On this occasion, Salam and Zaffulla travelled along the East Coast of the United States visiting historical places.71 This was the second encounter between the two Ahmadyyas as far as the documentation shows. Apparently, Zafrulla during this journey was the person who persuaded

Salam to think seriously as a physicist, as well as an Ahmadiyya, about the importance of the United Nations.72 The Ahmadiyya movement originated in

Pakistan but rapidly spread to other regions, particularly to what today is Nigeria, where a mission settled there.73 The Ahmadiyya sect had to confront powerful religious authorities in Pakistan from its very inception. Under such difficult conditions, trans-nationality was a resort to protect both the doctrine and its practitioners. It is not unreasonable to suppose that, during their meetings,

Zafrulla stressed the importance of a supranational government led by the United

Nations for the survival of a persecuted minority and that it was essential that prominent Ahmadiyyas conquer spaces of influence in that organisation.

70 According to some sources Oppenheimer drafted the “Centre’s Charter” (Salam, “Physics and the Excellences that it Brings,” 527). However, it never acted as an official statute due to the IAEA’s statues (A. Hamende, email to the author, 29 July 1998). 71 Salam, “Homage to Chaudhri Muhammed Zafrujla Khan.” 7: K. Tahir Shah, interview by author. r '::cher, Ahmadiyyah.

85 Alexis De Gre iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

In autumn 1951, Salam’s scholarship finished and he had to return to

Pakistan. That same year, he was awarded the Smith’s Prize by the University of

Cambridge for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to physics.

Cambridge regulations did not allow him to present his dissertation in advance, as he wanted to do. He was authorised to submit it from Pakistan in 1952, where he returned in September 1951.

In 1952, a particle, known as delta was detected by the University of

Chicago cyclotron. Its incredibly short lifespan was incompatible with the predictions by the Yukawa theory.74 The interest in the pure Yukawa-model decreased, and attention shifted to different approaches, particularly dispersion relations and later the S-Matrix, but meson theories continued being the focus of particle research, and in this context Salam’s contribution was considered a landmark.

1.4 Salam’s return to Pakistan and back to England: first academic and political appointments

1.4.1 Pakistan 1951-1954

Salam’s return to Government College, Lahore, and to Punjab University was traumatic, as is usually the case for most young scientists who, after carrying out research in élite universities, return to their depressingly precarious university systems. In a sociological study, Shiva and Bandyopadhyay observed that it is

74 Pickering. Constructing Quarks, 48-49.

86 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

doubtful that the experience of doing a PhD abroad was effective in overcoming the handicaps of doing research in India.73 They suggested that the reason lay in the fact that young PhD students are quickly trapped by a programme of research and hence do not learn the criteria for choosing a problem. The independence with which Salam carried out his PhD project, and his initiation as a member of the international scientific community had made him a mature physicist. Yet Salam’s alienation was certainly a consequence of the marked contrast between the

Cambridge research environment and the conditions offered by Pakistan in 1951.*76 *

The social apathy towards science and the lack of any sort of political concern with it meant a frustrating absence of intellectual stimulus and social recognition.

After being awarded by Cambridge University and praised by some of the most famous physicists for his scientific contribution at such a young age, his return and appointment as Head of the Mathematics Department at Punjab University passed completely unnoticed by the local scientific community.

Between 1952 and 1953 Salam published 10 papers, but he was practically doing no research. Most of these works derived from his work in the United

Kingdom and the United States. Two of them, published in the Pakistan Journal of Science, the organ of the Pakistan Association for the Advancement of Science, were semi-popular surveys of the recent advances in theories of (then called

V. Shiva, and J. Bandyopadhyay, “The Large and Fragile Community of Scientists in India,” Minerva 18, no. 4 (1980): 575-594.. 76 For a survey of situation in Pakistan in the 1950s, see the Report o f the Scientific Commission of Pakistan (Pakistan: Government of Pakistan Press, 1960), part of which was reproduced in Minerva 1, no. I (1961): 75-86.

87 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

nuclear) particle physics and cosmology. The third one was a technical exposition

of the Renormalisation problem which it is doubtful that anyone in Pakistan at the

time could appreciate.77 He also worked on field theories and superconductivity,

and sent to print a paper on the subject. The editors of Abdus Salam's Selected

Papers identified three papers from this period that deserved to be included in the

selection. All of them were co-authored by Matthews, and two were written

before Salam’s arrival to Pakistan (one in Princeton, the other in Cambridge).78

Besides the low social and economic rewards in Pakistan, there were very

few physicists in the country and no tradition of postgraduate work. There was

virtually no one with whom Salam could establish scientific collaboration at the

level for which he was qualified. The University libraries held virtually no

scientific journals. His salary was not enough to enable him to attend conferences,

and even less to buy the journals.79 The nearest research centre in physics was the

fata Institute, established and directed by Homi Bhabha in Bombay, India, and

To give an idea Salam’s isolation in Pakistan one can take the number of contributions in nuclear physics that were published in Pakistan Journal of Science', one article in 1951 (on “Atomic Basic Principles and their applications”) and, between 1952 and 1955, virtually only Saiam’s contributions. There were few physics articles published and all dealing with instrumentation and material properties. In other words there was no research in theoretical physics. The isolation of the country in particle physics may be illustrated by a 1949-article by Professor N.S. Japosky about a “theory of Whirls” he had been developing since the 1930s. Accordingly, these fundamental particles were “certain form of Maxwell’s electromagnetic waves in vacuo, which were called the ‘electro-magnetic whirls,’ or simply whirls.” The Whirl theory, ti’p.osky argued, “eliminates the ambiguity of the wave and particle aspects... and the difference between in essence between the matter and the electromagnetic waves” (“The Whirl Theory of Fundamental Particles,” Pakistan Journal of Scientific Research, 1 (1949) (1): 111-64) 78 See Ali et al, Selected Papers of A. Salam\ for a complete list of his scientific publications see pages 663-679. 70 Walgate, “Man of Two Worlds.”

88 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam ~s'life the strained state of relations between the two countries made any exchange very difficult.80

Doing research in the college was practically impossible. This was made clear to Salam by the Principal. When Salam was appointed, the Principal gave him three choices, but he indicated that his duty was to teach undergraduates.

According to Salam’s memories, the Principal gave him three choices of job: to be warden of the college hostel, to look after the college finances, or to look after the football team.81 Salam taught mathematics and a course on modem quantum mechanics. Salam never excelled as a teacher,82 and his courses demanded a qualification, a motivation and a commitment greater than that which the students in Pakistan universities were used to. In a few weeks the number of his students had gone down to two. Formal lectures stopped, but he continued giving lessons to an enthusiastic M.A. student of about Salam’s age, Riazzudin.83 At this point,

Salam’s major duty in the college was the football team.

In the meantime the political situation in Pakistan, already unstable since its creation, worsened. The Pakistan Muslim League, with its institutional basis completely undermined, was tragically indolent and vacillated in dealing with tensions between the eastern and the western sectors of the country. This

so Salam came to the Tata institute once while W. Pauli was visiting it. Salam travelled abroad without permission, probably to avoid that his travel might be unauthorised. At his return, Salam was taken to task by the Principal of his college for unauthorised absence from duty (see, for instance, Singh, Abdus Salam , 26). 1,1 Walgate, “Man of Two Worlds;” also Singh. Abdus Salam, 26. jp * " This view is shared by most of his colleagues and former students at Imperial. SJ R&zadin is one of the most reputed and influential physicists in Pakistan.

89 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life situation worsened due to the Korean War, which produced food shortages, growing unemployment and inflation in Pakistan. This led to social disorders in the provinces.84

Against this background, a violent anti-Ahmadiyya movement arose in the

Punjab Province. The Punjab Prime Minister, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, who was closely associated with the ‘itlcima, was always indecisive concerning the Anti-

Ahmadiyya movement and viewed it as a useful distraction from the deteriorating economic situation. As a consequence, the entire Ahmadiyyas community was denounced. Salam thought that he might be targeted and went into hiding at the house of Abdul Hamid, one of his old teachers.85 Daultana’s inactivity was crucial in the imposition of Martial Law in March 1953. Martial Law, which was enforced by Ayub Khan, restricted all freedoms. With the coup against the Prime

Minister, it became evident that the parliamentary system was just a facade.

Ayub’s measures stopped the riots against the Ahmadiyyas, but the risk for new persecutions was always latent. Daultana exerted pressure on the central government to dismiss the Ahmadiyya Foreign Minister, Zafrulla Khan. On 30

June 1954, Zafrulla resigned and became Judge of the International Court.86

Meanwhile, Salam continued to receive letters from his colleagues in

England suggesting that he leave the country. In Princeton, Dyson had insisted

s' See Ian Talbot, Pakistan. A Modern History (London: Hurst & Company, 1998). 139-142. s’ Singh, Abdus Salam, 28. 36 Mohammad Zafrulla Khan, Servant of God. A Personal Narrative (London: Unwin Brothers Ltd.. 1983), 210-211.

90 Alexis De Greiff Chapter I: Abdus Salam’s life that he remain in the United States and seek a position there. However, none of these suggestions was accompanied by a clear offer on a stable basis. During the

1 q53 riots, Rudolph Pierls, for instance, wrote him to say that he could arrange for a Fellowship if he wished to be in Birmingham, where Matthews had been appointed in 1952.87 Since 1951, Salam had been elected Fellow of St. John’s

College (Cambridge) and was entitled to receive £300 a year. This was certainly not enough to live in England. Throughout these years, Salam maintained contact with Kemmer, who was also of the view that Salam’s talent would be wasted in

Pakistan.

Going abroad was not an easy task, not just for what it meant to be an exile abroad, politically and psychologically. The Pakistan government had paid for

Salam’s fellowship abroad, and he felt it was his duty to pay it by returning and teaching there. His new appointment implied that he had convincingly to demonstrate that his services would be equally useful to the country in a foreign institution. This possibility only became an option when the Anti-Ahmadiyya movement affected him personally. Salam took the decision to leave the country when he was threatened by rioters.88 Kemmer wrote a supporting letter to help

Salam leave the country. Unfortunately, we do not know to which Pakistani

87 Birmingham was one of the most active physics centres in the world at the time. Their seminar became a reference point for theoretical physicists in England. One of Matthews pupils during these years (1951-1955) was Gordon Feldman, who later on became a close collaborator of Salam’s group at Imperial (Gordon Feldman, interview by author). fcS Singh, Abdus Salam , 28.

91 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

authority exactly the following letter was sent, but it is worth reading Kemmer’s

reasons for letting Salam return to Cambridge:

Dr. Abdus Salam is at present at the age of greatest scientific productivity [...] he is certain to increase his reputation from year to year and, in due course, can become one of these few to whom advanced students from all over the world come to learn, wherever he might be. In a few years he would then be capable of going back to Lahore or wherever he pleases and, with necessary financial backing, establish his own school of theoretical physics with the highest international reputation. However, if he were to stay at Lahore now, scientifically isolated and inevitably burdened with very elementary teaching he would certainly lose the chance to any great scientific and educational achievement later on, for even the best young scientists in a field such as ours cannot be expected to thrive without concentrating on advanced work and constant stimulus from others of similar intellect and interests.89

With this letter came an offer to become Stokes Lecturer in the Cambridge

University , the position that Kemmer had held before he accepted the Tait

Professorship in Edinburgh University. Salam accepted. Economically, the appointment was also a significant improvement. It consisted of a salary of £450 per annum. With £300 from St. John’s and £200 in allowances, Salam earned £950 per annum. In current pounds of 1992, this was equivalent to £20,000, a sum that allowed him to support himself and contribute to his relative’s financial well being.90

In January 1954, Salam emigrated to Cambridge. He would never again live in Pakistan, but he maintained throughout his life his Pakistani citizenship.

Letter from N. Kemmer to unknown [maybe the Education Department of the Punjab Government], ca. 1953, TKP. This letter was recently sent to Prof. T. Kibble from the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission. 1)11 Singh, Abchis Salam, 30.

92 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

1.4.2 Back in Cambridge and Abdus Salam’s missing Nobel Prize

Ironically, but not surprisingly, while the Pakistan Journal of Science did not comment on Salam’s return to Pakistan in 1951, it did announce Salam’s appointment in Cambridge in a note entitled “Pakistani scholar honoured,” and pointed out that he was the second Asian to receive that honour.91 That same year

1954, the Pakistan Academy of Sciences elected him as a Fellow. Salam started to be recognised in his native country as a result of his achievements in the West.

Salam’s relations with the scientific community in Pakistan proved controversial and contradictory. This is in part due to his belonging to the Ahmadiyya community. However, his adversaries’ chief accusation is that he did not do

• ■nough in Pakistan to improve research conditions. Similarly, his eventual involvement in the Pakistan government has been interpreted by his opponents as evidence of his opportunism. What is undeniable is that Kemmer was right in that

Salam was about to attract many students around the world, and particularly from the developing countries. This was especially the case in Pakistan, where Salam became a symbol for the younger generation of science students. It is also true that, even before the ICTP was created, Salam tried to open spaces in British institutions for them. Riazzudin, practically the only student Salam had while in

Pakistan, is a good example. When Salam moved to Cambridge, he arranged for his student to continue his studies there. Riazzudin graduted from Cambridge in 1958.

01 Anon., “Pakistani Scholar Honoured,” Pakistan Journal o f Science 6, no. 1 (1954): 65.

93 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Salam’s duties in Cambridge involved, of course, teaching. He taught undergraduate students for three hours per week during the first two terms of the academic year and graduate students for three hours per week during the third term

(the quantum mechanics course while Dirac was on leave of absence ). and supervised graduate students for six hours per week throughout the year. This makes a total of three hours a week of classes and six of supervision. Estimating that he needed two hours of preparation for every lecture hour, this makes a total of fifteen hours dedicated to the students. In his biography, Singh describes this teaching load as “onerous.” The facts cited above prove that this is an exaggeration, but it presumably corresponds to Salam’s perception. He did not enjoy teaching, while he knew he was “at the age of greatest scientific productivity.” He saw teaching as an obstacle to research. Singh says, repeating what Salam said in an interview published in France, that Salam used to “share his own problems in topics he taught” in his lectures on electricity and magnetism and that‘that made his course very popular.92 While this denotes his passion for research, it is doubtful that, as a consequence, students flocked to his class. In fact, according to some of his students at Imperial College, Salam’s tendency to talk about his own research in his lectures rendered them rather obscure and confusing.

Salam had various students under his supervision. Two of them must be mentioned. One is John Polkinghome, a Protestant clergyman who later became

Singh, Abdus Salam, 30. The interview is part of a collection of biographies published in France directed by Jacques Vauthier, from the Mathematics Department at University of Paris IV: Abdus Salam, and Jacques Vauthier, Abdus Salam un physicien, Prix Nobel de Physique 1979.

94 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Professor of Physics at Cambridge. He and Salam published a paper on

classification of fundamental particles, Polkinghome’s PhD subject. The other

student is Ronald Shaw. Shaw worked on a theory that tried to combine the gauge

ideas of Maxwell with a special type of internal symmetries. This kind of theory

was developed in the United States by Yang (whom Salam had met in Princeton)

and R.L. Mills. Shaw did not publish his work and was therefore never

recognised.93 Salam insisted that both results had been obtained independently, in

the sense there had not been direct contact between the two groups. It would be

interesting to know more about their mutual relationship through a larger network

of scientists and literary technologies. At any rate, the significance of Shaw’s

episode resides in the fact that it was the first in a series of cases in which Salam

and his collaborators found important results contemporaneously with other

researchers. Inevitably, recognition went to the other group, while Salam became

famous for arriving at similar conclusions, although more in the form of an intuitive

idea rather than an articulated piece of work resulting from a careful process of

reflection and development. Some were even sceptical about the independence of

the results.

Doing research without teaching is a privilege that a young lecturer has

neither in Pakistan nor in élite universities. Salam’s teaching load in Cambridge

seems to have been normal for an English university. In fact he was able to

Entretien avec Jacques Vauthier, Vol. 3, Scientifiques & Croyants (Paris: Beauchesne Ed., 1990); on Salam’s Cambridge years after 1954, see pages 16-17. ° ' Ronald Shaw, “The problem of particle types and other contributions to the theory of elementary particles” (PhD, Cambridge, 1955). 95 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life continue doing research. In the mid-1950s, the scattering matrix (or S-Matrix) scheme and dispersion relations started being investigated to tackle problems related to strong-interaction theory which were intractable using perturbative series of Feynman diagrams. Many theoreticians turned their attention to the properties of the S-Matrix, and several manuals and handbooks on dispersion relations were produced. In 1956, Salam produced two of these manuals. The one published by CERN was used in various universities, at least in Italy.94

However, the most important event during these years was his involvement in the problem of so-called parity violation in weak interactions. The details of the scientific debate are not as relevant as the way in which the whole episode unfolded and what Salam learned from it. The problem concerned whether weak interactions (the nuclear force responsible for radioactivity) were, as was generally accepted, invariant under space inversion, charge conjugation (same charge but with the opposite sign) and time reversal.95 Hence, and specifically, the question was if parity symmetry was conserved in processes involving the weak interactions. Retrospectively this was of primary importance because this kind of analysis led to the gauge theories becoming candidates to study the processes and classification of subatomic particles. For some years, Yang and Lee had been

9-1 Italian physicist Luciano Bertocchi, for instance, recalls having come across Salam’s name during his student years when he studied Salam’s manual on dispersion relations (Luciano Bertocchi, Interview by author). 95 An interaction is considered invariant under certain transformation of the processes involving such interactions are not affected by that transformation. For instance, the electromagnetic interaction is invariant under space transformations, because all processes involving this force are not altered for the fact of moving it from one place to another. When this happens, it can be demonstrated that there is a quantity that is conserved (Noether’s theorem); in electromagnetism, the spatial invariance leads to the conservation of momentum.

96 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

speculating about this question. In 1956 they concluded that in weak interactions

there is no parity conservation, reviving the two-component neutrino theory

discussed by H. Weyl in 1929 and presented by W. Pauli in his Hcindbuch der

Physik in 193 3.96 Yang and Lee's work was not just a speculation. They had close wlHv contact C.S. Wu, who was doing an experiment concerned with parity symmetry

in beta decays. In September, Yang presented their theory in a conference in

Seattle. Salam attended the conference and remained intrigued by the matter. When

he returned to Britain, he realised (Salam says that it was on the plane back to

London) that the question might be connected to another feature of neutrinos.

They seemed to have zero mass. Hence, just as the photon mass is zero because of

Maxwell’s principle of a gauge theory for electromagnetism, there was an analogy

; the neutrino case. He then postulated the so-called symmetry, or “chiral”

symmetry. This was an alternative, independent and elegant explanation of why

parity violation was not conserved in weak interactions.

When he finished calculating the consequences of his theory, his first

reaction was, just as he had done when with the overlapping divergences problem,

to go and talk to the gurus. He knew that his idea would not easily be accepted by

the orthodoxy. He thought the best antidote against orthodoxy was to try to

convert an orthodox. Before entering into the battlefield he realised he needed powerful allies. He first visited Peierls in Birmingham, who, according to Salam,

' For a complete discussion of the parity conservation problem see M. Jammer, The conceptual development o f quantum mechanics (Dordrecht: Reidel., 1991), and the bibliography there. See also A. Franklin, “The discovery and Nondiscovery of Parity Nonconservation,” Historical Studies in History and Philosophy o f Science 10 (1983): 201-57.

97 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

had raised this question in Salam’s PhD viva. Here memories disagree. Salam says

that when turned to Peierls to tell him his idea, he replied firmly: “I do not believe

left-right symmetry is violated in weak nuclear forces at all.”97 A few years later,

while revising some physics stories in which his name was mentioned, Peierls

found Salam’s version. He thus wrote to Salam:

I do not remember asking about the neutrino mass in your PhD Viva, though the question may have come up. However, we came back to the subject later, [...jWhen we met again (I don’t remember whether this was next day during the same visit or on a quite different occasion) you produced the idea that what was then called y5 invariance (i.e. helicity) might give the required conserved quantity. This discussion led on to the question of the neutrino, and we concluded that if the neutrino mass is zero, and if a single neutrino is a well-defined object, there must be again some conservation law to define

As for Salam’s idea, he added: “You then suggested that we might publish

a joint note about this (or perhaps you suggested adding my name to a note you

had already drafted?) but I declined. The reason was not that I regarded the iuea of

parity violation as absurd, but that I felt the reasoning was not compelling enough to back such a drastic conclusion.” And he concluded that: “it seems particularly

clear because the question of how to identify a one-particle state was a hobby of

mine for some time, and you were the only person to show a serious interest in

it.”99 It is difficult to discern which story corresponds to the truth. In fact, the passage illustrates the problem of dealing with personal reminiscences when 08 *

Abdus [Salam, 1979 #44], in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 375-90, quotation is on page 381. 08 Peierls to Salam, 3 January 1982, Physics Letters, B.288, ASP. w In fact, in his paper, Salam acknowledged Peierls “who first suggested investigating the consequences of the requirement 5mv=0” (see Abdus Salam, “On Parity Conservation and Neutrino Mass,” ll Nuovo Cimento 5 (1957): 299-301, reprinted in A. Ali, C. Isham, T. Kibble, and rliazzuddin, eds. Selected Papers of A. Salam (with Commentaryj (Singapore: World Scientific, 1994), 167-169).

98 Alexis De Greiff Chapter l: Abdus Salam’s life

writing history. Nevertheless, it must be noticed that whereas Salam's account,

(retrospectively) stresses Peierls' conservative view, Peierls pointed out: (a) that he was not totally opposed to the idea per se, but to the speculative basis of the argument; moreover (b) that the idea had been the result of their interaction (“we concluded...”); and (c) that the discussion had taken more than a single conversation and, of course, a moment of inspiration on a transatlantic flight.

Salam’s version was aimed at demonstrating that he had been a victim of the conservative ideas of the old generation of physicists, but it took an even more dramatic turn when Salam approached “the oracle” - Wolfgang Pauli.100

Salam was working on another symmetry scheme in weak interactions with D’Espagnat and J. Pretkin, both theoreticians of CERN in Zurich. In

October, a few weeks after his meeting with Peierls, Salam came to Zurich. He used the opportunity to seek Pauli’s advice. The Austrian physicist was not easy to approach and his comments about his colleagues’ works tended to be destructive. His caustic personality was well known in the physics community on both sides of the ocean. Therefore, once in Zurich, Salam decided to send his paper through an MIT physicist, Prof. Villars, who was visiting Pauli. The day after,

Pauli sent the paper back with a short note saying that there were better things to think about.

The consultations with Peierls and Pauli delayed Salam’s decision to send his paper. In addition, their reaction caused Salam to cast doubts about his idea.

Salam, “Guage Unification of Fundamental Forces,” 381. 99 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

After all. it was still a proposal that was in embryonic form. It needed to be developed. In the fall 1956 there were only rumours about Wu’s results, but nothing had been confirmed yet (we must remember that, unlike Yang and Lee,

Salam was not in contact with Wu). How could Salam possibly imagine that Yang and Lee’s parity violation would be so quickly accepted? Despite all the adverse circumstances, Salam believed that his conjecture deserved to be examined, tested and, just after having being investigated, evaluated. So, in November 1956, he sent a paper to the Italian journal II Nuovo Cimento. Unfortunately, the criterion on which a physicist decides to publish in one journal instead of another is still a grey area as far as science studies are concerned. In this case, it seems remarkable that

Salam did not choose to send his paper to Physical Review , the American journal for rapid communications. It might be that //Nuovo Cimento was the preferred review in European circles, but it might also be the case that Salam preferred not to expose himself too much with a suggestion that had been badly attacked by the two important members of the “invisible college.” He opted for prudence. The paper appeared in the January 1957 issue.

In early January, Madame Wu disclosed her famous cobalt-60 experiment results (which were confirmed shortly after by L.M. Lederman et al. and V.L.

TelegAi ■. et ah). After the experimental confirmation, Yang and Lee decided to submit their paper to the Physical Review .101 In the line of his low public profile

101 The article was received by the journal on 10 January; C.N. Yang, and T.D. Lee, “Parity Nonconservation and a Two -Component Theory of the Neutrino,” Physical Review 105 (1957): 1671-1675; reproduced in C.N. Yang, “Parity Violation and the Two-Component Theory of the

100 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life concerning the subject (and, I should stress, still unaware of Wu’s results), Salam circulated his paper in the form of a pre-print to air his theory, but without compromising too much his position. Separately, the Soviet physicist Lev Landau also distributed a manuscript, which he published later in Nuclear Physics. The official announcement of Wu’s experiment was made in a press conference in mid-

January, and was widely covered by the American press. For instance, in its 12

May issue The New Yorker published a front-page story about the non-parity discovery. In a few months, the non-parity violation became the centre of attention of the particle physics community. Neither the result, nor the theoretical articulation, were put in doubt. In a matter of a few months, parity violation was part of the new physics.

One of the most frequently cited reactions is that from Pauli. In a letter to v ictor Weisskpf dated January 27, he wrote:

Now the first shock is over and I begin to collect myself again (as one says in Munich). Yes, it was very dramatic. On Monday 21st at 8:15 PM I was supposed to give a talk about “past and recent history of the neutrino.” At 5 PM the main brought me three experimental papers papers: C.S. Wu, Lederman, and Telegdi; the latter was so kind to send them to me. The same morning I received two theoretical papers, one by Yang, Lee and Oehme, the second by Yang and Lee about the two component spinor theory. The latter was essentially identical with the paper by Salam, which I received as a preprint already six to eight weeks ago and to which I referred in my last short letter to you. (Was this known in the US?)... [...] It is good that we did not make a bet.... I did make a fool of myself, however (which 1 think 1 can afford to do) - incidentally, only letters or orally and not in anything that was printed. But now the others have the right to laugh at me.10"

Neutrino,” in Selected papers, 1945-1980, edited by C.N. Yang (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman Co., 1983), 205-209. A commentary by Yang can be read in the same volume, pages 35-36. lo: Letter from W. Pauli to V. Weisskopf, 27 February 1957 (CERN archives), reproduced and translated in Wolfgang Pauli, Collected Scientific Papers o f Wolfgang Pauli , Edited by R. Kronig and V. Weisskpf, Vol. 1 (New York: Wiley-lnterscience, 1964); my italics. An interesting document on Pauli’s dreams in relation to his “shock” and to his “mirror complex” when he

101 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

The letter has great significance not just in itself. It is worth noting Pauli’s special reference to Salam’s work. His question about Salam’s work was known in the United States shows Pauli’s concern that Salam had not received public credit after his blunt reaction to the pre-print. The letter also serves to show that

Salam’s name was, once again, circulating in the high circles of the physics community. As I mentioned before, and will demonstrate later in this dissertation,

Weisskopf s affection for Salam was crucial to his career. There is another point to be noted in this letter. Pauli’s consolation was that at least he did not leave any written proof that he had “made a fool of [himjself,” only in (private) letters or orciliy. On the other hand, Salam had decided to take the risk, but not before discussing the matter verbally. It was this type of personal communication that he lacked in Pakistan, and was the essence of his isolation. His paper was well known among the principal players because he had had access to the social circles that were necessary for him to be seriously considered. Had he sent his paper from

Lahore, it is very probable that it would have buried with the many pre-prints with speculative ideas from unknown institutions and maybe disinterred only when the whole episode was over.

Yang’s and Lee’s Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957 had a great impact in

Salam. For the first time the Nobel Laureate became a realistic possibility and a growing ambition for Salam. It is difficult to establish if he expected to be awarded

learned about parity violation is C.A. Mieier, ed. Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 160-166. Interestingly, he does not mention Salam in his correspondence with Jung, only Yang and Lee are mentioned.

102 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life jointly with his Chinese colleagues. Nevertheless, we know that some of his

British theorists fed what at that point may have been just an illusion. Matthews wrote to Salam a short note from the United States saying that: “You have really hit the jack-pot with the neutrino gauge! ! Yang + Lee have been veiy gentlemanly about it, though naturally they are getting most of the credit over here. Apparently

Landau also made the same suggestion.”103 John Ward, then at College Park

(Maryland), wrote to Salam in February reporting about Lederman's group results.

Then he added: “So, my congratulations and fond hopes for 1/3 at least of one

Nobel Prize. I trust you feel suitably proud of yourself.”104

I suggest that the 1956-57 events were crucial in order to define some of

Salam’s perceptions about the world of physics in two ways. First, he believed that the delay in the publication of his work - as a result of the negative responses o'" Peieijs and Pauli - may have played a role in his not getting enough credit. In fact, after this incident, although Salam continued to seek advice and support from the scientific élite, he adopted a much more aggressive stance towards publishing.

He decided and he told his students that one should never refrain from publishing.

It was the role of the scientific community, he argued, to filter good ideas from bad ideas. Self-censorship was counterproductive in a successful scientific career.

After all, he believed famous scientists are remembered for the few good ideas that they produced and not for the many bad ones. Of course, Salam did not publish

l0j P. Mattews to Salam, undated [probably January, 1957], A.74, ASP. 104 J. Ward to Salam, 11 February 1957, A.74, ASP.

103 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

every idea he produced. In this respect Paul Matthews played an important role

as a filter.10'"'

Second, independently of what he might have thought during 1957 about

getting the Nobel Prize, it is clear that after that year, and with the emergence of

the gauge theories, he was convinced that the Swedish Academy had not appreciated the deep implications of his proposal. When Ivar Waller, the Swedish physicist and member of the Nobel Committee for physics, asked Salam to send a note explaining his contributions to physics in order to advance his candidacy in

1969, Salam replied pointing out that:

The individual y5-symmetry principle and the two-state neutrino theory are some of the known truths in weak interaction physics; there is nothing inevitable or obvious about them, and without false modesty but with due humility, may 1 say no one else has as strong a claim to precedence in these post-parity developments as I have.105 106

Others shared this view. Dirac, for instance, who began nominating Salam at least as early as 1970, argued in his nomination letter to the Swedish Academy that:

He was the first to realize the necessity for a two-component wave function for the neutrino and the principle of y5 symmetry in its interactions. Other physicists, namely Landau and Yang and Lee, (all Nobel Prize winners) came to the same conclusions independently, but some months later than Salam.107

105 This aspect of Salam’s practice of physics has been pointed out by practically all Salam’s collaborators I interviewed. 106 Salam to I. Waller, 29 September 1969, A.79, ASP. 107 See P.A.M. Dirac, “Nomination of A. Salam for the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics,” undated, A.94, ASP. See also P.A.M. Dirac to Nobel Committee for the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1971, 1972. 1974 in A.82, A.83, A.91, ASP.

104 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

In the 1960s and 1970s Salam became “obsessed” (the word is used by some of his colleagues) with getting the Nobel Prize. He acted accordingly to win the confidence of and to become a well known scientific and political figure among the Swedish academicians.

The story about Salam’s missing Nobel Prize reached Pakistan. It was the second time Salam was mentioned in the Pakistan Journal for Science. Reporting the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics, more than half of the note was dedicated to explaining in great detail the Pauli-Salam affair, including the dates (day and month) of the various contributions to the two-components neutrino theory.

Hence the article concluded that: “Thus the dates of Salam’s and Landau’s, and that of Yang and Lee differ by a month (Nov., Dec., Jan.), only... There fore, besides Lee and Yang [they] are also entitled to credit for this landmark in the history of Physics.”108

The event also had some important repercussions in Britain for Salam’s career. In 1958, he was awarded Cambridge University’s Hopkins Prize for the most outstanding contribution to physics during 1957-58. That same year he received the Adams Prize from the same university. In 1959, he was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society, becoming the youngest fellow at the time.

Anon., “ 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics,” Pakistan Journal o f Science 10, no. I (1958): 2.

105 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

1.4.3 First Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London

The 1950s were years of a major expansion of Imperial College, London. In 1953,

Nobel Laureate Patrick M. Blackett was appointed Professor of physics. Around the same time, the Government Body of Imperial College decided to double the size by 1962.109 In 1954, the Court of the University of London approved the disposition of special funds to build new buildings and create many '‘key posts.”

In 1955, the College approved the construction of the new buildings for the physics department.110 In the same year, Imperial College was the largest postgraduate school in the United Kingdom, producing one man in thirteen of those trained in any subject in the country, and one in nine in technological subjects.

There were some people working at Imperial in theoretical physics and pure mathematics, but the College was predominantly an engineering school. The dominant areas in mathematics were solid-state physics and statistics. There were some works on scattering theory and general relativity, all of them in the

Mathematics department. In 1955, G. Stephenson produced some articles on unified field theories, but by 1956 there was no one publishing in that area. In

1954-55, only four out of thirty-one publications were in pure mathematics.

109 See the inaugural address to the 1955-56 academic year by the Rector, Dr. R.P. Linstead, “The Future of the Imperial College,” Imperial College Annual Report o f the Governing Body of Imperial College o f Science and Technology (1955-56), AIC. 1,0 As it can be see in the Rectors Reports from the academic years 1954-55 and 1955-56 in Imperial College Annual Report o f the Governing Body of Imperial College o f Science and Technology {1955-56), AIC.

106 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

As part of the planned expansion, there was an increasing interest in reinforcing the basic sciences in the College. Certainly, an interest in the applied sciences (soil mechanics, statistics, instrument technology, physical metallurgy and so forth) continued to dominate, but it was stressed that the complexity of technology required high quality teachers in basic sciences or, in the words of Sir

John Cockcroft,: that: “in some cases this is a natural development from basic scientific work - the atomic pile from fission, the transistor from solid state....”111 Hence, in 1957 two young, enthusiastic, brilliant and internationally recognised doctors were appointed as Professors at the

Mathematics department in order to boost research in theoretical physics and pure mathematics. W.K. Hayman became Professor of Pure Mathematics, and Abdus

Salam was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics. It is beyond the scope of the present work to show the impact of both appointments. Nevertheless,

Hay man’s appointment greatly stimulated work in mathematical analysis and projected the College’s reputation in the field at an international level. The same is true for Saiam.

I have not been able to establish with certainty how Blackett came to the decision to appoint Salam. We know that Blackett had developed a close friendship with the Indian physicist Homi Bhabha, so, in one sense, it should not sui-prise us that he showed no hesitation in appointing a physicist from the

Subcontinent. The question is, who else was considered for the post, and who

"Sir John Cockcroft’s Commemoration Day address,” Imperial College Annual Report o f the

107 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

recommended Salam. Unfortunately the only evidence available regarding these

questions is personal reminiscences. According to Lord Flowers, who eventually

became rector of Imperial College, the Chair was originally offered to him, but he

turned it down.112 It is difficult to confirm it, but some physicists doubt that

Blackett made such a choice. In 1956, Hans Bethe was visiting Cambridge. He and

Blacketthad been close friends for many years. Bethe was regarded someone who

knew all the important theoreticians on both sides of the Atlantic, young and old,

and had good relations also with the experimentalists. Blackett was looking for

someone capable of starting a research school with an international profile.

Blackett sought Bethe’s advice and he recommended Salam. Salam’s chair in

England was offered at the suggestion of one of the most influential physicists in

the United States.113

Apparently, Cambridge tried to dissuade Salam from joining that

'‘Blacksmiths College,” as Imperial was pejoratively called in some scientific

circles. Salam may have shared this view of Imperial, but becoming professor there

was better from any point of view than being a lecturer in Cambridge, or deputy-

director of die Philosophical Magazine, which was Cambridge’s counteroffer.114 In

January 1957, during the critical months of the parity violation debate, Salam joined Imperial with a salary of £3000 per year and the possibility of setting up a

Governing Body o f Imperial College o f Science and Technology (1955-56), AIC. '‘Notes by the Rector Lord Flowers before Salam’s special lecture” (1980), AIC. See Salam and Vauthier, Abdus Salam, 17. 1,4 Singh, Abdus Salam, 31.

108 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

research programme in particle physics under his command. His first decision in

this direction was to arrange for his former supervisor, close collaborator and

friend Paul Matthews, at that time working in Peierls’ department at Birmingham,

to be appointed Reader in Applied Mathematics at Imperial. Riazzudin, Salam’s

student, obtained a post at Imperial as assistant researcher. In 1959. Riazzudin’s

brother was accepted to do his PhD under Salam and Matthew’s supervision.

Salam’s chief concern at Imperial was to set up a group strongly tied to the international community. Imperial, he thought, should also be a training centre for a new élite of scientists from Third World countries. Salam sought support from scientists not just in Europe and the United States, but in other nations with certain scientific traditions as well. With this criterion in mind, the most natural choice would have been India, but that was rather difficult for a Pakistani. A crucial opportunity came when he was invited to Argentina and Brazil to give a series of seminars. These countries were, after India, those with perhaps the largest and most consolidated scientific tradition in the developing world.115 In

Argentina he was received by two theoreticians, Juan José Giambiagi and Carlos

G. Bollini. In Rio de Janeiro, Salam met Jaime Tiomno, John A. Wheeler’s pupil and one of the most eminent Latin American physicists of the day, as well as a young physicist called Erasmo Ferreira. As a result of these visits, Bollini, Ferreira and Tiomno were invited to Imperial College in the early 1960s. Consequently,

On the scientific communities in Brazil-, see Simon Schwatzman, A Space for Science. The Development of the Scientific Community in Brazil (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).

109 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Salam and Tiomno published a joint paper in 1961. All of them were eventually

important actors in the creation and establishment of the ICTP.

The Mathematics first, and Physics Departments later became, thanks to the presence of Salam, exceptionally active. The Department received an amazing number of visitors. Despite his young age, Salam’s credibility in scientific circles brought some the most eminent physicists to give seminars at Imperial. To illustrate the point, it may be worth mentioning a few names that came to Imperial to give seminars during the first year after Salam’s appointment (1957-58): Oskar

Klein, Victor Weisskopf, J.A. Wheeler, Alan S Whightman and W. Pauli. In 1959, the college announced that the existing chair and readership in Applied

Mathematics “in the light of current developments more appropriately might become integral part of the Department of Physics.”116 Hence, in the beginning of the 1960-61 session, Salam became the first Professor of Theoretical Physics at

Imperial College. The group moved from the Huxley Building to the new Physics

Building.

1.4.4 First Steps towards a Political Career

The consolidation of Salam’s scientific career and his political activities occurred simultaneously. These seemingly separate activities were actually the two increasingly complementary aspects of Salam’s life. While he became part of the

1 “Rector’s Report,” Imperial College Annual Report of the Governing Body of Imperial College of Science and Technology (1959-60), A1C.

110 /-vioxis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life international scientific community, his political career encompassed appointments in both international organisations and in Pakistan.

His first contact with the United Nations after his conversations with

Zafrulla Khan occurred in 1955, when he was appointed Secretary at the Geneva

Conference for the Peaceful uses of Atomic Energy. In 1974, he recalled his first visit to the New York headquarters as “falling in love with all the organization represented - the Family of Man, in all its hues, its diversity, brought together for

Peace and Betterment.”117 Note his call for the recognition of diversity, bearing in mind the persecution against his sect just a few years earlier. It is not accidental that these words were written in 1975, just after the Ahmadiyya community were officially declared illegal in Pakistan.

In 1958, Salam was again appointed Secretary to the second Geneva

. inference. This was a crucial opportunity in his life. The scientific aspect of the conference was not as important as the political one. The conference was the first international meeting aimed at easing the East-West tensions. It was widely celebrated among the scientific community as a good sign for future exchanges. For

Salam it was an extraordinary experience of scientific internationalism. Besides, it was crucial because of some of the people he met.

117 This romantic view certainly changed In the same address he said that: “I did not then realise how weak an organisation it was, how fragile and how frustrating in its inaction...," ([Salam, 1976 #65], repiinted in a longer version in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 3-22, and quotation is in 4).

Ill Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

The most important of these encounters was, undoubtedly, with Dr. Arne

Sigvard Eklund. Eklund was born in Kiruna, in Northern Sweden. He received his

A be in physics in 1925 from the University of Uppsala and worked at the Nobel < Institute for Physics (Stockholm) under Prof. Manna £iegbahn (1924 Nobel

Prize). In 1946, he was awarded a PhD from Uppsala in Nuclear Physics. He had worked at the Swedish Institute for National Defence and as Assistant Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology. In 1953 he became member of the working group for the European Atomic Energy Society. Since then, he had chaired a study group on experimental reactors for the Organisations for European Economic Co operation. He had been involved in the setting up of the United Nations’

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Eklund was an extraordinary diplomat and highly regarded by Dag Hammarskjöld. As a physicist Eklund had a great respect for Salam’s achievements and, in 1958, he was also enchanted by his personality. Both men developed a close relationship marked by mutual respect and a common interest in the promotion of science in the Third World. In 1961,

Eklund was elected the second IAEA’s Director-General. He was in office for the following twenty years.118

However, it was in Pakistan that Salam spread his wings as a politician of science. In 1958, the tensions between the Eastern and Western wings of the country led to a coup d ’état orchestrated by the former Chief Martial Law

Administrator, Ayub Khan - the person that had stopped the Anti-Ahmadiyya

118 See Anon, Bulletin o f IAEA, “SR/Research,” 2 October 1965.

112 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life riots. His regime lasted for eleven years and marked the beginning of a new era for the country.119 Ayub’s regime was predominantly paternalistic and authoritarian.

Although it cannot be compared with the brutality of 1970s Latin American dictatorships, tine establishment of this form of “representational dictatorship” meant the annihilation of independent thought through censorship, the banning of political parties and the prohibition of industrial strikes.120 Western countries justified restrictions to political liberties by the regimes’ efficiency in executing a modernisation programme of economic and social reforms. The speed of development exonerated the government of its anti-democratic measures.

Pakistan was thus subjected to a massive modernisation programme of the productive sector. It consciously promoted inequalities as a way to increase savings and stimulate competition. According to some historians, the land reform did not alter landlordism.121 As was the case years later in Chile with the Chicago school of economics, Pakistan was a laboratory for 1960s Harvard modernisation theory.122 Despite the profound contrast between the official line of a flourishing country emerging from their programme and reality, these plans encompassed an ideology of a peaceful revolution, a country finally projected toward r the future, and a new generation of technocrats ready to take Pakistan out of

M,) See O. Noman, Pakistan; 1. Talbot, Pakistan (and references therein). 120 In 1963, the Government introduced the Press Ordinance which practically eliminated the .'xprsssion of any independent thought (Noman, Pakistan , 29). The 1962 Constitution, introduced after at the end of the formal termination of the Martial law dropped the word Islamic from the country’s name, as symbol of the modernist movement, and banned political parties. A year later Ayub was forced to retreat on both proposals (Talbot, Pakistan, 157-158). 121 Talbot, Pakistan, 165.

113 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

underdevelopment. Promoting science was part of the discourse surrounding this

"revolution."

Khan tamed the intelligentsia through repression, but also through

seduction. Ayub, identified as he was with science as the way to modernise the

country.* 123 * invited * the national scientific community to join the new crusade.

During his time in power, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Council of

Scientific and Industrial Research and the green revolution became symbols of the progress of the nation.'24 In an unprecedented act for a Pakistani President, he opened the 1958 annual meeting of the Pakistan Association for the Advancement of Science. There he announced that his government was actively considering the creation of a “scientific service on par in respect of its dignity and prospects, with other national services.”123

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, another special guest to the meeting, made a speech about scientific co-operation in the Commonwealth. After referring to Rutherford, Sir Ronald Ross and Sir Claude Inglis as examples of such co operation, the Prince mentioned Professor Salam to show that the main thing was that, despite his not working in Pakistan, his work continued to be “available to

i:: G.F. Papanek and Mahbud-ul-Haq were the most influential adapters of Rostow’s model to Pakistan conditions. I:'1 Ayub Khan was educated in Aligarh College (see section 1.1.1). 1:4 Between 1960 and 1965, agriculture grew 3.7% per year, while the implementation of green revolution programmes this figure rose to 6.3% (O. Noman, Pakistan, 40, Table 2). 1:5 A. Kahn, “The President opens 1 l,h Science Conference,” Pakistan Journal of Science, 1 t (1959) (2): 75-76. For many years, influential scientists had called for their integration to the bureaucratic structure, S. Siddiqui, “Need for the creation of a scientific civil service in Pakistan,” Pakistan Journal o f Science, 3 (1951) (3): 82-92.

114 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Commonwealth and world science wherever he work[ed] in the free world.” “I was delighted to meet him last night,” he added.126 This comment and the implicit comparison with distinguished scientists honoured in England brought Salam to

Avub's attention. In his mind, Salam’s scientific reputation in the West, youth, humble origins, and detemiined, but charismatic personality were ideal features to make of him a symbol of the scientific spirit of modem Pakistan. Ayub saw in

Salam the ideal diplomat that his regime needed in the West. In August 1959,

Ayub inaugurated the Scientific Commission. At its first session, the President expressed his satisfaction in Salam’s acceptance to take part. He concluded his address by observing that “his attainments in the field of science at such a young age are source of pride and inspiration for us and I am sure his association with the

Commission will help to impart weight and prestige to the recommendations.”127

That same year, Ayub appointed Salam as an advisor to the Education

Commission. Two years later, in 1961, Salam became the Chief Scientific Advisor to the President, a post he held for 13 consecutive years.

Salam’s closest ally in Pakistan was I.H. Usmani. Usmani received his PhD in physics from Cambridge in the late 1930s. At his return to Pakistan, he abandoned any research and became a civil servant. Usmani met Salam for the first time in the 1958 Science Conference in Karachi.128 He was very impressed by

126 Prince Phillip, “Co-operation in Science in Commonwealth,” Pakistan Journal of Science 11 (1959) (3): 128-136. 1-7 Singh, Abdus Salam. I.H. Usmani, “Questions by Miss Yanmei Zhou During her Interview with Dr. I.H. Usmani of the BCCI International Foundation for the Promotion of NEST [New and Emerging Sciences and Technologies], in London,” B.285, ASP. 115 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Salam’s scientific stature and immediately became very fond of him. Salam saw in

Usmani a person with long experience in Pakistan’s civil service, and a frustrated scientist eager to be one of the chief promoters of the science and technology revolution in Pakistan. In fact, under Ayub, Usmani was appointed Chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, a position he held for the next 12 years.

The two physicists were responsible for several undertakings, including the establishment of the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Research (Pinstech). Like Salam,

Usmani thought that, independently of the pertinence of carrying out nuclear ' research in an agrarian country, Pinstech had an ideological meaning. Many years later he explained that:

‘symbolism’ did play [a role] in attracting the young people of a ‘Bullock- cart’ country like Pakistan, towards science and high technology. The mysticism of the atom and the symbolism of “Pinstech” went a long way to convince the bureaucrats and the decision-makers of Pakistan, that given the autonomy and an opportunity, the scientists of developing countries could execute the most complex projects and were talented enough to contribute to the development of as sophiticated a technology as that of Atomic energy.129 Ironically, the massive building was designed by an American architect (Edward

Durell Stone), and the reactor imported from the West and only assembled in

Pakistan. Usmani was in charge of another monumental endeavour promoted by

Salam, the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), near Karachi. Both scientists worked back to back to promote their careers.

Usmani undertook a massive campaign to propose Salam for every Prize in

Pakistan and abroad, including the Nobel Prize.130 Salam, for his part, nominated

!:9 Idem 101.H. Usmani, to I. Rabi, 7 February 1966, Box 26, Folder 10, IRP; I.H. Usmani to E. Amaldi, 25 December 1969, and, again Usmani to Amaldi, 23 November 1970, EAP. 116 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

Usmani to become Fellow of the Royal Society and interceded to get Usmani

appointed on various UN committees.

Ayub was not wrong to believe in Salam’s qualities as a representative of

his regime. He became an enthusiastic spokesperson for the new revolution. *Tt

would be right to date our progress to the ‘take-off from the assumption of

power of the present Government”, Salam observed in 1961.131 It was, of course,

not a social revolution aimed at changing the existing balance of power. The

revolutionary element was its rapid pace of change and the means to achieve it.

Salam explained in the same address: “Let us be absolutely clear about the nature

of the revolution we are trying to usher in. It is technological and scientific

revolution and thus it is imperative that topmost priorities are given to the massive development of the nation’s scientific and technological skills.” In other words, the “revolution” was neither political, nor social. In Salam’s view, it should

be a revolution which sought to find a role for the local scientific community. I shall develop this point in the next chapter.

1.5 Conclusion

Exploring Salam’s cultural and social roots, as well as his first contacts with

Western institutions, is important to grasp some features of his political and scientific career. In particular, I have concentrated on Salam’s early training and preparation for entering the Indian Civil Service. I have also stressed that Islamic

117 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life culture, and in particular the sect to which he belonged, was a central element in

Salam's education and social life.

Salam's education was highly personalised and complemented by a vigorous sense of competition. This personal contact engendered in the young

Salam a clear consciousness of the importance of tacit knowledge involved in training and research alike. This sense was reinforced while he was a student at

Cambridge.Ij2 Direct contact is essential to have access to such theoretical

“speculations” that theorists do not present in public. Hence it was crucial to develop a social network within the scientific community. Being in a good institutional location is essential, among other things, in order to identify, through personal contact, those problems, theories, conjectures, methods and data that the scientific élite assess as worthwhile. After all, these individuals constitute the referees for further projects and publication of results; they are “the” international scientific community. The balance of power between different members of the community determines the centres of the system and defines the peripheral institutions. Salam had learned this as part of his PhD experience.' Merz has pointed out that “talking physics” is perceived an important part of the practice of scientific theoretical research. However, she seems to agree with the distinction 5 *

1,1 Abdus Salam, Paper presented at the The XIII Annual All Pakistan Science.Conference 1961), 5, F.I, ASP. I ,: On the coach system in Cambridge see Andrew Warwick, Masters o f Theory. A Pedagogical History’ o f Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, 1760-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

118 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life theorists themselves draw between “talking physics” and “doing physics.”133 The

Dyson-Matthews-Salam and the Salam-Peiers-Pauli affairs indicate that there is still much to unravel about the role of personal communication in theoretical science. In this sense, it is worth quoting Salam’s own perception of the problem of communication and isolation. “Theoretical physics”, Salam explained in an interview, “is a subject in which - there is a biblical phrase which expresses it - in which speech is the important thing, not the written word. You have got to go around and talk with people and be in contact if only to learn that this particular mess of papers on my desk is rubbish and these others are the important thing.”134

As we shall see in the next chapter, this feeling of isolation was Salam’s chief argument and motivation for setting up an international centre for theoretical physics.

The competitive spirit engenders a particular relationship between peers and authority. Later in Salam’s life, we will find valuable collaborators and detractors, but perhaps with the exception of Matthews, Salam did not have close friends; nobody seemed to have known his deep motivations, ambitions, and strategies. There are no letters available which express his personal opinions about any aspect of his private or public life. In one sense, despite having a lot people around him, Salam was a lonely scientist and a lonely politician. From 1950

1 ’’ M. Merz, “Nobody can Force You When You are Across the Ocean'-Face to Face and E-Mail Exchanges Between Theoretical Physicists,” in Making space for science: territorial themes in the shaping o f knowledge, edited by Crosbie Smith and : Jen Agar, 313-329 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). ' ’ Anon., “Lonely Scientists — Thinking Ahead with Abdus Salam,” International Science and Technology, December, 1964, 66-71.

119 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life onwards, Salam’s career was exceptional. All the same, it was a constant struggle for recognition by different types of authorities, in particular by the scientific

élite.

During these years, Salam’s contributions to meson theories first and two- component neutrino theory later brought him to be a member of the invisible college of theoretical physics. He became not just part of an intellectual élite, but of a political network as well. Between 1950 and 1960, Salam learned how to move around the network of scientific diplomats - men of science representing the interests of their nations, the scientific communities of their countries, and the ideology of the “republic of science.” In the next chapter, I shall examine the main characteristics of Salam’s discourse, which was clearly influenced by his close relations with Ayub’s regime.

Likewise, I have stressed Salam’s belonging to the Ahmadiyya community.

It is important to note that it embraced not only an heavy cultural heritage, but al so a special set of social connections clearly expressed in his relationship with

Sir Chaudhri Muhammad Zaffulla. Indeed, the fact of being part of a heterodox and persecuted sect carries a special kind network of loyalties and ties. Such a connection, not previously noticed in Salam’s biographical accounts, would prove of great importance for his future diplomatic career. Moreover, the marginality of the movement, and the hostile environment in which it emerged, point at the crucial role of its trans-nationalism as a defence strategy. Internationalism is an ideology that supports this aim in the sense of looking at supranationality as a space created to protect local communities in trouble. This logic could as well be 120 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 1: Abdus Salam’s life

applied to a persecuted and fragile religious movement as to the weak scientific

community in a Third World country.

A somewhat marginal but important conclusion concerns to the dynamics

of scientific emigration in the period studied here. While the young generation of

United States physicsts in the 1920s came to Cambridge or Gottingen for training

and research in physics, after the war the flow was the other way around. It had

started with the scientific émigrés during the 1930s, though, as we have seen, from

the late 1940s bright young theoreticians such as Salam, Matthews, and before

them Dyson,13:1 went to places such as Princeton, Harvard and Cornell. This

reveals to what degree the United States arose as the centre of gravity for the scientific élite. From 1945 onwards, England was peripheral at least in theoretical particle physics.

135 Silvan Schweber, “The empiricist temper regnant: theoretical physics in the United States 1920-1950,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17, no. 1 (1986): 55-98. Despite Peierls’ efforts, Dyson never obtained his D.Sc. at Birmingham. In 1951, after his visit to the Institute for Advanced Studies, he replaced Feynman at Cornell.

121 Chapter 2

Salam’s Discourse on Science and

Third World Development

It is just impossible to talk of technology transfer. One should talk of science transfer, first, and technology later.

Abdus Salam1

ith the establishment in 1958 of Ayub Khan’s regime in Pakistan, which Wwas committed to modernising the country according to Western models and ideology, Abdus Salam began his career as a civil servant. This new turn in

Salam’s life finally reconciled his father’s desire to see Salam enrolled in the Pakistan civil service with Salam’s own ambition to pursue a scientific career. Salam became a scientific diplomat, a representative of different communities acting in different social and political settings. He was a diplomat who represented the Third World before the industrialised countries audiences, whereas^represented the international scientific community in Pakistan. His own life seemed to embody, indeed to represent these diverse worlds. As a scientist he carried great authority before politicians in Pakistan,

1 Anon., “Lonely Scientists — Thinking Ahead with Abdus Salam,” International Science and Technology, December, 1964, 66-71.

122 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse and as a Moslem bom in poor Pakistan, he seemed to be naturally invested with the authority to speak on behalf of tine Third World. His double condition as a Third

World citizen and as a professor at a British university made of him a cultural amphibian, '‘a man of two worlds:”2 the world of physics and the world of the politics for development, the First and the Third World. Salam appeared as the archetype of a diplomat commuting between two very different regions of a “Republic of Science” larger than the one depicted by Polanyi; one that should take into account the phenomenon of decolonisation. On the one hand, there was “the international scientific community,” featuring scientists in the most advanced scientific institutions; and on the other, there was a new group of fellows who belonged and lived in the developing world. As a member of the new elite in Pakistan, in the scientific community and in the new international institutions, Salam elaborated a discourse about integrating both groups into a single imagined community. It is my contention that this discourse was aimed at incorporating the Third World scientists as full citizens of the Republic of Science.3

: In an interview, Salam is described as follows: “Salam, physicist, FRS, Moslem born by the banks of the Chenab, passionate advocate for the Third World, has the heart of a poet and the mind of a scientist. He loves beauty and looks for it in his science. He is an excellent physicist concerned with deep pattern; he is also a deeply compassionate man. These two threads intertwined through his life” (Robert Walgate, “Man of Two Worlds,” New Scientist, no. 26 August (1976): 444-446; reproduced in Abdus Salam, Ideals and Realities. Selected Essays ofAbdus Salam, Edited by C.H Lai and A. Kindwai, Third ed (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1989), 451-456). Twenty years later, Pakistani physicist and former fellow of the ICTP Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, recalled that: “The Salam of the days gone by was a man visibly possessed by two passions. First, an urge to understand the nature of physical reality using the tools of mathematical physics. Second, the desire to put Pakistan on the high road to prosperity through science” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Abdus Salam -- Past and Present,” The News International, 29 January 1996 ). Hie notion of imagined community was introduced by Bendict Anderson to characterise the kind of link that exists between members of the same nation. He explains that “it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities. 123 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

Salam climbed rapidly to the top of the Pakistani and the international elite.

After 1958. he became a member of the following in Pakistan: the Atomic Energy

Commission (1958-1974). the Scientific Commission (1959), the National Scientific

Council (1963-1975), and the Board of Pakistan Science Foundation (1973-1977). He was adviser of the Education Commission (1959) and Founder Chairman of the

Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Committee (1961-1964). In 1962, Salam was appointed to the International Atomic Energy Agency as a member of the Pakistani delegation. From 1961 to 1974, he acted as Chief Scientific Advisor to the President of Pakistan. At the international level, and after his appointment as secretary at the

Geneva Conference in (1955 and again in) 1958, Salam was elected member of the

Bc\.rd of Governors at the IAEA for 1962-1963. Between 1964 and 1975 he was member of the United Nations Advisory Committee of Science and Technology and, from 1970 to 1973 he was member of the United Nations Panel and Foundation

Committee for the United Nations University. This list does not exhaust his political career, which included the directorship of the ICTP starting in 1963 (until the early

1990s). Yet, it illustrates his engagement in the diplomatic and political worlds of science and development.

Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 1999), 7). The “Republic of Science” was understood by Michael Polanyi as the ethical, political and economical framework that allows scientists to act as such (that is in reference to the selection and validation of problems and solutions) following a “principle of spontaneous coordination of individual initiatives” guided by an invisible hand (Michael Polanyi, “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory,” Minerva 1, no. 1 (1962): 54-73). In my analogy of the republic of science and the nation, I do not intend to revive Polanyi’s liberal conception of the scientific community. On the other hand, Polanyi’s thesis was indeed influential to shape the discourse about the scientific community when Salam established himself as spokesperson of the interests of the Third World scientists. Thus, the analogy, I argue, should be intended here as an implicit reference in Salam’s discourse.

124 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

Despite Salam’s intensive engagement in the civil service in Pakistan and abroad, his biographer and colleagues tend to reduce his political life to the humanitarian feelings that inspired him, as if by scrutinising his political discourse, alliances and strategies it meant casting doubts about tire bona fide with which he acted. Some of his contemporaries believed that his political life was “just a hobby.” In this vein J.

Singh writes in Salam’s biography that: “the work that Salam did as Chief Scientific

Adviser to the President of Pakistan, and what he did to establish the International

Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), was a diversion." 4 This tendency to emphasise Salam’s scientific persona may be due to Salam’s self-fashioned image as a scientific diplomat. He was aware that his authority as spokesperson for the

“science for development” ideology derived from beinj perceived as a scientist, not as a civil servant. He sought to demonstrate that his political association was contingent, almost accidental, and not an essential component of his professional life. Otherwise, his own case would refute his discourse about the marginality of scientists in the

Third World. For many years, and at least until the creation of the ICTP, some of his closest collaborators at Imperial were unaware of his “other interests.”5 In other words, his interlocutors were spectators of Salam’s performance as a scientific persona engaged in an intense diplomatic career. This does not mean that his collaborators at Imperial College and elsewhere ignored his political activity. 3 *

4 Jagjit Singh, Abdus Salam: A Biography (Calcutta: Penguin Books., 1992), 38 (italics added). During one of my visits to Trieste, a prominent physicist pointed at the iCTP massive building and said to me: “all this was just a hobby for Salam.” 3 Tom Kibble, interviewed by author.

125 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

However, in the public sphere they did not want to transgress the artificial, but symbolically crucial boundary between his scientific and political life. In Pakistan and abroad his colleagues were privately critical and sometimes even sarcastic towards his audacious proposals to promote science and technology in the Third

World, and of his “art of flattering.” Still, because of their respect for him as a physicist, and admiration for him as a diplomat, nobody wanted to put at risk his

“presentation of self.”6 This is not surprising if we consider that such a public image, both as a diplomat and as a scientist, was crucial for the reputation of the institutions he helped to create (particularly for the theoretical physics group at Imperial College and at the ICTP), and therefore for the interests of their individual members. Those who did not necessarily depend on Salam’s image , in the United States, for instance, and despite viewing Salam’s political activities with a more critical eye, may have though: that expressing their reservations would be perceived as a manifestation of neo-colonialist arrogance. Hence they did not challenge Salam, at least not publicly.

This chapter presents Salam’s discourse.7 The presentation works at two levels. For the first level, I conducted a comprehensive reading of Salam’s articles

6 In the effort to understand Salam’s many public roles I owe a lot to Erving Goffinan’s classic study The Presentation of self in everyday life (London: Penguin, 1990). Indeed, the notion of a scientific diplomat entails performing distinct roles before different social actors. This is not necessarily a manifestation of a cynical or hypocritical personality, as Goffman points out, but a resource used and accepted by social actors to permit smooth social interactions. It, besides, involves the spectators’ acceptance of the other’s performance as part of their social recognition of the other. 7 Following Foucault, anthropoligist Arturo Escobar uses the term “discourse” as a space of representation in which “only certain things could be said and even imagined” (Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Priceton University Press, 1995), 39). The production discourses entails, and is based on, a particular interpretation of history. Notions used in these constructions of reality as universal and neutral descriptors of social reality appear as historically produced. That is the case of the “native” and the “village” in the discourse about development (Op. Cit, 47-52). In a broad sense, I have the same 126 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse and. speeches on science and development in order to draw a profile of the justification for establishing, supporting and, later, expanding the ICTP. In that sense this is a reconstruction of Salam's discourse. A remarkable feature of Salam’s writings during those years is the consistency, almost repetitiveness of his theses, albeit that their presentation changed according to the audience. This is an important element for the production of the discourse. Reality is colonised by discourse when the space of representation in which such discourse operates becomes familiar, and familiarity is a result of revisiting that space. Repetition is not a sufficient condition for constructing a discourse. It is necessary to have access to the appropriate social spaces in order to be in the position of inviting the public to revisit those spaces.

Salam’s power position in Pakistan and abroad granted him such a privilege. I argue that the identification of Abdus Salam with the discourse on North-South collaboration in science, both in the Third World and the industrialised countries, was due to his recurrent discourse about science, development and international co operation. Such identification was crucial for establishing Salam’s authority. This should not be taken to mean that his discourse was static. In fact, after 1980 he shifted towards a more critical position about the role of aid from rich countries for the

o development of the South. I should add that my aim is not to analyse what he 8*

meaning in mind when analysing Salam’s construction of the Third World scientist as an “isolated” individual and the role of science as the key element for the Third World development. In this regard, it worth mentioning that Escobar’s remarkable study says disappointingly little about the role ascribed to science and technology in the development discourse. 8 In the 1980s and 1990s, Salam’s public statements and writings focus on the relationship between science and the doctrines of Islam. It may be seen as an elaboration of the ideas he developed during the previous twenty years; see for instance Abdus Salam, Renaissance of science in Islamic countries (Singapore, London: World Scientific, 1994).

127 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

privately believed, his intimate reasons for his beliefs, or how his personal worldview

may have changed in time. My concern is to present Salam’s public persona as a

scientific diplomat, rather than to perform a psychological study of the origins and

development of his discourse. It is Salam’s role as a public figure and his public acts

of communication that interest me.

The other level of analysis focuses on the historical context in which Salam’s discourse was produced. It has repeatedly been pointed out that discourses are constructed out of the cultural resources available at specific historical moments. In this sense, this is also a deconstruction of Salam’s discourse. This is a dual exercise.

First I shall investigate Salam’s intellectual pedigree. I shall argue that Salam’s discourse was constructed upon an eclectic integration of elements from theses elaborated by contemporaneous intellectuals about science and development, some of tnem conflicting with Salam’s own ideology. Secondly, a discourse about science and technology transfer as the fundamental means for Third World prosperity could be forged only in the context of the “development decade” (as the decade of the 1960s was called). Likewise, only after the establishment of theoretical physics in Europe and the United States in the 1930s and 1950s respectively, would it be possible to advocate for its crucial role in Third World development. Indeed, what is remarkable about Salam’s claims, is that in spite of invoking Western history of science as a rhetorical and ideological resource, his proposal for Third World development implies an inversion of the order in which physics developed in Europe and the

United States. The historical process in those places was the consolidation of a strong

128 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

experimental tradition first, that slowly and somewhat reluctantly opened spaces for

the theoreticians .9

2.1 Breaking the barriers of isolation: “The Gondasipur and Toledos of today”

Salam's 1966 article on “The isolation of the scientist in Developing Countries” was

one of the most frequently cited pieces about the conditions of science in the Third

World throughout the 1970s. The central thesis there was that, after years of

colonialism and the concomitant hostility in colonial society to science and technology, the Third World scientist was essentially “isolated.” He was internally isolated because of the lack of recognition by the society in which he lived. Societies in the Third World had not understood the pivotal role that scientists should play in the economic and cultural modernisation of their societies, unlike societies in the industrialised countries. In Ben-David’s terms, the scientists in the Third World did not have a role in tw societies .10 In a reference in which Salam seems to explain to

s’ In nineteenth-century Europe (as before the 1950s in the United States), theoretical physics was considered a second-rank scientific discipline, It was relegated to the Jews. The image of theoretical physics as a driving force of scientific and technological development emerged only after the Manhattan Project. For a history of theoretical physics in Europe see C. Jungnickel, and R. McCormmach, Intelectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein (Chicago: [S.l]: American Institute of Physics, 1986). On the emergence of theoretical physics in the United States, see Silvan Schweber, “The empiricist temper regnant: theoretical physics in the United States 1920-1950,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17, no. 1 (1986): 55-98. Interestingly enough, the same pattern can be found in Japan, as has been shown in Dong-Won Kim, “The Emergence of Theoretical Physics in Japan: Japanese Physics Community Between the Two World Wars,” Annals o f Science 52, no. 4 (1995): 383-402. 10 The concept of role was defined in Joseph Ben-David’s book The Scientist's role in society. A comparative study (London: Prentice-Hall International Inc., 1971) in the following terms: “the pattern of behaviours, and motives conceived by people as a unit of social interaction with a distinct function of its own and considered as appropriate in given situations. This concept implies that people understand the purpose of the actors in a role and are capable of responding to it and evaluating it.” 129 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse his own father his decision to emigrate, Salam described such isolation through Saif- ud-din Salman's dilemmas. Salam quoted from a letter to Salman’s father from 1470

A.D.: .in my own town I am a sad, a pathetic misfit.. ,[b]ut some day soon all

Samarkand will rise in respect when your son will emulate Biruni and Tusi in learning and you too will feel proud ”.11 12*“This cry,” Salam added, “from his heart has an aptness for our present times,” for Third World scientists “feel themselves that they could, given the opportunity, make a fundamental contribution of knowledge.”

Whether contributing to knowledge for its own sake was a priority for societies with stringent economic conditions was the first and most obvious objection

Salam had to confront. His argument was based on the naive and simplistic linear model of science-technology-economic growth, widely diffused among many scientific intellectuals at the time. Accordingly, science provides the intellectual basis of technological innovation, which in turn allows larger production capacity and, hence, economic growth.Ij Rather than a model based on an articulated explanation

Depicting scientists as marginal social actors is a political resource precisely to negotiate with power. Saying that scientists do not play any role in Third World societies assumes that since their social status is low in comparison to scientists in Germany or the United States, they are marginal and powerless. This is, at least, disputable for a sector of the scientific community in those countries has close ties with power. Salam himself is an example, but we could mention also Homi Bhabha in India, or Marcel Roche in Venezuela. 11 Abdus Salam, “The Isolation of the Scientists in Developing Countries,” Minerva IV, no. 4 (1966): 461-65; reprinted in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 211-216; quotation is on page 211. 12 Salam, “The Isolation of the Scientists in the Developing Countries;” quotation on pages 211-212. b For a critique of the linear model in relation to the science payoffs in Third World countries, see J.D. Frame, “The pay-offs of science for development,” Interciencia 4, no. 5 (1979): 260-265. Although the linear model is still invoked in some public debates about the value of science, it is accepted by economic historians as well as historians of technology that the linear model is an oversimplification of the relation between science, technology and economic performance. See, for instance, David Edgerton, “British Scientific Intellectuals and the Relations of Science, Technology and War,” in National Military Establishment and the Advancement of Science and Technology, edited by Paul Forman and José Manuel Sânchez-Ron, 1-35 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub, 1996).

130 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

of the modes of interaction between these elements, it appears as an implicit (and

sometimes explicit) postulate justified on the grounds of a peculiar (though familiar)

philosophy of history. Salam was no exception to this rule: in an interview in 1986,

he cited the Japanese case emphasising that “science is the basis of technology in the

present day.. .[Over the years Japanese invested heavily in learning] all of science at

the very high level. And then they were really successful in their technology .”14

Once the postulate has been accepted, the standing problem is reduced to how

to establish a scientific tradition and how integrate it into the economic system. Salam

argued that the crucial step was to “break the mental barrier.” Again his historical

examples were far from original. Although Salam did not advertise his intellectual

and ideological pedigree, a number of elements in Salam’s discourse during this

period can be traced back to C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures}5 One of them is the use

of history. The last section of Snow’s book was titled “The Rich and the Poor” and

concerned the question of development and science in the Third World .16 He

observed that, after colonial rule, the poor noticed the disparity and learned that “the

u Rushworth M. Kidder, “Abdus Salam,” The Christian Science Monitor, December, 1986, 15-21, in Ideals and Realities, 474-478, and the quotation is on page 475. 15 Despite its enormous influence, there are very few critical studies about Snow’s work. However in David Edgerton, “C.P. Snow as Anti-Historian of British Science,” Paper presented at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting (Leeds, September 1997), the author criticises Snow’s “anti-historical” (in E.P. Thompson’s sense) version of British history of science and technology. For a discussion on Snow-Leavis controversy see Stefan Collini’s introduction to C.P Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 16 The first article Snow published on the “two cultures” was in The New Statesman, in 1956. He continued publishing on the subject in several articles until 1959 when he delivered the Rede Lecture at Cambridge, published also in The New Statesman (6 October, 1959). The lecture, however, did not include the question of the relations between the rich and poor countries (Collini’s Introduction, xxvi).

131 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

trick of getting rich” depended on science and technology .17 18Since they had discovered the trick, “[Western scientific monopoly] won't last for long,” he pointed out. Further, he suggested that “it is technically possible to carry out the scientific revolution in India, Africa, South-East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, within fifty years” and so close “the gap between our two cultures.” Snow said that if the government implemented a serious science policy, such a development through science and technology was possible, as the Russian example demonstrated. He also pointed at China as a successful case of rapid industrialisation. “The fact is, the rate of change has already been proved possible.. .The only secret of the Russian and

Chinese industrialisation is that they’ve brought it off. That is what Asians and

Africans have noticed.” In a speech in Pakistan, Salam invoked these two examples, adding Japan and Britain. According to Salam there were some morals to be learned from these stories. Russia showed that the “transition to sustained growth need not take a century or longer;” the Chinese lesson was that cheap labour was itself a form i ; o.ipital; the case of 19th century Britain proved that “the poverty barrier can be crashed through if skills and capital are available.” Nonetheless, Japan was Salam’s preferred example. The Meiji revolution was the perfect model for a new scientific revolution in Islamic countries: it represented the opening of a backward society towards Western science through an enlightened elite .19

17 Snow, The Two Cultures, 42. 18 Snow, The Two Cultures, 43. 19 Abdus Salam, “Technology and Pakistan's attack on Poverty,” Address to the XIII Annual All Pakistan Science Conference 1961, F.2, ASP. The Japanese case was often used by Salam to support different points about the relation between theoretical physics, technology and development; see, for instance: Anon., “Lonely Scientists” in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 433-440, see pages 434 and 437; 132 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

It is worth noting that, in each of these examples, Salam avoided any reference to the radical political and social changes that these revolutions entailed.

One can infer two important implications, apart from the practical reason of not wanting to upset the establishment, for not speaking about it. First, for Salam development and authoritarianism were perfectly compatible, perhaps even inevitable if you wished to avoid, in his own words, “the interminable arguments, conducted in private and public [by the political class]... about ideology .”20 It should be mentioned that Ayub Khan’s dictatorship, which Salam served, based its scheme of “basic ■ democracies” on a dislike of and distrust of politicians .21

Second, Salam assumed that industrial, scientific and technological developments were modular. Thus, they could be copied and moved from one context to another without altering their function and independently of the production system, political regime and social structure in which they originated. In the case of science, this assumption relied on its neutrality and universality. The problem, according to

Salam, was finding the material means to transplant science.

In addition to internal isolation, the lack of opportunities for Third World scientists had another aspect. They were internationally isolated both geographically

Abdus Salam, “Science and Technology in the Emerging Nations,” in Science in the Sixties, edited by D.L. Arm, 32-41 : U. of New Mexico, Air Force Missile Development Center, The Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1965); and Idem, “The Isolation of the Scientists in Developing Countries.” 20 Abdus “Address to the XIII Annual,” 5. 21 The establishment of Ayub’s form of “representational dictatorship” meant the annihilation of independent thought through censorship, banning of political parties and prohibition of industrial strikes. As Talbot points out, “Ayub saw the answer to Pakistan’s search for stability in modernisation and depoliticisation” (Ian Talbot, Pakistan. A Modern History (London: Hurst & Company, 1998)). Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

and intellectually.22 *“One of the major reasons why such communities do not flourish is related to the unfortunate fact that, geographically, most developing countries are far from those which are scientifically active. The result was that these communities remained isolated.” Intellectually, isolation resulted from the lack of scientific tradition in the local contexts in winch scientists trained abroad had to work. The lack of intellectual links to other scientists was a professional as well as a psychological motivation to leave the country. Here Salam always introduced his own case to illustrate the dilemmas of modern Salmans. This rhetorical resource provided the drama and the realistic touch. For audiences in the rich countries, Salam’s testimony as the modern Salman produced great emotional impact. Through this historical metaphor, his case was presented as a symbol of the tragedy of Third World scientists who are compelled to emigrate in order to pursue a scientific career. He embodied the brain drain problem .24 In his 1966 article he stressed that feeling “terribly isolated,” he was forced to leave his home country. There could have been an alternative, though:

If at that time someone had said to me, we shall give you the opportunity every year to travel to an active centre in Europe or the United States for three months of your vacation to work with your peers; would you then be happy to stay the remaining

22 A similar sense of isolation has been pointed out in relation to the theoretical physics community in the US in the 1920s (S. Coben, “The scientific establishment and the transmission of quantum mechanics to the United States, 1919-32,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 442-466); see also Schweber, “The empiricist temper regnant,” for the case of Oppenheimer’s group in the same period. 22 Abdus Salam, Speech before Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives at its Twelve Meeting with the Panel on Science and Technology, January 26-28, 1971, Washington, D.C. 1971. 24 Interestingly, the first important report about the phenomenon was produced in Great Britain during the debates about science policy and planning by the Wilson government.

134 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salarti’s discourse

nine months at Lahore. I would have said yes.23

This was a ray of hope for other Salams. “Breaking the barrier of isolation ”* 26 by creating a bridge between “the international scientific community” and those

'lonely scientists” - as a review headline described them - 27 would have eliminated the intellectual causes of the brain drain. This should be a means by which a collaboration between international peers is established. However, the notion of

“isolation,” and defining who is isolated, entails a relationship of subordination in the collaboration. Scientists from the South participate in research programmes defined and validated by the calculation centres in the North. Salam did not dispute this dependency, as it was inevitable at least during the transition period. Eventually,

Third World scientists should be able to master these programmes and to establish a

Leri contai relationship. For the time being, however, the priority seemed to reside in fostering international collaboration to prevent the brain drain and catalyse the establishment of a scientific tradition.

Decolonisation in Asia and Africa was presented as the rise of a new era in which poor regions were no longer subjected to external constraints for development.

For many politicians, and intellectuals, national independence was associated with development. Across the political spectrum development was a sign of progress for these peoples. Development brought new expectations of prosperity for the deprived

23 Salam, “The Isolation of Scientists in Developing Countries,” in Ideals and Realities-, quotation on page 215. 26 Idem, in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 214. 27 Anon, “Lonely Scientists,” reprinted in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 433-440

135 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam's discourse

regions. Salam embraced this illusion passionately. He celebrated that: “the great

colonial convulsions of the last twenty years have freed our nations from tutelage. We

can plan and execute out own destinies purposefully, remembering the lessons of the

recent past .“28 29Like Snow, Salam argued that independence had created also a new

consciousness regarding science, technology and development: “Technical

competence and material prosperity have become synonymous and it is this cardinal

fact that the poorer two-thirds of humanity is beginning to realize."19

Decolonisation offered a particularly favourable background against which

Salam stressed the need for international scientific co-operation. At an ideological

level Snow had given good reasons to help the poor nations. Notwithstanding Snow’s

contention in the sense that he did not relate the lecture to the Cold War ,30 he urged

the West to co-operate with poor nations because, “if we don’t do it, the Communists

countries will in time .”31 What was Snow’s practical solution? Sending an army of

scientists and linguists could prevent the Third World to fall in communist hands:

“with scientific teachers from [Britain] and the United States, and what is also necessary with teachers of English, other poor countries could do the same in twenty.”32

28 Salam, “Science and Technology in the Emerging Nations,” 40. 29 Salam, “Science and Technology in the Emerging Nations,” 34. ,0 In C.P Snow, The Two Cultures: A Second Look (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963), reprinted in Snow, The Two Cultures, 53-107, see page 97. 11 Snow, The Two Cultures, 50. 32 According to Snow, scientists were the most suitable agents for development because “they are freer than most people from racial feeling; their own culture is in its human relations a democratic one” (Snow, The Two Cultures, 48).

136 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

Aware of the political compromises that such collaboration entailed, the hope

of Third World countries lay in the internationalist spirit preached by the United

Nations and its technical agencies. Due to the block imposed on the UN decision

making system by the veto, the organisation focused on '‘development" because it

turned out to be one of the few areas in which there was more of a consensus .33 The

relationship between North and South remained largely asymmetrical after

decolonisation, but, under the banner of the United Nations, such asymmetry was

tempered by a discourse about the rise of a new type of collaboration between

sovereign nations. The non-aligned movement played an instrumental role in cementing the hope of protecting poor nations from the East-West conflict and in concentrating on development. The United Nations was to be a system where all nations would have the same rights and responsibilities.

The view from the industrialised nations was far more pragmatic. With the

League of Nations experience, and imbued in the Cold War climate, they were sceptical about internationalism. Precisely for the ideological reason implicit in

Snow’s discourse, the vast majority of this collaboration was channelled through bilateral agreements with the former colonial rulers. In the 19th century, France and

England had set up programmes for scientific and technical assistance to their colonies. After the independence of African colonies, and the partition of the world after World War II, such programmes increased. With the Third World as the

Gilbert Rist, The history o f development. From Western origins to global faith, translated by Patrick Camiller (London, New York, Cape Town: ZED Books, University of Cape Town Press, 1999), 8-10, and Chapter 5.

137 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

ideological battleground of the United States and the Soviet Union, the "‘donations”

packages sought to extend the influence of the former colonial powers upon the new

states. Scientific and technical co-operation was seen as a means to exercise their

political influence .34 35

In addition to such a contrasting view of multilateral co-operation and the

value of the United Nations, there is another element of tension in the notion of

scientific internationalism. After the Second World War, the practice of science in

industrialised countries was predominantly national. Driven by military and industrial national interests, the tight link between technoscience and the state restricted the international climate that characterised the scientific practice during the period between 1880 and 1914 (and even the inter-war years, with the important exception of the boycott of the German scientists ).33

Nonetheless, in order to cope with the massive investment required by :ug science, initiatives such as the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), the

European Space Agency and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, implicitly created the notion of an European space for science .36 Indirectly, and unconsciously these projects created high expectations among Third World scientists and scientific civil servants. CERN in particular became the most cited example of a successful

See Jacques Gaillard, ed. Coopérations Scientifiques Internationales, Edited by Roland Waast, Vol. 7, Les Science Hors D'Occident av XXe Siègle (Paris: ORSTOM Éditions, 1996). 35 E. Crawford, T. Shinn, and S. Sôrlin, eds. Denationalising Science: the Context of International Science Practice, Vol. 16, Sociology of Science (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).

138 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

international co-operation of the kind that Third World countries should seek to

establish.37 *It represented a joint effort of a severely damaged scientific community

struggling to rebuild itself through a joint effort. It had been created as an intra-

governmental enterprise because the European nations alone, impoverished by war,

could not cope with the costs big science demanded. Politically, CERN was also an

important factor for regional cohesion. In addition, it demonstrated that the only way

to compete with the United States hegemony was to join forces. Some people saw a

parallel with the situation in the Third World, and called for a similar initiative. The

central point is that, despite the minor percentage of the international research

initiatives represented in the science and technology national budgets, and the little

scientific value of international exchange programmes under the banner of the

international organisations, such as the International Geophysical Year and the

Geneva conferences, these initiatives reinforced “the tenets of scientific ideology .”39

The generation of scientists returning to developing countries with new PhDs

from Western institutions in the late 1950s embraced such ideology regardless of the

stringent limitations to the international scientific co-operation at that time.

International collaboration was presented as sine qua non condition for national

’6 See, for instance, Ruberti, “Riflessioni sul sistema della rlcerca dopo il 1945,” in Ricerca e Istitvzioni Scientifiche in Italia, edited by Raffaella Simili, 213-230 (Bari; Roma: Editori Laterza, 1998) on the importance of CERN in the history of Italian scientific institutions. 37 For instance, the Centro Latinoamericano de Física, established in Brazil in the early 1960s was thought as a “Latin American CERN” (Luis Masperi, email to author). See, for instance, the widely read book in Latin America José Leite Lopes, La ciencia y el dilema de América Latina: Dependencia o liberación (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1978). ’9 Paul Forman, “Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists: The Ideology and Its Manipulation in Germany after World War I,” Isis 64 (1973): 151-180.

139 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

scientific development in developing countries. Such discourse was manifested in

countless statements and declarations on science, technology and development. In the

1960s, for instance, the Weizmann Institute held the Rehovoth Conference. It was the

first large meeting concerned with “Science and the New Nations.” The “Rehovoth

Declaration,” signed at this meeting, stated that to turn science and technology into an

instrument “capable of bringing about swift improvements in the conditions of the

new states,” these governments should take three actions. First, they should establish

and integrate science in national education and economic projects. Second, they

should promote international co-operation, particularly with the scientific and

technical assistance offered by governments, agencies and foundations in advanced

countries. Finally, international assistance should be part of national science policies.

In the Rehovoth Declaration, one reads: “States which have made advanced scientific progress should, as a matter of policy , be willing to extend scientific aid and advice to states less scientifically advanced .”40

Salam was convinced that international scientific collaboration should take place in a neutral space. He was aware of the difficult conditions in which South

Asian scientists had to work in national Western institutions. He himself experienced the rigour of the asymmetrical relations of bilateral co-operation. As I suggested in the preceding chapter, Salam may have experienced discrimination during his student

40 The Rehovoth Declaration was signed on 25th August, 1960 by ministers, high government officials and leaders of educational and development institutions from many countries. It is reproduced in Ruth Gruber, Science and the New Nations (New York: Pyramid Books, 1960), 363-365; the quotations are in 364 (italics added). Similar declarations in that period included: the Laos and the Badung Declarations. In 1988, the Trieste Declaration was signed (in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 55-104). The

140 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse years in Cambridge. At Imperial College he was certainly highly regarded by his colleagues, but his Pakistani origins imposed limits on his opportunities .41 This can be inferred from a letter by S. James Gates, Jr., a black professor at MIT. During a visit to the ICTP, the two physicists had discussed the problem of racism in the

United States and England and how it affected their careers. Eventually, Gates resigned his position at MIT. Explaining his reasons for making the decision, he reveals Salam’s own motives for building a (scientific and especially political) career in a supranational institution (under his command):

You asked me, ‘Are you tied to MIT? Look at what might have happened if I had stayed in England! It is completely clear to me in hindsight that to have stayed there under the circumstances would have meant the end of my career.’ That brief conversation was the catalyst which began the final maturation in my views of being a Black American theorist in such a system.42

International collaboration should take place in a neutral space in order to

“avoid the psychological host-guest feelings inevitably associated with national centres.”43 He envisaged this space as a place where Third World scientists could come as a matter o f right. The United Nations represented the most suitable organisation under which an institution could operate free from unequal opportunities for non-white, non-Westem scientists (Salam did not make comments on gender).

good intentions of all of them remained largely on paper, not least for their vague and idealist character. 41 A memorable case is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, whose dispute with Arthur Eddington in the 1940s was coloured with the fact that he was an Indian confronting an English authority, or at least that is how Chandrasekhar understood it according to what he told Dennis Sciama in private (Sciama, interviewed by author). For an account of the dispute, see Kameshwar C. Wali, Chandra: a biography ofS. Chandrasekhar (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 120-146. '■ Letter from S. James Gates, Jr. to Salam, 5 January 1989, B.242, ASP. 4j Salam, “Twelfth meeting with the panel on science and technology.”

141 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

Extending the notion of national planning, Salam urged a global science and technology plan; an international co-ordinated system of science and technology institutes sponsored by national governments, but directed only by scientists and under the banner of the United Nations. This required the creation of an institutional framework for an international technocracy composed of scientific diplomats like himself. In 1971 he urged the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the United

States House of Representatives to take “semi-official action” setting up a “World

Science Policy Council for Basic Sciences .”44 In his words, this council should be “a non-governmental small but authoritative body of active scientists, covering eventually all pure science - making recommendations in respect of world-wide collaboration in the high-cost frontier physical sciences.” The aim of the Council dealt with science, he added, “and by science, I mean unashamedly pure science.” It was, Salam argued, the only way of rationalising the high costs big science demanded. Invoking their “global” character, Salam suggested that big science and the environment were two “obvious cases” demanding international collaboration.

However, this comparison which appears so naturally in Salam’s discourse, was far from obvious. The ecologists’ concern in the 1970s, when it started to occupy a central place in the political discourse, encompassed a strong anti-science element.

The main threat to the environment was a result of the science and technology model embedded in a development model that put economic growth as the chief goal. The criticism extended to pure science in general and big science in particular as one facet

Idem.

142 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

of the technoscientific complex .43 Advocating for big science and the ecological

cause was a contradiction. This argument suffers a twist in Salam’s proposal.

Moreover, for Salam, big science and environment presented “some of the best things which could have happened to science,” and could serve as a way to learn how to face problems in the future through international collaboration .45 46

Salam’s concept of US scientific internationalism was made evident by

Salam’s idea of forming an international scientific council conformed by the US congress. His “vision of the future” is clearly illustrated in a 1986-interview in the

Christian Science Monitor. Answering the question of how he hoped the gap between poor and rich nations would close, he replied that he would like “to see” industrial nations specialise in providing scientific and technical training to developing nations, according to each one’s strength. “For example,” he added, “higher education may be taken up by Britain and the United States. The Russians may take up lower education.

The Japanese and the Germans will be asked to do technology .”47 Only a visionary or a naive politician of science would have offered such a view of the future. Salam

45 On the anti-science movement in the early 1970s, and how this affected the physics community in the United States, see Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: the History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press., 1995), Chapter 24. 46 Salam, “Twelfth meeting with the panel on science and technology;” italics added. Referring to the 1968 movement, Salam presented another argument that ignored the essence of the 1960s social movement. In 1975 he told a Swedish audience: “Around 1968 was the beginning of the student revolt and the realisation that the environment was being wrecked. I felt and still feel that the developing world lost a great moment, lost a great potential alliance, a great potential source of strength when the protesting energy of world youth concentrated on the one issue of environment and did not espouse at the same tintthe more embracing cause of world development” (Salam, “Ideals and Realities (Lecture given at the University of Stockholm, 23 September 1 915)," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1976, 9-15; text reprinted in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 3-22, the quotation is on page 14). Development and science were for Salam one and the same thing. 47 Kidder, “Abdus Salam,” in Salam, Ideals and Realities, see 478.

143 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse played both roles. In his presentation as a scientific diplomat, he had to offer an idyllic “vision” of the future.

Turning history into prophecy is a central element of such a vision of the future. Such use of history required the elaboration of a philosophy of history, a the017 about how history unfolds, and a social teleology that assigns a direction and a meaning to history .48 Salam presented his views on this issue on several occasions, for instance, during 1965 in a Seminar conducted by the Air Force Office of

Scientific Research, again in 1971 before a Committee of the US House of

Representatives, and again in 1979 when he received the Nobel Prize for physics .49

His views were based on the following thesis: “Scientific thought and its creation is the common and shared heritage of mankind. In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilisation, has gone through cycles .”50 The idea was not original. The conception of social processes as a natural phenomenon implies the notion of history as a succession of ages of growth, apogee and decline. Plant and human evolution is applied as a metaphor to “explain” human societies. Salam combined this model, which has its roots in the Greek mythological tradition, with the tradition of the nineteenth century revivalist movements of Islam.3' If the Islamic 3031 * * * * * *

'IS For an insightful discussion on the prophetic character of Rostow’s philosophy of history as presented in his “non-communist manifesto,” see Rist, “The History of Development,” 93-103. ’r Saiam, “Science and Technology in the Emerging Nations;” Salam, “Twelfth meeting with the panel on science and technology;” Abdus Salam, “Gauge Unification of Fundamental Forces (address delivered on the occasion of the representation of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, 8 December, 1979, reprinted in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 373-390. 30 Salam, Ideals and Realities, 373-390, and 373. 31 On the cyclic history and the Greek historigraphy, see L. Canfora, La Storiografìa Greca (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 1999), Chapter “Il Ciclo Storico.” 144 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse societies were finally able to emulate the Western scientific revolution, then the

Islamic '‘renaissance” - re-birth and growth - was also possible.

In order to cement this belief in the renaissance of science in Islamic nations, he had to demonstrate that science was not a Western patrimony. He stressed that

"seven centuries back, at least some of the developing countries of today were in the forefront of scientific endeavour; they were the standard bearers, the pioneers .”52 *

Depending on his audience, this claim was twofold. Before the Islamic public, it was another attempt to “break the mental barrier” by emphasising that Muslim science, being part of “our cultural heritage”, “is of direct relevance even today and its remembrance, still a peculiar source of inspiration .”33 In the industrialised countries,

Salam’s argument meant a veiled declaration against Western superiority .54 55Science was a measure of “civilisation,” but in the past “the honours [were] still shared between the East and the West.”33 Armed by a historical argument and by diplomatic language, Salam was the most influential Third World scientist who never ceased to confront the Eurocentric believe that “Science is the creation of the Western

52 George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, Vol. I: From Homer to Omar Khayyam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1927), one of the first studies of Muslim science, was Salam’s main sources and one of the few he explicitly acknowledged (see Salam, “Science and Technology in the Emerging Nations,” 33). 3* Abdus Salam, “Presidential address on the occasion of the inauguration,” Paper presented at the International Seminar on Low Energy Nuclear Physics (Dacca 1967), F.2, ASP. 54 On the use of science and technology as measure Western superiority see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure o f Men. Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 55 Salam, “Science and Technology in the Emerging Nations,” 33.

145 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

democracy, Judeo-Christian tradition ,”36 To contest that thesis, Salam repeated the

story of Michael the Scot:

Seven hundred and fifty years ago, an impoverished Scotsman left his native glens to travel south to Toledo in Spain. His name was Michael, his goal to live and work at the Arab universities of Toledo and Cordova... His interests lay in the sciences of astrology and alchemy, then fashionable in Scotland. But once in Toledo, Michael formed the ambitious project of introducing Aristotle to Latin Europe, translating not from the original Greek, which he did not know, but from the Arabic translation taught in Spain [...] Toledo’s school, representing as it did the finest synthesis of Arabic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew scholarship, was one of the most memorable of international essays into international collaboration.37

Once again, the autobiographical reference is apparent, and has been pointed out by his contemporaries .38 In Salam’s cyclic theory of history, the present situation was symmetrical, but the roles had been inverted: it was now the new Michaels, from the South who had to come to the North to learn science.

In the eleventh centuries, Salam went on, science was transmitted to the West through the school of Toledo, a hybrid place of cultural synthesis and ‘‘one of the mort memorable of international essays into scientific collaboration.” Five hundred years before, another school, Gondisapur, had been central to the transmission of

Christian knowledge to Islam. He gave other “parallels” from the Chinese and the

Hindu civilisations to show that “the pattern is more or less the same.” That is to say,

36 Salam’s claims against this statement can be found in virtually all his writings since 1960. 37 Abdus Salam, “The United Nations and the International World of Physics,” Bulletin o f Atomic Scientists, February, 1968, 14-15. See also Idem, “Science and Technology in the Emerging Nations;” Idem, “The Advancement of Science for the Developing Countries,” in The Place of Values in a World of Facts, edited by Arne Tiselius and Sam Nilsson, 269-280 (New York, London, Sydney, Stockholm: Wiley Interscience Division and Almqvist & Wiksell, 1969); and Idem, “Gauge Unification of Fundamental Forces.” 38 “Salam saw himself in some ways as a latter-day Michael,” writes his colleague Tom Kibble in his Obituary (Tom Kibble, “Muhammad Abdus Salam. 29 January—21 November 1996,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 44 (1998): 385-401). 146 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

the initial borrowing from an external intellectual tradition - and I wish to stress external tradition - possibly at an international intellectual centre; the great diffusion of learning in the society, its wholesale acceptance of the scientific spirit of enquiry and finally the closing of mental barriers once again.59

Furthermore, “the scientific revolution of thought has hardly touched the

developing world ,”60 Salain pointed out in a statement that is reminiscent of Walter

Rostow's characterisation of the “traditional society” as pre-Newtonian .61 Following the 19th century tradition of using Western science and technology to measure degrees of “civilisation,” Rostow regarded the establishment of Newtonianism and the adoption of Western science as one of the “preconditions for take-off .”62 *In Rostow’s terms, “traditional societies” - the zero-level of development according to his model

- ' is one whose structure is developed within limited production functions, based on pre-Newtonian science and technology, and on pre-Newtonian attitudes towards the physical world.M Modernisation required importing Western scientific culture. What

Salam’s philosophy of history asserted was that, with the transmission of science from the North to the South, another full cycle was about to be completed. Hence, the

59 Salam, “The Advancement of Science for the Developing Countries,” the quotation is on page 274 (italics in the original). 60 Salam, “The Advancement of Science for the Developing Countries,” 270. 61 Conversely, Rostow’s argument goes, in Europe operated “the spirit of science and productive gadgeteering, of Galileo and Leonardo down to Newton, Bacon, and the flood of eighteenth-century men catch up in what Ashton aptly calls ‘the impulse to contrive’,” (Walter W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: a non-communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 32). 62 Rostow, “The Stages of Economic Growth.” 6’ Rostow, “The Stages of Economic Growth,” 4-7 (italics added). Rostow argued that change during the pre-taking off period came about as a result of external circumstances. As Rist observes, according to Rostow, “‘development’ would not be so close if the societies of the South had not been a little ‘shaken up’ by the North,” (Rist, The history o f development, 97).

147 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse modern international “excellence institutes” under the United Nations banner were to be the “Gondisapurs and Toledos of today .”64 65

2.2 The science versus technology transfer debate

Despite the unanimity in the 1960s and 1970s about the central role of science and technology in Third World development and the importance of international co operation, the kind of science and technology policy and the terms of such co operation remained a matter of heated debate. Writing about the 1960 Rehovoth

Conference, Stevan Dedijer, a Yugoslavian physicist who emigrated to Sweden in the

1950s and became one of the most influential sociologists of Third World science and technology, noted :63 “[W]e seem to be moving faster and faster along many similar paths toward a world research policy.” This claim, supported by what he perceived as

“the organic and traditional unity of science ... [which] is making consciously planned worldwide research projects both necessary and possible,” was the kind of ideology that certainly inspired World politicians of science. Dedijer also pointed out the contrasting views of the participants: “It was said again and again that what the new nations needed was not to hear of fission power or fusion power, but to be told how to plan and how to build research on ‘the humdrum level ’.”66

64 Salarti, “The Advancement of Science for the Developing Countries.” 65 Stefan Dedijer, “Greetings to the First Swallow,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists XVII, no. 2 (1962): 33-36. On Dedijer’s thought see Jan Annerstedt, and Andrew Jamison, eds. From research to social intelligence: essays for Stevan Dedijer (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). fa' Dedijer. “Greetings to the First Swallow”.

148 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

The debate dealt with classic questions on science and technology policy.

Should a poor country invest in pure science, develop science-based technologies, or just buy the most appropriate technologies available in the market; to what extent

were some disciplines more appropriate than others and what was the criterion in

choosing them; what was the cost-benefit of pure science in a local context lacking an

infrastructure to meet the basic needs of the majority of the population? These were some at the topics of the debates that politicians of science and scientists tried to answer in conferences like Rehovoth.

Salam was the most energetic advocate of the mainstream pure science for development thesis. At the other end of the debate, arguing for an old technology i economy in the developing countries, was P.M.S. Blackett, Salam’s Dean at

Imperial College. I shall suggest that Blackett’s coldness towards Salam’s proposal to create the ICTP resulted from a deep disagreement about the kind of science and technology policies developing countries needed for economic development.

While his scientific and political career has been studied, virtually nothing has been said about Blackett’s interest in the Third World .67 Yet, since the late 1950s,

Blackett was a leading figure in the debate about science, technology and Third

67 Some of his most relevant writings on the science and development are the following: Patrick M.S. Blackett, “Technology and World Advancement (Presidential Address to the British Association, Dublin),” British Association for the Advancement o f Science 14 (1957): 3; idem, “New Science or old technology,” in Science and the New Nations, edited by Ruth Gruber, 31-35 (New York: Pyramid Books, 1960); idem “Science and Technology and the Developing Countries,” Transactions o f the Institution of Chemical Engineers 39, no. 4 (1961): 299-304; idem, “Address at the United Nations Conference on Applications of Science and Technology for the Benefit of Less Developed Countries.,” in Plenary Proceedings (2nd Plenary Session), edited by United Nations, 49 (Geneva: United Nations, 1963); idem. Science, Technology and aid in Developing Countries (Third Encyclopaedia Britannica Lecture) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971).

149 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

World development. In fact, he was one of the distinguished invitees to the 1960

Rehovoth conference. Various governments, especially India, sought his advice on science, technology and defence .68 In the late 1960s, Blackett chaired the

International Council of Science Unions’ “Committee on Science and Technology in

Developing Countries .”69

Although there was no open confrontation between Salam and Blackett, their discourses clearly expressed their dissension. Blackett’s position was neatly explained in Rehovoth. He titled his presentation with an eloquent question: “New

Science or Old Technology ?”70 Rostow’s aeronautical metaphor for development became the common place to speak about development. Even Blackett

. endorsed Rostow’s thesis, arguing that the essential thing was “speed” in initiating growth (as a precondition for the “take-off’). “It is impossible to wait for new scientific and technological developments to occur. The planning of the initial process of growth must be based on known technology, and cannot rely on new science.”71 The advocates of “science at the humdrum level” to whom Dedijer referred were, in fact, Blackett and economist W. Arthur Lewis. At the Rehovoth meeting, Lewis stated that:

68 On Blackett’s influence on Indian science policy and his relationship with Homi Bhabha, the most powerful scientist of post-colonial India, see for instance, Itty Abraham, The Making o f the Indian Atomic Bomb. Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (London: Zed Books, 1998). 69 The recommendation of this committee were published in a volume supervised by Blackett; see G. Jones, The Role of Science and Technology in Developing Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), Introduction. 70 Blackett, “New Science or Old Technology.” Some of the contributions to the 1960 Rehovoth conference , including Blackett’s, were reproduced in a 1961 special issue of the Bulletin o f the Atomic Scientists (Volume 17) dedicated to “Science and the New Nations.”

150 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

Fortunately for the new states, they do not have to be in the forefront of developing new science. What they need is rather the application to their problems of what is already well known. This is science at the humdrum level, not to be compared with the glamorous and exciting games with the infinite that are played in institutions such as the Weizmann Institute.71 72

Blackett insisted on this point in several articles published in the 1960s.73 The logical consequence was that the underdeveloped nations should concentrate on “shopping for priorities” in the “world Supermarket” of technical know-how. “Socialism could, in one aspect, be considered a religion of priorities,” Blackett concluded recalling

Aneurin Bevan’s memorable definition .74

Salam’s public reply came three years later also in the Bulletin of the Atomic

Scientists.75 He did not mention Blackett’s or Lewis’ writings. He contended that two problems afflicted humanity: nuclear annihilation and world poverty. He argued that h ■”!; ''diseases” sprang from a common cause: excess of science in the case of the rich and lack of science in that of the poor. The East-West tension was a result of the former, while the North-South gap a result of the latter. The arms race was but

71 Blackett, “New Science or Old Technology.” 72 W. Arthur Lewis, “Science, Men and Money,” in Science and the New Nat ionsr edited by Ruth Gruber, 46-56 (New York: Pyramid Books, 1960). Lewis (1915-1991) was bom at St. Lucia and studied in the London School of Economics. He was a professor at Princeton University. He was a prominent expert in economic development with particular consideration to the developing countries, for which he (and Theodore W. Schultz) received the Nobel Prize in 1979; the same year Salam was awarded with the same prize for physics. This article was included in the Bulletin o f the Atomic Scientists special issue. 7 ’ For instance, he wrote: “There would be special applications to local conditions, particularly in agriculture and medicine, where new scientific research was needed, but as Arthur Lewis has said, it is scientific research at a very humdrum level” (Blackett, “Science and Technology and the Developing Countries,” italics added). See also his introduction to Jones, The Role of Science and Technology in Developing Countries. 74 Blackett, “New Science or Old Technology.” 75 Abdus Salam, “Deseases of the Rich and Deseases of the Poor,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 19, no. 4 (1963): 3 and 27..

151 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam s discourse

another manifestation of the opulence that was at the heart of the inequality

separating the rich and poor societies. From the point of view of the poor nations, the

East-West confrontation - Salam wrote - was “inevitable luxuries of a state of

physical well-being,” while very few people among the richer nations “are really

aware of the intensity of world poverty.” A logical consequence of this argument was

that, since the lack of science was the single most important cause of world poverty,

only a redistribution of scientific knowledge could close the economic gap.

At first sight, Salam seems to concede that the kind of science necessary in

poor countries was “of an unglamorous variety,” consisting of taking stock of the

natural resources .76 However, pure scientists were still needed for “unfortunately, in

most underdeveloped countries there are few men who can make right list of

priorities.” Therefore, “the greatest single long-term contributions individual

scientists can make is helping to create such men.” Pure scientists served to train a

qualified civil service that should deal with the problem of technology transfer.

Furthermore, the scientist’s technical knowledge and his ethos distinguished him

from other professionals. Thus, scientists themselves were the ideal watchdogs in the

technology transfer process: “it is at this crucial stage of counsel and advice that the

technical knowledge and the idealism of the scientist can help .”77 This social role justified the poor nations’ investment in “glamorous science.” For, unless a country

76 This was the sort of a linear model of construction of a national scientific tradition going from taxonomy and ending with theorisation; the same model was proposed some years later to explain the diffusion of Western scientific knowledge by George Basalla in a very influential article (George Basalla “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611-622). 77 Salam, “Deseases of the Rich and Deseases of the Poor.”

152 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse was in a position to offer an active research environment, scientists would flee.

Financing pure research was the price to be paid to have crucial advisors to negotiate with the North.

The notion of science as a source of emancipation was a central element in colonial and post-colonial ideology against foreign domination in two ways. First, from a pragmatic viewpoint, and second, for its symbolic significance to the scientific elite in the new states. I shall discuss these aspects in turn.

Unless “technology transfer” encompassed “science transfer,” the former was a new form of domination and dependency. For, without science, the recipient was a blind consumer of black boxes. It is obvious that this assertion relies on a linear model in which technological development depends on theoretical science. Salam was a fervent believer in this hierarchical relationship between science and technology. As various authors have pointed out, in the second half of the twentieth centur, this ideology was widely shared among physicists in general, and high- energy theoretical physicists in particular .78 In Salam’s opinion there was no question about the intellectual superiority of science.

The following anecdote is revealing. Speaking in Dacca in 1961, Salam described his experience when he visited the De Haviland Aircraft Factory in

Hatfield:

78 Sven Widmalm, “Big Science in a Small Country. Sweden and CERN II,” in Centre on the Periphery: historical aspects of 20th century Swedish physics, edited by Svante Lindqvist, 107-140 (Canton: Science History Publications, 1993).

153 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

Instead of an organised assembly line where I expected to see molten aluminium being poured in at one end and a Comet Airliner coming out at the other, all I saw was something like an overgrown metalsmith’s workshop in rural Pakistan. And then two women in overalls lifted a couple of aluminium sheets while a third started welding them together with a manually operated welder to make part of the fuselage, I am afraid 1 lost my respect for the mysteries of the manufacturing craft.

1 do not for one moment wish to suggest that all technology is electrical welding. There is the other part of the story - the aerodynamic design of the Comet where the high-level scientific talent comes in .79 80

Clearly, the association of women in overalls, a metalsmith’s workshop in rural Pakistan and electrical welding meant to denote the inferiority of manual work.

(In this context, that was to say technology.) Conversely, science, especially theoretical science, was the only thing that saved technology from being simply electrical welding. The intellectual challenge laid in the design, “where the high-level scientific talent comes in.”

Indeed, Salam thought and publicly stressed that technology, in contrast to science, was easy. Again he appealed to history to make his point. The Japanese case,

Salam argued, taught that technology could be acquired rather quickly. InSO an interview he explained that:

Up to a level technology is very easy. After one goes through a little bit of the technical - after one starts living in a technical society, one finds that one develops a sort of contempt for the thing, it’s ndthard, it’s easy. It can be acquired very easily, given the proper training, the proper atmosphere, the proper facilities. It’s not like scholarship, for example .81

79 Salam, “Address to the XIII Annual All Pakistan Science Conference;” quotation is on page 186 (italics added). 80 Idem 81 See Anon, “Lonely Scientists,” in Ideals and Realities, see page 434.

154 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

Such disregard for technology in Britain may have been an expression of what

C.P. Snow called in his Two Cultures “the passion to find a new snobbery.” In another passage, he points out that “pure scientists have by large been dim-witted about engineers and applied science.” However, it is likely that Salani was inspired by another passage in the same book which casts doubts upon Snow’s own appreciation of technology: “It is simply that technology is rather easy. Or more exactly, technology is the branch of human experience that people can learn with predictable results .”82 83 Scientific research was a sign of the intellectual development of a nation and a criterion to measure prosperity. Conversely, “[tjechnology is just an episode in the history of a nation .”84

Salam combined his discourse about the hierarchical classification of knowledge with the relationship between colonialism and underdevelopment.

Accordingly, backwardness and underdevelopment in general, and in the Islamic

- :.fions in particular, resulted from two ominous features of the British rule. First, its scientifically illiterate civil service, and second, as a corollary, the lack of science and technology schools in British India. Identifying colonial underdevelopment with the hostility to science and technology was an extension of Snow’s explanation of the

British “decline” based on the “traditional culture” of British civil service .85 In 1964,

Salam contended that: “The civil service was a legacy of the British empire - men of

82 C.P.Snow, The Two Cultures, 32. 81 C.P.Snow, The Two Cultures, 44. 84 Abdus Salam, “Failing of Arab Science. Interview with Judith Perera,” 1986, 40, F.l, ASP. 8i Snow, The Two Cultures, 23.

155 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

liberal education, responsible for law and order and revenue collection. Sterling men,

first rate administrators. But men with no appreciation of engineering, technology and

science. Not the men best suited for development .”86 This was a widespread sentiment in most post-colonial scientific milieus .87 In an interview for the same magazine a year earlier, Indian nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha, head of the Atomic

Indian commission, said: '‘our civil services have been of a very high calibre, but their whole background is that of the administration of justice, of law and order, tax collection.. .The administrator with a technical background is something we have yet to develop in adequate numbers .”88 Consequently, one of the tasks of the new states should be not to permit “the system to perpetuate” and to invite civil service men to svnd “their own sons to read physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering...for research.”89 In summary, Salam’s believed that the scientific institutions should liberate themselves from administrators and be put in the hands of scientists.

In one sense it was another version of the superiority of science. Such arrogance was not specific to Salam’s discourse. As part of the process of gaining a higher academic and social status in the first half of the twentieth century, theoretical

86 Anon, “Lonely Scientists;” in ¡deals and Realities, quotation is on page 435. 8 Identifying the scientific backwardness with the colonial rule is a common trait also in Latin American historiography. Echoing it, scientists do not doubt in pointing at Spanish and Portuguese lack of scientific tradition as the main reason for scientific underdevelopment: “Due to the heritage in our formation, we have an intellectual tradition inclined towards literature and law studies, with no experimental curiosity and alien to scientific mentality,” wrote Leite Lopes in his La Cienciay el Dilema de América Latina, 20. For an insightful discussion of how political interests influence the construction of histories of science in the periphery see Olga Restrepo, “En busca del orde: ciencia y poder en Colombia,” Asclepio (Madrid) 50 (2) (1998): 33-75. ss Anon., “Thinking ahead with...Homi Bhabha. India's Development Strategy,” International Science and Technology, October, 1963, 93-98. 89 Anon., “Lonely Scientists;” in, Ideals and Realities, quotation is on page 435.

156 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

physicists developed a self-affirmative ideology. In hostile environments towards

science, particularly in developing nations, scientists pushed such ideology to the

limits of the credible. This version of scientism prescribed that a scientifically

disciplined mind was prepared to excel in any kind of qualified job. In particular, it

could administrate efficiently a research centre, a national system of science and

technology, and even the state. Concomitantly, the problem of the new states was that

it lacked leaders with scientific training .90

The symbolic meaning of science in post-colonial contexts is rooted in the

lack of scientific and technical schools during the colonial rule. As Deepak Kumar pointed out, “the logic of the metropolis-colony relationship did not favour the latter getting a higher form of scientific and technical education. What the colony get was a sort of hybrid education emerging out of a careless fusion between industrial and technical education .”91 Given the supposedly intellectual hierarchy of science and technology, such education was second class. Even more, for colonial scientists, the constraints imposed on scientific research in the colonies mirrored the power structure in the intellectual sphere. Curiosity-oriented research in pure science was a privilege reserved for the British. In particular, activities in physics-and chemistry

90 In the United States, Minerva's editor, Edward Shils, championed the idea of pure science. He argued that the problem of the Third World was related to the lack of leaders with scientific training; see for instance Edward Shils, “Scientific Development in the New States,” in Science and the New Nations, edited by Ruth Gruber (New York: Pyramid Books, 1961). See also his other essays on science in the developing world in Idem, The Intellectual and the Powers and other Essays (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975). Not surprisingly, when Minerva was founded, in 1961, Shils invited Salam to be member of the Editorial Board. 01 \’ee D. Kumar, “Cultures of Science and colonial culture,” British Journal for the History o f Science 29. no. 2 (1996): 195-209; also. Idem, Science and the Raj, 1857-1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Pre.;s, 1995), 140.

157 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse were almost completely absent in India, not to mention in the African colonies.

Simultaneously, science had reached a professional stage in Europe. This produced the idea that denying access to science to the colonies was a strategy to perpetuate domination: concealing the “trick of getting rich” kept the colonies materially poor, and banning colonial scientists from participating in scientific enterprise precluded cultural development. This “apartheid in science,” as Kumar calls it, was an evident manifestation of discrimination against which Indians reacted in late nineteenth century.92

Salam’s discourse was a continuation of such a reaction against exclusion in the post-colonial world. Pursuing science in the new states was not just a national

! ■: ed. but an individual right. The newly independent states should guarantee their citizens the right to carry out “useless” research. The international scientific community had the duty of supporting the long-expected re-establishment of a scientific tradition in those nations. Any form of opposition to science in Third World nations concealed the discriminatory and inadmissible distinction between a “global science, science for the rich countries [and] science for the poor countries .”93 It preserved material but also mental colonialism. Science should return to the civilisation from which the West had benefited in the late middle ages. Participating

92 In Africa, there was even less participation of the locals in scientific activities. As Eisemon et al. pointed out: “Most Africans did not derive significant benefits from the scientific research infrastructure created in the colonial period; they were spectators to the scientific development of their countries” (T.O. Eisemon, C.H. Davis, and E.M. Rathgeber, “The transplantation of Science to Anglophone and Francophone Africa,” Science and Public Policy 12 (1985): 191-202). On the “Africanisation” process in post-colonial Nigeria and Kenya, see Idem, “The Implantation of Science in Nigeria and Kenya,” Minerva 17 (1979): 504-526. 9'’ Kidder, “Abdus Salam,” in Ideals and Realities; the quotation is on page 476.

158 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse in mainstream scientific research meant recognising the new status of the former- colonies’ scientific intellectuals.

2.3 The leading role of theoretical physics

One more question remains to be addressed. Was there any scientific discipline that was more suitable than the others for the establishment of a scientific tradition in the developing countries? Salam pointed out several reasons for promoting theoretical physics in developing countries. Like other parts of his discourse, he based those reasons on his own version of the history of physics and a stereotypical image of theoretical physics.

The first reason was that theoretical physics needed no costly apparatus; only a good brain, pencil and paper. This stereotype is related to the superiority of theory.

In contrast to experimentalists, the theoreticians were able to discover the fundamental laws of nature by purely thinking in the solitude of their offices. No reference was made to the institutional support required to establish a culture of “pen and paper.” His discourse was a negation of his own experience at Cambridge, the institution where such culture was shaped precisely through the creation of a complex network of human and material resources .94 Moreover, justifying the creation of the

ICTP, Salam told the IAEA delegates that theoretical physics was the field in which what counted was “the individual initiative - rather than collaborative effort.” This is

94 See Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory. A Pedagogical History of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University. 1760-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

159 Alexis De Greiff Chapter!: Salam’sdiscourse

why. Salam contended, theoretical physics is “the first science in smaller countries,

which get developed at the advanced levels.” He explicitly referred to various

“historic” cases. Among them, Brazil and Argentina, two not at all small countries,

and Japan, where the history of theoretical physics was preceded by a long tradition

in experimental physics.9'-' It was another example of Salam’s use of history. More

importantly still is Salam’s confidence in presenting these cases; history serves to

cement the belief in a natural development of sciences: “No one can reverse this

historical process of the order in which science grows in rich and poor soils.” As a

corollary, Salam continued, theoretical physics was one of the most effective cost-

benefit investments. To support this statement, he relied on a hardly original example: the supposedly direct relationship between Einstein’s 1905 paper and nuclear reactor energy. He asked: “Who among us dare to say today that a theoretical speculation on the muon fusion may not be relevant to the energy problems tomorrow?”* 96

The second reason Salam invoked to promote physics was the metaphysical argument about the “fundamentality” of physics. In this view, not only is science above technology in the knowledge classification. The unification programme of

“fundamental” forces - Salam’s topic as a physicist - entails the idea that it is possible to logically derive a formal description of all physical phenomena from a limited number of natural laws. Following the positivist tradition such a scheme sets a

05 Kim, “The emergence of Theoretical Physics in Japan.” % Abdus “Need for an International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Speech at the IAEA Annual Conference, Vienna, 1962.,” FI, ASP; reproduced in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 219-223

160 Alexis De Grelff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse clear disciplinary hierarchy also within the sciences. Accordingly particle physics is at the top of the sciences.1,7

Salam also argued that the question of “fundamentality” of theoretical particle physics had a deeper sense. It involved the transcendental dimension of the search for unity. In Islam, unity is a central notion. The references to this aspect of Islam are countless. Take, for example, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian historian trained in

MIT in the 1960s. In 1966, Nasr published an influential book titled Ideals and

I'ro’:ties in Islam, from which Salam took the name for his most celebrated lecture at

Stockholm University in 1975 and, in turn, for his collection of essays on science and society. In a sense Nasr’s was a continuation of Sarton’s work but with greater emphasis on the metaphysical and gnostic elements in Islamic science. His Science and Civilization in Islam (with a critical preface by Giorgio Santillana) is hitherto one of the richest sources on Islamic science. It is plausible that Salam used it as source of

Islamic contributions to science. In this work we read:

The arts and sciences in Islam are based on the idea of unity, which is the heart of the Muslim revelation...One might say that the aim of all the Islamic sciences...is to show the unity and interrelatedness of all that exists, so that, in contemplating the unity of the cosmos, man may be led to the unity of the Divine Principle, of which the unity of Nature is the image." 99 98 97

97 On the debate problem of Unity of/in Science see Galison, and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science. Boundaries, Contexts and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). For a critique of Hempel’s model of fundamental and phenomenological laws on which the debate of the '‘fundamentality” of physics laws lay, see Nancy Cartwright. How the Laws of Physics lie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 98 Salam’s lecture was later published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist (32 (7) (1976): 9-15) and reproduced in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 3-22. 99 Seyyed H. Nasr, Science and Civilization in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 24.

161 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

In 1965, Salam gave the “Iqbal Memorial Lectures” transmitted by Radio

Pakistan100 on “The search for unity in the understanding of nature.” He presented the

state of the art in particle physics. In the last section - “The Faith of the Scientist” -

he concluded:

If I have done anything I hope to have shown you that allied with the wonder of God’s creation, that allied with this wonder is the inescapable fact that all explanation we have ever found is based on symmetry concepts.101

Citing from the Quran, Salam suggested that discovering the fundamental

symmetries of the nature of all forces resided at the core Islamic doctrine. In modem

terms, such searching for symmetries and unification turned to be the “sublime” and

“unique” physics theories. He concluded his address with a plea from the Holy Book:

“Oh Lord! Show me the heart of tilings!”102

100 See the third part of the series in Abdus Salam, “Symmetries, matter and energy,” Science Chronicle, August, 1965, 17-20. r01 idem. 102 Salam described physics as “sublime and unique” in Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards, “Science Sublime,” in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 463-473. Salam’s concern of linking science and Islamic doctrine has been criticised in relation to contemporary debate about the rise of ah “Islamic science” as “alternative” to Western science, including an alternative physics. Salam’s position has been perceived by both camps as “ambiguous." Examples of both critiques are Hoobhoy, “Abdus Salam” on one extreme, and Munawar A. Anees, and Merryl W. Davis, “Current Thinking and Future Directions,” in The Revenge of Athena: Science, Exploitation and Third World, edited by Z. Sardar (London: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1988), on the other; for a study on the debate about science in Islamic countries see Mazyar Lotfalian, “Technoscientific identities: Muslims and the Culture of Curiosity” (PhD Dissertation, Rice University, 1999). Although Salam preferred to adopt a prudent distance regarding the relation between the content of science and the doctrines of Islam before the Nobel Prize, in the 1980s and 1990s he became far more explicit. Among other things, he proposed and supported a project to teach physics through the verses of the Koran. Yet, in 1986, when the “Islamic science” debate was at the centre of the public opinion in some Islamic nations, he declared: “Islamic science is a slogan with no meaning...Islamic ethics are universal anyway - care for the environment, lack of specialisation, care for wholeness and so on. To call this Islamic science is an absurdity... It seems that those that do not want to do real science talk of Islamic science” (Salam, “Failing of Arab Science”).

162 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

The third reason for choosing theoretical physics to foster development concerned the potentiality of particle physics for Third World practitioners given its current state. Scholarship - unlike technology - needs a long tradition to develop, and developing countries lacked such a tradition. Was it possible to establish one in a short period of time? The question was similar to whether developing countries could catch up with Western economic '‘maturity” quickly. The case of physics was: Can a

Third World scientist make a scientific contribution that is as equally important as those made in places with a long scientific tradition? According to Salam that was the case in particle physics. In 1964, just after setting up the ICTP, Salam explained his thesis to a journalist. A solid tradition was typified by people like Hilbert, Weirstrass and Gauss, he said. Developing countries could not produce those kinds of individuals, Salam said. However,

I keep telling my boys in Pakistan - Do not despair if you do not produce, for example, mathematicians like Hilbert. You still might produce mathematicians like Ramanujam...an intuitive person, one who could be produced anywhere at any time given a minimum of mathematical training.103

Salam’s analogy with Ramanujan may be a projection of Salam’s own mode of conceiving practising physics. His tutor at Cambridge, Fred Hoyle, explicitly made tire parallel between Salam and Ramanujan when recalling his interest in intuitive

l0j Ramanujam was an Indian mathematician with no formal mathematical training. In the 1920s, he sent his works to Cambridge eminent mathematician G.H. Hardy. A few months later Ramanujan was called to Cambridge as Hardy’s collaborator. He made some of the most important contributions in his field. On Ramanujan see S.R. Ranganathan, Ramanujan: the man and the mathematics (London: Asia Publishing House, 1967); Robert Kanigel, The man who knew infinity: a life of the genius of Ramanujan (London: Scribners, 1991). This are mostly hagiographic works. A study based on Ramanujan’s case is Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: creativity and authenticity in two Indian Scientists (Delhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); some reminiscences can be read in P.K. Srinivasan, ed. Ramanujan, an inspiration (Madras: Muthialpet High School, 1967-1968).

163 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse results rather than mathematical formalism. Perhaps Salam identified his own practice of physics with Ramanujan’s intuitive practice. Nevertheless, as we saw in the previous chapter, since the early years in Pakistan and under the guidance of his father, Salam’s academic formation had been shaped through a disciplined practice in mathematics. We should not forget that Salam, in contrast with the Indian mathematician, received solid training in Cambridge. The overlapping divergences problem, for instance, involved learning a whole set of calculation techniques. As

David Kaiser demonstrates, such techniques were developed through routine exercises and strong interactions with other practitioners.104 It is also true that

Salam’s practice of physics changed when he became the leader of the Imperial

College group. There his role was more on the production of new ideas. His collaborators at Imperial in fact agree on one point; Salam’s most remarkable quality as a scientist was his knowledge of ‘ what were the crucial problems in the field.

However, at Imperial, Salam was not too interested in following the details of the consequences of his ideas. That job was done by a consolidated group of collaborators and students dedicated to filtering some of those ideas, doing the calculations and testing the plausibility of his “intuitive” ideas (see chapter 6). The case may be drastically different for a physicist in a Third World institution, lacking a team of collaborators literally around him. These circumstances never appear in

Salam’s conceptualisation of his own practice. Furthermore, instead of recognising

104 David Kaiser, “Making Theory: Producing Physics and Physicists in Postwar America” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2000).

164 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse his privileged position as leader of a research programme, he claimed that the state of the art in particle physics allowed anyone to make an important contribution.

High-energy physics in the 1960s was one of the most prolific areas in theoretical physics. All sorts of symmetry groups were proposed to classify and explain the phenomenology of the zoo of particles coming out from the accelerators.

The Imperial group under Salam's leadership was one of the most active in the field.

During the 1960s they constructed and investigated a number of these symmetry schemes. Imperial College became a industry of gauge theories. This state of particle physics allowed him to argue that:

theoretical physics at the moment is in an intuitive state. It’s a stage when we are sitting on the top of experiments. We are utterly impatient. We don’t want to wait from one resonance to the next. As soon as three resonances turn up, we make a complete theory. That theory is upset tomorrow; we start all over again. If you make mistakes, you don’t worry. That is the intuitive milieu in theoretical physics. You need different types of gifts: you need good imagination, intuition, perception, seeing a correlation between facts. You do not need that long tradition of erudite knowledge.105

This was a temporary situation, Salam conceded. “In a few years.. .the basic laws will have been established; the thing will become classical, less exciting. We shall need duller people with deeper scholarship.”106 Consequently, this peculiar state of the art in physics offered a unique opportunity to insert scientists from developing countries into the international scientific community of the most fundamental of the sciences.

103 Anon, “Lonely Scientists;” in ¡deals and Realities, quotation is on page 435. 106 Idem.

165 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

The fourth and last reason to promote theoretical physics was that it had the

additional advantage that it was a “glamour subject” (a phrase that again reminds us

of Blackett and Lewis) that attracted the majority of young students interested in science. This was certainly true due to the relationship between the development of quantum mechanics and the successful building of the atomic bomb. This image of

theoretical science as the source of new technology had also great impact on the ideology of scientific intellectuals in the Third World, as Kim has shown for the

Korean case.107 108 In his proposal to create the ICTP, Salam stressed the new intellectual aspirations of the less developed countries’ scientists: “let us not forget that young scientists in the under-developed world feel the urge to meet the challenge of fundamental science as much as anyone else. Among the fundamental sciences, theoretical physics has a peculiar fascination for them.” And in 1964 he said: “As a rule it’s the glamour subjects which get developed first. That seems to be the pattern all over the world.” Was it not “an element of old-fashioned intellectual snobbery” that a country such as Pakistan trained more physicists than agriculturalists? Salam contended: “It's something to be deplored, in the abstract, but you can do nothing about it in a free society.”109 Salam, however, did not intend to be cynical. He borrowed the language of the capitalist ideology to demonstrate that market laws also applied to science. Therefore, opposing the establishment of theoretical physics

lu7 Dong-Won Kim, “Why Physics? The Conflict between the Image and Role of Physics in South Korea.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society (Vancouver 2000). 108 Abdus Salam, “Need for an International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Speech at the IAEA Annual Conference,” in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 219-223, and the quotation is on page 220. 109 Anon, “Lonely Scientists,” see pages 436-37 in Ideals and Realities.

166 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

would mean acting against a sacred value of the “free world:” the right to the free

development of the individual.

2.4 Conclusion

To summarise the main points in Salam’s discourse one could say that he called for international co-operation in science in general, and theoretical physics in particular.

Such co-operation should take place in an international institution under the banner of the United Nations. Only such an organisation could warrant the neutrality in which scientific exchange could occur. It should emulate what had taken place in the eleventh century in Toledo; the transmission of knowledge from one civilisation to another. Such discourse was based on a cyclic conception of history. On this point it is interesting to note that, nine centuries before, the renaissance of the West coincided with the decline of Arab culture. Would that be the fate of the West? Salam never raised such a question publicly. Nevertheless, given his own theory of history, it is quite possible that in private he thought that the renaissance of the Third World implied the end of the Western golden age.

The existence of a scientific elite, and the destination of funds for pure science in less developed nations, was justified by their role as the educators of a new kind of civil servants trained to foster science and technology for development. Thus the administration and policy of science at international and national levels should be in the hands of these scientists devoted to the institutional administration of science.

Hence no external force should control scientific research policies and administration.

Their chief goal was to consolidate a national scientific community to defend the

167 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse interests of scientists and to advance scientific research in poor nations. The scientific community’s commitment ought to be the advancement of development based on science and technology.

Salam associated the advancement of science for development not just with economic prosperity, but with values rooted in the tradition of Western liberal ideology. He stressed the central role of the individual in science and hence development. It was based on a stereotypical image of science as a discipline driven by a few exceptional minds that could appear spontaneously anywhere. It was the inalienable right of citizens in a “free society,” to pursue a scientific career. “Free society,” however, did not stand for “democracy.” It was a euphemism deployed to express an anti-communist discourse. Therefore, in contrast with the “Copenhagen spirit,” where scientific practice was based on the free exchange of ideas and could not flourish in non-democratic societies, Salam believed that democracy was not a precondition for the advancement of science, and therefore for development. In the

1980s, he put it bluntly:

I am sure it is painful for some of you hear, and painful for some of you to say it,..., but the truth of the matter is that excellence in Sciences is dependent on the freedom and openness within the scientific community and not necessarily upon the openness or democracy with the society at large110

110 Abdus Salam, “Scientific Thinking: Between Secularisation and Transcendent," in Ideals and Realities. Selected Essays of Abdus Salam , edited by Abdus Salam, C.H Lai and A. Kindwai (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1989), 280 (italics in the original). This paper combined two talks on science and Islam, one given at the UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, in April 1984, and another on the same subject delivered at the Conference organised by Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, Turin (Italy), in June 1988 . Stefan Dedijer had observed in 1963 that: “My theory is that you can develop much quicker and much cheaper if you have democracy...Now that doesn’t mean democracies in which you have three parties to vote for. But let’s say a democracy within your scientific community - where the scientists can influence the government, where there is a candid exchange of 168 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

The idea that scientists have the right to do science for its own sake, that scientific institutions should be administrated by scientists, all in the name of development, constitutes the core of what a senior officer called the “Trieste spirit.”

That is to say, prescribing a Centre such as “an international Centre to which high- level physicists of all countries could come as a matter of right.” The ICTP was conceived as a centre “‘for scientists, and run by scientists,’ where the primary objective and consideration is to be at the service of scientists to develop science.”1"

The science versus technology transfer debate reflects some of the tensions around international aid for development. Salam’s main argument was centred on the value of science for “cultural development.” Blackett’s and Lewis’ pragmatic views about the type of science and technology needed in developing nations was certainly correct from an economic perspective. Poor nations could not afford to invest in areas that had no clear connection with the urgent needs of the majority of the population.

The link between scientific research and technological application is too long and uncertain for that to be predictable. International co-operation should concentrate on technology, rather than on the transfer of science. Their view in fact reflected the dominant vision of international aid during the 1950s and 1960s, currently termed in the historiography of international co-operation as the “problem resolution phase.”

The opposite view, which became dominant in the 1970s, stressed the concept of *

views” (Anon., “Thinking ahead with...Stevan Dedijer. The Science of Science,” International Science and Technology, August, 1963, 68-73). Luciano Bertocchi, “The International Centre for Theoretical Physics: Historical Developments and Present Status,” in From a Vision to a System. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (1964- 1994), edited by A.M. Hamende, 38-61 (Trieste: International Foundation Trieste.for the Progress and the Freedom of Sciences, 1996), quotation on page 58.

169 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse capacity building. Its aim was to develop an endogenous scientific and technical capacity."2 Salam’s proposal tended to be more on this side. In tune with the general view of the role of science, Salam adopted a utilitarian discourse of science.

However, his call for international co-operation in science entailed a deeper sense of justice; Third World citizens should be allowed to participate in the construction of scientific knowledge. In other words we could see Salam as an advocate o f“ elitist egalitarian,” a position which Dedijer, whose writings clearly influenced Salam, defined as follows: “Now I call myself an elitist egalitarian. I know I belong to an elite; I live better than most people. I want all the poor people, and not only the poor people, to live as well as I.”112 113

Perhaps an analogy might be of some help here. The case for land reform has been more political and ideological, than economic. In some countries, it has proven a failure in terms of productivity. Nonetheless, the strongest case for land reform is the sense of equality."4 My point is that land reform generates a sense of belonging, a consciousness of being part of the national modernisation project. The decision of democratising the land property had a crucial meaning in the construction of the imagined community, and hence of a nation, as most revolutionary movements understood. Similarly, Third World scientists felt themselves historically marginal, and “isolated.” In his 1966 Minerva article, Salam referred this sentiment:

112 See Jacques Gaillard, “Introduction. Ver une interdépence interactive,” in Coopérations Scientifiques Internationales, edited by Jacques Gaillard, 7-21 (Paris: ORSTOM Éditions, 1996), especially page 10. Ib Anon, “Thinking ahead with...Stevan Dedijer.”

170 Alexis De Greift' Chapter 2: Salam’s discourse

The truth is that, irrespective of a man’s talent, there are in science, as in other spheres, the classes of haves and haven-nots; those who enjoy the physical facilities and the personal stimulus for the furtherance of their work, and those who do not, depending on which part of the world they live in. This distinction must go. The time has come when the international community of scientists should begin to recognise its direct moral responsibility, its direct involvement, its direct participation in advanced science in developing countries, not only through helping to organise institutions but by providing face-to-face stimulation necessary for first- rate individual working in these countries.114 115

The new international situation created by decolonisation and by the

“development” programmes ought to include the establishment of a democracy within

the international scientific community. Salam was convinced that the developing

nations needed the rich nations’ assistance to develop. In similar vein, the

■‘international scientific community,” meaning the invisible college of scientists

working in elite institutions, had the “moral responsibility” to help the “have-not

class” of scientists to acquire full rights as new citizens of the “Republic of Science.”

Creating a truly international centre for theoretical physics could serve to catalyse this process, and therefore raise the quality of science in the developing countries.

114 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century (London: Michel Josep, 1994), 356- 357. 115 Salam, “The Isolation of the Scientists in the Third World;” in Ideals and Realities, quotation is on page 213.

171 Chapter 3

The Tale of Two Peripheries:

The Creation of the

International Centre for

Theoretical Physics in Trieste

A frontier is a strip which divides and links, a sour gash like a wound which heals with difficulty, a no-man’s land, a mixed territory, whose inhabitants often feel that they do not belong to any clearly-defined country, or at least they do not belong to any country with that obvious certainty with which one usually identifies with ones native land.

Ara and Magris1

n the first two chapters, I focused on Abdus Salam’s life and his ideology. As

a member of the Pakistani delegation to the IAEA, Salam championed the idea that the Agency should actively participate in the building of the scientific elite in the Third World through the creation of an international scientific centre. As director of the Centre, Salam’s leadership, enthusiasm, scientific credits, political sense and diplomatic skills produced a profound impact on the memory of his

1 “La frontiera è una striscia che divide e collega, un taglio aspro come una ferita che stenta a rimarginarsi, una zona di nessuno, un territorio misto, i cui abitanti sentono spesso di non appartenere veramente ad alcuna patria ben definita o almeno di non appartenerle con quella ovvia ceitezza con la quale ci si identifica, di solito, col proprio paese” (Angelo Ara, and Claudio Magris, Trieste. Un'identità di frontiera (Tonno: Ed. Laterza, 1987), 192; translated by Lucretia Steward).

172 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

collaborators and colleagues. The fact that such a centre was renamed after his

death as the “Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics” reflects

how much the Centre came to be identified with him.

Nevertheless, it has been said repeatedly that individual and collective

memories tend to be bad history. In the case of institutions, collective memory

leads to a “standard view of institutional histories.”2 This is a retrospective

rational reconstruction that reduces the number of actors and crucial events to the

minimum, in such a way that the story can be easily remembered and retold to

outsiders and newcomers. In particular, when these views concern the creation of the institution, the stories are almost textbook examples of what anthropologists call myths of origin. A case in point is the European Organisation for Nuclear

Research (CERN) which was created because Isidor Rabi took the initiative in

UNESCO to propose a European laboratory. Since CERN perhaps has the most documented history of an international scientific institution, it also demonstrates

¡.hat the process was more complex, involving many actors and interests, and that

Rabi’s role may have been rather marginal. Similarly, I shall show that, although

Salam’s initiative was obviously important, it is historically inaccurate to portray him as “the founder” of the ICTP.3 Indeed, the standard and widespread version of the origins of the Centre contrast with the relative invisibility of Salam during the early phase. I am not trying to diminish his undeniable importance during the first years of the Centre. I argue, however, that his central role in the history of the

ICTP produced a distorted image of him as the leader of all the forces involved

2 For a discussion in the case of CERN, see John Krige, “Some Methodological Problems in Writing the History of CERN,” in Physicists Look Back Studies in the History o f Physics, edited by John Roche, 66-77 (Oxford: Adam Hilger, 1987). ’ See, for instance, the ICTP’s official website http://www.ictp.trieste.it/ [November 2001]

173 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

during the “pre-history.” In general terms, the most dangerous temptation in

writing any “pre-history” is to end up doing Whig history, in which one focuses in

certain actors who, later , became central figures, rather than concentrating on the

process. The creation of the ICTP was a result of a complex negotiations process

involving physicists, diplomats and science administrators from Europe, the

United States, and some Third World countries. These actors have already been

identified as central in the “pre-history” of the other institutions such as the

CERN. In his insightful study, Dominique Pestre points out that the creation of

CERN was possible due to the attitudes among the actors, an effective network of relations, and a positive atmosphere in the scientific circles.4 The ICTP case shares most of these characteristics. However, I will show that the pre-history of

the ICTP had an additional set of crucial actors that were apparently absent in the

CERN negotiations: the local political and intellectual elite.

The question about how the Centre came to fruition encompasses at least two aspects. On the one hand, one should try to understand the process that led the

IAEA to support the creation of the ICTP. Salam’s idea, in fact, produced heated controversy from 1960 to 1963, and, even after setting up the Centre, its existence was subjected to multiple questions on behalf of some delegations. Thus, I should present the distinct views of the idea, the possible motivations of these views and some of the alternatives presented. The other question one must ask is why the

Centre was established in Trieste, which as we will see was not the most obvious choice for an international institution. In fact, both questions are intimately connected. The ICTP would have not been possible without the determination

4, Dominique Pestre, “The First suggestions: 1949-June 1950,” in History o f CERN. edited by A. Hermann, J. Krige, U. Mersits and D. Pestre, 63-96 (Amsterdam: North-Hoiland, 1987), 64.

174 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

with which the Italians, especially the University professors and politicians from

Trieste, acted. Indeed, I shall argue that the two question are linked by the geopolitics of Trieste. It is worth noting that this is a new element in the history of international scientific institutions, where historians tend to take for granted the interests of the host-city without spelling out its historical background, political interests and active role during the negotiations.

Therefore, the creation of the ICTP in Trieste occurred in a sort of circus with three arenas: the local, the national and the international. I shall argue that the atmosphere in the circus is a common factor and can be summarised as the central role ascribed to nuclear physics, and particularly to physics in the development discourse." Of particular importance was Italy’s interest in joining the nuclear energy club. This was an effort that had been going on since the

1950s, through the negotiations with the United States Atomic Energy

Commission.3 6 * * It was also the time of national planning and science policy debates, epitomised in Europe by the British Labour Party’s platform for the 1964 elections based on a programme to “modernise” the country in “the white heat of the technological revolution.”7 Italy was not an exception and in the early 1960s

3 The development ideology was not limited to poor nations, although at an international level there was an almost explicit classification of countries according to their “degree of development.” In fact, the Enlarged Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), considered practically all countries except the United States, the Soviet Union and those in the Western Europe as “developing countries.” As Rist points out, in the 1950s and 1960s, in Europe at least, it was considered that “every country in the world was developing” (Gilbert Rist, The history of development. From Western origins to global faith, translated by Patrick Camiller (London, New York, Cape Town: ZED Books, University of Cape Town Press, 1999), 107 see footnote 52). 6 In these contacts between Italian physicists and engineers and some American firms Egidio Ortona, then special counsellor to the Embassy in Washington D.C., played an active role (see Egidio Ortona, Anni d'America: La diplomazia, 1953-1961 (Bologna: II Mulino, 1986)). 7 See Hillary Rose, and Steven Rose, Science and Society (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1969), specially Chapter 6. More recently, Edgerton also analysed the white-heat years in “The 'White Heat' Revisited: The British Government and Technology in the 1960s,” Twentieth-century British HistoiyT, no. 1 (1996): 53-82.

175 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

the ruling Christian Democratic Party launched an aggressive campaign to demonstrate its commitment to a “new scientific renaissance” for Italy.

A historiographical comment is appropriate regarding “pre-histories” of scientific institutions. The scarcity and dispersion of “archaeological” documentation is a serious obstacle in knowing how the events unfolded and, hence, in understanding the process. One may have expected that the IAEA’s archives could have played a similar role as did UNESCO’s in writing the history of CERN. Alas, the Agency’s archives were not useful in this respect. The available material is found mainly in resolutions. There may also be a problem of accessibility to recent historical documents, but as far as I could establish, there is not any special fond in the Agencies’ archives concerning the ICTP negotiations.

As the reader will note, most of the IAEA’s debates are documented in the present chapter were gathered in alternative collections, mostly in personal papers. Given that the negotiations, the contacts and the exchanges during this phase occurred orally, and that any written material tends to increase only after the Centre was set up, the use of interviews proved to be an invaluable resource.

This chapter is organised as follows: I begin by presenting Trieste’s historical background. This disquisition about the contemporary history of Trieste gives me the opportunity to introduce some of the key people involved in the

ICTP negotiations. It also provides important elements in understanding how and why the Centre was established in Trieste. Then I describe how the negotiations unfolded, stressing the definitive role played by the Italians. Finally, I provide an explanation about the different interests that favoured the creation of the ICTP.

The Centre emerged to the joint effort of the delegations of several developing

176 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

countries and an effective network of Italians diplomats and physicists, against the

hostility of powerful countries.

3.1 Trieste: internationalist dreams of an orphan city

Those were the bitterest days for Trieste and Venezia-Giulia, when the powerful of the world played with our small destiny.

Giani Stuparich8

To understand Trieste’s geopolitical conditions under which the creation of the

ICTP took place, I need to recall the dramatic changes Trieste suffered following

its emergence as a modem city. With the transformation of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire into a modem state in the late eighteenth century, Trieste became the strategic port of the Empire.9 The Latin town was integrated both administratively and politically into the central government of Vienna. Hence, since the late eighteenth century, Trieste underwent a rapid transformation due to its new economic flourishing, and to the concomitant immigration from different parts of

Europe and the Mediterranean. Serbs, Slovenians, Greeks and Protestant-Germans cohabited in the city. This however, did not mean the rise of one single community. Rather, the city was made up of closed and isolated groups, living “in

8 “Erano i giorni piu amari di Trieste e della Venezia Giulia, quando i potenti del mondo giocavano col nostro piccolo destino” (Giani Stuparich, Cuore adolescente. Trieste net miei ricordi, Edited by Giovanna Stuparich Criscione (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984), 233; my translation). 9 In this section, I follow three texts connected to the cultural, the political and the economic histories of Trieste. They are: Ara and Magris, Trieste-, and the following essays in Elio Apih, Trieste (Roma, Bari: Editori Laterza, 1988), and Giulio Sapelli, “11 Profilo del ‘Destino Economico’,” , 209-269; and Elio Guagnini, “La Cultura. Una fisionomia difficile,” 273-283. For a bibliography on the history of Trieste see that volume. An interesting view of Trieste through the eyes of travellers is Nicola Powell, Travellers to Trieste. The History of a City (London: Faber, 1977). On Trieste’s cultural identity, see Claudio Magris, / luoghi della scrittura: Trieste, in Itaca e oltre (Milano, 1982).

177 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

parallel,” to use Ara’s and Magas’ expression, with the Italian culture.10

Mercantile activities and the insurance business dominated the local capital.

Trieste was an “international” city populated by an entrepreneurial mercantile and financial bourgeoisie with a strong sense of its cosmopolitan character.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the city was the economic lung of the Empire and therefore a central part of Austrian economy.

No other Italian city had its future so dramatically determined by its geopolitical situation. With the end of the Great War, the end of the Austrian

Empire, and the “liberation” of Trieste, prosperity came to an end. After being a central city of a flourishing empire for about a century, it became a peripheral port of a peninsular nation struggling to find national unity. The myth that only by annexing Trieste to Italy the city would find its “economic destiny,” was a reflection of what Angelo Vivante calls “utopian Imperialism,” the Adriatic expression of the Imperialistic ambitions of Italy.11 In spite of its efforts to maintain its links with Central Europe after 1918 Trieste began to lose contact with its hinterland, entering into a slow and dramatic phase of political isolation, economic decline and identity crisis. Culturally, Trieste lost its function as an interface between Mitteleuropean German culture and Italy.12 Psychologically, a

10 One of the most insightful works on nineteenth-century Trieste continues being Angelo Vivante, Irredentismo Adriatico. Contribute alia discussione sui rapporti austro-italiani, Vol. First (Florence: La Voce, 1912). 11 Idem; quoted by Sapelli, “II Profilo del ‘Destino Economico’,” 210. 12 Ara and Magris, Trieste, 109-113. Notwithstanding the link with the German culture weakened after the Great War, for part of the intellectual elite Germany and Austria continued being central reference points. For many years, German was the language of the educated castes. Two obvious cases of this double identity that come to mind are the writers Italo Svevo (artistic name of Ettore Schmitz) and Claudio Magris. Magris’ multiple works on Central European literature are tokens of this important tradition. On this sense of belonging to a Mittleeuropean cultural tradition, it is opportune to mention the subtitle of the eminent Istrian statistician Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz’s autobiography, Lettere da Zadobaski. Ricordi di un Borghese Mitteleuropeo 1900-1984 (Trieste: Edizioni Lint, 1984): Memories of a Mitteleuropean bourgeoisie.

178 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

sense of fracture prevailed between the memories of a glorious but irrecoverable past, and the reality of a peripheral Italian centre with an unpromising future.

Socially, the previous dynamics of mutual isolation between the different ethnic groups, particularly the Italians and the Slavs, turned into an open confrontation modulated by the international tension with Yugoslavia. Such confrontation was exacerbated during the Second World War when the Fascist regime first, and the

German later, imposed a total Italianiscition of the Slovenian and Croatian populations.13

The sense of crisis was never so apparent as at the end of the Second

World War. For any other city, the armistice meant its re-incorporation or annexation to a national state. Their international role was mediated through the corresponding national ministries of foreign affairs. This was not the case for

Trieste. Trieste was the only area where the Allies and the Soviets did not establish a clear demarcation line beforehand. The city and the Istria peninsula in the post-war years was condemned by this state of uncertainty, its geographical position virtually on the Iron Curtain and the complex international politics involving Tito’s Yugoslavia.14

After 40 days of Yugoslavian occupation, an accord was signed demarcating the border with Italy a few kilometres to the east of Trieste. With the

Belgrade accord, the future of the city was still unpredictable. It was supposed to

l3In order to illustrate the sense of crisis, it is worth mentioning that allusions to it began to appear as early as 1919 in Giani Stuparich, “Lacrisi di Trieste,” Rivistadi Milano, 20 November, 1919 (cited by Ara and Magris, Trieste, 115; more generally, on this sense of crisis see 114-132). On the World War Two years in Trieste and the German occupation, see Apih, “La storia politics e sociale," Chapter V, and the bibliography therein. The Italianisation implied, for instance, the elimination of the Slavic names. For example, the name Budinich became Budini 14 See G. Cox, La corsaper Trieste (Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 1985).

179 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

be a transitory measure to start negotiations on Istria and Trieste. Meanwhile, the city was administrated by the Allied Military Government. The new negotiations lasted nine years. In 1947, there was an agreement between Italy, Yugosavia and the Allies regarding the constitution of the “Free Territory of Trieste.”

Accordingly, the United Nations Security Council would name a Governor. The city was living a period of political polarisation and economic uncertainty, resulting in violent manifestations, especially after 1951-52, when the Free

1 erritory proposal failed.15 Thus, Trieste became a central issue of negotiation between the two blocs. The Italo-Yugoslavian exchange proved to be unproductive. In 1954, the so-called “London Memorandum” was signed, opening the possibility to make a free port.16 As for Istria, the two countries agreed to a final settlement in the near future. The memorandum was a practical measure to stop the agony of Trieste. However, it was not enough.

Two crucial points must be underlined here. First, during the intense period of negotiations the Triestini were actively involved, although marginally.

The city’s elite realised that the future of the city depended heavily on their diplomatic actions. The most preponderant of these diplomats was the statistician and university professor Diego De Castro. In fact, the University of Trieste was well known for representing a national presence in the city. De Castro was the most influential diplomat of his generation, acting as a counsellor of the Allies as

15 For a testimony of the 1953 blood events and the political tension in the city, see for instance Diego De Castro, Memorie di un novantenne. Trieste e Ischia (Trieste: MGS Press, 1999), 162- 190. 16 On the negotiations see G. Cox, and H. Jacobson, eds. The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: >• ¿lie University Press, 1973); Diego De Castro, La Questione di Trieste: Tazione politico e diplomatica italiana dal 1943 (Trieste: Morcelliana, 1986); G. Valdevit, La questione di Trieste ¡941-1954: Politico internazionale e contesto locale (Milan: Collana dell'Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia, 1986). For a succinct account but a very complete bibliography, see Luigi Vittorio Ferraris, Manuale della politico estera italiana, 1947-1993 (Roma, Bari: Editori Laterza, 1996), 24-30.

180 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

well as serving as a link between them and Italy. De Castro’s collaborators

included Guido Gerin. Gerin graduated in law and began his career as an assistant

to A.E. Cammarata, the rector of the University, who championed Italian

nationalism in Trieste.17 After 1954 and for over 15 years, Gerin continued his

work in Trieste as a top officer in the contenzioso diplomatico, the liaison office

with Rome that dealt with diplomatic affairs.18

Second, the negotiations unfolded in a manner that produced mixed

feelings among the people of Trieste, including these diplomats. The “London

Memorandum” was prepared in hermetic secrecy. The Trieste diplomats were

excluded from the crucial decisions. They learned the details of the final

agreement after it was presented to the Italian Senate. This left a strong sense of

distrust of Rome. These sentiments deepened when rumours circulated about

secret clauses stating the definiti ve character of the partition conditions. The loss

of Istria was equally felt as treason. The sentiments of isolation and abandonment

marked the way Trieste saw its relation with the central government. Trieste developed the sense of being an orphan city.19

17 See, for instance, the incident with the Allied Military Government when, in April 1947, it tried to replace Cammarata, in Apih, “La storia politica e sociale,” 175. 18 Guido Gerin, interview by .author. Other figures involved in the post-war international negotiations as members of the National Liberation Council were Ruggero Rovatti, Giorgio Cesare, Gianni Giuricin, Giacomo Bologna. Two prominent figures from the Christian Democratic Patty that held contact with the central government during the 1954 negotiations were Corrado Beici and Professor Redento Romano. See De Castro’s autobiography Memorie di un novantenne; Corrado Beici, Trieste: Memorie di Trentanni (¡945-1975) (Brescia: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1989), especially 42-45; 19 The historiography of the city reflects this strong sense of political isolation from Rome. Referring to this critical phase, Ara and Magris assert that: “Perhaps only De Gasperi, among those responsible of the Italian [foreign] policy, had - as De Castro says - a vivid sensitivity not just for the political aspect, but for the cultural one of the Giulian problem as well” (Ara and Magris, Trieste, 159; my translation and italics). The title of a book by Trieste writer, Manlio Cecovini, is also telling in this respect: Manlio Cecovini, Del patriotismo di Trieste. Discorso di un triestino agli Italiani nel cinquantenario della redenzione (Milan: Collana Coda di Paglia, 1968) [On Trieste 's Patriotism. Discourse by a Triestino to the Italians...] . The Osimo Treaty (1975) virtually ratified the points of the “London memorandum.” It reopened a deep wound in Trieste’s consciousness (Apih, “La storia politica e sociale,” 193).

181 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

3.1.1 The decline o f the border city

In relation to the re-incorporation of Trieste into Italy, Ara and Magris observed that:

the reaction in 1954 could not be the same as the reaction in 1918 in a city aware of its own crisis and decline, in which - at least for the most conscious part of the population - the lesson left by the two decades of fascism, and its abuse of the national myths, cannot be forgotten.20 21 Indeed, the withdrawal of the Allied troops in 1954 was received with mixed feelings in Trieste. On the one hand, the Allies represented another foreign occupation and ill sentiments had developed specially against the British, who controlled the administration and the public order. The withdrawal was received as new liberation. On the other, Trieste knew what an Italian liberation meant economically, especially considering that now the hinterland belonged not just to another country, but to another system. Furthermore, the Allies had provided several jobs and a stable income to many families. When the Allies announced that they would leave Trieste, more that eight billion lire were withdrawn from the banks. It has been estimated that with the departure of the Allies, Trieste lost twenty-five million lire per day. “) I

By 1954, the economy of the city was in a catastrophic situation, and only worsening. Since there was no hinterland, there was no agriculture. The few large local industries that served the local market had not invested in technological innovation. Commerce flourished in these years, but again it was all local.22 All indexes fell. In 1956, the proposal to create a free port failed. In 1951, the Friuli-

20 Ara and Magris, Trieste, quotation in 180 (my translation). 21 The financial estimates are taken from Sapelli, “Il Profilo del ‘Destino Economico’,” 248. 22 The people economically depending on the Ally presence reached 10% of the population; see Apih, “La storia politica e sociale,” 184-187.

182 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Venezia Giulia occupied the fifth position among Italian regions in terms of the

income per capita. Ten years later, it was reported to be eighth.23

Employment statistics are illustrative of the crisis. The non-active

population was almost equal to the active one. Of those employed, about 50%

worked in the industrial sector. The other half worked in the tertiary sector. The

expansion of the University was crucial; in the 1980s, the University was the

largest city enterprise. Yet, even more telling, about 22% of the workers were

employed by the public sector. Finally, I should stress that the problem of how to

compensate or relocate the people employed by the Allies became a matter of

serious concern for the local and the national authorities alike.24

Concomitant to this situation were the negative demographic indexes since

the war years. The increasing population came from rural Istrian refugees, while

emigration was significant in number and type. Particularly, young professionals

lied, causing serious concern in the local government. In 1962, the City Council

discussed at length the issue of “brain drain” from the university and what measures should be taken to prevent it. A counsellor pointed out that: “[there]

exists a natural desire, on behalf of scholars, of moving to less de-centralised and more important universities, and to cities offering them more possibilities of developing activities outside the university but still connected to the scientific ambience.”2:>Trieste became an old city in every sense of the world. A very low birth rate was accompanied by a longer life expectancy. In addition, the Istrian

Set Giovanni Palladini, “Il reddito prodotto nel Friuli-Venezia Giulia,” Trieste, January- Febrary, 1963, 8-10. 24 Apih, “La storia politica e sociale,” see 185 and 201. 23 “Attività del Consiglio Comunale. Seduta del 12 febbrario,” Rivista della Città di Trieste, February-April, 1962, 29-30, my italics.

183 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

refugees were, in their great majority, old people. The number of residents

dropped drastically. While in 1951 Trieste occupied the eleventh place among the

Italian cities, in 1961 it drop to the twelfth.26

Psychologically, the effect was devastating especially for the new

generation that, for one reason or another, had decided to remain. Arrigo Cavalieri

was a young lawyer from Trieste visiting the United States when the

“Memorandum” became public. He found himself with the dilemma of whether to

return to Trieste. He vividly recalls the moment when, during a dinner at the

Italian embassy in Washington, the ambassador asked him: “And you, what have

you decided?... Yes, because the city will have to be re-organised. This was the

first signal of alarm [Cavalieri added]; [“reorganising” was] a notion [that] came

to my mind many times in the years to come when most enterprises were

dismantled... .”27 Cavalieri returned and made a successful career as a lawyer. He

also served as president of the American-Italian Association in Trieste for many

years, an organisation that was eventually involved in the creation of the ICTP.

Since 1976 he has published several acclaimed novels set in Trieste. In II futuro

non e in vendita (Future is not for sale), he describes with exceptional clarity the

situation of those who had remained:

A posteriori, it was a counterproductive decision for an ambitious person, though he never complained about it. Not even when he realised that the city was destined to an inevitable decline and was getting older not just in terms of the average age of the inhabitants, but for a governing mentality that had produced even more devastating effects on him...than his own ageing.28

26 1961 Census, cited by Sapelli, “Il Profilo del ‘Destino Economico’,” 249. 27 A. Cavalieri, interview by author; 1 have translated the Italian expression “ridimensionare” as “re-organise.” 28 Arrigo Cavalieri, // destino non è in vendita (Trieste: MGS Press, 1997), 10; my translation.

184 A lexis De Gre iff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

But, what does an older mentality exactly mean? Cavalieri, makes a point about

Trieste when explained to the author: “It means this: any obstacle becomes unbearable and impossible to surmount.. .the famous ‘no se pol, ' which in Trieste dialect means, ‘it can’t be done’... And then, there is another phenomenon that accompanies senility: claustrophobia. Triestini know that, in case of war, they will be abandoned.”29

There were good reasons for feeling claustrophobic in Trieste. Besides the political, economic and cultural insularity, it was physically isolated. Since the

1920s, Trieste had been better connected with Austria and Central Europe than with Italy. In the 1950s, the Udine-Tarvisio train service was the only Trieste railway system remaining in Italian territory (just one track, because the other had been bombed in the war). Likewise, the city was not connected to the highway system, and remained so throughout the 1950s and part of the 1960s. Trieste had no airport with the exception of a small military base in Ronchi, 30 kilometres

/■ cm the city. The modernisation of infrastructure was a new source of tension with Rome. In the end, a special bill was approved by the Parliament. However, it was preceded by an angry exchange of messages between a prominent figure of the central government and the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Pierpaolo

Luzzato Fegiz. In the words of the Istrian senator for Trieste Corrado Belci, the confrontation “put Trieste ‘against Rome’.”30

Another critical factor was the political polarisation. It would be impossible in this limited space to describe such a complex situation. However, it is important to get a glimpse of it. The confrontation between the. various political

:9 A. Cavalieri, Interview by author.

185 Alexis De Gre iff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

factions was catalysed by tensions between different minorities (Slovenians,

Catholics and workers), and the scars left by fascism and the Yugoslavian occupation. Trieste mirrored the complex political and social anxieties of the

Balkans, Italian nationalism and, of course, the Cold War. The antagonism was multipolar. The left was highly fragmented, with two principal groups: the

Slovenians, who were Pro-Tito, and the pro-Soviet (anti Tito) Communist Party, led by Vittorio Vidali.30 31 At the other extreme was the Movimento Sociale Italiano

(MSI), the former fascist party. Their presence and power in the City Council was above the national average. In the 1958 communal elections, for instance, the MSI had 14.8% of the votes (the Communist party amassed 21.6%). The dominant political force was the Christian Party (35%), ideologically closer to the right.32

he strength of the ultra-right contrasted with the national more moderate national trend. In the national elections that same year, the proportions were as follows:

4.8% for the MSI, 22.7% for the Communist Party, and 42% for the Christian

Democrats.33 These figures did not change much in the forthcoming years.34 In the early 1960s, moderate sectors, influenced by the international distension climate and centre-left Government in Italy, saw promoting international cultural

30 See Beici, Trieste, 65-70; and Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz, Lettere da Zadobaski. Ricordi di un Borghese Mitteleuropeo (Trieste: Edizioni Lint, 1984), 388-394. jl Vidali, a veteran of the Spanish civil war and exiled in Mexico during the fascist years, was one of the central figures of the communist party in Italy and abroad. It was said that there were two main protagonists of the post-war Trieste: the Communist Vidali and the Archbishop Antonio Santin. The legend around Vidali says that he took part in the conspiracy to kill Leon Trostsky, an assertion difficult to document. 32 Figures taken from Beici, Trieste, 91 footnote 6. " Figures taken from Paul Ginsborg, Storia d'Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi. Società e polìtica 1943-1988 (Turin: Einaudi Editori, 1989), 345. In the 1963 national elections, the DC went under 40% for the first time, while the MSI went up to 5.1%. In Trieste, in 1962, the figures were very similar to 1958: MSI 13.14 %, Communists 20.44%, DC 33.25% (Paolo Venier, “Le elezioni del novembre 1962,” Rivista Mensile Città di Trieste, January, 1963, 3-6). ,4 For an interesting and rich set of testimonies of Trieste’s political life in the 1950s and 1960s see Guido Botteri, Giorgio Cesare, Fabio Marchetti, and Stelio Spadaro, Trieste e la sua storia (Trieste: Edizioni Dedolibri, 1986).

186 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

exchange, especially with Eastern Europe, as an important instrument for mitigating extremist tendencies.

3.1.2 The internationalist tradition in Trieste

The insurance companies certainly boosted the internationalist ideology.35 They represented a special and different type of economy. From the 1920s, the insurance companies escaped the general recession by opening very quickly and aggressively to the international market. The Assicurazioni Generali and the

Riunione Adriatica di Sicurezza had one of the largest financial capitals in the world as well as investments in all countries. Other sectors tried to emulate them, as we saw in the case of the port, without success.

Trieste’s elite sought to project Trieste internationally in order to overcome the city’s chronic recession and isolation. In their view, Trieste needed to reinvent itself as the Mittle-european, cosmopolitan, bourgeois city it had been.

By doing this, Trieste’s elite could regain control, now in the hands of a new class insightfully called by Sapelli the “political entrepreneurs”: “apolitical class with enormous power to allocate and distribute public resources gathered through the co-active imposition upon the community... rapidly replacing the big families.”36

The most important group of internationalists clustered around a cultural review called Umana, created in 1918 by the socialist writer Silvio Benco. In

1951, after a long period of recession, it reappeared under the leadership of his daughter, Aurelia Gruber-Benco. The review was aimed at cultivating a debate about culture and politics with an international perspective. As she explained

35 Sapelli, “II Profilo del ‘Destino Economico’,” 230-232. j6 Sapelli, “II Profilo del ‘Destino Economico’,’’ the quotation is in page 243 (my translation).

187 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

years later: “The content required a national direction, a Trieste seat, and an international dimension.”37 Others had tried, unsuccessfully, to do similar things.

One of them wrote to Gruber-Benco what became an inspiring line for the review, and for the intellectual movement around it: “revive ...‘Umana’ and try to insert in these years of greyness, in which Trieste passed from being a historic subject to a political pawn for Italy as well as for the Allies, a stimulus that, from being cultural, should become political in order the city to find its autonomous re birth.”38 As a matter of fact, it was an exceptionally sophisticated review with significant participation from local, national and international authors reflecting about literature, visual arts, philosophy, music, cultural policy, and science and technology. Gruber-Benco invented the “Umana Fridays,” meetings of intellectuals and university professors concerned with their social and political iso lation and who would become the editorial board of the review. These intellectual meetings brought national and international fame to Umana. One character close to Gruber-Benco was the Prince of Duino (a little town on the

Western cost of Trieste), Raimondo della Torre e Tasso.39 Also nostalgic for the past times, he tried to recreate the court by inviting to his castle intellectuals and promoting international cultural initiatives, especially with Germany. Gruber-

Benco and the Prince worked actively on the European University idea. In their view, it should be a “unitary federation” of the most reputed faculties in Europe.

They thought that Trieste could be inserted in that network through an institute for

37 Aurelia Gruber-Benco, ed. Antologia di Umana. Rivista di politica e Cultura. 1951-1973 (Trieste: Edizioni Umana, 1986), 4. ’* Maria Crilanovich to Aurelia Gruber, [Undated but probably 1950 or 1951], quoted by Gruber- Benco, “Gli Antefatti,” 4. '9 The Thurn und Taxis house dominated the royal mail and, later transport of passengers, in the continent. This is in fact the origin of the word Taxi. It was loyal to the Habsburg house.

188 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

transport studies. It was another abortive effort to connect Trieste to Europe.40

Besides the direct participation of university professors in Umana, the network extended to other figures in the university and the political spheres, including the rector of the University of Trieste.

3.2 Two figures: Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz and Paolo Budinich

Two energetic internationalists, indirectly connected with the Umana group, were

Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz and Paolo Budinich. Their relationship, as I shall show in the next section, was crucial for the fate of the ICTP. The connection was not through an intellectual circle, but due to their link with the Island of Lussino.

3.2.1 Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz

Luzzato Fegiz was bom in Trieste and studied economics with emphasis in statistics. (The Mathematics Institute was created inside the Economics and

Commerce Faculty, in 1924.) In 1931 he became one of the youngest to be appointed Professore Ordinario of Statistics at the University of Trieste.41 Before the war, he visited the United States to conduct a demographic study on Italian-

Americans. He passed the war commuting between Trieste, Bologna and

Zabodaski, a small village on the Island of Lussino where he had a small house and a boat. After the war, Luzzato Fegiz was one of the founders of the DOXA,

40 Gruber-Benco, “Gli Antefatti,” 6. The European University ended up in an institute founded in 1972 and located in Fiesole, near Florence. See also Luigi Stasi, “Il sogno triestino vissuto all'Università,” in L'Università di Trieste. Settant'anni di Storia (1924-1994), edited by Guido Botteri, 342-360 (Trieste: Editoriale Libraria, 1997). 41 Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz, Lettere daZadobski, 123. This is equivalent to the title of Professor in England or Tenure in the United States. For characteristics of Italian university system, it is not just a permanent and stable position, but often, depending on the subject area, also politically influential.

189 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

the first and most important polling firm in Italy in the post-war period. He served as director of DOXA for 38 years.

In 1946, he was sent to the United States to participate in discussions with

American firms to set up an organisation to conduct polls at an international scale.

While in New York, he participated in the peace talks. On November 29, he was invited to a meeting where the Trieste question was discussed at length by delegates from Yugoslavia, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United

Kingdom, France and Italy. The Italian diplomats held him in high regard. After the meeting, the three members of the delegation, Alberico Casardi, Guido Relli and Egidio Ortona, gathered in his apartment. Afterwards, he also discussed the problem of Trieste with the Italian Ambassador. Back in Trieste, he became acquainted with the top political leaders of post-war Italy, now interested in browing the general perception of transcendental decisions such as the peace

.'•■:aty, the elimination of the monarchy, and the inclusion of socialist ministers in the Government in the early 1960s.42 Between 1955 and 1958, he was president of the Chamber of Commerce and maintained excellent relations with the financial world of Trieste.43

3.2.2 Paolo Budinich

Luzzato Fegiz’s autobiography does mention Paolo Budinich, but has one entry for another Budinich, a carpenter from Lussingrande, a town in the Island of

Lussino. The Budinich family arrived in Lussingrande from Budapest in the sixteenth century. They were sailors and, later, became boat builders and

42 See Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz, llvolto sconosciuto dell’Italia. (Milano: Giuffre, 1966). Luzzato Fegiz was the invisible pen of Umberto ll’s declaration in 1946. See Luzzato Fegiz, Lettere da Zadobaski , 324-334 and the Appendix.

190 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

carpenters. Paolo’s grandfather taught at the Naval Institute at Lussinpiccolo and

wrote a book about the history of Lussino. His son, Paolo’s father, taught history

and geography at the Royal schools in Trieste. “Many of my ancestors,” Paolo writes in his autobiography, “passed their life between the sea and books.”44

Paolo Budinich was born in Lussingrande in 1916. During his life time,

Lussino belonged to four different countries. In 1918, it passed from Austria to the Kingdom of Italy, in 1946 it was annexed to Yugoslavia, and by the end of the century it was Croatian. Paolo spent his infancy and adolescence between Trieste and Lussingrande. He studied, like the majority of Trieste’s elite, in the Liceo

Dante Alighieri (Luzzato Fegiz also studied there), and graduated in 1934. With

■Tip ascent of the fascist regime in 1922, the family name changed to Budini.45 His family could not afford to send him to the university. Therefore, he participated in a national fellowships competition to study at the Scuola Normale di Pisa. He failed. With the meagre monies his father could send from Trieste, he arranged to receive supervised training from one of the examiners to take the exam the following year.46 He succeeded, and in 1939 he graduated from the Normale with a thesis on experimental spectroscopy.47

J ’ Luzzato Fegiz, Lettere da Zadobaski, 341. 44 ‘1 tried to be loyal to the family traditions,” he adds; Paolo Budinich, L'archipìelago delie meraviglie (Rome: Di Renzo Editore, 2000), 2. For this section I have used that autobiography, Paolo Budinich, “All'inizio eravamo in quattro,” in La Ricerca in Fisica nell'Università di Trieste, edited by Marco Budinich and Gianni Vannini, 131-140 (Trieste: INFN, 1995), and three interviews by author. 43 He readopted the Slavic form in the 1980s. In the present text, I use the “original” name Budinich, although in citing his works or letters I maintain the spelling as it appeared in the documents. 46 Note the face-to-face training crucial factor in the formation of a theoretical physicist, common to Salam and Budinich. 47 Published as a review paper; see Paolo Budini, “SulPallargamento e spostamento delle righe spettroscopiche,” Nuovo Cimento XVI, no. 86-107 (1939).

191 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

When the war broke, Budinich enlisted in the Italian Navy. He served first

on board of a submarine and, later, as pilot of a reconnaissance aircraft in Greece.

He was transferred to a base near Naples, where he had contact with young

antifascists. During a mission, and under unclear circumstances, he was made

prisoner by the English. He was sent to a prisoners camp in the United States. In

1945, Budinich returned to occupied Trieste. After a period of indecision about

whether to pursue a scientific career at Trieste, or accept the invitation of R.

Longone to join the Communist Party and work in L 'Unità (the communist

official newspaper), he returned to Trieste. Budinich never joined the Party, albeit

he befriended several communists, specially in Trieste.

The Physics Institute at the University of Trieste had just been created that

same year, July of 1945. The department was eminently experimental but the

working conditions were precarious. In 1946, Nestore Cacciapuoti, from the

University of Rome, was appointed but, a year later, he took a leave of absence to

serve as consultant of UNESCO for scientific matters in Latin America. The

Institute was practically under the directorship of experimentalist G. Poiani, with the assistance of physicists from Padua University, particularly N. Dallaporta and

A. Rostagni.48 Budinich joined the university as F. Vercelli’s assistant in the rational mechanics course. The course was offered by the Mathematics Institute,

although Vercelli and Budinich were affiliated to the Physics Institute, where

experimental research was carried out. For a while, Budinich tried to do some

instrumentation work, but after seven years of inactivity, he had lost practice and

48 “Cronistoria Dell’Istituto di Fisica Dell’Università di Trieste,” undated [but probably 1963], Archivi del Dipartimento di Fisica, Physics Department, University of Trieste. See also, Edoardo Arnaldi, “The Years of Reconstruction Part II,” Sdentici 114, no. S-6-7-8 (1979): 439-451. For a history of the natural sciences at the University of Trieste, see Guido Botteri, ed. L'Università di Trieste. Settant'annì di Storia (1924-1994) (Trieste: Editoriale Libraria, 1997), Chapter 4.

192 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

interest in experiments. He felt more attracted to theoretical physics. In 1950, he

published several papers with Poiani and Dallaporta on cosmic rays.

Budinich knew that his knowledge of theoretical physics was outdated. He

visited Edoardo Amaldi’s institute in 1951, returning with a study plan prepared

by Bruno Ferretti.49 He was too old to do graduate studies in England or the

United States. So, he went to Germany with a fellowship from the Italian Foreign

Affairs Ministry, where he stayed with Heisenberg at the Max Plarik Institute in

Gottingen. It was a splendid occasion to update his physics. He started working on

the meson component in cosmic rays, a research line he pursued for several years.

It was also a crucial visit to establish contacts with Central European physicists. In particular he became acquainted with K. Lehman, K. Symanzik, R. Olhme, G.

Ludens and W. Thirring. He also maintained correspondence with Amaldi and sent him internal reports from Gottingen concerning meson theories.'10

Back in Trieste, Budinich realised the importance of linking the Institute to

European centres. He started to run a seminar on mathematical physics at the

Physics Institute. He invited many of the physicists had met at the Max Planck as well as in Vienna, Graz, Praga, Ljubljana, Budapest and Zagreb. In 1954 he visited Germany again, and in 1954 he travelled to Zurich seeking contacts with

Pauli and other Swiss physicists. This was virtually the first attempt to introduce advanced mathematical physics to the Physics Institute. Only when Budinich was appointed professor of theoretical physics in 1954 was the subject integrated into 30 *

49 Budini to Amaldi, 13 March 1951, Box 140, folder 1/2, EAP. 30 Budini to Amaldi, 7 March 1952, Box 140, folder 1/2, EAP.

193 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

the Institute as a formal course. In 1955, he became director of the Institute but

still theoretical physics was very weak.51 52

Possibly at Cacciapuoti’s suggestion Budinich turned to UNESCO in order

to bring the department out from periphery. In 1957, an international network of

scientific institutes called the “European Network” was to be created. Each

institute would specialise in a branch of science. Trieste was to be the co

ordinating centre. The project was jointly proposed by W. Thirring (in Vienna), G.

Marx (in Budapest), I. Supek (Zagreb) and Osredkar (Lubiana). Budinich was

authorised by the Foreign Affairs Ministry to carry out negotiations on behalf of

Italy at UNESCO. The enterprise failed because of the tense relations between

Western and Eastern Europe.32 Neverthless, with the support of the Physics

Department in Padua, and Arnaldi in Rome, Budinich established a branch of the

National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), of which he was director for several years. He continued spending time in Lussingrande. There he shared his passion for boats and sailing with Pierpaolo Luzzato Fegiz.53

3.3 The Negotiations: the Trieste-Rome-Vienna triangle

Against this background negotiations for the creation of the ICTP developed.

Such a geopolitical situation was far more important than the actions of any single player, including Salam or even Budinich, whose participation was permanent and

31 “Memoranda sull’attività svolta dal direttore dell’Istituto di Fisica e dai suoi collaboratori”, Archivi del Dipartmento di Fisica, Physics Department, University of Trieste. 52 Budinich, L'archipielago delle meraviglie. This was not an isolated initiative, of course. Contemporaneously, a similar idea was suggested by the British, Communist mathematician Hyman Levy. Henri Laguier, a leftist and former head of the French National Science Council, argued that this network should be under the flag of the United Nations (Aant Elzinga, “Unesco and the Politics of Scientific Internationalism,” in Internationalism and Science, edited by Aant fih.ingaand Catharina Landstrfim, 89-131 (London: Taylor Graham, 1996), 89-131, and 104)).

194 Alexis De Gre iff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

indeed active. We have to move to the international arena. I shall describe how the

negotiations to bring the Centre to Trieste unfolded. Rather than being an isolated

sphere, I shall argue that the events at the IAEA were strongly influenced by

pressures from Rome and Trieste. I will proceed by showing the process in two

steps. Firstly, concentrated on the position and strategies of Trieste and Rome, and

secondly, I will focus on the positions of some actors at the IAEA whose

intervention seems to have been crucial in the negotiations.54

3.3.1 The first contacts and the idea of an international centre

The first encounter between Salam and Budinich was in 1960. Despite the

discouraging experience at UNESCO, Budinich continued his activities to

internationalise the Physics Institute. He and Claudio Villi, one the first students

to graduate from the Institute, organised a symposium on elementary particle

interactions held in June at the Miramare Castle, near Trieste.55 It was attended by aboiC thirty physicists, including G. Furlan, N. Dallaporta, J. Prentki, S. Fubini, D.

Amati, V. Glaser, B. Vitale, W. Thirring and G. Feldman and Abdus Salam. The letter of invitation made clear that “the atmosphere of the Symposium would be very informal.” If the city lacked a scientific tradition, it still had the qualities of an Imperial port that, for more than a century, had learned the art of charming illustrious visitors. It was a success and the participants were enchanted by

Trieste’s hospitality. Feldman and Salam wrote a note in Physics Today, stressing

ij Budinich, interview by author. 54 Krige points out that it is perhaps not necessary to look at the smaller actors to understand the position of the “main” ones. However, if one has the opportunity to do so, the analysis is certainly more refined (Krige, “Some Methodological Problems”). This chapter follows this principle. However, there is a question that remains, in my view, problematic: how can we be sure that a “small” actor is not, at least at some moments, a “major character” of the story?

195 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

the relaxing atmosphere and the beauty of the place. The invitees’ impression was

described as “pure delight.” The authors added that they hoped “that all

conferences and symposia could be so enchanting.” As the note pointed out, “the

intention [was] to make the Symposium an annual event.”35 36 37

In August, Salam attended the 1960 Rochester Conference, held at

Rochester University. Organised by Robert Marshak, it started by being a national

gathering. In the second half of the 1950s the Conferences became the most

important international high-energy physics meetings.57 However, they were

seriously disrupted by the Cold War. In particular, in 1960 several top Soviet

delegates did not attend.38 The main speaker, John McCone, Chairman of the U.S.

Atomic Energy Commission, tacitly referring to the incident, made a remark

about the convenience of creating a “Joint International High Energy Physicist

Institute” with both East and West participating equally. McCone had also pointed out that the United States would support high-energy physics as long as it was not too costly. Presumably, this was but another manifestation of political rhetoric.

Nonetheless, Salam took it very seriously. That night, he discussed the idea with

Marshak, Weisskopf and Bethe. They all agreed that it could start as an

35 The castle, located in the Miramare park, was built by Emperor Maximiliano, from the Habsburg dynasty, after failing to proclaim himself Emperor of Mexico. This was an exact copy of his castle in that Central American country. 36 Gordon Feldman, and Abdus Salam, “Elementary Particle Interactions,” Physics Today 13, no. 11(1960): 74. It is likely that idea of writing a note publicising Trieste was suggested by Budinich. 37 See John Polkinghome, Rochester Roundabout: the Story o f High Energy Physics (Essex: Longman, 1989); Silvan Schweber, QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga (Princeton, N.J.: IAP Press, 1994). 38 The event was reported, incidentally, by another physicist who, a few years later would become deeply involved in problems of science in the Third World; Michael Moravcsik, “High Energy Physics. An informal report of the Rochester Conference,” Physics Today 13, no. 12 (1960): 20- 25.

196 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

'International Theoretical Institute under IAEA.”39 At this point of the process, it

is clear that Salam’s role was crucial. He acted as the initiator of the idea and the first one to advance it in political, diplomatic and scientific milieus. His Third

World origins would be certainly crucial to mobilise the Third World delegations at the IAEA, not just through official channels, but because he was a young

Pakistani with a remarkable academic career at a British institution.

A month later, Salam was taking part in the IAEA’s General Conference in

Vienna. He convinced the Pakistani delegation to present a resolution proposing the creation of the institute. In his address, he stressed the leading role of theoretical physics in the development of nuclear technology (analysed in the previous chapter). “The basic notion that atomic energy can be released in tha service of man was the brain child of two men: Bohr and Einstein,” he told an audience primarily made up of politicians and diplomats. He contended that “the first nuclear reactor was assembled and actually constructed by a theoretical physicist - Enrico Fermi.” He mentioned the East-West collaboration, but stressed the scientific backwardness of the developing countries. In his view, only the transfer of science, and in particular nuclear science, would open the possibility of the independent (though presumably capitalist, if we bear in mind his discourse about Pakistan) development of poorer nations; the triangle East-West-Under developed countries should be the basis for any internationalist initiative.59 60 These

59 A. Salam to J.R. Oppenheimer, 21 October 1960, JRO, Box 40. 60 The notion of “Third World” had a specific geopolitical meaning in the context of the Cold War. if entailed the right to have development independently from the two ideological poles represented by the USSR and the USA. Salam’s claim was widely accepted for offering science as a means to achieve this independence. During these years, Italy was keen on establishing good relations with most of these countries. Some sectors in Italy saw the American hegemony as an obstacle for Italy’s development and tried to advance a foreign policy to counterbalance it, specially in the Mediterraneo and the Middle East. An important aspect of this policy regards scientific and technological endeavours led by Olivetti in computing science, Enrico Mattei in the energetic sector and several science administrators in nuclear technology. All of them were, of

197 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

arguments led him to two conclusions: first, to present the linear model of science, technology and economic performance; second, and by the same token, to argue that the Agency was in debt to the community of theoretical physicists. He criticised the Agency’s fellowship programme as ineffective because the Members

State had no information about the institute where the applicants were to go. His proposal was to centralise the programme in a single institute under the control of the United Nations, where “these physicists can come as a matter of right at intervals on leave from their countries.” Anticipating the criticism that such a centre should need a laboratory attached to it, he drew a neat boundary between both activities. While laboratories such as CERN, Bro okhaven, and so forth,

“produce data,” theoretical physics interprets this information and correlates it

'•.■uh existing theories to propose new ones. Interestingly enough, he presented such a naive model precisely when a new form of organisation involved in assembling in a single space theoreticians, experimentalists and engineers was emerging.51 The resolution was jointly presented by Pakistan, Afghanistan, the

Federal Republic of Germany, Thailand and Turkey. The rhetoric and histrionic qualities of this young Pakistani theoretical physicist produced great impact on the audience, especially among the delegates from developing countries. The resolution was unanimously approved, with eleven abstentions, including Canada and the United Kingdom (while the USSR, USA, Japan, France and India61

course, primarily concerned with Italy’s own dependency on the United States. I thank Gianni Battimelli and Gianni Paoloni for a useful discussion about this point. 61 See Peter Gal ¡son, and Bruce Hevly, eds. Big Science. The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); also, Peter Galison, Image and Logic. A Material Culture o f Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

198 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

supported it). It was decided that the Director General should appoint a panel to

study the question.62

In the meantime, Salam started moving the idea among the political elite

of physics on both sides of the Atlantic. He asked Oppenheimer to write to

McCone for “[y]our blessing may see this [sic] things through,”63 and four days

later, after the resolution was approved, to guide him about “the next steps to be

taken.”64 65 Oppenheimer replied saying that he would be attentive to the “status of

'.he 'study’.” On 28 September, Salam wrote Amaldi asking for his support as

president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).63

Amaldi said that he would certainly support the initiative, but that unfortunately

his mandate as President of IUPAP had ended on 10 June.66

3.3.2 Trieste's candidature: October 1960-March 1961

The letter to Amaldi had a much more important consequence than Salam might

have imagined. Amaldi was the most powerful physicist in post-World War II

Italy. He was president of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (the highest

authority in nuclear and particle physics) and his influence on the National

Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche , CNR) was

overwhelming. Everything regarding physics in the peninsula passed through his

desk. He strongly believed in international collaboration as the only way for Italy

62 IAEA, CC(lV)/RES/76, 6 October 1960. 6j A. Salam to J.R. Oppenheimer, 21 October 1960, JRO. Box 40. 04 *.. Salam to J.R. Oppenheimer, 28 September 1960, JRO, Box 40. 65 A. Salam to E. Amaldi, 28 September 1960, Box 246, folder 2/0, EAP. 66 E. Amaldi to AS, 12 October 1960, Box 246, folder 2/0, EAP.

199 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

to reconstruct its scientific community. He had been one of the architects in the

creation of CERN and his name carried great authority in European circles.67

When Amaldi received the letter from Salam, Budinich was in Rome.

Budinich immediately realised that this was an ideal opportunity: “for us the banner of the United Nations would have been a blessing we did not even dare to dream of,” he wrote later.68 At his return to Trieste, he wrote to Salam offering accommodation in Trieste for the institute. On 14 December 1960, Salam replied with two letters, the first a personal letter thanking Budinich and the other for official purposes. In the official letter he stated that, provided that the facilities for education in English were adequate (probably one of the problems he had noticed during his first visit), he wanted to “express [his] deepest interest in seeing the

Institute located in such a delightful place as Trieste.”69 Budinich forwarded the letter immediately to the rector, Agostino Origone, who gave Budinich the green light to go ahead with the paperwork and necessary contacts.

Budinich realised that the first thing needed was to have a financial base to support the candidature. The Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste is a bank with strong links to the public sector.70 The majority of the public works and initiatives, including the university, used to be financed by loans from the Cassa. Budinich

67 On the history of Italian twentieth scientific institutions see Simili, ed. Ricerca e istituzioni in Italia (Roma: Ed. Laterza, 1998), Battimelli, ed. L'Istituto Nazionale di Fìsica Nucleare - Storia di una comunità di ricerca (Roma, Laterza: Editori Laterza, 2001). See also Edoardo Amaldi, Da Via Panisperna all'America (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1997). An important primary source is Idem, 20th Century Physics: essays and recollections, a selection of historical writings by Edoardo Amaldi, Edited by Giovanni Battimelli and Giovanni Paoloni (Singapore, London: World Scientific, 1995). 68 Paolo Budinich, “ICTP: Thirty years after,” in From a Vision to a System. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics of Trieste (1964-1994), edited by A.M. Hamende, 26-37 (Trieste: International Foundation Trieste for the Progress and te Freedom of Sciences, 1996), 28. 69 A. Salam to Budini, 14 December I960, Reproduced in Budinich, “ICTP: Thirty years after,” Annex I. 70 Sezione Sviluppo e Studi, Trieste e la sua Cassa di Risparmio dal 1942 al ¡967 (Trieste: Ed., della Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste, 1967).

200 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

called Luzzato Fegiz, who arranged for an appointment with the President of the

Cassa, Guido Sardar. Sardar was sceptical. Budinich tried to persuade him with

Salam’s letter and the prestige of having a United Nations institute in the city. He continued being reluctant. Nonetheless, by national regulations, banks had to spend on “social works.” Sardar continued being reluctant to the idea. If the

Centre was to be set up in Trieste, it would be necessary to invest in infrastructure, and the Cassa would become the main bank. After a few days,

Sardar decided to invest in the idea donating 100.000 lire (a very considerable figure) for the candidature. Financially, Budinich was set to start promoting

Trieste in Rome and Vienna. The problem was now a political one of convincing and mobilising the authorities in Trieste and Rome.

It was not difficult to convince the local authorities. The idea of having a

United Nations institute sounded like a good step in bringing Trieste back to an international prestigious position. The Demo-Christian Mayor, Mario Franzil, presided over an ad hoc committee where he presented the candidature to Rome.

Among its members there was the President of the Province, the rector of the

University, Cesare Merzagora (then Counsellor of the Assicurazione Generali, and later Italian Senator), Prince Raimondo Torre e Tasso, a representative of the

Cassa di Risparmio, and representatives of various local economic sectors. On 8

February 1961, the Mayor, the President of the Province and the rector of the

University sent an official letter to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Segni

(a few years later elected President of the Republic) requesting the candidature.

The official candidature had to be presented in Vienna before the next

Board of Governors meeting in June. Budinich had to move quickly. He again approached Luzzato Fegiz and Manlio Udina, professor of international law and,

201 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

in the 1930s, rector of the University, who had good contacts at the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs and the at Council of Ministers. The three professors were received by Amintore Fanfani, the (Démocratie-Christian) President of the

Council. He gave his approval, and passed the order to the Ministry to proceed with the Trieste candidature. Clearly, the diplomatic and political channels were open to the establishment of an institution. On March 14, 1961, less than six months after the Resolution had passed in Vienna, Rome officially presented the candidature as the seat for the new centre. This is an impressive record of efficiency given Italian heavy bureaucracy.

3.3.3 The negotiating at the IAEA (1961-63)

The 1961 Panel of Experts and the Fifth General Conference

Following the 1960-Resolution, a panel of experts convened in Vienna on the 21 ci.id 22 March 1961, to make recommendations about the establishment of the

Centre.7' The physicist Carlo Saivetti, director of the IAEA’s Division of

Research and Laboratories, acted as chairman. All members of the panel were theoretical physicists, more or less close to Salam and/or Budinich: G. Beck

(Brazil), A. Bohr (Denmark); S. Hayakawa (Japan); L. Infield (Poland); N.

Kemmer (UK); L.S. Kothari (India); M. Levy (France); Salam (Pakistan); W.

Thirring (Austria), C. Moller (Nordita); J. Pretki (CERN); H. Roderick

(UNESCO); S. Rozental (Nordita). Budinich was invited to participate as an observer. It must be noted that all of them, probably with the exception of Pretki

IAEA, SAC/36, 6 April 1961.

202 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

and Kemmer (both collaborators of Salam), came from institutes that needed to

foster their international contacts.

The panel unanimously supported the idea. Its importance was scientific as

much as political. It stressed the necessity of fostering the “exchange of ideas”

between the West and the East blocs, as well as the importance of promoting

research in the developing countries. The panel recommended that the Centre

“should also be open to non-Member States of the Agency, as, for example, the

People’s Republic of China. It should operate “on a truly international level

without political polarization” in order to “serve also to some extent the lessening

of international tension.” In addition, the Centre would serve as a “pilot project”

fa future international research institutes. In contrast to other centres where

scientists came to “meet only," this institute was to be a place of “common wortf'

in areas of common interest and benefit. In their view, the field to be covered was

“theoretical physics related to nuclear physics.” However, the list of proposed subjects was quite broad; it went from reactor theory to theoretical high-energy physics. The panel insisted that it should be “ strictly an advanced research

institute for able physics ,” implying that it was not to be a training centre.

Lectures on special subjects were desirable, but only to “foster ‘cross-fertilization’ of ideas.”72

The panel stated the following six conditions that the host-city should

fulfil; (i) that it be a communication centre (that is, good access); (ii) that it be a

pleasant place to live for the scientists and their families; (iii) that it have a

university with a good physics department; (iv) that it be well connected to other

strong theoretical and experimental centres; (v) that it had to have an experimental

203 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

centre of good level; (vi) that it have easy access to computational facilities.

Needless to say, Trieste was hardly in a position to fulfil any of these conditions.The panel also calculated the costs of the Centre. This is the less elaborated part of the report. After all the alleged advantages of a theoretical physics institute was its low cost, a sensitive point for a young Agency with a very tight budget. The figures were certainly conservative, although they said that the error did not exceed 20%. The budget only included the running costs, which were estimated at half a million dollars in the first two years and less than a million in the next two.

The recommendations were submitted to the Agency’s Scientific Advisory

Committee (SAC). This document went to the Board of Governors accompanied by SAC’s own views. SAC suggested that the same could be better achieved by providing additional fellowships at a number of existing institutions and by arranging summer schools in various countries. The document urged the organisation of one or two summer schools in order to test the response from the scientific community.73

The Board of Governors gathered in June to prepare the fifth General

Conference of the IAEA. After a difficult start in 1957, and an early period full of tensions and with very few effective actions,74 the Agency had to prepare to elect its second Director-General. This item, and the amendment of an article of the

Statife related to the representation of Member States in the Board of Governors, occupied the attention of the delegates. This was certainly not a propitious72

72 idem. n IAEA, GOV/INF/51, Annexes, May 1960. u See David Fischer, History o f the International Atomic Energy Agency: The First Forty Years (Vienna: IAEA Pub, 1997), 71-95.

204 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

moment to debate the expansion of the Agency. Nevertheless, with the support of

Denmark, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Yugoslavia and a large number of developing countries, the Conference approved a resolution requesting that the director general circulate, among the Member States, a report on the panel’s study and

SAC’s comments, and to enquire whether they would support and provide facilities for the Centre. An Italian offer of US$1.000.000 for the required infrastructure, plus a US$32.000 annual contribution towards the costs of running the Centre was included as an annex.75

Yet, perhaps more importantly for the ICTP’s future was the election of the Director General. After initial hostility by the Soviets, who urged the assembly to appoint someone from the Socialist bloc, Swedish physicist Sigvard Eklund was elected.76 His appointment and the end of the Conference meant the beginning of a new era for the Agency; as the Chairman of the Conference wrote in retrospect, “after four years of mostly preparatory work, the organization was readying itself for action.”77 Eklund, who also carried the experience of the 1958

Geneva conference (where he and Salam collaborated, see Chapter 1), thought that it should emphasise its technical and scientific support, especially to the developing countries.

75 IAEA, GC(V)/RES/107, 6 October 1961. 76 On the relation between Eklund and Salam, see Chapter 1. 77 Oscar A. Quihillalt, “The Fifth General Conference of the IAEA,” in The International Atomic Energy Agency: Personal Reflections, edited by David Fischer, 53-61 (Vienna: IAEA Pub, 1997), 56.

205 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

First Inquiries about the proposal

In March 1962, Eklund circulated a questionnaire among the Member States. In

the cover letter he announced that the Agency was making arrangements to help

the Government of Italy hold a seminar on theoretical physics in Trieste from 16

July to 25 August, expecting that it would “give useful guidance regarding the

further steps to be taken for the establishment of an international centre for

theoretical physics on the lines envisaged by the General Conference.”78 The idea

of the summer school was presented as a preliminary step towards the creation of

the Centre, as the Trieste physicists wanted to show it, and not as an alternative, as

SAC had suggested.

Very few countries replied to Eklund’s circular. It was perceived that the creation of a centre under the banner of the IAEA would have political consequences for the future of the Agency and the balance of power within it. As the Centre’s idea began to crystallise, the prudent stance of most delegates from both the Eastern and Western blocs turned into overt hostility. The United States said that it was “unable at this time to provide the information requested” but that it would be prepared to discuss the question at the Board of Governors. The

Soviets made no declarations at all. The French government expressed its surprise to receive Eklund’s letter “because we thought that the setting up of such a centre in the near future is not very likely since the American and Soviet members of the

Scientific Committee did not feel that such an undertaking would be possible at the present time.” Norway took a negative attitude too, though on different grounds: fundamental studies in theoretical physics did not lie within the scope of

8 S. Eklund to IAEA’s Member States (SC/331), 21 March 1962, Box 28, Folder 3. IRP.

206 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

the IAEA. This, actually, was a debatable argument after the two resolutions

passed in 1960 and 1961. At any rate, it was used on several occasions by

different delegations opposing to the ICTP.79

Three countries were enthusiastic about the idea. Ironically, but perfectly

expectable, they were the poorest and least scientifically advanced ones which

offered to contribute. Greece said that it would send professors and share the

running costs of the Centre, while Pakistan said that it would increase •maWt substantially its voluntary contribution to the Agency towards the establishvof the

Centre and nominate Pakistani scientists. A candid note was sent by the

Guatemalan government “approving with pleasure the establishment of an

International Centre for Theoretical Physics with the location in Trieste.”80

Trieste continued pressing. Budinich decided to speak about the project to

De Castro’s assistant, Guido Gerin, asking him to see what he could do to intercede with Rome for Trieste’s candidature. As a member of the Demo-

Christian party and as an officer of the Consorzio Diplomatico, Gerin had excellent relations with top officers in Rome. He agreed to collaborate and began an intense campaign at the Council of Ministers. He reminisces that the most enthusiastic figure about the idea of the Centre was the then Ministry of the

Defense, Giulio Andreotti.81 The Council backed the project.

In 1961, Egidio Ortona returned from the Embassy in the United States when he was promoted to Director General of Economics at the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs. During that same year, Luzzato Fegiz was appointed professor at

79 S. Eklund to I. Rabi, 25 May 1962, Box 28, Folder 3, IRP. 80 Idem 81 G. Gerin, Interview by author.

207 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

the University of Rome. He moved there with the family.82 * While in Rome, he had more frequent contacts with political personalities, including Fanfani, himself professor of economic history at the same university. Through Luzzato Fegiz,

Budinich had access to Ortona, who immediately became interested in bringing the Centre to Trieste. One can speculate on Ortona’s enthusiasm regarding the project by examining some antecedents. It was not the first time Ortona worked with scientists and science administrators. In the frame of the Atoms for Peace programme back in the 1950s, he acted as an intermediary between a delegation of Italian physicists, which included Carlo Salvetti and Edoardo Amaldi, and the

United States Atomic Energy Commission. In addition, Ortona had taken part in tre diplomatic negotiations for the acceptance of Italy as part of the United

Nations. Ortona recalled in his memoirs that the strategy adopted to gain a seat in the UN, was in fact to present Italy’s candidature to the UN Disarmament

Mission, an issue that involved nuclear politics.84 In 1958 Ortona was the Italian representative to the UN. Being an experienced diplomat, Ortona realised the central role that the new nations would play in future decisions taken by UN.

Admitted in 1955, Italy was new in the system, just like the new nations. Ortona showed a especial interest for those clearly aligned with the West, particularly

Pakistan and Iran.85 My argument suggests that these elements explain his active interest in the ICTP idea. During his tenure at the Ministry he played a key role in the commitment of funds for the Centre. Indeed, in 1962 Italy replied to the

82 Luzzato Fegiz, Lettere da Zadobaski, 405-414. 8j See Ortona, Anni d'America: La diplomazia, 1953-1961,135-140. At the Ministry in Rome, for instance, he supported the European Space Agency project (E. Ortona to Amaldi, 5 May 1963, Box 231, folder 2/0, EAP). 84 Ortona, Anni d'America: La diplomazìa, 1953-1961, 142. 85 Ortona, Anni d'America: La diplomazia, 1953-1961,420.

208 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

IAEA’s Director General letter confirming an offer of over USS lm for the new

centre.

With part of the funds to promote the candidature, a deluxe booklet of

photographs was printed featuring the city, lists of the active cultural life,

diagrams of future motorways which would serve Trieste, maps of the airports

“within easy reach of Trieste,” the architectonic project of the Centre

commissioned to two professors of the University, and maps of the four choices of

sites offered to host the Centre. The first option was in “Le Ginestre,” between

Monfalcone and Trieste, which was offered by the Province; the second was

closer to the city, in the Sea Drive Area; the third alternative was a site offered by

Prince Torre e Tasso, near Duino. Finally, a site in the Miramare Park was

proposed. It is difficult to say whether the first three options were seriously

considered by the Trieste authorities. What is clear is the preference for the last

option. The architectonic project was designed with the Miramare Park in mind.

Lvioreover, the booklet has a photomontage of the scale model exactly in the

position where it eventually was located in the Miramare Park. Interestingly, this

was the only land that had to be acquired, whereas the others would be donated.

One could speculate that the interest in locating the Centre in Miramare was related to some plans to develop the tourist industry, with the little port of

Grignano, next to Miramare, as a strategic centre. As part of the internationalist

dreams of Trieste, it had been argued that the importance of turning the city into

an attractive tourist place. In 1957, the “Rogers Project” was presented. It was

strongly supported by Luzzato Fegiz. One central point of the plan was to build a

209 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

path along the seaside between Sistina and Miramare.86 The Project was never

accomplished, but the interest in opening Trieste to tourism continued. Perhaps

some people thought that developing “scientific tourism” eventually would boost

tourism in the area.

By this time, however, Trieste was not the only candidate. A few days

after the General Conference, Denmark expressed its interest in having the Centre

in Copenhagen. In March, what was initially a general statement turned into a formal and detailed offer. Considering the firm tradition of Copenhagen in theoretical physics, the recent setting up of Risa’s Research Establishment, the efficient scientific documentation service rendered by the University, and the electronic computer operating at the Danish Institute of Computing Machinery

(and extensively used by the Bohr Institute), Copenhagen became a serious competitor. In addition, the Danish authorities, following the estimate made by the panel, offered US$800.000.87

Nevertheless, the Danish seemed unconvinced about the scale of the ICTP project. In their response to Eklund, they urged him to consider the new centre as a “modest” institute tightly connected to an existing one. This would render all the practicalities easier. However, that meant that the new centre would be an extension of a national research institution (in this case the Copenhagen Institute for Theoretical Physics). This contrasted with the spirit of the proposal, for the panel (including Salam) had insisted in the uinternationaP' and “neutraF character of the new centre. In addition, the Danish suggestion implicitly meant a compromise solution to the objections in the sense that, instead of a new

86 The model for Trieste’s urban plans was the “ passeggiata ” between Bogliasco and Nervi, near Genova; see Luzzato Fegiz, Lettere da Zadobaski, 376-377.

210 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

international centre, it was preferable to re-enforce the international aspect of

some existing national institutions.87 88 Undeniably, from a scientific viewpoint,

the Centre would have been better located in Copenhagen but, again, die ICTP’s

pre-history was governed by the geopolitics of Trieste, rather than by the

scientific considerations offered by alternative options.

Two additional offers were made, one from Turkey and another Pakistan.

Salam’s influence in the incipient Pakistan science and technology system

suggests that he may have been behind this decision. However, neither of these countries could compete with the prestige and financial offer of the European counterparts. Furthermore, Salam thought that the Centre should be located, at

least in its early years, in a “central” location, namely in Europe. It was better to be located in a peripheral city in the “metropolis” than in a metropolis in the

“periphery.” Thus, the Pakistani proposition can be interpreted as a move to raise the European offers, as in an auction.

Following SAC’s recommendation, Eklund wrote to some of the major institutions enquiring about whether they could receive scientists from the Third

World sponsored by the IAEA. Whereas CERN responded that it “would hardly be able to contribute,” Oppenheimer wrote from Princeton that: “we would be glad to receive nominations, recommendations, and information about any candidates who might reasonably come here.”89

87 S. Eklund to I. Rabi, 25 May 1962, Box 28, Folder 3, IRP. 88 Similarly, Norway held that, in case it was decided to create the Centre “it should be done by extending one of the established national or regional centre of theoretical physics, as for instance NORDITA in Copenhagen” (S. Eklund to l. Rabi, 25 May 1962, Box 28, Folder 3 ,1RP). Letter from CERN quoted in Sir William Penney’s report “International Theoretical Physics Centre”, Second Draft Undated [but probably January 1963], Box 28, Folder 4, IRP. Oppenheimer to Eklund, 27 August 1962, JRO, Box 40.

211 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

The Trieste Summer School and the Sixth General Conference

The Board of Governors again studied the question in June 1962. The Director

General submitted the results of the questionnaire to the Member States, the report of the 1961 panel and the SAC’s views. Fears arose concerning the possibility that the Centre might become a heavy financial burden for the Agency. It was recommended that the financial assistance had to come from the interested

Member States, and not from the Agency’s regular budget. Given Denmark’s proposal of hosting but a small centre linked to a strong national existing institution, the idea of creating a new international centre under the banner of the

IAEA was increasingly associated with Trieste.

Eklund, Salam and Budinich thought that the summer school should be used as an important antecedent towards the establishment of the Centre. This is a perfect example of political ability whereby the opponent’s suggestions are adapted to suit their plans. The SAC’s proposal of holding summer Schools in

Trieste and Czechoslovakia was to demonstrate that a new centre was unnecessary. In May, the IAEA’ Deputy Director, John Hall visited Trieste. He reported to I. Rabi, a member of SAC, that “it is a very attractive location and the people whom I met were very enthusiastic about developing Trieste on a continuing basis as an international site.” In what seems to be an attempt to ease

Rabi’s strong opposition, Hall added: “As you know, your friend Professor

on Cacciapuoti is Professor of Physics at the Physics Institute of Trieste.”

Budinich continued to receive the support of the Mayor and the Members

City Council. He was able to convince the General Commissioner of the National 90

90 J. Hall to I. Rabi, 18 May 1962, Box 28, Folder 3, IRP.

212 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Government (the representative of Rome in Trieste), whose relations with the local authorities were traditionally rather tense, to make the necessary provisions for the adaptation of the '‘Castelletto” in Miramare Park to host the meeting. On

16 July, the symposium was officially inaugurated. Three days later. Mayor

Franzil, on behalf of the City of Trieste, conferred a medal on Eklund.91

The result of the school was what Salam and Budinich expected. It was attended by some the most prominent names in theoretical particle physics, including Eugene Wigner and Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger. Most of the lectures focused on the hottest topic of the day, the “Regge Poles” presented by

Italian theorist Tullio Regge, then member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced

Studies. However, the centre of attention was not physics. One of the participants was the Argentinean physicist J.J. Giambiagi, with whom Salam had developed a very good relationship since his visit to Buenos Aires in 1958. His recollections illustrated neatly the atmosphere and the goal of the meeting. After referring to the interest in Regge theory, Giambiagi points out that:

But, I must correct myself, the dominant topic was actually the proposal of Abdus Salam and Paolo Budinich to create an international centre for the benefit of the developing countries. The seminar was in fact a kind of pilot experiment for testing the feasibility of a centre... In a couple of afternoon meetings, Abdus Salam and Paolo Budinich disclosed their plans. These were discussed not only during the sessions but also in the evenings on the terraces of the Hotels Riviera and Miramare Castle .92 At the end of the school, Budinich and Salam asked the participants to write a letter supporting the initiative of having a centre in Trieste and stating that, if such a centre were created, they would come on a regular basis. It is also likely that

91 “Attività del Consiglio Comunale nel mese di luglio 1962,” Rivista della Città di Trieste, August-October, 1962, 17 92J.J. Giambiagi, “Memories from ICTP," in From a Vision to a System. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics of Trieste (1964-1994), edited by André Hamende, 219-225 (Trieste: International Foundation Trieste for the Progress and the Freedom of Sciences, 1996), 220.

213 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

they asked the participants to write personal letters to the representatives of their

governments.

Given the divided opinions at the Board of Governors, the advocates of the

Centre thought that it would be better to wait until the General Conference in

September (after the Trieste Seminar), trusting in the support from the developing countries (the new majority). In a joint paper, the Board of Governors and the

Director General informed that the former was reviewing what could be done to implement most of the recommendations of the Scientific Advisory• Committee. »93

During the Conference, Eklund circulated the letter of support from the participants of the Trieste Seminar, and copies of the replies from the institutions he had contacted in August.

It was impossible to predict the outcome of the Conference. On the one hand, SAC and many of the delegates at the Board meeting were against the establishment of the Centre. Besides the delegations that explicitly opposed,

France and Norway, the most powerful ones (the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom) were unenthusiastic, even hostile. This undermined the political motivation for opening some space for dialogue between the Eastern and the Western blocs. On the other hand, with the exception of Princeton, none of the institutions that were consulted wanted to co-operate with new fellowship programmes for scientists from developing countries. In addition, the Trieste school had been ably used by Salam and Budinich as a platform to receive the backing of important physicists. It would be a real diplomatic and political battle.

93 IAEA, GC/(VI)/194, September, 1962.

214 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Salam talked at the General Conference delivering one of the most powerful political addresses by a scientist in that forum. In a ten minute speech he w as able to align most of the developing countries’ delegates to support a new resolution in favour of the Centre. In this masterpiece of rhetoric, Salam asked three simple questions: “(1) Does research in theoretical physics fall within the scope of the Agency’s activities? [Norway’s objection]; (2) Do physicists from the emerging countries really need and desire such Centre? (3) If the Centre is desirable, can it be created and can the Agency afford it?” Making reference to the first question he pointed out the supposed relation between theoretical physics and nuclear technology extensively commented in the previous Chapter 2: “I sometimes wonder what reply an Agency like ours may have given to a request of a young and unknown theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, in 1904, if he had made an application for a Fellowship to follow his theoretical speculations on the nature of space and time,” he said. He contended that theoretical physics did not need costly apparatus and hence was inexpensive. Finally, with admirable political sense, he referred to the rights of the young scientists from poor countries: “let us not forget that young scientists in the under-developed world feel the urge to meet the challenges of fundamental science as much as anyone else.” In this context, the word “challenge” has a strong political meaning: denying the opportunity to do theoretical physics at the highest standards constitutes an insult to and a waste of the intelligence of the underdeveloped nations. As for the second question, Salam showed the letter signed in Trieste by

53 of the participants. Regarding the question about whether the centre could be created, Salam produced further names of physicists who he knew that “from my personal impressions” (including Niels Bohr and Hideki Yukawa), they all were

215 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

"‘strongly in Favour of an International Centre.” It was an authority argument; in

Salam’s view the project was feasible because it counted on the blessing of the

physics elite.

He concluded inviting the delegates to follow what he saw as the inevitable flow of history:

Gentlemen, let us project to twenty years from now. The world is moving closer, economically, intellectually, scientifically. In twenty years, there will be international research centres not only for theoretical physics but for most fundamental sciences. The world trend is in this direction and nothing can stop it. It is possible for us in this Agency to take the initiative in forwarding this movement. I do hope very much we shall. With these words I commend to you the resolution in front of us.94 Salam had achieved his aim to polarise the audience by presenting the case as a confrontation between poor countries in need of science and technology and rich countries possesing of the key for development. He was acclaimed by the developing countries’ delegations. He had touched the internationalist hopes of these nations. The rest of the delegations looked perplexed and felt uncomfortable

‘.he enthusiasm generated by Salam’s words. It was seen as a manifestation of

Salarn’s populism and the developing countries ignorance and naivety regarding science and technology. With similar arrogance, one year later, when the negotiations ended, an American delegate commented: “you wanted to have a centre for underdeveloped countries: it will be an underdeveloped centre.”95 In a letter to his friend Oppenheimer, the same delegate wrote:

The great surprise in a way was the terrific head of steam which Salam was able to raise and the poorer nation for a scheme for a rather large center of theoretical physics. Delegations which had no idea what it was all about lined up passionately in favor and we had the encouraging spectacle of the Eastern bloc and the Western bloc being on the same side.. .about to be bowled over by the hepped up underdeveloped...The Trieste meeting must have been most extraordinary...

94 The speech is reproduced in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 219-223. 95 Budinlch, “ICTP: Thirty years after,” 30; Budinich, interview by author.

216 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

And he added:

Salam’s skilful leadership in mustering the strength of the have-nots was truly astonishing. I have never seen the most skilled professional gather in his votes more effectively. He is clearly a man who will go for [sic] in politics or in the politics of science. I am writing all this because I have such a feeling of inadequacy in presenting our case at home compared with the natural genius of a Salam.96

What Rabi probably ignored is that Salam was already working to keep

Oppenheimer on his side. A few days later, Oppenheimer received a letter from

Salam reporting the “strong demand from the smaller countries of South America

and Asia,” and the lack of interest shown by the USA, USSR and the UK. The

letter closes with Salam’s characteristic way of presenting his own proposal as a

project of his interlocutor: “I do very much hope through your continued interest

the Centre comes to existence as early as possible and justifies all the hopes which

have been built up on the idea of truly international collaboration in our

subject.”97

Finally, a new resolution was approved recommending that the Board of

Governors study “ways and means” of setting up the Centre. I f the study showed its feasibility the Centre should be included in the Agency’s programme as early as possible. It was a compromise solution. There was still the possibility this new study would conclude that the Centre was not convenient. However, it is fair to say that the unusual alliance between Italy and the Third World countries won a battle against the even more unusual coalition of the United States, most Western

96 I. Rabi to J.R. Oppenheimer, 25 September [1962], JRO, Box 59. 97 A. Salam to J.R. Oppenheimer, 28 Sept 1962, JRO, Box 40.

217 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

European countries and the Socialist Bloc.98 A final decision would be made the

following year.

Sir William Penney’s Report

The IAEA’s SAC discussed in depth the establishment of the ICTP in May 1961,

June 1962, October 1962, and again in February 1963. Throughout this period, the

unanimous hostility of the members remained unaltered. During the October

meeting, for instance, they reported that: “In the view of the limited resources

available to the Agency, every effort should be made to avoid duplication with

national programmes.”99 Given that its views “had clearly not been accepted by

the [1962] General Conference the Scientific Advisory Committee therefore

decided that they would fully explain in writing their considerations about the

advantages and disadvantages of the proposal.”100 The report was commissioned to Sir William Penney (who, in 1962, replaced Sir John Cocttcrt>[b as scientific advisor of the British Atomic Energy Authority101).

Although the Committee was said to be “impressed by the enthusiasm expressed at the conference,” it contended that “for the present there were more effective and more economical methods by which the objectives may be achieved.” I shall examine in turn the objections. The first objection may be summarised as follows: Pure science is not relevant in improving the standard of

98 Resolution GC(VI)/RES/132, from 26 September 1962, was approved with 57 votes in favour and 4 abstensions. 99 IAEA, SAC/OR.9,28 January 1963, 8. ,uP Sir William Penney’ paper on the International Atomic Energy Physics is enclosed in a letter from H. Seligman to I. Rabi, 16 January 1963, Box 28, Folder 4, IRP. All quotations in this section are taken from this report, unless indicated otherwise. 101 UK Atomic Energy Authority, Eighth Annual Report (1961-1962) (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1962), paragraph 333.

218 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

living in poor countries. It was clear that the Centre’s scientific activities would

concentrate on high-energy theoretical physics. The SAC pointed out that this

field “has perhaps no immediate practical application in the direction of

improving the living standards.” Other areas such as fluid mechanics, solid state

theories, gas theory, logical use of computers and so forth, would be “less distant

from practical application” and, therefore, more useful in that part of the world.

The debate between application-oriented and curiosity-oriented research was but a special case of the dilemma between technology and science for development (see

Chapter 2). It did not mean, as has been simplistically said, that the developing countries should not carry out any research at all. It contended that these countries should do research bearing in mind the basic needs of their societies. The

Committee stated that developments in theoretical physics and applied science could only come about by national scientific programmes on a wide and substantial basis. Therefore SAC proposed that the IAEA should limit itself and

“encourage tire growth of theoretical physics on a wide basis in newly-developing countries.”102

The second objection was that the presentation of the Trieste 1962

Summer School (presumably made by Eklund, Salam and Budinich) had been misleading. The Committee admitted that the school might be thought to demonstrate how successful the Centre would prove to be (as Budinich, Salam, and implicitly Eklund sought to show). This argument was “of doubtful validity,” the report said. For scientists, especially leading scientists, will not leave their institutions for a year or more to work elsewhere. At best, this may happen in the early years, when some of them will be “sympathetic to encouraging research in

102 Idem (Sir Wiliam’s report, italics added).

219 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

the developing countries.” As time passed, the quality of the institute would

deteriorate due to the lack of interest of the scientists that would visit the Centre in the future. It is worth noting the patronising character of this position. For the

Committee, as for the advanced countries, the Centre would never be attractive because of its intellectual merits, but just a sort of charitable institution for poorer countries. The concentration in one single subject seemed inevitable and negative.

In one single institution of this kind it would be extremely difficult to maintain a research group in more than one area. Consequently, fellows coming to work in other areas would find themselves working on their own, just as in their home- countries. It was thus asserted that the Centre would be “an artificial creation” because, in order to survive, it would need to “artificially” supply a constant flow of leading theoretical physicists. This objection reflected the Committee’s scepticism towards an institution not closely tied to a national programme, and budget. Presumably, that would be a more “natural” undertaking. As a response to this objection, the SAC proposed to hold Summer Schools in different parts of the world. Scientists will not keep travelling to the same place each year not least because one of the attractions of the summer schools is “the opportunity of visiting different parts of the world.” Additionally, this alternative allowed more flexibility in terms of the subject matters.

Finally, the SAC objected because the Centre would be too costly. The

Committee made a detailed estimate of the costs of the building, library and necessary equipment. This last item included a US$1 million dollar computer considered by the SAC to be “essential.” Indeed, the majority of theoretical physics does not depend “just on pencil and paper.” All the phenomenology coming out from theoretical models entailed long calculations where a computer

220 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

seemed necessary. A physics centre without such a facility would not be

competitive. This necessity became apparent in the early 1960s and, in fact, in the

1970s it meant a major change in the practice of physics.103 SAC estimated that, in

order to set up the Centre, costs would run between 2.1 and 2.25 million dollars,

plus another US$800.000 per year for the general costs. This figure was

considerably higher than the one estimated by the 1961 panel. Taking into account

Italy’s offer (US$1 million, plus US$250.000 per year), the IAEA had to pay for the remaining US$1.2 million, plus US$ 550.000 per year. Given its precarious financial situation, the Agency could not afford this. The IAEA’s total budget was

US$6.446.139 in 1962 and US$ 7.337.500 in 1963 (in 1964 it increased by 1.37% only).104 Therefore, the ICTP represented about 17% for the initial infrastructure, plus 8% of its annual budget. Considering that the Centre would host no more 80 theoreticians in total, the cost seemed disproportionate. The Committee suggested that, instead of creating a Centre, the Agency should intensify its fellowships programme made available to Third World students to study in the existing research centres. In this sense, the Committee stressed the “encouraging” answers from Dubna and Princeton to the Director-General’s questionnaire. One should note that those replies were far from being clear offers to host researchers, and anyway, the period of time and number of posts available for IAEA’s fellows, as stated in their letters, would be rather limited. They only stated their intention to welcome nominations.

IOj Galison, Image and Logic. Ift4 United States Department of State, “Seventh General Conference International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, September 1963. Position Paper, Program and Budget for 1964,” NARA, DoS Rec., Rg. 59, Box 4154, file AE-IACE (1963).

221 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

In February 1963, the Committee gathered again and submitted the report

practically without any modification to the Director General. The tone of the

report was set in the first paragraph, where the Committee said that: “The

Committee...unanimously feels on scientific grounds that the Agency should not

take responsibility for, or encourage, the establishment of such an institute under

the Agency.”I(b In summary, the SAC insisted that Summer Schools and more

fellowships would be a more effective way to cover the demand from the developing countries. As for the “loss of theoretical physicists” in those countries

(brain drain), the Committee considered it an “unavoidable” problem.

Furthermore, it suggested that the Centre might be even counterproductive in this respect. In contrast to the Summer Schools where scientists from poor countries travelled alone, they would be at the ICTP with their wives and children. This circumstance, they said, could encourage them to leave their home countries. At any rate, SAC was determined to stop the project. In the fall of 1962, just before the General Conference met, the Indian physicist Homi Bhabha suggested to bring the question to IUPAP, of which he was its President. In fact, a few months later the matter was discussed in Bombay by the Executive Committee.

The crucial year: 1963

The period from October 1962 to June 1963 was the most dramatic in the negotiations. The Italian lobby intensified so as to persuade at least those personalities politically influential in the Agency and contrary to the initiative.

Meanwhile, a new panel had to be appointed. The task of this body was crucial as 105

105 IAEA, “Conclusions reached by the Scientific Advisory Committee at its Tenth Meeting on 8 and 9 February 1963 in Geneva,” Box 28, Folder 8, FRP.

222 '-'.'c.'iis De G re iff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

it had to deliberate the feasibility of the Centre. This would not be an easy task given the strength of the opposition.

As soon as Carlo Salvetti - now Italian Governor at the IAEA’s Board of

Governors - learned about Bhabha’s intention, he urged Amaldi to "move the idea of the Centre and in particular the candidature of Trieste when the item is presented in that organisation [IUPAP].”106 During SAC’s October 1962 meeting in Cannes, Salvetti had the opportunity to discuss the matter in private with several personalities. Salvetti briefed Amaldi about the various positions and the bad mood of the Members of the Committee with relation to the idea. One of the strongest opponents was B. Goldschmidt, “by far the most influential Governor,” according to the Agency’s historian.107 Despite his opposition, he conceded that if

Italy agreed to pay entirely for the infrastructure, “it would be rather difficult for the Agency to reject the offer.” Salvetti asked Prof. G. Perrin, another figure of international stature, to talk to GcU^mlolt in order to “soften his opposition to the v.'cutre idea in general and to Trieste in particular.” Perrin, for his part, was also critical, but more moderate. Salvetti also approached the head of the Danish

Atomic Commission, Koch, requesting the support of the Danish scientific community. Koch said that his country would support the idea only if it was approved unanimously in the Agency, but agreed to talk to Aage Bohr about the issue. Salvetti ended his memo with a list of actions that should be taken: (1) to arrange a meeting in Rome with top officers at the National Nuclear Energy

106 C. Salvetti to E. Amaldi, l6-Oct-62, Box 504, folder 2, EAP. 107 David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 72.

223 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Council or the Foreign Affairs Ministry in order to define the Italian proposal; (2) to study the possibility that Italy finance the entire project.” 1 flfi

In September, Budinich asked Amaldi to present the case at the next executive council meeting of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). In his conversations during the Conference, Budinich noticed Rabi “more understanding.” Budinich wrote to Amaldi: “I know that he is a good friend of yours and hence I would kindly beg you to write him to force his eventual support to Trieste.”108 109 Five weeks later, Budinich wrote again to Amaldi describing the three main objections presented by the SAC, and the counter-arguments. First, responding to the criticism that it would be difficult to have a high-level scientific staff, Budinich explained that he had letters from a number of scientists expressing their desire to collaborate with the Centre. Second, commenting on

SAC’s assertion that there are more effective ways to get the same result, the

Trieste physicist noted that the existing centres were overcrowded. Budinich’s interpretation of Oppenheimer’s reply to Eklund was exactly the opposite of

SAC’s, albeit equally exaggerated: “[Princeton] ha[s] already made known their material impossibility of accepting physicists from underdeveloped areas as researchers.” Lastly, in response to the observation on the costs, Budinich replied that some nations had offered “considerable financial support,” however mentioning only Italy.110

At this point, the work of promoting the Centre was entirely carried out by the Italians, joined by Alexandre Sanielevici, who was a Romanian experimental

108 C. Salvetti to E. Amaldi, 16 October 1962, Box 504, folder 2, EAP. 109 P. Budini to E. Amaldi, 29 October 1962, Box 504, folder 2, EAP. 110 P. Budini to E. Amaldi, 10 November 1962, Box 504, folder 2, EAP.

224 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

physicist trained in Turin and Deputy Director of the IAEA’s Division of

Research and Laboratories .111 112Salam was still active moving his international

contacts, but his correspondence with Budinich was sporadic. Budinich knew that

Salam’s presence in Trieste was essential to make the Centre scientifically

attractive. On 28 January 1963, Budinich wrote to Salam saying that he expected

Salam to accept the Directorship of the Centre. He reported that Sanielevici was

visiting Trieste “in order to start the machine for the creation of the Centre, site,

building and so on.” And he added: “You should come to Trieste as soon as you

can, you will be received as a Roman Emperor.” This letter is of central

importance to realise to what extent the Trieste group was working independently

from Salam. Indeed, the letter summarises Budinich fears that Salam would not come to Trieste after the Centre’s foundation, and confirms the leading role of

Trieste in the negotiations. This again reminds us that we must be careful in assessing the participation of each actor in each particular phase of an institution.

Before 1964, it was not clear whether Salam would take over the directorship of the Centre.113

111 Luigi Stasi, who was a Trieste administrator working for the University and an active promoter of the ICTP idea, recalls that “ it was [in the hospitable house of Alessandro Sanielevici] that the strategy in support of the candidature of Trieste as the seat for the future of the ICTP was planned. Paolo Budinich and the Italian diplomat Fausto Marinucci de Reguard ¡...took part in this ‘conspiracy’ meeting” (Stasi, “Il sogno triestino vissuto all'Università,” 208). Andree Hamende, then a IAEA’s officer, reminisced that Sanielevici’s admiration for theoreticians arrived to the point of having in his office a photograph of Italian physicist A. Rostagni, the leader of the small but very active group of theoreticians in Post-war Padua (Hamende, interview by author). (On Rostagni’s group see Edoardo Arnaldi, “The Years of Reconstruction Part I,” Scientia 114 (1979): 51-68.) 112 P. Budini to Abdus Salam, 28 January 1963, D.138, ASP. " J Even after the approval of the Centre in 1963, Salam’s acceptance to direct the Centre was delayed to his own negotiations at Imperial College to arrange a double appointment (at University of London and at the ICTP). In February 1964, Sanielievici expressed his preoccupation and pessimism for what seemed to him Salam’s indecision: “in spite of his promises, Salam did not send us back his written acceptance of the post of Director” (A. Sanielevici to P. Budini, 7 February 1964, D.138, ASP).

225 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Amaldi’s support for the project was crucial but he remained prudent in

offering funding. He did not participate in the IUPAP meeting in Bombay and

therefore could not defend the ICTP item there, but forwarded Budinich’s memo

to all members of the Executive Committee. Amaldi could do nothing and

IUPAP's stance was similar to SAC’s - the Centre was inconvenient. In contrast,

in Italy he worked actively but also carefully in order to obtain the necessary

political and economic support for the new centre. He was convinced that

bringing the Centre to Italy would contribute to re-enforcing the international

contacts of Italian physicists. Beside, the Centre was not competing with the

budget for other research projects. The state, or more exactly, the Ministry of.

Foreign Affairs had to make a special provision for it. This meant more money

from the state and destined for science. On the other hand, he was careful not to

commit funds already approved for national programmes. In January 1963, he replied to Budinich’s request of 150.000.000 lire from the INFN to the Centre,

indicating that in 1961 the Institute had decided to make a contribution of

20.000.000 lire for scholarships, and that it did not intend to make any further provision .114 At any rate, in the Spring of 1963, Italy confirmed the offer made a year earlier. In addition to financial support, the creation of two full professorial chairs and four assistant professorial chairs in theoretical physics at the University of Trieste was announced.

In February, the Board of Governors, now chaired by Salam’s intimate collaborator, the Pakistan Governor I.H. Usmani (see Chapter 1), requested that the Director General convene a meeting of up to three advisers to study the offers of facilities, assistance and co-operation made to the Agency in connection with

114 E. Amaldi to P. Budini, 10 January 1963, Box 286, folder 2/0, EAP.

226 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3 : A tale of two peripheries

the establishment of the Centre .1 b We have no details of the criteria used to select the members. Nevertheless, the “three wise men,” Robert Marshak, Jaime Tiomno and Leon Van Hove, were certainly not neutral arbiters. Robert Marshak was a champion of international exchange, which was the idea behind the Rochester

Conferences, where the idea had been discussed for the first time. Jaime Tiomno was back in Brazil after his work with Wheeler in the United States and badly needed to keep his international contacts. In fact, in 1961 he spent some time as

Salam’s guest at Imperial College. Leon Van Hove was the director theoretical division of the largest international centre in the Europe (CERN).

The panel met in April and, despite SAC’s considerations, “it came to see such great potentialities in the project of establishing an International Centre for

Theoretical Physics that [they] feel this enterprise to deserve the greatest and most enthusiastic support.” In contrast to the 1961, the panel recommended that it should be a research as well as a training centre. Implicitly referring to the

Copenhagen spirit of the 1930s, they called for the creation of “an atmosphere of informality and free discussion. As for the computer, it pointed out that it might be enough to count on computing needs amounting 20 to 30 hours per week, carrying a total cost of about $ 100.000 at the end of the fifth year, significantly lower than SAC’s estimate. It finally expressed its optimism towards the financial problem arguing that the Director General could try to find additional support from philanthropic foundations on the basis of the scientific prestige of the staff.

As for the seat, the panel suggested that a choice should be made between

Copenhagen and Trieste; “Copenhagen would be a more favourable location than

115 The draft resolution was submitted by Greece (IAEA, GOV/874, 21 February 1963). The United States made an amendment in order to weaken the eventual commitment of the Agency in

227 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Trieste from the point of view of existing theoretical environment whereas Trieste

would be favoured on the basis of the financial commitment,” the report

concluded .116

However important the Panel’s backing, the project still had several

enemies. I suggest that the opposition of at least some of the members of the

Scientific Advisory Committee reflected the position of their national delegations

(of which they were part). This research could not examine the position of every

single delegation, and the same is true for the members of the SAC. Nevertheless,

from the available material it is possible to draw some general conclusions about

those countries not studied in detail.

Without doubt the most important in this respect is the Soviet Union,

whose initial disinterest increasingly turned into overt hostility. It did not even

answer Eklund’s questionnaire. The Soviet attitude might be due also to the strong

f oviet opposition to the election of Eklund a few months earlier. Interestingly, the

arguments against Eklund had been championed by Vassily Emelyanov, another

Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee. Therefore, one can infer that the

Soviet opposition to the Centre was a result of their disinterest in sponsoring an

institute located in Western Europe and backed by a Director General they

considered aligned with the NATO countries .117 Equally important is the fact that,

an eventual creation of such a centre and transferring the responsibility to the individual Member 3tales (IAEA, GOV/875,22 February 1963). 1 ' IAEA, “The International Centre for Research in Theoretical Physics. Report to the Director General by Messrs. Marshak, Tiomno and Van Hove,” Gov/INF/98,21 May 1963. 117 To give an idea of the tone of the Soviet attack one may mention that, in the 1961 General Conference, Emelyanov referred to a letter supposedly from an anonymous source in Sweden charging Eklund with having spied for the British in Sweden; see Oscar Quihillalt, “The Fifth General Conference,” 57-60.

228 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

like its counterpart, the USSR was not interested in having intermediaries to

negotiate with the Americans.

The British and the French delegations also made clear their opposition

from the beginning. Neither country really needed to re-enforce its international

contacts in theoretical physics. From their point of view, there were no advantages

to setting up such a centre, and the internationalist ideology played very little in

their foreign policy. As Goldschmidt told Salvetti, a different thing would be if

Italy paid for the bulk of the institution. After all, the French and British research

institutes, financed by the national budgets, were constantly visited by eminent

physicists. Hence Goldschmidt’s and Sir William Penney’s insistence in

strengthening the existing centres. Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College,

London, were prestigious and powerful centres. In the field of theoretical physics,

France had the Summer School of Les Hauches, also sponsored by NATO,

precisely to put the French students in contact with leading theoreticians from the

rest of the industrialised world. In contrast to the defeated countries of the Second

World War, Italy, Japan and the Federal Republic of Germany, which embraced

the ICTP idea from the-beginning, France and Britain could offer nuclear

capabilities such as advisory services and equipment to several countries. For

these countries the bilateral collaboration was politically and economically more

attractive. The links with the developing world did not pass through the United

Nations system, but through their own post-colonial networks co-ordinated through national institutions.

I should also note a remarkable absence in the ICTP negotiations, namely

Patrick Blackett. In the previous chapter, I showed how much his ideas differed from Salam’s in relation to the role of theoretical physics in the developing

229 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

countries. A similar conviction seems to have prevailed among the delegates of the industrialised countries, particularly the United Kingdom and the United

States. Sir William Penney’s report begins addressing precisely this point. It is my contention that this conception of the irrelevance of theoretical physics in the poor nations acted as a genuine motivation to oppose the ICTP idea, and that this explains also why Salam’s boss at Imperial College did not collaborate in this phase, nor did he ever visit the ICTP later. Salam and the Italians claimed that these kinds of arguments concealed an overt discrimination, and exploited this point to gain support from the developing countries delegations.

India was the only Third World country that opposed the ICTP idea.

Fearing that the Americans would support the enterprise, the Indian delegation elaborated an extensive memo, written by Surjit Mansigh, who was a notorious exponent of the realist school of international relations in Indian diplomacy. The

Indian delegation was determined to stop a project of this calibre proposed by the

Pakistani delegation. The fact that the memo was elaborated by a Third World delegation, in fact the one with the largest scientific community in the developing world, gave special weight to its arguments. The memo put it bluntly from the beginning: “an institute of this nature would not be of benefit to the developing countries.” It provided four reasons which were identical to SAC’s objections.

The “alternative methods” also copied SAC’s (summer schools and fellowships).

It pointed out the expressed opposition by the members of SAC and IUPAP

(including Bhabha, a member of both). The memo concludes urging strong opposition to the initiative: “The Government of India, therefore, hopes that the

Government of the United States of America will give careful consideration to the

230 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

views of these scientific bodies [SAC and IUPAP] and support their

t 1 Q recommendations.”

After a heated discussion, on 14 June 1963, the Board of Governors,

decided to approve, on a provisional basis, an International Centre for Theoretical

Physics at Trieste. The Director General was requested to submit a draft of the

agreement to be voted on during the next General Conference .118 119 Usmani, the

chairman of the Board, told the story in an interview to the BBC many years later.

He reminisced that the argument presented at the time was that the Centre would

worsen the brain drain problem. In fact, this was but one of several objections.

Incidentally, he was tacitly referring to India’s criticism. This shows not only how

selectively the memory works, but also the importance the issue had as part of the

diplomatic tensions in the sub-continent. Usmani recalled Salam’s “brilliant,”

almost heroic defence and how his answers “silenced the critics.” Thus, “I, as

Chairman of the Board in one of its historic meetings in June 1962 [sic],

announced that the consensus of opinion in the board favoured the establishment

of the ICTP .”120 It was the most important battle for the Centre. Budinich, Salam,

Usmani, Salvetti and Marinucci (the Italian Ambassador to Vienna) and Eklund

had won. It meant that Italy and the Agency were committed to the creation of the

Centre. Now their respective contributions to the undertaking had to be decided. It

was a political and a diplomatic triumph for Trieste. Budinich immediately sent a

telegram to Amaldi and to the ad hoc city committee, thanking them their support

118 “Aide Memoire, delivered to D. Schneider by Nuss Surjit Mansingh of Indian Embassy on June 12 I963,” NARA, DoS Rec., Rg. 59, Box4156, AE-IACE(1963). 119 IAEA, GOV/DEC/31(VI), decision number (63), 14 June 1963. 120 “Questions by Miss Yanmei Zhou During her Interview with Dr. I.H. Usmani of the BCCi International Foundation for the Promotion of NEST [New and Emerging Sciences and Technologies], in London,” [undated] B.285, ASP.

231 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

and underlining the crucial role of the national government diplomats Marinucci and Salvetti.121

The following day, Budinich was received at the train station by his colleagues, his father and the local press. The same day, Mayor Franzil congratulated him and informed the City Council. Budinich had departed from

Vienna at 5 p.m., landed in “Marco Polo” airport at 6.35, left the Venice train station at 7.45, and finally arrived in Trieste at 9.30. After a Vienna-Trieste trip of four and half hours, he declared to the press: “ It is necessary to provide immediately for the indispensable works for the Centre’s functioning: the Ronchi airport, the Venice-Udine highway and a double track railway system between

Trieste and Venice. This is a commitment we will need to face in the quickest and most rational way .”122

Limiting the IAEA’s participation

Now the final decision about the future of the Centre was in the hands of the

General Assembly. The text of the agreement needed to establish the participation of the Agency in the enterprise. In this respect, the United States’ opposition was central in establishing the operating conditions of the Centre.

The “three wise men” report balanced the power relations between the advocates and the opponents. The panel’s conclusion served to neutralise SAC’s opposition. Now each side had the backing of an authoritative, “ scientific” body of experts. The question had to be defined democratically at the General

121 P. Budini to E. Amaldi, 14 June 1963, Box 504, folder 2, EAP.

232 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Conference. This left to the opposition forces two options: either put strict

constraints on the participation of the Agency in the undertaking or stop the whole

project by gathering enough votes at the General Conference. The former was the

United States stance, whereas the latter was the position adopted by India. There

is no evidence to establish whether Rabi and Bhabha suggested similar strategies

at SAC. However, we do know that their hostility was consonant with their

delegations’ attitudes.

The 1962 resolution had been a compromise solution that practically

transferred the decision to a new panel of experts. The United States realised that

the “three wise men” report left little margin for opposing the creation of the

Centre. In a confidential document, the State Department gave instructions to its delegation in Vienna in the sense that the United States

[did] not plan to match special contributions such as those for the Theoretical Physics Center or the Oceanographic Research Project [in Monaco], since the United States matching formula is intended to encourage contributions for the support of the regular operational program, whereas special contributions are made for special projects which are of particular interest to the donor country and are outside the target supported by all other voluntary contributions .122 123 One measure taken by Eklund when he was in office was to study how to implement a long range planning in the Agency. A panel had been convened for that purpose. Since the ICTP was in a study phase, it was not included in the planning. By defining them as “special projects,” the United States argued that they were not of interest to the Agency, but to the donor country. This justified its unwillingness to collaborate as well as a reason to limit the Agency’s

122 Anon., “II Centro reclama aeroporto e autostrada,” Il Piccolo, 15 June 1963,4. About the Mayor’s declarations, see in the same page “Fattivo contributo della città nell’azione del comitato promotore.” 123 United States Department of State, “Seventh General Conference International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, September 1963. Position Paper, Program and Budget for 1964," NARA, DoS Ree., Rg. 59, Box 4154, AE-IACE (1963).

233 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

participation. This position remained unaltered even after the creation of the

Centre. The United States systematically opposed any attempt of including the

ICTP in the IAEA’s regular budget. Consequently, and throughout its history, the

future of the Centre depended on the periodic renewal of a special agreement

between the Agency and the Italian government. The instability and fragility

produced by this circumstance is the most evident feature of the International

Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.

Item number 13 of the 1963 General Conference concerned “the

establishment under the auspices of the Agency of an International Centre for

research in Theoretical Physics.” Once again, it was not an easy discussion.

However, as in the previous year, the pressure of the new majority representing the recently independent countries forced both the United States and its allies, as

well as the USSR and the Socialist bloc, to accept the creation of the Centre.

Instead of overtly opposing the resolution, most industrialised countries deemed to abstain. Hence there was no formal opposition. However, the United States campaigned to limit IAEA’s contribution to an amount “ndtexceeding US

$55.000” in the form of fellowships, and, during the first four years, a total amount of US$110.000. The United States’ position is clearly stated in a State

Department confidential report in which one reads: “The Board... approved the establishment of the Centre, on a provisional basis and subject to some fairly stringent restrictions regarding the Agency’s financial commitments. The U.S. was a principal architect of this decision, and as the principal contributor to the

234 Alexis-De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Agency’s voluntary budget, our objective was clearly to limit the Agency's financial commitment,”124

The Agreement

The agreement between Italy and the IAEA established that Italy would pay 80%

percent for the running costs of the Centre (US$270.000), provide a first nucleus of a library and of administrative personnel, plus an international school for the children of the scientists and a new building, while the Agency would contribute the other 20%. The Italian Government signed the agreement with the understanding that the bulk of the funds would come from the City of Trieste and some private companies. On 11 October 1963, Ortona sent telegrams to the Rector of the University of Trieste, the Trieste City Council, the President of the

Province, the President of the Cassa di Risparmio, the General Commissioner of t". e National Government at Trieste and a couple of Italian private firms announcing that the agreement had been signed between Italy and the IAEA. He pointed out that, on the basis of the financial contribution by each of these bodies it was, necessary to elaborate an official document clearly identifying the commitments adopted by each entity and the mode in which these funds would be paid. A meeting was held at the Direction of Economic Affairs of the Ministry to define the matter.125

124 John Trevithick [?] to Herman Pollock, Memorandum 30 July 1965, Attached to H. Pollock to J. Slater, 9 August 1965, in grant-file 67-40, Ford Foundation Archives (FFA); my italics. 125 Egidio Ortona to Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Milano), Consiglio Nazionale di Energia Nucleare, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Comune di Trieste, Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste, Pirelli S.P.A., Montecatini S.P.A., Commissario Generale Governo Trieste, 11 October 1963, Box 504, folder 2, EAP.

235 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

A crucial event was taking place simultaneously while the ICTP was being created. In the winter of 1962-63. the Italian Senate studied and approved a bill declaring Friuli-Venezia Giulia as “Region with Special Statute.” This gave a great deal of autonomy to the region, especially in budgetary matters. The

University was a direct beneficiary and the local government was able to make investments in several infrastructure works, including a new building to host the

ICTP. This law was a crucial step for the future of the Centre. 1

One final point must be stressed regarding the partisan interests in the initiative. Not just the Demo-Christians backed the ICTP. Apparently, all parties wanted to appear as committed to the ICTP project. Four years after the signature of the agreement, the Communist Vittorio Vidali from Trieste presented it to the

Senate for ratification .126 127 He spoke about the importance the Centre had for

Trieste as “a significant example of moral and political value ” and stressed that

“it must also be a stimulus for the realisation of other works and aiming at making

Trieste accessible with modem communications.” Only Vidali and the Sub secretary of State of the Foreign Affairs Ministry spoke during the “debate” urging the prompt passing of the bill. The Sub-secretary pointed that out that

Trieste was paying for the Centre and, therefore, there was no financial

126 In particular Article 9 was concerned with the development of the university. On the implications of the new status see the address by the General Vice-Secretary of the Regional Giunta in “Attività del Consiglio Comunale. Seduta del 4 febbrario,” Rivista della Città di Trieste, February-April, 1963. 127 This was again under pressure of Budinich. He was acquainted with Vidali when both returned to Trieste after the war. The contact was through their common friend the communist mathematician Mario Ubaldini. Budinich also knew Vidali’s wife, Laura Weiss, herself a scientist and a City Counsellor (Budinich, interview by author; Licia Chersovani, interview by author).

236 '\'cxis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

commitment on behalf of the central government. All articles were approved

without any debate.128

3.4 Conclusion: Effective networks and propitious environments

I must say that very rarely were so many difficulties sorted out so quickly...Once again science has survived, has surpassed politics to show the direction that conduces to the progress and fraternity among men.

Carlo Amaudi129

To conclude this chapter, I shall try to summarise why the Centre was created. I

believe that when one realises that the geopolitical situation of Trieste constitutes

the chief historical framework in which the main actors moved (the Italians), it is

not difficult to understand why Salam seems to have been in the shadow during

this phase of the ICTP. He certainly was essential in mobilising the Third World

delegates both by lobbying and through his splendid rhetoric on the stage, but it

would be naive to believe that the Centre would have come to fruition without the

financial and political support of an industrialised country. Given the actual distrust of international endeavours, even a relatively inexpensive project of this kind needed the commitment of a national state willing to pay. No Third World country would have been in the position to support such a proposal, as the utilitarian view of science was shared by the governments of the United States and most developing countries alike. The ICTP was possible due to Italy’s offer which, in turn, resulted from the mobilisation of financial, political and diplomatic

123 Atti Parlamentari del Senato Italiano, IV Legislatura, 7 April 1967,32071-76. I am grateful to AM. Hamende for sharing with me his unpublished translation of Vidali’s address to the Senate. 129 “Devo dire che raramente si sono superate così presto tante difficoltà...Ancora una volta la scienza ha avuto il sopravvento, ha sorpassato la politica indicando a questa le vie che conducono al progresso ed alla fraternità fra gli uomini,” C. Arnaudi, Minister for Scientific and Technological Research, Address on the occasion of the inauguration of the ICTP In Trieste

237 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

resources in Trieste. Therefore, while Amaudi’s rhetoric is a typical example of the rhetoric of the scientific internationalism ideology, the creation of the ICTP does not represent the victory of science over politics, but, rather, the efficiency of an intimate collaboration between physicists and politicians in a propitious political environment. Despite having different motivations and interests, the political circumstances provided the conditions for the crystallisation of their common effort. The local, national and international political and scientific networks to which Salam and Budinich had access were a crucial force in advancing the idea against the hostility of the Scientific Advisory Committee and the American and Soviet delegations. This network included the Trieste authorities and intellectual elite, the Italian and Pakistani diplomatic services, and

.•..■me influential members of the scientific elite in the United States and Europe.

I shall examine in turn the motivations and the environment in the different arenas where the negotiations unfolded - Trieste, Italy and the IAEA.

Trieste

From the historical background provided earlier, the motivations should be clear for the reader. First, it was another attempt to bring Trieste out from its isolation.

As we saw, this was but another example of a series of efforts that included the

Umana group, Cacciapuoti’s involvement with UNESCO, the “European

Network” in which Budinich forcefully collaborated, and later the European

University. In the minds of some promoters, the new facilities necessary for the

ICTP would convert Trieste into an Italian Geneva. When the Centre was

(Istituto di Fisica Teorica dell’Università degli Studi di Trieste, // Centro Internazionale di Fisica Teorica , booklet, undated [but 1964]; my translation).

238 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

approved, Budinich and Arrigo Cavalieri (then director of the Italian-American

Association in Trieste) founded a school for the children of the scientists (a condition placed by the Agency). The model used was the existing International

School in Geneva. As part of the documentation used to justify the creation of the

School, a text was included pointing out that the new school could attract

‘"American and other firms which had decided to establish branches in

Europe.. .based on their choice of Geneva as their European headquarters on the presence of the International School .”lj0

Second, many envisaged the Centre as a means of neutralising the political polarisation in Trieste. The local intelligentsia, clearly represented in the Umana group, firmly believed that the cultural exchange with the Socialist countries could ease the acute political tension. This was favoured by the new climate in the relations between the United and the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. Nikita

Kruschev declared the peaceful coexistence doctrine, and the Kennedy administration welcomed the initiative. For the first time, a Soviet leader visited

• he Pope. In 1962, Italy elected a centre-left government and the socialists took over some key ministries .131 Meanwhile Trieste continued living a polarised life.

Therefore, not only the intellectuals, but also moderate politicians believed that the effect of being the host-city of a centre with an active scientific collaboration between the two blocs would mean the gradual isolation of the most extremist factions. In principle, the Centre would serve as an example that holding a dialogue between members of antagonistic ideologies and systems was possible,

1,0 “Relazione sull’Attività del Comitato Cittadino Ristretto, Dal 26 Giugno 1963 al 12 Ottobre 1965, Annex F,” D. 147, ASP. 1-1 The “turn to the left” of the Demo-Christian party was, however, a political manoeuvre to isolate the Communist party; see Ginsborg, Storia d'Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi , Chapter 8. On the Centre-left years in Trieste see Botteri et al., eds., Trieste e la sua storia.

239 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

and mutually beneficial. They hoped that the United States and the Soviet Union

were honestly interested in fostering this kind of scientific internationalism. Yet,

in Trieste the image of a fruitful collaboration was an open possibility even after

the creation of the Centre. After a few years of sterile attempts to attract the

Soviets and the Americans to work together in the Centre, the focus shifted to a

North-South collaboration, rather than in the East-West exchange.

Third, the creation of the ICTP was a way to force Rome to adopt certain

compromises with Trieste. The advantage of this strategy was that, if Rome

signed an agreement with the IAEA to set up an international centre in Trieste, the

commitment of the central government to provide the necessary infrastructure,

particularly in terms of communications, was guarantied by an international

obligation. The economic benefit for the local building companies, as well as for

the commercial sector, and the popular demand for those services, would have paid significant political dividends to the local authorities. It is difficult to assess the actual weight of the existence of the ICTP in the decision to build a new

highway linking Trieste, Miramare and Monfalcone, the duplication of the

Trieste-Venice railway track, and the transformation of Ronchi into a commercial airport. However, the Centre frequently was invoked to justify these works, which eventually were done. Certainly, the “Special Statute” approved in 1962, which actually was another manifestation of the same, was crucial for the future of the

city and the ICTP. In this sense, the investments made were in fact investments in the city, involving local industries and local services. Furthermore, the seat in

Miramare belongs to the University, which rents it for a symbolic price to the

United Nations. Even if the ICTP had failed, the infrastructure would have been

useful to the city.

240 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

I demonstrated that the Trieste scientists, most notably Budinich, were

remarkably efficient. What circumstances allowed them to act so quickly? I

suggest three factors. First, the emergence of a special group of people with

experience in diplomatic negotiations was essential. This was due to Trieste’s

peculiar geopolitical situation after its incorporation into Italy. Most of people

who worked for the candidature of Trieste, particularly those lobbying in Rome,

had been involved in negotiations defending the interests of Trieste during the

hai*d post-World War II years. This group included a high proportion of professors

from the University of Trieste. Budinch, Udina, Luzzato Fegiz, Gerin and others,

all had had experience in the international arena and had excellent contacts with

the Foreign Affairs Ministry. If one considers that Rome submitted Trieste

candidature less than six months after Budinich knew about Salam’s idea, then it

is clear that there were close personal connections perceiving a common political

interest.

Second, a strategy adopted by Budinich and his allies in Trieste and Rome was to avoid intermediaries. This was a lesson they had learned from living in a highly bureaucratic system such as the Italian academia. Had Budinich followed the regular process, he would have had to pass through the dean of the Faculty, the Council of the Faculty, the Senate House, the City Council, the Rector and so on. This would have taken months, or perhaps years, multiplying the chances of failure. Budinich later recalled that he was sourly criticised in the University for

“having handled the creation of the Centre in a non-orthodox way, systematically passing over the Science Faculty as well as the Senate House of the

University.”132 Although the City Council knew about the initiative, it never

132 Budinich, interview by author.

241 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

debated the question in any detail. The decision of creating the Centre in Trieste

was made by Budinich, who was considered the expert ,”133 with the approval of the executive, the assistance of an ad hoc committee and the complacency of the

City Council .Ij4 They all agreed that the Centre was an unquestionably good thing. In June 1963, the Council was informed about the decision taken in Vienna.

Finally, the approval of the “Special Statute” for the Friuli-Venezia Giulia explains the central role played by the local actors. In contrast with other Regions, this Statute granted local authorities a great deal of autonomy to commit financial resources that otherwise would have to have been approved by the National

Government. Therefore, the Province and the City of Trieste were in a position to make offers in terms of facilities such as the building and the required personnel.

Italy

In the national arena, at least three reasons prompted the Government and the

Demo-Christian Party to advance Trieste’s candidature. First, Italy showed an open interest in pursuing a nuclear policy at least for industrial reasons. Some of these contacts between Italian science administrators and nuclear powers in the

West, particularly the United States, started at least in the mid-1950s (including E.

Ortona as a central actor). The idea of entering the nuclear club was an aspiration of many scientists and politicians during the 1960s, and later. The 1964-68 events, known as the Ippolito affair, which involved charges of corruption against a top science administrator from the INFN (Felice Ippolito) certainly affected these

Gerin, interviewed by author. 1,4 In the records of the City Hall from 1960 to 1964,1 could not find any debate about the Trieste candidature, except from the brief reports by the Mayor about the actions taken by the ad hoc

242 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

plans and cast a shadow upon the nuclear alternative. However, in the early 1960s,

when the Centre was negotiated, the government, and the ruling Demo-Christian

Party (now allied with the Socialists) believed in the feasibility of the project and

thought that the internationalisation of Italian science was crucial. Moreover,

during the negotiations, the ICTP was repeatedly presented by the Trieste

newspapers as a “nuclear theoretical centre” and an “atomic centre,” an ambiguous term that neither the physicists, nor the politicians tried to clarify .135

The second reason deals with Italy’s interest in cultivating a good relationship with the Third World. Diplomats and politicians alike, such as Ortona and Attilio Piccioni (Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1962 and 1963), were aware of the importance of holding good relations with key regimes in the Third

World, particularly North African and some Middle Eastern countries. These relations were crucial, not only in diplomatic terms (in multinational fora such as the United Nations), but most certainly economically and commercially. Italy wanted to become a “donor” country. The symbolical and psychological effect of this move is perhaps as important as the political and economic aspects. Offering technical and scientific aid, Italy would be identified in international circles as a member of the “developed” world. Metaphorically, moving to the side of the donors was an essential part of being part of the adult countries that were ready to help those “still behind.” The idea was that Italy’s power would improve133

Committee; see Rivista della Città di Trieste. The verbal records between 1954 and 1964 are missing in the City Archives. 133 Examples of the use/abuse of the term “nuclear theoretical physics” in the main local newspaper, 11 Piccolo, are countless: see Anon., “Trieste è prevalsa nella scelta per il Centro di fisica nucleare,” Il Piccolo, 15 June 1963,5; Anon., “Scienziati come allievi nel Centro di studi nucleari,” Il Piccolo, 16 June 1963, 5; Anon., “Il Centro di Fisica nucleare entra in fase di realizzazione,” Il Piccolo, 29 June 1963, 5. In Anon., “Presto il Centro atomico senza attendere la sede,” Il Piccolo, 28 June 1963,4, Sanielevici observed that: “The Centre will be devoted to research in theoretical physics in connection to applied problems in peaceful uses of nuclear

243 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

alongside with the other industrialised countries and the “developing” nations .136

However, the manoeuvre proved to be even more convenient for Italy than

initially imagined. Many years later, when the Italian physicist Antonino Zichichi

(referring to Budinich’s and Salam’s request) convinced the President of the

Council of Ministers, Giulio Andreotti, to visit the ICTP, the senior Demo-

Christian (Giulio Andreotti) explained to his Minister of Foreign Affairs why the

ICTP was worth supporting:

The ICTP of Trieste is a good investment for Italy. First because we are committing the Funds for Development which, by law, we have to spend anyway in the Third World. These funds are called multilateral, while, in fact, they are bilateral, because the beneficiary countries know that they come from Italy. Second because the scientific assistance is the kind of help these countries want. Third, because a great deal of the funds are invested in Trieste.137

There is a third reason that is still of hypothetical character, and needs further evidence. However, some questions must remain open for future researchers in this rather unexplored field, namely the kind of relationship that developed during the 1960s between science, technology and the ruling parties in

Italy. I suggest that the support that the ICTP received was a manifestation of the

energy.” In the fall 1965, the RAI (National Broadcasting Company) transmitted a special service on “Trieste—Città Atomica.” Ij6 Ortona wrote on several occasions insisting on the importance of embarking on a co-operation policy with the Third World; see Egidio Ortona, L'Africa e le Nazione Unite (Lecture given on December 11, 1961, at the inivitation of the Centro Italia-Africa, adnt the Commerce Chamber of Milan), Cuaderno n. 5, Centro Italia Africa, 1962); also Idem, “Le 'tensioni' dei paesi sottosviluppati,” Moneta e Credito 15, no. 58 (1962): 230-51. On the Italian international co operation policy, see Ferraris, Manuale della politica estera italiana, 196-211 (and bibliography therein). Italy’s sense of inferiority regarding its international role was a constant element in the literature of those years. Italy's participation was almost invariantly presented in terms of a sort of international race among the most “advanced” countries. In 1962 it was reported that Italy “[was] in the fifth post, joined by the Netherlands. After them one finds Canada and Sweden, while Belgium to make its first steps” (Anon., “L'Italia e l'assistenza ai paesi in via di sviluppo,” Relazioni Internationali, 21 April, 1962, 464-5). In 1962, Piccioni spoke before the Senate stressing the importance of the decolonisation process in Africa and the Middle East: “It is to this world that is waking up that Italy wants to approach according to its possibilities and qualities,” he said (Anon., “La Politica Estera al Senato in Italia,” Relazioni Internationali, 21 July, 1962, 846- 52). That same year, the Parliament studied and approved a bill concerning international technical assistance (n. 1594, 26 October). 1,7 Quoted by Budinich, L'archipielago delle meraviglie, 85 (my translation).

244 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Demo-Christian Party’s interest in attracting the scientific intelligentsia. They

perceived that the left dominated the university and that it was a crucial space for

political and electoral reasons. In 1962, Fanfani formed the first centre-left

government in an attempt to attract the Socialists and isolate the communists. The

same war was to be fought in other fronts, including the universities. The role

ascribed to exact scientists in general, and physicists in particular, in the

modernisation of the country. Compared to the social scientists the physicists and

other scientists held weaker ideological ties with the partisan politics, a good

reason to seek their support. The Demo-Christians realised the importance of the

ICTP in order to tame scientific intellectuals closer to the left and especially

faithful to their professional interest in strengthening the Italian science and technology system. In this respect, Amaldi, a socialist himself, is a perfect example.

These interests would have not been enough to create the Centre without the existence of favourable conditions in Italy regarding to science and technology. In the first place, Italian scientists and science administrators were convinced that Italian science badly needed international support to revive. After the disaster of physics in Italy during the fascists years, Amaldi and the few other physicists struggled to reconstruct the physics institutes and renew contacts with international circles. The critical phase of this process ended in 1954. In the words of Amaldi, “a new phase was beginning in Italy, nay in Europe, not only for the study of elementary, but for all branches of research .”138 Indeed, in the 1960s, with the emergence of the new physics and large laboratories, Italian physicists felt that Italy was, in many respects, “behind” its European partners. Not

1 ,K Amaldi, “The Years of Reconstruction Part 11.”

245 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

surprisingly, after the first years of CERN, when Amaldi played a central role,

Italian physicists, and of course Amaldi among them, continued seeing the

European laboratory as their most important point of reference and support. Some

of them had the illusion that the ICTP would become a sort of theoretical CERN.

The type of relation that emerged during these years between science, technology, the political parties and the state, constitutes the most important national factor that favoured the creation the ICTP. As mentioned earlier, in order to attract the scientific intellectuals, the Demo-Christian Party sponsored several initiatives that developed parallel to the negotiations for the creation of the ICTP.

On 2 and 3 December 1961, the Central Office of Cultural Activities of the

Christian Democratic Party held a national meeting concerned with “A Policy for

Scientific Research” in Rome .139 Attilio Piccioni, then Vice-President of the

Council of Ministers and President of the National Council of the Demo-Christian

Party (and later Minister of Foreign Affairs), gave the opening speech in which he stressed that the Party must have “sensitive antennas to receive and transmit the requests, the criticisms, the proposals of enlightened minds, and sensitive to the progress of the country .”140 Piccioni also acknowledged the indifference the Party had shown, in the past towards science policy, but insisted that this would certainly change. Most of the presentations focused on the structural and financial problems of science in Italy and its importance for Italy’s economic growth.

Indeed, as time went by, the Italian economy started to show signs that the indexes would begin to decline. The politicians sought to find reasons for this

139 Una politica per la ricerca scientifica (Roma: Edizioni 5 Lune, 1962). Extracts from this report were re-printed in [, 1963 #585]. 140 A. Piccioni, ‘Discorso Introduttivo,’ in Una politica per la ricerca scientifica, 4.

246 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

deceleration and manners to prevent the end ihe “Italian miracle .”141 The most

common argument was precisely that Italy had failed to establish a serious science

and technology policy able to integrate scientific research into the economic

sector. In a sense, it was a similar diagnosis to Rostow’s theory of development

applied in many developing countries, as well as to the so-called British decline

theory .142 What seems remarkable is that this analysis did not seem to realise the

kind of asymmetric explanation it provided. For a while it attributed the decline to

the lack of scientific and technological innovation, because it could not explain

why, under the same circumstances, the “miracle” had been possible. It may be

that, like in other cases, rather than being a result of an empirical analysis, there

were political interests and ideological reasons to insist in science and technology

as the “new” answer to the economic or societal problems.

In this context, the physicists tended to dominate Italian science policy. As

said earlier, this seems to respond to the Demo-Christian Party’s initiative to

isolate the opposition parties (more notably the Communists) in the academic milieus. Whatever the reason was, the presence of exact scientists in the debates and decision making positions is significant. In the 1961 Meeting, almost 200 people, including university professors and top Demo-Christian officers, composed this so-called “study group.” Over 80% the scholars were Professors either of physics, chemistry or mathematics; at least 41 of them (about 25%) were physicists or related to nuclear physics. A year later, the Party presented a bill to the Senate concerning the organisation and development of scientific research in

141 This is the expression used to describe the flourishing of Italian economy betweenl958 and 1963. Italy had never grown so fast before or after this period; see Ginsborg, Storia cTltalia dal dopoguerra a oggi, Chapter 7. 142 For a criticism of the British “decline” thesis, see David Edgerton, Science, Technology and British industrial "decline", 1870-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

247 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

Italy. It was approved on 2 March 1963 (LawN. 286).143 It was a turning point for

it meant the centralisation of decision making, co-ordination and control processes

into one single organisation, the CNR (Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca;

National Research Council). It was also crucial because, for the first time, the

Interdepartmental Committee of Reconstruction (of Italy) was enlarged for

scientific matters, integrating for this purpose the Minister of Public Instruction,

the Minister for the Co-ordination for Research, and the Minister of Defence (by

then Mr. Andreotti). More importantly, perhaps for our discussion, is the

composition of the CNR. The Party insisted on new legislation aimed at

rationalising and democratising the system. However, the CNR was utterly

dominated by natural scientists. According to the new law, the National

Committees were to be composed by 140 members. Forty eight of them were to

be elected from the pool of Professors of experimental sciences, mathematics and

technical related fields. Another 16 were to be elected from the assistants to these

p -cfessors. Another 34 posts depended indirectly on the members. It is difficult

not to agree with a critic’s observation who, in 1964, pointed out: “An assembly

in which 88 members out of 140 belong to a certain category, not to mention that

they are the beneficiaries of their own decisions, is an assembly that will express

the interests of that category .”144

143 “Scientific Policy in Italy.” Minerva 2, no. 2 (1963): 210-224. 144 Romolo Saccomani, “La nuova legislazione sulla ricerca scientifica,” Il Nuovo Osservatore, Aprii, 1964, 292-296 (my translation); this was a special issue of the official review of the Demo- Christian Party, entirely devoted to science policy.

248 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

The United Nations Technical Agencies

One common element was shown by several delegations : their lack of interest in scientific internationalism, that is in international scientific collaboration. There was a marked interest in national (or regional) programmes and bilateral agreements, and a complete disinterest in international programmes and multilateral agreements. Industrialised countries considered that the proliferation of international institutes under the UN banner was a heavy financial burden of little benefit to Third World countries and politically uninteresting to industrialised countries. This reflects a general trend in the second half of the

•wvmtieth century towards nationalisation of science. The members of the

Scientific Advisory Committee was constituted by scientists who knew that elite institutions, both in the North and in the South, were tightly tied to national economic and military systems. A United Nations scientific centre would be, in their view, “unnatural” because of the lack of infrastructure that supported it.

Finally, we should see this case as an example of the fact the power of the new nations at multilateral fora resided in their concerted action. The explosion in number of new countries coming out from decolonisation and becoming members of the United Nations system produced crucial pressure in terms of the number of votes. Those countries not part of the nuclear nations felt that the IAEA was not of any direct benefit. This is the fibre Salam touched in order to demonstrate that the ICTP would be one of the few things where the IAEA could be useful to the Third World. Despite the serious reservations expressed by most industrialised countries, especially the United States, as well as the Soviet Union, they did not want to be perceived as opposing the scientific aspirations of the Third World. A

249 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 3: A tale of two peripheries

great deal of the international development game was a question of image. As a

State Department officer explained later: “The U.S. position, which we never

pushed very hard in view of the enthusiasm generated among the underdeveloped

countries for the centre, was based on our feeling that there were many well

established centres....”l4:> Opposing the Centre would be opposing

“development,” an idea of paramount importance to recast a new dependency of

the poor nations on the industrialised countries.

To summarise it briefly, the pre-history of the ICTP must be understood in the context of the efforts of two communities striving to move away from their

own sense of isolation and periphery. While Budinich and the Trieste elite thought that they could enhance Trieste’s position in the national and the international arenas by being part of the “donors” in the international development game, the

Third World nations and Salam saw in Trieste a peripheral city seeking a new function, and they were ready to provide it. However, it must be underlined that the Centre was very weak and that it had to survive a very unstable situation.

Financially, the ICTP’s budget was inferior to the one estimated as necessary in

1961. It lived with a Damocles sword upon its head, being forced to demonstrate quickly that it would be a top research centre worth supporting. The ICTP was weakly tied to Salam’s idea of a pure international network of international institutions and depended heavily on Italy. The following years were marked by

Salam’s efforts to stabilise the Centre, achieve its independence, and to create a network of international scientific institutions. As we shall see, Salam and

Budinich would strive for years in order to invent such a network.

143 John Trevithick [?] to Herman Pollock, Memorandum 30 July 1965, Attached to H. Pollock to J. Slater, 9 August 1965, in grant-file 67-40, FFA; my italics.

250 Chapter 4

Striving To Survive With Private

Funds: The N egotiations With The

Ford Foundation

Speakers and writers often do not know what they think until the words are out. Foundations, similarly, do not know what they are doing until they do it. It appears that the waverings and changes in Ford’s program strategies for Europe have been grounded in the difficulties and complexity of sustaining clear rationales for venturing out from home shores, and maintaining confidence in them. Francis X. Sutton1

y the Spring of 1964, Budinich and Alexandre Sanielevici were working Bhard to set up the last details to begin that would allow operation that summer. Meanwhile, Salam’s negotiations at Imperial College to obtain a leave of absence were proceeding slowly, ultimately taking several months. People in

Vienna and Trieste were becoming anxious about this delay: “in spite of his promises, Salam did not send us back his written acceptance of the post of

Director,” Sanielevici reported .2 Finally, in March 1964 the College granted him

' Francis X. Sutton, “The Ford Foundation and Europe: Ambitions and Ambivalence,” in The Ford Foundation and Europe (1950's-1970's). Cross-fertilisation o f learning in social science and management, edited by Giuliana Gemelli, 21-66 (Brussels: European Interuniversitary Press, 1998), 21-66.The quote is on pages 59-60. 2 Alexandre Sanielevici to Paolo Budini, 7 February 1964, D.147, ASP; see also Budini to Salam, 15 July 1963, D.I47, ASP.

251 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

permission to take over the directorship of the new IAEA centre for one-year.

There is no available evidence as to whether Salam had intended to be in office more than a year, or just to start the project and return to Imperial. However, given his political experience in the 1950s, it is likely that he realised that the

Trieste centre was an extraordinary opportunity to build his own empire, something that for a Pakistani would have been virtually impossible within a

British University.3 It turned out that Salam was to remain in office for the following thirty years. He commuted between London and Trieste, and as the centre consolidated he spent more and more time in Italy. However, during the early years it was unclear whether the Centre would take-off and there was a high probability that the enterprise would fail.

The agreement between the Italian government and the IAEA stated that the new centre should start to operate in 1964. It was agreed that the Italian authorities would provide accommodation for the scientists and a new building.

This agreement would have to be renewed in 1968, after a full evaluation of its first four years. The Trieste authorities decided that the Centre could occupy a building in Piazza Oberdan, Central Trieste. It was a 1930s building built under the fascist regime and designed as a boys school. After liberation the building was occupied by the press offices of the central government representative, the

Prefetto until the arrival of the physicists. In fact, the Prefetto was never informed of the decision taken by the local authorities, and one day found himself without his press office. The physicists had been used to annoy Rome’s representative, and this incident provides another example of the tense relations between local

’ As he himself acknowledged some years later in the letter to MIT professor S. James Gates, Jr., quoted in Chapter 2 (James Gates, Jr. to Salam, 5 January, 1989, B.242, ASP).

252 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

and national authorities in Trieste .4 The ICTP’s personnel was provided by the

Province and it in fact helped alleviate the employment problems of at least a few

former employees of the Allied Military Government, who constituted the

Centre’s first core of administrative and technical staff.

Salam and Budinich agreed that their top priority must be to make the

Centre visible among the scientific community. It was crucial to demonstrate as quickly as possible that Rabi and the other members of the SAC were utterly wrong about the future of a United Nations scientific centre. The first years of the

Centre were a continual effort to show that it would benefit not just Third World scientists, but scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain as well. Eklund also knew that the Centre needed to be legitimised by the highest possible scientific authorities. It was necessary to create a panel of scientists with indisputable political and academic credentials whose names could be invoked against those hostile to the project; this panel should act as a force to counterbalance SAC. This was to be the role of the ICTP’s Scientific Council. Indeed, the first Council, which gathered in Piazza Oberdan in the summer 1964, included an impressive list of names. Among them: J. Robert Oppenheimer (chairman), the charismatic director of the Princeton Institute; Mexican MIT physics professor Manuel

S ando val-Vallarta, an authoritative figure both in the United States and in

Mexico; the creator of plutonium and member of the American delegation to the

IAEA, Glenn T. Seaborg; and theoretical physicist, and scientific advisor and administrator, Victor Weisskopf .5 Trieste diplomat Guido Gerin, who, as we saw,

4 In response, the Prefetto occupied the building that hosted Trieste’s film archive. This time the victims of the occupation were the archives, which were thrown away and definitively lost. 5 Oppenheimer drafted the “Centre’s Charter” (Salam, “Physics and the Excellences that it Brings," 527). However, it never acted as an official statute because IAEA’s statues, did not allow the ICTP to have its own Charter (A. Hamende, email to the author).

253 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

participated in the negotiations, was appointed as the representative of the Italian

Government to the Council where he remained for several years. The IAEA was

represented by Sanielevici, and the director, Salam, and deputy-director,

Budinich, completed the group. In principle, the Council’s duty was to appoint visiting scientists and take strategic decisions about the future of the Centre, but in practice, its role was to use its authority to give political and scientific credibility to the ICTP. All strategic decisions were actually taken by Salam and Budinich and rather than being a consultative body, the Council became a support group designed to defend the Centre at the IAEA and to attract further financial support.

Often, the Council signed resolutions that had been written beforehand by the

Director and his Deputy, trusting to their knowledge of local and Third World realities.

In the summer of 1964, the ICTP began operations by hosting an international conference on Plasma physics. It was supposed to be the beginning of a programme of collaboration between American and Soviet physicists based in

Trieste. In April 1965, the ICTP hosted another politically important meeting: the preparatory meeting for the Fourteenth Pugwash Conference that was to be held in

Venice later that month. Salam, himself a member of Pugwash, wrote to Rotblat inviting the conference itself to Trieste, but it proved to be too large to be hosted in Trieste. Budinich organised the preparatory event. Thirty-five participants accommodated in the Jolly Hotel in Trieste, and sessions held at the University.

Besides discussions on the agenda of the forthcoming Conference, there was also a meeting of the Study Group on Biological Warfare .6 The purpose behind

6 Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash: the First Ten Years. History o f the Conferences o f Science and World Affairs (London: Heinenmann, 1967), 51.

254 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

inviting Pugwash, from the ICTP’s point of view, was to show that the Centre was

to be a neutral space committed to world peace, and a place where East and West

could meet .7

The limitations imposed on the ICTP’s international financial resources

created a strong dependency on the Italian government. This, in turn, severely

constrained Salam’s agenda for the Italians were not interested in fostering

exchange with the Third World and instead wished to use the Centre to link

Trieste to Central Europe. Salam was forced to start a massive campaign to

attract complementary funds. Although he would have preferred the Centre to be

part of the regular budgets of IAEA and, after 1970, by UNESCO, this was

prevented by the strong opposition of the United States, the United Kingdom,

India, Canada and Australia which kept the ICTP as a special project that was up

^renewal every four to six years. As soon as the ICTP started to operate, Salam turned instead to philanthropic foundations. Of Particular importance was the

interaction of the ICTP with the Ford Foundation, the assets of which were

incomparably larger than the budget of the all United Nations agencies combined .8 For the ICTP, the Ford Foundation was crucial for the development of several of its programmes. In this chapter I analyse the dynamics of this relationship in the light not just of its significance for the ICTP, but also from a

7 Budinich, Interview by author. 8 In 1964 the IAEA and UNESCO’s budgets combined did not exceed US$20 millions (IAEA’s was less than US$ 8m; David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: The First Forty Years, Vienna: IAEA Pub, 1997,497), whereas, that same fiscal year, the FF’s assets climbed over US$4 billion (Francis X. Sutton, “The Ford Foundation and Europe: Ambitions and Ambivalence,” 39).

255 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

perspective that highlights an important factor in the history of these

organisations, namely, the question of resistance to fund a proposal .9

Indeed, serious consideration should be given to the decision making

process underlying the funding of scientific projects. We should ask whether

decisions made by funding bodies are determined by general factors of

administration and policy, or by more specific and individual applicant-centred

considerations. At a historiographic level, the following question then arises

naturally: do our attempts to construct a coherent analysis of funding decisions

adequately account for either case, or. do they impose misleading political

interpretations on routine financial matters? This critique concerns studies of national and international organisations in general and, in particular, American philanthropic foundations who played a central role in international science in the twentieth century. Certainly, a substantial part of fund-awarding officers’ duties consists of seeking out and selecting projects that match the general policies of the organisation. Huge programmes -such as those on agriculture (green revolution), health and population in the Third World- responded to a particular conception of not just philanthropy, but of development and the “developing” regions. In many ways, they tell us more about the culture with which the foundations are imbued than the problems they seek to solve .10 This, however, is not the only motivation

9 A version of this chapter was published in Alexis De Greiff, “Supporting Theoretical Physics for the Third World Development. The Ford Foundation and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (1966-1973),” in American Foundations and Large-scale Research: Construction and Transfer of Knowledge, edited by Giuliana Gemelli, 25-50 (Bologna: CLUEB, 2001). 10 For an excellent discussion on the foundations’ prejudices see Marcos Cueto, “Visions of Science and Development: The Rockefeller Foundation's Latin American Surveys of the 1920s,” in Missionaries of science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America, edited by Marcos Cueto, 23-51 (Bloomington, IND.: Indiana University Press, 1994), 23-51. See also, Deborah Fitzgerald, “Exporting American Agriculture: The Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, 1943-1953,” Social Studies of Science 16 (1986): 457-483, reprinted in Cueto, Missionaries of Science, 72-96, on the Rockefeller Foundation and the Green Revolution in Mexico.

256 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

behind the decision to fund. General policies may not provide enough guidelines

for officers faced with a decision regarding specific requests. Therefore, as I will

suggest, a portion of grants will be given as a result of the applicants’ initiative,

persistence and pressure. During the evaluation process, contingent factors such as

the personality of the applicant, the political pressure of influential people, and the

prejudices of the personnel dealing with the application, are important elements

that affect the decision on each application. The weight of each of these elements,

as well as other historical variables, should be assessed for each specific case.

We must remember that it is usual for the number of applications to

exceed the number of approved projects. Thus, it is natural, even necessary, that

these requests are met with resistance. Such resistance is a natural instinct

cultivated by officers as part of their selection strategy. As David Edgerton

suggests, the primary problem in science policy is that of stopping projects, rather

than starting them. Thus, in this context “resisting” should not carry the negative

connotation that is usually associated with the term .11 One may extend Edgerton’s analysis by pointing out that there is a tendency to concentrate science-policy analyses on projects that were approved, when a far richer field for exploration may be provided by those projects that were stopped, or approved with serious reservations. This is not a symmetry argument in the sense of calling for a study of the unsuccessful applications after studying the successful ones. Exploring the grey area between the selection criteria and the decision to sponsor projects that do not match those criteria may teach us about the selection processes operating in large organisations, the distribution of power within those bodies, and the

11 David Edgerton, “From innovation to use: Ten Eclectic Theses on the Historiography of Technology,” History and Technology 16, no. 2 (1999): 111-136, footnote n. 67.

257 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

practical aspects of decision-making in science and technology policies. This grey

area is extremely useful to the historiography of the grantees, for an understanding

of the origin and evolution of the donors’ resistance sheds light upon the

applicants’ fundraising strategies and effectiveness.

In this chapter, I focus on the relationship between the International Centre

for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) at Trieste and the Ford Foundation (FF), a

relationship marked by the Foundation’s resistance and scepticism towards the

very idea of the ICTP .12 However, for reasons that will later become clear, the FF

classified it as a European project. For the FF officers, it was never obvious why it should finance the Centre, yet the ICTP received two grants, one in 1966

(US$200,000) and another in 1970 (US$150,000).13 1 am interested in the following questions: Why did the FF have initial reservations about the ICTP;

12 There is a considerable literature about science in Europe and American philanthropic foundations. See, for instance, Finn Aaserud, Redirecting Science: Niels Bohr, philanthropy, and the rise of nuclear physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Pnina Abir-Am, The Discourse of Physical Power and Biological Knowlege in the 1930s: A Reappraisal of the Rockefeller Foundation's 'policy' in molecular biology,” Social Studies of Science 12 (1982): 341- 382; Giuliana Gemelli, ed. Big Science. Intellectual Cooperation in Large-scale cultural and technical systems (Bologna: CLUEB, 1994); idem, ed. The Ford Foundation and Europe (1950's- 1970's). Cross-fertilisation of learning in social science and management (Brussels: European Interuniversitary Press, 1998); idem, ed. American Foundations and Large-scale Research: Construction and Transfer of Knowledge (Bologna: CLUEB, 2001); John Krige, “The Ford Foundation, European Physics and the Cold War,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 29, no. Pt2 (1999): 333-361. See also, Kathleen McCarthy, ed. Philanthropy and Culture: The International Foundation Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984). In contrast, the literature concerning American philanthropic foundations and sciences in developing countries during the same period is not so large. However, see Marcos Cueto’s pioneering works on Latin American medicine (especially Peru): for instance, Marcos Cueto, “The Rockefeller Foundation's Medical Policy and Scientific Research in Latin America: The case of Physiology,” Social Studies o f Science 20 (1990): 229-254; idem, “The Cycles of Eradication: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American Public Health,” in International Health and Welfare Organizations between the First and Second World Wars, edited by P. Weindling, 179-202 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); idem, “Science under Adversity: Latin American Medical Research and American Private Philanthropy, 1920-1960,” Minerva 35 (1997): 228-246 (this volume is dedicated to philanthropic foundations). On Venezuela and the Rockefeller Foundation, see Hebe Vessuri, “Scientific Cooperation among Unequal Partners: the Strait Jacket of the Human Resource Base,” in Coopérations Scientifiques Internationales, edited by Jacques Gaillard, 171-186 (Paris: ORSTOM Éditions, 1996). On the Rockefeller and the social sciences in Brazil, see Sergio Miceli, Betting on An Emergent Scientific Community (Ford Foundation and Social Sciences in Brazil) (Sao Paulo: IDESP, 1992). 13 All figures in this chapter are in current dollars.

258 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

how was the ICTP perceived by the largest American philanthropic institution;

how did the ICTP’s director cope with FF’s resistance; why, in spite of their

doubts, did the FF decide to support the ICTP?

In order to begin to answer these questions I present in Section 4.1 the

main causes of the resistance of the Ford Foundation towards the ICTP’s request.

At this point it should be noted that the Ford Foundation had little interest in

sponsoring theoretical physics in the 1960s, a trend that contrasts with John

Krige’s findings a decade before in relation to CERN and Bohr’s institute in

Copenhagen .14 In Section 4.2,1 suggest what motivated the Ford Foundation to

finance the ICTP in spite of its doubts. I conclude by stressing the implications of

this case for the historiography of institutions sponsored by philanthropic

foundations, pointing out the importance of the foundations’ activities in the Third

World to an understanding of their global politics.

4 .1 Resistance to support of the ICTP

During its early years, around 70% of ICTP’s budget came from the Italian

Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For Salam to advance his own agenda of promoting

North-South collaboration, he had to find his own resources. The Italians also wished to increase the budget of the ICTP. However, for Salam attracting

international funds was of great importance as means of balancing the political power within the centre. In 1964, the ICTP was still in the process of development. Its final shape, and the orientation of the kind of internationalism to

14 John Krige, “The Ford Foundation, European Physics and the Cold War.” See also idem, John Krige, “Philanthropy and the National Security State: The Ford Foundation's Support for Physics in Europe in the 1950s,” in American Foundations and Large-scale Research: Construction and Transfer of Knowledge, edited by Giuliana Gemelli, 5-24 (Bologna: CLUEB, 2001).

259 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

be promoted there, would depend on the balance of power between Salam and

Budinich, which in turn depended on their respective shares in the enterprise.

Because of the instability of a centre entirely dependent on the IAEA and

one single government, Salam and S. Eklund, Director General of the IAEA and a

convinced champion of scientific co-operation for Third World development, used

their personal contacts to get funds from private foundations in Europe,

specifically the Volkswagen Foundation and various Swedish organisations .13 *15 A

few months after the approval of the ICTP project by the IAEA General

Assembly, Eklund and Salam contacted the FF. In early 1965, Eklund met Joseph

Slater, from the Ford Foundation International Division, and Paul Hoffman, the

11 '-st president of the Foundation and an energetic supporter of the United

Nations .16

Despite being an initiative concerned with the less developed nations, the application passed through the International Division as a European project. There were good reasons for this decision for the Centre was located in Italy. It also reflected Salam’s conception of the Centre. He thought that it should not be a centre for development, with the patronising connotation such a term carried, but

13 S. Eklund to Dr. Ing. Gotthard Gamke (Secretary General, Stiftung Volkswagenwerk), 4 July 1966, D.804, ASP. On suggestion of Lamek Hulthen (from the Royal Institute of Technology), Salam and Eklund contacted the Nathhorst Foundation, which eventually financed visits to the ICTP by Swedish physicists (Hulthen to Salam, 8 December 1969, D.783, ASP). 16 This meeting was reported two days later in an internal memorandum by J. Slater to S. Stone 20 May 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA. After the meeting, Hoffman insisted; in a Post Data Slater informed that: “Paul Hoffman called today to state that he felt that help for Eklund’s proposal (for the physics training center) in Trieste was a very solid enterprise and one we should look at very seriously.” Hoffman had been an administrator of the Marshall Plan and as first president of the Foundation he promoted programmes for international intellectual exchange; see Paul Hofftnan, Peace Can be Won (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1951), cited by Kathleen McCarthy, “From Cold War to Cultural Development.” After leaving the Foundation, Hofftnan served as a high officer at the United Nations. An example of his support to international scientific co-operation for Third World development is his participation at the meeting on science and the new nations, held in the Weizmann Institute, Rehovoth (Israel) (Ruth Gruber, Science and the New Nations (New York: Pyramid Books, 1960), 332-337).

260 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

a centre of excellence in theoretical physics, with substantial participation by

scientists from the Third World. The ICTP’s contribution to the less developed

countries would derive from the high quality of the research carried out under its

auspieces; its aim ought to be keeping Third World physicists “scientifically

alive.” The Centre would demonstrate that scientists from the South could do

physics of the same quality and relevance as their colleagues in the North. If the

ICTP was to be revolutionary, it was for its capacity to help the Third World

develop its own scientific resources. In Salam’s view only scientists, and

theoretical physicists in particular, were essential for training good technicians,

making dependence on Western know-how unnecessary. Moreover, any differential treatment of these scientists, such as classifying them as scientists for development would be viewed as discriminatory. The ICTP ought to be a new

Copenhagen Institute or a version of the Institute of Advanced Studies at

Princeton, addressed to the needs of the scientists of less developed countries .17

Salam requested that the International Division of the FF provide one million dollars to finance visiting scholars, conferences and federation agreements. The latter were agreements that facilitated the exchange of scientists where it was difficult to apply the Associateship scheme, most prominently in socialist countries. Whatever their interest in the subject might be, the Foundation

,7The Copenhagen Institute was certainly a reference point, especially for the European physicists who aspired to recreate the almost mythical environment that put Copenhagen at the centre of world physics in the late 1920s. Some, like Luciano Bertocchi, member of the ICTP scientific advisory board, have even talked of a special Trieste “spirit,” implicitly alluding to the “Copenhagen Spirit” (Luciano Bertocchi, “The International Centre for Theoretical Physics: Historical Developments and Present Status,” in From a Vision to a System. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (1964-1994), edited by A.M. Hamende, 38-61 (Trieste: International Foundation Trieste for the Progress and the Freedom of Sciences, 1996)). Nevertheless, Salam was probably influenced by his experience as graduate student visiting the Princeton Institute for Advance Studies. Salam invited Oppenheimer to chair the first ICTP scientific council.

261 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

would never consider granting such a large amount of money .18 It was willing to

provide “matching grants” to support new projects, but it would never take on the

entire cost of a new United Nations institute.

The FF did not regard natural sciences programmes as being within its

sphere of action unless tied to political or ideological interests. In the 1960s this

policy became even stricter. The 1962 study about the direction of the Foundation

had established six “critical problems” upon which the Foundation should act:

education; development of cultural television; strengthening of the Atlantic

partnership; accelerating growth in less developed countries; strengthening the

postion of artists in the US; and urban improvements .19 The report made clear the

necessity of turning towards “action” and away from “research,” and the 1965

appointment of McGeorge Bundy as President of the FF reinforced this view.

Thus, the only conceivable scientific research the foundation would finance should be addressed to education and development programmes, if not towards ideological and political ends. In 1967, for instance, the only funding for research in the natural sciences, even in connection to overseas development projects, was that given to the ICTP. The case of the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in

Lima, Peru, is illustrative. The Ford Foundation was instrumental in bringing a number of Argentinean physicists and mathematicians to the University, as well as providing a good scientific library. However, the award was intended not for research, but “[f]or [the] improvement of curricula, staff and equipment .”20

Likewise, grants to science faculties and libraries in Latin America (Chile and

18 J. Slater to Herman Pollock, 17 August 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA. 19 Ford Foundation. “The Ford Foundation in the 1960s. Statement of the Board of Trustees on Policies, Programs, and Operations,” New York: Ford Foundation, 1962. The study was directed by J. Slater and chaired by J. J. McCloy. 20 Ford Foundation, Annual Report 1967 (New York: Ford Foundation, 1967).

262 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

Argentina) and Africa were part of larger packages intended to strengthen the

educational system.

Thus, paradoxically, what Salam viewed as a strength turned out to be an

obstacle. The FF had sponsored international contacts and even scientific

collaboration in physics, the grants to CERN and Bohr’s institute being two cases

in point. However, the Foundation was not interested in the production of

knowledge per se, but the political dimension of international contacts between

scientists.21 Moreover, by the time of the ICTP’s request, the FF had decided to

finance no programmes in physics. When Slater informed S. Stone, then director

of the International Division, about Salam and Eklund’s request, he replied in an

internal memo that: “We should talk because a few years ago we were shunted off the physics track.”22 Likewise, when the Italian diplomats approached him to recommend the application of the ICTP, he explained that “our problem remains a decision made a few years ago: that we would not continue to make grants in the field of theoretical physics .”23

Both Slater and Stone informed Salam about the Foundation’s constraints on the funding of theoretical physics. In spite of the discouraging'responses,

Salam was insistent. He met Slater several times to explain why theoretical physics and Third World development were intertwined, reasoning that technical assistance without the development of endogenous scientific capabilities would create another form of dependency. Physics was the most fundamental of the

21 In 1956, Stone assured to FF’s President that the Copenhagen and CERN grants were made “specifically for the expansion of international activities and not for the support of science as such” (Stone to Gaither, 1956; quoted by Krige, “The Ford Foundation, European Physics and the Cold War”). 2' S. Stone to J. Slater, memo, 8 June 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA. S. Stone to Egidio Ortona, 17 September 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

263 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

sciences, and hence, a truly developmental programme should include the

promotion of physics. Theoretical physics had, besides, an additional advantage

for poor countries: it was cheap .24 25Salam insisted that in order to ensure the

international character of the initiative, it was essential to end the dependency on

Italy.2;> Simultaneously, pressure was exerted on three other fronts: Salam’s allies

in the American scientific community; the IAEA’s Director General; and the

Italian Diplomatic Service.

Salam’s contacts with the American scientific community were at the

highest levels, because of both his own professional reputation, and his post as

scientific adviser to the President of Pakistan. One of these contacts was Jerome

Wiesner, Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics at MIT, who

served as scientific adviser to J.F. Kennedy, and was actively involved in foreign

arlairs during the 1960s.26 Like Bundy, Wiesner had close contacts within thé

membership of the Council on Foreign Relations. In a letter of 1965 he told Slater

that he knew the FF would “ordinarily not support such an activity for its

scientific value alone,... [but] that the international cooperative effort that the

Center makes possible,... and the fact that it was started by their initiative” made

it an appropriate thing for the Foundation to support. He added: “[f]irst of all,

Salam himself, is extraordinary both as a physicist and a human being.” Wiesner

was impressed that someone could “participate of modem science and still

maintain ties with their native lands.” He also referred to Robert Marshak, Victor

24 This was Salam’s main argument to get support from the IAEA when it was proposed in the 1962 Annual Conference. Salam’s speech is reproduced in Abdus Salam, Ideals and Realities. Selected Essay», of Abdus Salam, Edited by C.H Lai and A. Kindwai, Third ed (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1989), 219-223. 25 Salam to J.Slater, 5 July 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

264 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

Weisskopf and Murray Gell-Mann, who were “extremely please[d] with the performance .”26 27 Indeed. Weisskopf and Marshak (not Gell-Mann) also sent letters of recommendation that expressed their positive views of the Centre. Weisskopf regarded the Centre’s list of publications as “impressive, and among them are some of the decisive achievements of theoretical physics in that period.” He pointed out that “[i]t is not only the scientific achievement that counts,” but the opportunity for scientists in developing countries to “get in touch with the most modern developments,” in a space where “experienced scientists from the USA and Western Europe could meet with a large number of younger people from many under-developed countries, and also from the communist countries.”

Marshak had been not only responsible for the famous Rochester Conferences, the largest international conferences in theoretical physics in the 1950s and 60s, he was also, from 1963, the Chairman of the Science Advisory Committee for

Eastern Europe, where he had previously served as Vice-chairman. The

Committee advised the US State Department on scientific exchanges with the

Eastern bloc .28

In the meantime, Eklund’s approach to Paul Hoffman had proved effective in attracting attention, as this internal memo from Slater to Stone demonstrates:

“Paul Hoffman called today to state that he felt that help for Eklund’s proposal for the physics training centre in Trieste was a very solid enterprise and one we should look at seriously .”29 In a visit to the FF headquarters in 1966, Eklund

26 Wiesner was member of the “Cambridge discussion group,” who met to discuss on the problem of Vietnam. Among the members there were H.A. Kissinger, J.K. Galbraith and J. Killian. There is an extensive documentation on this in Jerome Wiesner’s papers at the MIT archives. 27 V. Weisskopf to J.E. Slater, 19 July 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA (my italics). 28 Anon., “We hear that,” Physics. Today, July, 1963, Vol. 16, N. 7, 70. 29 !. Slater to S. Stone, memo, 20 May 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

265 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

described the ICTP as “the best tiling (the most deserving of support) with which

he has dealt since he has been Director of the International Atomic Energy

Association [j/c ].”30

Progress on the third front, by the Italians, was also underway. It was

probably Budinich who asked Egidio, an experienced diplomat with connections

in the American political circles ,31 to explain the ICTP’s financial difficulties to

Stone, and the importance of the FF grant. Simultaneously, the Counsellor of the

Italian Embassy in Washington and the Deputy Consul General of Italy in New

York called Stone “to express the hope of the Italian Government that the Ford

Foundation would support” the ICTP .32 The pressure was overwhelming, but

resistance too was strong. In August 1965, Slater received a report from the State

Department about the ICTP, which he forwarded to Stone with an attached memo

calling his attention to the Department’s views. Stone overwrote on the same

memo: “Joe, I am ready. As I told Salam - why do we have [illegible] to support

physics and not other sciences [?]”33 Despite Stone’s sceptical tone, this seems to

have been a turning point in the evaluation of the project. The question was no

longer one of resisting to fund physics. After all, several personalities insisted that the Centre should be seen mainly in political terms, as a means of assisting Third

World development. The problem now was the same one Salam had faced a few years before in the IAEA: how to convince those in the developed world that 51 *

J. Slater to S. Stone, memo, 30 March 1966, in grant file 67-40, FFA. 51 Ortona was a crucial figure during the negotiations to create the ICTP securing Italian funds for the new Centre not only during the negotiations at Vienna in the early 1960s but also afterwards. Orton a had worked in the Italian embassy in New York for almost 10 years before being promoted to Director General of Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome in the early 1960s. He would eventually return to the US a few years later as Italian Ambassador. Ortona seemed to have a personal relation with Stone as the tone of the letter suggests (E. Ortona to S. Stone, 14 August 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA). S. Stone to J. Slater, memo, 17 August 1965, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

266 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

some of his colleagues in Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Turkey, Ghana, etc, wanted

and, in his view, had the qualities to be part of the international scientific

community and to contribute to the development of their countries. For Saiam it

was frustrating to learn that while scientists in the industrialised countries were

highly respected, and physics was considered an important subject for the

development of advanced technology in the West, Third World theoretical

physicists were utterly dismissed as valuable agents of modernisation. The general

view in the industrialised countries was that Third World countries had higher

priorities, than basic science. Food and birth control problems ought to be solved

before thoughts turned about, for instance, to the development of exotic quantum

theories. It was felt that the building of a scientific tradition required first the

solving of “more basic” problems Saiam saw this as overt discrimination. He

would not accept that science and scientists should play different roles in the

North and in the South. He was required to explain what was assumed in most

Western scientific circles after World War II, that physicists were essential actors

in modem societies.

The recommendations by senior members of the scientific community

prompted the FF to reconsider the ICTP request. In a one-sentence memo to

Stone, Slater bluntly noted: “Shep: In view of the Weisskopf, Eklund,

Oppenheimer, and other recommendations, we should talk at your convenience

about the attached.” The attached document was the State Department report on

the ICTP.34

Idem. ’4 Idem.

267 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

In 1966, the first grant was approved, but doubts about the role of

theoretical physicists and mathematicians persisted in the minds of the FF

officers. In 1968, Francis Sutton took Slater’s post as the officer responsible for

the ICTP’s grant. He became enthusiastic about the idea, and in 1970

recommended a second grant. However, the question of the role of physicists in

Third World development continued to be a problem. In 1973, he wrote a long

report about the Centre stating that:

These people are not directly useful in development, and they do not have a distinctive cultural coloration. The case for concern with them must lie in the influence they have on good quality teaching and research in the sciences and such general inspirations as their quality may give to the intellectual and cultural development of their countries. These influences certainly seem to me not trivial. On the other hand, I am uncertain how much of our attention and resources they deserve.35 After having received two grants worth US$350,000, the Foundation turned down a third request in 1973. By then, the oil crisis had prompted austere

policies in the US and Europe.

T2 Motivations for supporting a young centre

Political pressure does not, on its own, constitute a reason for supporting a request. Most applications to donor bodies are backed by more or less influential personalities, yet not all are approved. Therefore, the motivations to provide grants to the ICTP must also lie in those features of the ICTP that were potentially interesting to the Foundation.

The first thing Slater did when Eklund and Salam approached him in 1964 was to request Herman Pollack, Acting Director of the State Department

International Scientific and Technological Affairs, if they had any thoughts

’5 F.X. Sutton to D. Bell, 1 February 1973, in grant file 70-158, FFA.

268 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

regarding the ICTP .36 A few months later, Pollack forwarded him a State

Department report stating that “the US was unenthusiastic about this project”

when first proposed in 1960, but the mission to the IAEA had reconsidered its

nosition and Ambassador Henry Smyth was now “tremendously impressed by the

enthusiasm and cooperative spirit of those working there.” Given the “promising picture” of the Centre, it concluded, “the Department was wholeheartedly in

favour of private support for this kind of activity .”37 The Foundation also

consulted Smyth, who responded along the same lines, stressing that the ICTP was an interesting project “both from the point of view of the scientific production and its political usefulness.” The problem was that, in spite of the widespread enthusiasm, nobody wanted to pay for it, implicitly reflecting the constraints on

IAEA’s contribution introduced by the US delegation. On the possibility of establishing a link between the ICTP and UNESCO, Smyth told Stone: “I am sure you are familiar with the difficulties of working through UNESCO. Personally, I would be very reluctant to accept major support for this Center from UNESCO if it meant becoming involved in their red tape.” In relation to this possibility, he assured Stone that “some support from the Ford Foundation would be of great assistance directly and indirectly.”38 56

56 This spontaneous reaction of consulting the State Department confirms what other authors have pointed out about the close relationship between the FF and American foreign policy. Most of these studies are concerned with cultural activities related to ideological warfare during the Cold War. In particular, see Kathleen McCarthy, “From Cold War to Cultural Development: the International Cultural Activities of the Ford Foundation, 1950-1980,” Daedalus 116, no. 1 (1987): 93-117 for a study about the cultural Cold War in Asia. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), tells in detail the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe. Curiously, neither of them considered in their studies any scientific intellectual involved in the cultural Cold War. On the other hand,.Krige (“The Ford Foundation, European Physics and the Cold War”) demonstrates that the cultural Cold War extended to scientific institutions such as CER.N and Bohr’s Institute too. 37 H. Pollack to J. Slater, 9 August 1964, in grant file 67-40, FFA. ,s H.D. Smyth to S. Stone, 10 August 1966, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

269 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

Helping to advance American foreign policy was a good incentive for FF

to intervene. According to the State Department, the activities at the ICTP were of

interest because of what they saw as its political character. The important thing is that, for the FF, such an interest prompted it to consider the ICTP’s application seriously. After all, its international activities were closely linked to the views of

State Department, as the early consultation about the ICTP showed. As the State

Department’s report stated, American hostility towards the creation of the ICTP was influenced by IAEA’s fragile financial situation .39 The US thought that a research centre was a burden that a poor organisation could not bear. Following the same line of thought, the US wanted to avoid the proliferation of redundant centres depending on UN agencies .40 However, the US did not want to give the impression that they were leading the opposition against a project popular amongst Third World countries. As the State Department report to FF said:

The US position, which we never pushed very hard in view o f the enthusiasm generated among the underdeveloped countries for the center, was based on our feeling that there were many well established centers for study in theoretical physics and these existing centers were sufficient to meet the need.41

This statement is striking for the ambiguity of the US position towards the

ICTP. In 1964/65, with the positive assessment of the US scientific elite, including the diplomat Smyth, these mixed feelings became more evident. A solution that could demonstrate the US willingness to revise its position towards the ICTP, without compromising its policy towards the UN research centres, was

39 See David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: The First Forty Years (Vienna: IAEA Pub, 1997), especially Chapters 2-3. 40 During the negotiations to create the ICTP, one of the alternatives presented by the US and other European countries to Salam’s idea was to broaden the IAEA’s fellowship programme to send Third World students to the existing institutions in the West. The ICTP was indeed considered redundant by the American delegation and all members of the IAEA Director’s scientific advisor committee, which thought that the US and European universities were more than enough to cover the Third World demand.

270 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

to back Salam’s application to the major American philanthropic foundation. The

FF shared Smyth’s concern over the ICTP’s involvement with UNESCO, also,

expressed by Salam himself .41 42 Furthermore, as Stone informed Bundy, Salam and

Eklund had expressed their confidence that “after a five-year period the Centre

will be fully supported by governments .”43 In summary, the FF and the State

Department shared the view that if the ICTP was to be a valuable centre it had to

be removed from the influence of the UN. In 1969, a FF officer bluntly described

the situation as follows: “the Centre is a lively program of first-class quality

despite its UN connection,”44

Another reason to support the ICTP was the possibility of establishing contacts with the communist bloc. This was not an isolated effort: the Ford

Foundation, especially during the Bundy years, showed particular interest in exchange programmes with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Bundy’s personal interest in arms control and security influenced other levels of the FF hierarchy.45 Francis Sutton argued that one of the few motivations to support physicists was their central role in arms control .46 Presumably, the FF thought that such contacts with the USSR would help the US intelligence services to gather

41J. P. Trevichick [?] to H. Pollack, 30 July 1956, in grant file 67-40, FFA (my italics). 42 In the 1960s, the FF partially financed some programmes sponsored by UNESCO (see Ford Foundation Annual Reports from these years).This does not necessarily contradict the critical views about that organisation. The Foundation’s concern about the ICTP being corrupted by UNESCO’s bureaucracy increased in the late 1960s, when the agreement between UNESCO and the Atomic Energy Agency on the ICTP’s operation was signed. For instance, in the early 1970s, Francis X. Sutton described the ICTP as a “victim of UNESCO 10-year rule,” and expressed his concern for UNESCO’s pressures to use geopolitical distribution of staff positions (F. X. Sutton to IR-10, July, 1973, in grant file 70-158, FFA). Some FF officers viewed positively Salam’s strategy to resist such pressures by publishing no statistics on country-by-country participation in the ICTP activities (S.T. Gordon to F.X. Sutton, 28 July 1969, in grant file 67-40, FFA). 4j S. Stone to M. Bundy, 7 April 1966, in grant file 67-40, FFA. 44 S.T. Gordon to F.X. Sutton, 28 July 1969, in grant file 67-40, FFA (my italics). 43 Francis X. Sutton, “The Ford Foundation and Europe: Ambitions and Ambivalence,” 56. 46 F.X. Sutton to D. Bell, 1 February 1973, in grant file 70-158, FFA.

271 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

information-regarding scientific and technological facilities and also on potential

defectors .47 Krige has suggested that in the late 1950s there was a genuine view

among FF officers that scientific contacts could improve bilateral relations .48 As

Stone reminded Bundy, between 1956 and 1965, the Foundation donated

US$500,000 to Bohr’s institute “for the participation of American, East European,

Soviet and Chinese physicists .”49 In the late 1960s, this was still part of the

International Division rationale. As Sutton pointed out some years later, in fiscal

1970, the FF set aside US$2,700,000 for this kind of exchange with countries

behind the Iron Curtain. The ICTP grant, in this respect, represented a tiny

investment.

The ICTP offered an ideal means to attract Eastern European scientists

without creating suspicion. As was well known within the FF, the ICTP had

decided to use a version of the United Nations regulations according to which

those countries were considered “developing countries .”50 This allowed the ICTP

to use funds from the IAEA, UNESCO and other organisations concerned with

“Third World development,” to bring scientists from the Socialist bloc into the

-Centre. The architect of this scheme was Budinich, who wanted to bring Trieste

out of its peripheral situation by creating a network of Eastern and Central

European institutions. As we saw in Chapter 3, the effort to link Trieste to its

47 Some of the Western scientists visiting the ICTP were approached by intelligence services in their home countries to enquire about the activities of the Russians and Eastern Europeans. Ray Rivers, an Imperial College PhD physics student who visited the Centre at the time, recalls being interviewed by an officer from the British Foreign Office soon after his returning from Trieste. In the interview it was clear to Rivers that the intelligence services were remarkably well informed about who was there and doing what. He speculated that the source of it were the Americans at the oceanography centre at Trieste, with whom most ICTP physicists interacted in social meetings (Rivers, interview). 48 J. Krige, “The Ford Foundation, European Physics and the Cold War.” 41:1 S. Stone to M. Bundy, 7 April 1966, in grant file 67-40, FFA. 30 S.T. Gordon to F.X. Sutton, 28 July 1969, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

272 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

intellectual hinterland had started long before the creation of the ICTP, in the mid-

1950s, within the context of what was then called the “European Network”. At this early date, the idea did not come to fruition. The classification of these countries as “developing” was thus the result of Budinich’s plan, Salam’s agenda, and the necessity of creating a tradition of internationalism in the Centre. This necessity was in part that of attracting funds from bodies concerned with scientific internationalism. As for the FF, the classification was certainly convenient, for it assured the neutral character of the exchange.

The 1965 Trieste seminar on plasma, a branch of physics concerned with potential ways of controlling energy released in fusion reactions, had been the first meeting to bring together Soviet and American experts in the field. In ti c early 1960s, the USSR possessed the largest magnet for the isolation of the reaction. The hope of producing fusion reactors was to be disappointed, but in the early 1960s expectations were high. Like the Atoms for Peace Conference ten years before, and other meetings of plasma physicists, the ICTP activities were not particularly significant in terms of scientific results. After the conference, the

American and Soviet leading teams decided to set up a joint research group in the

ICTP. Although the research undertaken was too highly theoretical to be of practical use, Trieste became one of the few places to have access to Soviet scientists engaged in an area reputedly dominated by the USSR. By 1966, the collaboration was almost nominal, but Salam, the Italians, and some of the US scientists, such as Oppenheimer, nevertheless saw and presented it as a programme of great potential, especially for the West. Among the reasons given

273 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

by Stone to Bundy as to why the Centre had become a “significant force” was this

contact with the Soviets .31

The ICTP plasma physics programme was short lived; by the early 1970s,

it had practically disappeared as a collaboration project between the USSR and the

US.32 However, the FF grant had by then already been approved. After 1968, the

plasma physics programme was no longer mentioned in the FF headquarters and

emphasis was put instead on the “East-West character of the Centre .”33 Indeed, in

addition to the classification strategy, the ICTP had created another mechanism to

enable the movement of scientists from behind the Iron Curtain: the Federation

agreements. The Associateship scheme worked well with scientists from

A: . eloping countries, but not those based in socialist countries. The socialist

regimes in these countries would not allow their scientists to travel to the West on

a regular basis without official control. It was thought that agreements between

the ICTP and the appropriate official institutions - usually the corresponding

national academies of sciences - would facilitate the exchange. Moreover, an

additional advantage of these agreements was that they established that the

institutions would pay travel costs, while the centre would pay only the living

expenses in Trieste. This programme was later extended to cover other parts of the

world, but its original intention was to overcome the constraints laid upon the

movements of Eastern Europeans. By 1969, the ICTP had signed 20 Federation

31 S. Stone to M. Bundy, memo, 7 April 1966, in grant file 67-40, FFA. 32 However, some Third World scientists came to the Centre and worked in theoretical aspects of plasma physics with no aspirations of having any realistic application in energy production, as can be inferred from R.K.. Varma, “Plasma Physicists at ICTP: some reflections from an Indian Physicist,” in From a Vision to a System. The International Centre for theoretical Physics of Trieste (1964-1994), edited by A.M. Hamende, 302-309 (Trieste: International Foundation TRieste for the Progress and the Freedom of Sciences, 1996). 3’ S. Stone to M. Bundy, memo, 7 April 1966, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

274 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

agreements, nine of them with Eastern European institutions, mostly with the aid

of the Foundation’s funds .34

The third motivation to finance the ICTP was closely related to the

possibility that Salam’s schemes could be applied to other institutions. This

applied to both the Associate scheme and the Federation agreements. In 1966,

Salam participated in the “International Symposium on Science in South Asia,”

sponsored by The Rockefeller University and the New York State Department of

Education, and few months later, sent his article to Edward Shils, who published it

in M in e r v a Salam ordered 500 reprints to distribute ,54 5556 57and the article, originally

titled for the conference as “Advanced Scientific Research in Developing

Countries,” was widely distributed and read, becoming a common reference on the “Isolation of the Scientists in Developing Countries” (as it was re-titled fir the

Minerva issue). Salam wanted to publicise the Associateship scheme, inviting

other institutions to copy it. He hoped that this would tie the ICTP to a network of research centres especially in England and North America. In his article, aimed at the American intellectual community, Salam suggested that:

Universities and institutions with the wealth and scientific eminence of Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge, All Souls, Rockefeller University, New York State University, the Imperial College in London and others should seriously consider the establishment of their own associateship schemes. It ought to be considered not only for theoretical physics but for other subjects too.37

A few years later, Salam published another article, this time in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where he described the Associateship scheme invented by

54 IAEA and ICTP Final Report to Ford Foundation 1970-1971, in grant file 67-40, FFA. 55 Abdus Salam, “The Isolation of the Scientists in Developing Countries,” Minerva IV, no. 4 v 1966): 461 -65, in Salam, Ideals and Realities, 211-216. 36 A. Salam to E. Shils, 20 May 1966, D.149, ASP. 57 A. Salam, “The Isolation of the Scientists in Developing Countries.” This quotation is on page 216 in Salam, Ideals and Realities.

275 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

the ICTP. He insisted on his belief hoped that “the idea will each on, and even

before an international university comes into existence,” and that other institutions

in the US will “[fund] their own associateships.” Then he put the FF on the spot:

“We do not yet possess the funds or the stability to make our scheme an ongoing

one, but there is the possibility of a special Ford Foundation grant to strengthen

it.”38 In other words, not helping the ICTP meant contributing to the isolation of

Third World scientists.

A few months after the publication of his first article in Minerva, Salam

met Slater in New York. In a memorandum to prepare for the meeting, Slater was

told that:

You might want to learn more about the new dimension which Salam expressed in his phone call to you...: the ‘projection of the Center’s activities into other places’ - which means the creation of similar centers in other parts of the world. If this were to happen, unquestionably we’d be asked for support - and this is one you would want to think over first, I am sure.59

Despite the fact that the proposal did not materialise, apparently the idea was

seriously considered; this at least is what some Americans encouraged Salam to

believe. This was crucial for a FF decision. The Board of Trustees report

recommending the approval of the first grant observed that: “Several American

institutions, such as MIT and Princeton, are considering the creation of similar

associateships modeled [sic] after those at the Trieste Centre.” A few years later,

when the ICTP requested a second grant, Slater reported that: “Dr. Salam is

confident that in time the Associate program will be copied by other institutions

38 Abdus Salam, “The United Nations and the International World of Physics,” Bulletin o f Atomic Scientists, February, 1968, 14-15. A few months before this article was published, Salam gave an interview to the popular science writer Nigel, Calder, “A Man of Science -- Abdus Salam,” Science Year: The World Book Science Annual (1967), in Salam Ideals and Realities, 441 -450) in which he acknowledged the Ford Foundation’s “special support” to the ICTP. 59 Charlie [unidentified] to J. Slater, 6 September 1966, in grant file 67-40, FFA .

276 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

and disciplines. He mentioned that the National Academy of Sciences (Harrison

Brown) in the recent past talked about a program of 300 ‘Associates' for all disciplines of interest to N.A.S .”60 Slater noted with interest that UNESCO and the National Research Council of Canada had announced their intention to incorporate similar programmes.

Indeed, when Salam applied for a second grant, the possibility that the

ICTP was to be used as a model became a central issue, in light of the discussions on a “World University.” What eventually became the United Nations University was officially proposed by UN General Secretary U Thant in 1969 and approved by the General Assembly in 1972. Salam had been involved in the discussions of the Panel for an International University since the late 1960s. However, he had a different view from the rest of the Panel. He thought that if the University was to be restricted to an Institute of Global Problems as the Panel wished, it would achieve nothing new. His idea, following the UNESCO model discussed above, was to create a network of decentralised institutes each dedicated to a specialised subject of research and post-graduate training .61 In 1970, Salam proposed that the

United Nations University take shape first as a federation of institutes modelled on the ICTP. He also suggested it undertake a scheme similar to the associationship set up by ICTP .62 In other words, the Centre was depicted in some circles as a pilot project for the University. The similarity with Budinich’s network model was not accidental. Salam and Budinich had realised that the ICTP

6,1 S.T. Gordon to F.X. Sutton, 28 July 1969, in grant file 67-40, FFA (italics in the original). 61 Salam pointed out to a Member of the Pakistan delegation to UNESCO that the ICTP should be used as a prototype because “since its inception some eight years ago, the Centre has created something of a revolution so far as advanced study of Physics in the developing world is concerned” (Abdus Salam to Qudrat Ullah Shahab, 16 June 1972, G.278, ASP).

277 Alexis De Gieiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

was politically isolated and, therefore financially fragile, as it belonged to neither

a national nor an international network. Their proposal was to create such

network, and their agenda the stabilisation of the Centre. Both wanted the ICTP to

become the science faculty of the “World University.” In 1973, Italy offered to

finance a Faculty for Basic Sciences in its territory (dealing with Life Sciences,

Mathematical Sciences, Physical Sciences, Chemical Sciences). In March 1969, a

few months before U Thant’s announcement, Salam wrote to J.A. Stratton from the FF, expressing his concern about the ICTP’s finances after 1970. There was,

Salam argued, a good reason why the FF should continue to support the ICTP:

The widening of the Centre’s mandate is relevant, in my personal view, to the Centre’s existence in the broader context of a world university idea. As you are aware, there is a renewed interest among the world academic community in the founding of one or more world universities. A first step which has been suggested in this context is a World Federation of International Institutes for Advanced Study.. .The International Centre at Trieste is the one concrete example of a truly international United Nations institute of higher education which could form a part either of a world university or of a world federation of research institutes of distinction.62 63

From there onwards, the reference to the World University and the ICTP’s participation in it was a recurrent theme if the FF’s internal and external correspondence regarding the Centre .64 In 1982, Sutton wrote retrospectively:

The Trieste Center has often been seen as a model for other fields and there was an effort at one time to generalize the model. I recall a meeting at the U.N. which Jay Stratton, myself, and perhaps other from the Foundation attended, much under the stimulation of Harrison Brown. I am not aware of anything concrete that followed on this effort but it may have had some influence in the movement towards a United Nations University.65

62 In 1973, Italy offered a 500m lire annual expenditure to set a “Faculty for Basic Sciences" (dealing with Life Sciences, Mathematical sciences, Physical Sciences, Chemical Sciences) for the United Nations University. Budinich’s was the active force behind this development. 6j Salam to J.A. Stratton, 21 March 1969, in grant file 67-40, FFA. 64 See, for instance, S.T. Gordon to F.X. Sutton, 28 July 1969, in grant file 67-40, FFA. 65 F.X. Sutton to The Files, 19 February 1982, in grant file 70-158, FFA.

278 Alexis De G re iff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

The fourth factor involved in explaining the Foundation’s support for the

ICTP was the “brain-drain” problem. The FF shared a widespread concern about

the emigration of scientists from underdeveloped countries. It is worth noting that

in Europe too the brain-drain was associated with the scientific and technological

gap between themselves and with the United States .66 However, as Gaillard and

Gaillard observe, “embedded in an ideology of Third Worldism that gave [the

brain drain] the aura of a problem, it soon became the subject of many

impassioned discussions, and it was addressed in numerous studies .”67 Such

studies were accompanied by several regional and global initiatives, and the ICTP

was to be one of the symbols of the “anti-brain drain war.” The Foundation was sensitive to this discourse also because it had been involved in the mobilisation of scientists during the rise of the Latin American dictatorships, particularly in

Argentina in 1966.68

As we have seen, the Associateship scheme assumed that, besides the usual political and economic elements, an intellectual factor also dragged the best brains out of the poorest countries. To illustrate this point, Salam never ceased to use his own case as an example of a “victim of isolation” forced to leave his country. From the Western perspective, Salam was in many senses an ideal person

66 For an insightful discussion of the perception of the brain drain problem in the United Kingdom, see Hillary Rose, and Steven Rose, Science and Society (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1969), Chapter 10, especially pp 203-209. For a review of the literature on the subject in relation to the Third World see, for instance, Anne Marie Gaillard and Jacques Gaillard, “Introduction: The International Mobility of Brains: Exodus of Circulation,” Science, Technology & Society. An International Journal Demoted to the Developing World 2, no. 2 (1997): 195-224. 57 Anne Marie Gaillard and Jacques Gaillard, “Introduction.” 68 The Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Lima, Peru, is again a case in point; despite being conceived as a grant to improve education in Peru, it effectively helped nearly 60 physicists from Argentina to flee the country during the “intervention” of the University of Buenos Aires (Eduardo Ortiz, conversations with the author, 1999). The Ford Foundation also helped to pay the salaries of the seventy-three Argentinean scientists who went to Chile (Thomas Glick, “Science in Twentieth century Latin America,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. VI, Ideas and

279 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

to implement modernisation programmes. The Foundation hoped that by

preventing the brain-drain, they would find more people like Salam in those

countries, which would make the Foundation’s job much easier and effective.

There is in this respect an ironic ambiguity in Salam’s status. On the one hand

Westerners failed to appreciate that Salam was to a great extent a product of

Cambridge and therefore very atypical of Third World scientists. On the other

hand, it was the very mixture of origin in a Third World country with a

Cambridge training that made him so attractive as someone capable of

implementing Western models of modernisation. However, although Salam’s

charisma, impeccable scientific reputation, and brilliant diplomatic skills helped,

the FF officers found it very difficult to see the function of mathematicians and

theoretical physicists in Third World countries. A FF officer depicted the situation

in these words:

I have heartily supported his [Salam’s] Associateship Program as an important tactic to keep foreign-trained teachers and researchers down on the farm, once they have returned to their home institutions. It could well be used in many other instances where scholars from developing countries are tempted to immigrate because of lack of proper facilities and stimulation at home.69

The cultural prejudice is evident. In many ways, that was exactly the kind

of reasoning Salam had been trying to combat since 1960. Nevertheless, how

could he possibly explain to a member of the FF in New York that a physicists in

Buenos Aires, or Ankara, or Islamabad might have more in common with a New

Yorker than with an American farmer? How would he demonstrate that Third

World scientists had similar aspirations and capabilities to their colleagues in the

North? Indisputably that it remained unclear how theoretical physicists could

Ideologies in Twentieth Century Latin America, edited by L. Bethel), 287-360 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)). 69 Charlie [unidentified] to J. Slater, 6 September 1966, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

280 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

contribute to solving famine and disease in those countries, but industrialisation

during the 1950s had transformed most agrarian societies in the Third World,

including the role of the scientific communities in national government. In post

colonial countries like India and Pakistan, the first generation of national

professional scientists emerged after 1948, most of them, like Salam, educated in

the elite universities of the industrialised countries .70 Benefiting from the deficit

of European students in American universities, and before that from the “Good

Neighbour” policy, during the same period a significant number of Latin

American scientists had returned home waving fresh PhDs and had gone on to

work in universities and the atomic energy commissions that emerged after

1955.71 * This intellectual elite was considered insignificant by most Western

governmental and non-governmental officials, as well as by some intellectuals,

whose “problematization of poverty” set a specific definition of the developing

world. In such a discourse, locals including scientists, had little or no input in the solution of the problem. Salam shared most of the developmentalist ideology,

but, in the elitist environment of Cambridge and the “international scientific

community”, he learned that the driving force of development was the local scientific elite, and he was committed to helping his fellows .73

70 This is a particular example of what Bendict Anderson has noted regarding emerging nationalist intelligentsias in the Twentieth-Century. In contrast to the nineteenth-century Europe, they were very young in age individuals educated in the West, usually (but not always as the Indian case reminds us) the first generation (Bendict Anderson, Imagined communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 1999)), see pages 118-119). 71 See Thomas Glick, “Science in Twentieth century Latin America;” Hebe Vessuri, “The Universities, Scientific Research and the National Interest in Latin America,” Minerva 24, no. 1 (1986): 1-38.. 121 am deploying the term in the sense Arturo Escobar describes the new relationship of domination between North and South as shaped by the invention of a discourse and a practice of development in his Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Priceton University Press, 1995). 7j On Salam’s discourse of science and development see Chapter 2.

281 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

In spite of the FF’s lack of an articulated explanation about why these

“agrarian” countries should have mathematicians or theoretical physicists, it decided to gamble on Salam’s initiative. Apart from the reasons described above, we must remember that, the ICTP’s requests were insignificant for a foundation

“at the peak of its power .”74 Salam’s strategy to start by requesting an exorbitant figure (US$1 m) allowed him to later receive more than a tenth of it, which became essential for the ICTP’s survival during those years. This tactic demonstrates Salam’s extraordinary skills as a fund-raiser in two ways. First, he knew that the only alternative for a weak institution like the ICTP to seriously compete for funds from the main philanthropic foundation in the world was to present itself as an ambitious project and to prevent the Centre to be perceived as a poor, modest and unstable “Third World physics centre.” Had Salam and his allies failed in showing the ICTP role as a political actor at a global scale - its link to the future World University, the promotion of physics as a central element

'p the long-term Third World development, it location in Trieste as a place favourable to establish contacts with Eastern European physicists - the

Foundation would have not supported it. Secondly, Salam realised that institutional rules are flexible and hence that the success of a proposal depended less on the formal request than on its capacity to convince a few influential individuals to consider the positive aspects of the idea. In a sense, Salam was applying a similar principle he had learned in his scientific practice (see chapter

6), namely that a scientific contribution has a chance to survive only if it can be defend through direct, personal interaction with central figures of the scientific

74 In 1964, the FF’s assets climbed over US$4 billion. This figure was never reached again in constant dollars; Francis X. Sutton, “The Ford Foundation and Europe: Ambitions and Ambivalence.”

282 Alexis De GreifF Chapter 4: Striving to survive

community. Popperian severe tests are applied only to new scientific theories that lack enough social support, as Fred Hoyle and the Cambridge steady-state cosmologists perfectly knew .73 Similarly, institutional rules are applied in order to reject projects, while projects in which financing institutions could pinpoint an interesting aspect in terms of their own future development force officials to adjust these apparently strict rules.

4.3 Conclusion: from Europe to the Third World

I have analysed the resistance encountered by the ICTP when it approached the

Ford Foundation. The origin of this resistance was the type of project that the

ICTP represented. For many years the FF had dealt with research institutions in the First World and, separately, with programmes for Third World development.

The Centre’s location, subject of study and mixture of First and Third World personnel, made it a-typical of projects supported by the Foundation. The FF’s resistance to the notion that theoretical physics could be a priority in areas of the world where the large majority of the population suffered from urgent and profound privation ought not to surprise us. What it failed to recognise was that the modernisation process in those regions had also engendered a small but important community of highly trained scientists, struggling for recognition at both international and national levels. Whereas in previous projects, such as

CERN and the Copenhagen Institute, Ford could justify its support in terms of the political role of scientific intellectuals in Europe and the United States, it had75

75 De GreifF, Alexis, “How to Kill a Theory: A Case Study in Modern Cosmology” (MSc. Dissertation, University of London, 1997). ,

283 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

difficulty in.identifying any specific role for Third World scientists either in

foreign affairs or as agents of ideological warfare.

Lacking the experience to deal with a project of this nature, the FF trusted

the opinion of reputed American scientists and the State Department.

Furthermore, when assessing the ICTP the State Department also accepted the views of the senior members of the American scientific community. Thus Salam’s good relations with this community, forged since his first visit to Princeton fifteen years earlier (see chapter 1), were crucial not just to the invention of a scientific tradition in the ICTP, but in spreading of the image of a centre of excellence. This is not to suggest that this image was a misrepresentation of the Centre. However, it is important to note that while part of the elite publicly expressed a belief in those “decisive achievements,” which they felt was necessary to create interest within the State Department and the FF, the younger faction dismissed the ICTP’s scientific production (with the exception of Salam’s group work).

In order to arrive at a final decision about the ICTP’s request, the FF did not trust only in external advisers. It also had to elaborate its own motivations.

The East-West character of the Centre, promoted by the Trieste physicists and practically exploited by Salam, was vital because, as the 1962 study stressed, the

FF aimed to stimulate “East-West intellectual and cultural exchange and to encourage common projects in scientific, educational and cultural fields .”76

Reservations about the UN, and particularly UNESCO, became central to the decision to help the Centre establish its independence from what the FF officers saw as endemically bureaucratic, inefficient, poor and “politicised”

76 Ford Foundation, “The Ford Foundation in the 1960s,” quoted in 12.

284 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

organisations. Finally, the prospect o f‘'generalising” the ICTP model is a good illustration of how the FF perceived the Centre. Despite their doubts about the actual role of the ICTP in Third World development, the FF was prepared to invest and learn about a novel scheme for the assistance of Developing Countries that could be applied in other areas and institutions. In summary, the FF’s decision to gamble on the ICTP was motivated by the anticipation of indirect benefits.

Although my analysis discusses the ICTP-FF interaction as though events had followed a logic chronology in which lobbying came first and the FF’s search for justifications to fund the Centre later, this division does not correspond to the actual chronology; this way of presenting an institutional process is a mnemonic resource. In fact, both elements, lobbying and self-justification, were present throughout the period of interaction between the ICTP and the FF. For seven years, the ICTP continuously provided “evaluations” of the Centre, and the FF officers strove to find motivations for its support. I wish to stress the necessity of determining the size of the grey area generated by ambitious and vague requests, both in terms of approved projects and invested capital. This case illustrates that applicants needed to possess a set of resources supporting an attractive idea.

Moreover, if well administrated, these resources can compensate for reservations that might otherwise prevail in the final decision. We should investigate whether this form of resistance and strategy is a pattern or an exception. However, if we really want to learn about patterns of funding by American philanthropic foundations, we must start by looking at their activities in the Third World, where

285 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

these bodies invested more than twice their total budget for “institutions in

Europe .”77

Finally, notwithstanding the interest of the Foundation towards certain aspects of the Centre, it never tried to push the direction of its research. The support was certainly not disinterested, as I have shown, but once the project was approved, the Ford Foundation only checked that the funds were being used according to the contract. Despite its private views, the Foundation allowed the

1CTP autonomy to develop theoretical physics and appoint the fellows selected by the Salam and its Academic Board. For some of the ICTP’s programmes, like the

Associateship scheme, the FF was crucial, especially in the years 1970-1973 (see

Appendix 1). In principle, one may have thought that this strong link between the

ICTP and the Foundation would have re-directed the Centre’s objectives according to the FF’s dictates. In contrast to what happened in the UNESCO-

ICTP interaction in the 1970s (see next chapter), there is no evidence that suggests that any FF officer suggested to Salam, or any other member of the ICTP, the kind of science the Centre should develop. It would be fair to conclude that FF’s chief interest was to see what would develop from an experiment such as the ICTP in

Trieste. Ten years later the Foundation made an evaluation of their contribution to science in the Third World through the ICTP. Francis X. Sutton, who elaborated the report, concluded that “because of the subject matter, this was a venture of unusual sort for the Foundations... and [that] despite the departure from our normal range of subject matter..., this was good undertaking for the Foundation at

7' Francis X. Sutton, “The Ford Foundation and Europe: Ambitions and Ambivalence,” 42-43.

286 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 4: Striving to survive

a time when our budget permitted more wide-ranging interests than... in recent years.„78

78 F.X. Sutton to The Files, 19 February 1982, in grant file 70-158, FFA.

287 Chapter 5

The International Centre for

Theoretical Physics as a Training

Institution

I am a product of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics.

Prof. Harun-ar-Rashid (Bangladesh, former ICTP Associate)1

s an academic institution, the ICTP was conceived as a research centre in the A1961 proposal, however in 1963 courses and workshops aimed at Third World scientists were added. As we shall see in the last two chapters of this dissertation, the Centre was in fact to both carry out research and hold conferences, courses and workshops. The main research patterns are the subject of the next chapter, but in this chapter, I begin by describing the characteristics of the ICTP’s population of visitors, “Associates” and permanent scientific staff. This will provide a general “map” that will allow us to move through the main Centre’s pedagogical activities. While some authors have studied pedagogical processes in undergraduate

288 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academic institution

and graduate studies in theoretical physics, this is, to my knowledge, the first attempt

to tackle the problem of training in physics after PhD level.* 2 An important difference

between my study and previous ones is that they have focused on how pedagogical

practices affected the development of mathematical and theoretical physics, whereas

the aim of this study is far less ambitious. I am concerned with the way that the

Centre envisaged its role as a pedagogical institution and how the ICTP’s projects

developed during its first fifteen years. Concomitantly, I spell out the expectations

and perceptions of Third World physicists and compare these to the image the Centre

itself projected. Thus, I shall try to answer to the following questions: What

distinguished the ICTP from other scientific centres? Was it a research or a training

institution? What kind of activities did it promote? Which sub-disciplines were

studied at the ICTP? Who participated in those activities?

5.1 The ICTP demography: visitors, “Associates” and permanent scientific staff

In order to formulate a clear idea of the kind of institution that the ICTP was, I will begin by giving a general description of its population. The following description help us to understand the ICTP in terms of its participants, scientific initiatives and products. The purpose of this exercise is to highlight the most evident characteristic

' Harun-ar-Rashid, email to author. 2 Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory. A Pedagogical History of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, 1760-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); David Kaiser, “Making Theory: Producing Physics and Physicists in Postwar America” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2000); Kathryn Mary Olesko, Physics as a calling: discipline and practice in the Königsberg seminar for physics, Cornell history o f science series. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

289 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

of the Centre, namely its size. The ICTP was one of the largest institutions for

theoretical physics in the world. No other institution devoted to the fostering of

theoretical sciences in the Third World hosted so many diverse people and activities.3

This is all the more remarkable if we take into account its limited financial resources

and institutional instability. According to the regularity with which they participated

in the Centre’s activities, the academic population of the ICTP can be classified into

three categories: the visitors, the “Associates,” and the permanent scientific staff. In

this section, I shall describe their background, recruitment to and their relation with

the ICTP in turn.

5.1.1 The Visitors

The visitors were physicists from both developing and industrialised countries who

came to the Centre without long-term affiliation. They could use the ICTP facilities

and paid accommodation was provided. Prominent physicists from Europe and the

United States were invited as part of a conscious strategy to raise the visibility of the

Centre. From 1964 to 1980 more than 13,000 scientists visited the ICTP, between 50

and 60 percent of which came from industrialised countries. The ICTP was not,

3 At least in the period analysed, the ICTP had no parallel as a centre entirely devoted to theoretical physics and mathematics. One could mention regional institutions such as the Centro Latinoamericano de Física (CLAF, Latin American Centre for Physics) in Rio de Janeiro and other similar institutions concerned with mathematics and chemistry. However, the scale at which they operated was significantly smaller. (They also counted on an even tighter budgets.) Unfortunately there are no scholarly informed studies of these endeavours. However, see Luis Masperi, “El Centro Latinoamericano de Física,” Paper presented at the Encuentro de Historia de la Ciencia (Buenos Aires 2000). Another case that comes to mind is the Korean Institute for Advanced Studies, but, again, its activities in pure science were remarkably smaller and, in any case, only until very recently one historian of science is beginning to work on it (Dong-Won Kim, “Why Physics? The Conflict between the Image and Role of Physics in South Korea,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society (Vancouver 2000)).

290 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

therefore, just a Centre for underdeveloped countries. This is particularly evident

during its first years, when coped with the handicap of having been established under

the sceptical, even critical eye of respected members of the scientific community. In

fact, this high participation by physicists from industrialised countries quickly

became another cause for angry attacks by enemies of the initiative. Some IAEA’s

delegates questioned Salam in 1967 about why so many scientists from developed

countries had visited the ICTP. Salam honestly pointed out that “the Centre needed

visibility particularly the first year, it needed to be associated with excellence in physics, it needed to build up traditions of a high stimuli atmosphere.”4 He also intimated that several of these scientists delivered lectures and seminars at the ICTP courses and workshops. It was necessary to demonstrate that this would not be “an underdeveloped centre.”5

Although the total number of visitors serves as an indicator of the ICTP’s scale, we must study the ICTP’s demography in more detail. If we express the number of visitors in man-month units, the picture changes. While the participation of physicists from industrialised countries remained relatively high in the early years, by the 1970s there was a decline in their participation, and in the last part of the decade it was reduced to less than 40%. Thus, in terms of time spent at the ICTP, its “stable” population was comprised by Third World physicists. This effort is evident in the fact

4 Abdus Salam’s Statement to the Board of Governors, February 1967, D.217, ASP. 5 As Isidor Rabi had predicted shortly after its approval at the IAEA (quoted by Budinich, Paolo, “ICTP: Thirty years after,” in From a Vision to a System. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics o f Trieste (1964-1994), edited by A. Hamende, 26-37 (Trieste: International Foundation Trieste for the Progress and the Freedom of Sciences, 1996), 30). See also Section 3.3.3.

291 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

that the participation of developing countries in the Centre’s research activities

increased steadily. The ICTP, in other words, maintained a constant flow of physicists from elite institutions in the North, who visited the Centre for short periods to lecture and meet colleagues from other European, American, and, in very special cases, from Third World institutions. For them, the ICTP was a meeting place populated mostly by Third World scientists. Those who visited the Centre regularly, were moved by a feeling of solidarity or even of moral obligation towards the “have- not class” scientists. For instance, when Nobel Laurate Alfred Kastler, a physicist who actually collaborated with the Centre on a stable basis for many years, was asked

“Why do you come the Centre,” he replied: “We, the scientists, are fortunate people, who have had the opportunity of working on what we like, namely in scientific research; we have to pay out debt to society, and my way of paying this debt is to help scientists from deprived countries, through my co-operation to the Centre.”

Instead of interpreting this attitude as patronising, the ICTP were proud of Kastler’s magnanimous commitment to the Centre.6 In the meantime, as reported in 1973, the

ICTP continued to make serious efforts “to create a home for physicists from developing countries.”7

Kastler’s answer is proudly cited by former ICTP’s Deputy-Director Luciano Bertocchi, “The International Centre for Theoretical Physics: Historical Developments and Present Status,” in From a Vision to a System. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (1964-1994), edited by A.M. Hamende, 38-61 (Trieste: International Foundation Trieste for the Progress and the Freedom of Sciences, 1996), 60. 7 ICTP, ICTP Annual Report, 1973, 14, ICTP Archives.

292 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

5.1.2 The Associates

Another group of fellows, the ICTP “Associates,” represented a tiny minority compared to the visitors - about 200 overall between 1964 and 1980. The “Associate

Scheme” was created as early as 1964, exclusively for the benefit of physicists from and working in developing countries.8 It gave them the possibility of spending six weeks to three months at the Centre during a five years period. As mentioned earlier, the ICTP’s aim was to offer a solution to the brain drain problem.

Here the recruitment process relied heavily on a network of personal connections. Applications to be an Associate, in principle, passed through the IAEA,

UNESCO, or directly to the ICTP. However, the process through the United Nations agencies was a formality rather than an effective method of recruitment. As was mentioned in chapter 4, by refusing to publish statistics on country-by-country participation in ICTP activities, Salam resisted any pressure from these organisations, especially by UNESCO, to consider the geographical distribution of ICTP positions.9

In standard procedure, former Associates sent their candidates directly to Salam, who thought that this network was the most suitable source for suggestions regarding potential candidates. The official procedure was as follows. Openings were announced by circular letters from the Director General of each organisation to all

Member States. The same letter was circulated to all the physicists who had visited the Centre, for which the ICTP kept a mailing list. The prospective candidate was

8 ICTP. ICTP Annual Report, 1973, 10, ICTP Archives. 9 See S.T. Gordon to F.X. Sutton, July 28, 1969, in grant file 67-40, FFA.

293 Alexis De GreifT Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution required to send his Curriculum Vitae and six copies of his publications to the ICTP’s

Director, plus two letters of recommendation. The Scientific Council was, in theory, the body that examined the applications, and made the recommendations for appointments.10 11 This routine was purely theoretical. In practice, Salam offered the

Associateships to physicists he knew before the creation of the Centre. Riazuddin,

Fayyazuddin, Igor Saavedra (students of Salam’s at Imperial College, London), Feza

Giirsey, J.J. Giambiagi (see Chapter 1), and Jaime Tiomno (recall the “Three wise

Men Committee;” see chapter 3) were part of this first contingent. As for the new

Associates, they had previously visited the Centre either to attend a meeting or as visitors. Their first contact with the ICTP had been through a personal contact with f .i iaer ICTP visitors from their home institutions."

The recruitment process itself had important political aspects. It was at some point suggested that regional institutions should make the selection, but due to the tight budget of these organisations recruitment continued through former Associates in their respective countries. In any case, this alternative would have simply meant centralising the power of the members of the ICTP network in other international institutions. Another mechanism for recruitment involved the Federation Agreements, which were institutional accords for the exchange of students and researchers. These agreements were a formalisation of collaborations initiated by Senior Associates. As recruitment was carried out locally, the power of the ICTP Associates was

10 ICTP, ICTP Annual Report, 1973, pages 14, and 10-11, ICTP Archives. 11 This is based on a series of interviews conducted by the author between 2000 and 2001 via email with about 20 ICTP Associates.

294 Aie:, is De G re iff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academic institution consolidated within their institutions and, in some cases, at national level. They became the intermediaries between the national scientific communities and the principal door to the international scientific community. Salam and Budinich wanted to have Associates in all developing countries. Salam thought that a network of the

ICTP missionaries would be the most effective measure to counterbalance the persistent attacks on the Centre.12 Thus when he noticed that no physicist from a given country had visited the Centre, Salam contacted the corresponding delegate urging him to send candidates.13 As for the internal selection process, as in virtually all other matters the role of the Scientific Council, as in virtually all matters, was nominal. Power was clearly concentrated on the “Academic Board,” an “auxiliary” body composed by Salam, Budinich and one or two younger theoretical physicists from the University of Trieste. Regarding the Associates, Salam made the final decision and the Scientific Council was informed afterwards.14 Just as Salam trusted the Associates, the Council trusted Salam’s judgement.

The following conclusions regarding the background of the Associates are drawn from a statistical study of about 50% of the population. Firstly, Salam’s role in recruitment was central. Salam, as professor at Imperial College, London, and Fellow

12 In 1975, for instance, the ICTP Associates were asked to write to their UNESCO delegates. After the General Assembly, Budinich thanked Daniel Akyeampong from Ghana in the following terms: “This time we made it, but the feeling here and at UNESCO, is that probably we shall have to fight another, more severe battle... On that occasion we shall need the strong support of all our friends like yourself; so please consider yourself mobilised” (P. Budini to Daniel A. Akyeampong, 9 January 1975, D. 169, ASP). The explicit idea of creating a network of Enlightened scientists in the Third World reminds us of other historical cases starting with Jesuits in the sixteenth century and passing by the Copenhagen school of Theoretical physics. Perhaps a comparison could be an appropriate study in the future. Ij See for instance Abdus Salam to Prof. Francisco de Paula Leite Pinto (President, Nuclear Energy Board, Portugal), 24 May 1966, D.149, ASP.

295 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The 1CTP as an academie institution

of the Royal Society, had access to a network that was crucial to the invitatanof

lecturers, John Ziman probably being the most notorious example, and also to the recruitment of young PhDs. Practically all the Associates were PhDs in theoretical physics, with a high proportion coming from British universities (about 30% in the period between 1964 and 1980, however in the first 5 years of the Centre this figure reached almost 50%; Appendix 2). For most Third World theoretical physicists trained in the United Kingdom, the ICTP became the most important connection with the international scientific community. Secondly, the ICTP’s appeal depended on where Third World physicists were trained. A clear connection between these two points becomes apparent when we look at the number of PhDs from other European universities (less than 5%). For instance, those educated during the 1970s in France and Germany, interviewed during the course of this research, did not hear about the

ICTP during their graduate studies. They only learned about the Centre upon their return to their home countries and when other colleagues, who had been at the Centre, told them about it.14 15 Thirdly, drawing from a similar analysis, the ICTP apparently did not compete with United States scientific institutions in terms of its influence on future scientists trained there. About 20% came from American universities - less than the number of ICTP Associates trained in India. Presumably, those trained in the

United States maintained their international contacts through American institutions.

Finally, those who came from PhD programmes in the Third World represent a major

14 See, for instance, “Meeting of the Academic Board,” 21 September 1976, D. 495, ASP. 15 Angela Camacho, interviewed by author (held at the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics). Luis Quiroga, interviewed by author (hold at the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics).

296 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The [CTP as an academie institution challenge of interpretation. I would be tempted to conclude from several conversations with physicists that the ICTP was a major pole of attraction. However, it would be necessary to know if, as the pattern of recruiting suggests, those who came to the Centre were students of actual or former Associates. This micro- sociological study needs to be done case by case. We can say that, if the ICTP statistics are representative, then the only developing nations capable of producing

PhDs during these years were India, Brazil and Argentina. This would confirm longer scientific traditions compared to the rest of the Third World, however, this assertion will have to be qualified through future comparative studies.

One word about gender seems appropriate here. Unfortunately, from the available lists consulted by the author, it is extremely difficult to know the gender of the visitors, and even of the Associates, and the ICTP statistics are ndtuseful eh her.

However, the general trend of a significantly higher proportion of males in theoretical physics seems to be the rule also in the ICTP case. In some cases, for instance, the

ICTP officers wrote in front of some names the title “Miss,” which may suggest that their represented a minority. Interestingly, a few of them had awarded PhDs, but were not called Doctors, while the males received their proper academic title.

The ICTP was the place where several generations of theoretical physicists and mathematicians from the Third World went (and still go) seeking new problems to tackle. The average age of the Associates was 35 years (with a very small deviation; see Appendix 2). This was a crucial period for a physicist who, most likely, had just completed his PhD. In general, on their return to their home countries, these scholars continued working for a while in aspects directly related to their PhD

297 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution projects, allowing them to publish in international journals. However, a PhD problem is a limited source for future research projects and, after a few years in environments with incipient scientific traditions, these physicists tended to cease their research activity. If one examines the publication record of scientists who returned to weak scientific communities, one is likely to find that the bulk of papers come from their

PhD years. The ICTP offered an alternative to this bleak future. The sense of isolation for these physicists derived from the lack of social recognition and, most importantly, the impossibility of discerning what problems were considered pertinent. By definition the “pertinent” problems were those suggested by theoretical and experimental developments by physicists in Europe and the United States who, in turn, came to the ICPT to update Third World theoretical physicists. Through personal communications about “the most recent developments in physics,” the young Third World physicists could decide which new lines of research to pursue.

Although a careful study of the patterns of collaboration at the ICTP is still to be done, from a preliminary investigation carried out with a small sample of interviews with Associates (around 20, that is 10% of them between 1964 and 1980), one can see that these collaborations tended to South-South (i.e. between Third World scientists), rather than North-South. This leads us to the geographical distribution of the ICTP Associates.

5.1.3 Geographical distribution of Associates

In principle, the absolute domination of Indian Associates should not surprise us (see

Figure A2-1, Appendix 2). India has the largest scientific community in the Third

World. However, there is a sharp contrast between this and the official attitude of the 298 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

Indian government towards the Centre. The overt hostility of the Indian delegation to the IAEA during the negotiations in 1962 and 1963 (see Chapter 3) did not ease. For example, immediately following the creation of the ICTP, the Indian delegate to the

IAEA declared that sending qualified personnel was “out of the question for us for the time being as we cannot spare suitably qualified professors.” He then concluded that India would not in fact send any scientists to the ICTP “because tine Centre is intended for those newly independent countries which are not advanced in science and which, therefore, do not have training facilities for their own,” adding “we have adequate training facilities and, therefore, we would prefer that the Centre be utilized by those countries which are not in the same advantageous position as we are.”16 An

ICTP Associate seems to have considered it a second best option when writing to

Salam about what the ICTP could do for India. This Associate observed that India could send fresh PhD students “who could not get a Postdoc in USA.” He suggested that, at another level, the ICTP could assist “rather senior competent workers, like Dr.

Sankanarayana, who for historic or personal reasons have not been able to go abroad so far, but who would benefit considerably from the stimulating atmosphere of the

Centre.” This Indian Associate pointed out, “Fortunately we do not have at the

Institute any more cases like Dr. Sankaranarayana.”17

Perhaps Pakistan, which provided the second largest number of Associates, was the nation that has most benefited from the ICTP. This cast doubts on the

16 P. Dasgupta to S. Eklund, 14 November 1963, D.2105, ASP. This letter was forwarded to Salam, who annotated in the margin: “Keep this with care”, I suggest as hoping he could demonstrate in the future how wrong the Indians were. 17 B.M. Udgaonkar to Abdus Salam, 19 May 1967, D.2105, ASP. 299 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution assumption held by the Centre, in justification of the large number of Indians, that the size and research tradition of national scientific communities determined the number of prospective candidates and, therefore, the proportion of Associates. Had that been the chief factor, and taking into account their training capabilities at postgraduate level, one would have expected to find Argentina and Brazil competing for second place. Conversely, Pakistan did not have any tradition in physics, as Salam himself acknowledged in order to explain to Western audiences his own sense of isolation there. However, Salam’s international reputation, and the campaign (conduced by

Usmani and enthusiastically backed by the official regime) to promote physics in

Pakistan, prompted many young students to pursue theoretical physics. Some of the most talented went to Imperial College, London, to do their PhDs under Salam’s supervision. Hence there was a continued flow of Pakistani physicists trained at

Imperial during the 1960s. The Pakistani physicists participated in two networks that had Trieste as common denominator. The ICTP for them quickly became the natural place to develop international contacts during and after their postgraduate studies. I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that this group constituted Salam’s most loyal and grateful followers. At the ICTP they found a centre where they could foster international connections, while in Pakistan they held posts in the Physics

Department of Islamabad University, which Salam had helped to establish in 1965

(generously backed by Ayub Khan’s regime). It is undeniable that Salam’s influence in the development of science in Pakistan was significant, despite what some of his critics in Pakistan maintain. Although Salam left Pakistan early in his life, he was a leading force in the establishment and consolidation of a highly competent

300 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution community of physicists recruited by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and put in charge of several research programmes, including the construction of the

Pakistani Atomic Bomb. Salam’s involvement with the Pakistani A-Bomb is still a question that needs to be studied in detail. This would reveal one of the most interesting cases of the conflict between the national and the international role of prominent Third World physicists during the Cold War period. When in 1972

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announced to the physics community that the A-Bomb project was a national priority, Salam did not raise any voice of protest and held his post as

Scientific Advisor to the President for two more years (until the promulgation of the

Anii-Ahmadiyya laws), although internationally he campaigned against nuclear arms proliferation (in 1968 he received, along with Sigvard Eklund and Henry Dewolf

Smyth, the “Atoms for Peace Award”). The fact that the best physicists would be recruited by the Atomic Energy Commission was vox populi at Islamabad University.

Salam and his former students kept one eye closed, presumably thinking that, in the long run, this would benefit the scientific development of the country.18

It is worth noting that the number of Third World countries represented by the participants in ICTP’s activities is enormous. During its first 15 years, the ICTP appointed Associates from 50 different (developing) countries. Considering that the number of Associates is small compared to the total number of visitors, the ICTP’s estimate, that at least one member of each Third World scientific institution devoted

181 am grateful to Prof. Lawrence Badash calling my attention on this problem, and to Dr. Faheem Hussein for very helpful discussions.

301 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The 1CTP as an academie institution to theoretical physics visited the Centre at least once, seems reasonable.19 It is difficult to imagine another institution devoted to one single discipline with a similar record. This is an obvious, but important fact that historians of science in the Third

World must bear in mind. One of their chief challenges will be to determine the interplay between the ICTP fellows and the local communities; that is, to establish how the former affected the academic and scientific practices of the latter.

As a meeting point for physicists from the Third World, it is not surprising that the Centre became one of the most important factors for South-South collaboration in physics. An excellent example is the establishment of the general relativity school in Venezuela. Carlos Aragone, a Uruguayan physicist trained in

Rome, visited the ICTP for the first time in 1967. Aragone worked in general relativity and had began to create an incipient school in Montevideo. While at the

ICTP, by Salam’s suggestion, he collaborated with Venezuelan Julián Chela Flores.

Alter the military coup in Uruguay in 1973, Aragone was forced to flee and he wrote to his friend Chela Flores. These were the years of the Venezuelan oil boom, therefore it was not difficult to obtain a position for Aragone at the Simón Bolívar

University. There, with his pupil Alvaro Restuccia, Aragone founded a school of general relativity, for many years, one of the most active schools in Latin America.

There are several examples like this one, in which the ICTP connection was crucial to the establishment of research schools composed by scientists from different peripheral countries. For instance, the Solid State physics group at the Universidad de

19 Luciano Bertocchi, “The International Centre for Theoretical Physics,” 55.

302 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academic institution

Los Andes of Bogotá, Colombia, was set up after the visit of Professor Angela

Camacho to the ICTP in the early 1980s. This visit was crucial not just to isolate a fruitful area of research in which the various members of the group learned to combine different research traditions, but also to the establishment of collaborations with Chilean, Mexican and Spanish colleagues (see below). Some of these collaborations, supported by the International Centre of Physics {Centro

Internacional de Física) of Bogotá, a by-product of the ICTP, have lasted almost twenty years now, and the group has achieved international recognition in the field of semiconductors and quantum dots. Aside from the work carried out at the Centre, its role of intermediary between peripheral communities is perhaps its most remarkable achievement.

It is interesting to analyse the branches of physics in which the Associates worked. One of the criticisms made against the creation of the Centre was that the difficulties in attracting top scientists would force it to concentrate on only one area.

As the Scientific Advisory Committee argued in 1963, the Centre would be an

“artificial creation.” Of the sample examined in the present study (Appendix 2), 60% of the Associates researched in one area, namely particle physics, whereas only 24% worked in solid-state physics, which appears to confirm those fears. The Solid State physicists clustered around Stig Olog Lundqvist, a Swede and former student and collaborator of Ivar Waller, a leading researcher in condensed matter and an influential figure in the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Lundqvist was a champion of 20

20 Julián Chela Flores, Interviewed by author.

303 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution scientific internationalism and, after an extended first visit with his family in 1968, began a very active collaboration with the Centre that lasted until the end of his life

(2000). After organising a workshop in 1970 at the ICTP, he started to spend longer periods in Trieste in summer. He would become the reference point for those visitors interested in carrying out research in solid-state physics. During these years, research focused on imperfections in solids, electron structure calculations, surface physics and problems related to chemical reactions. Except in the summer, there was no senior personnel to guide the young Associates at the Centre. This dilemma had been also predicted by the Scientific Advisory Committee. However, in winter, John

Ziman organised annual courses in solid-state physics, aimed at training Third World physicists. Finally, after having placed expectations surrounding plasma physics in the early years of the Centre, it accounted for only 11% of the Associates. It must be underlined that the impossibility of appointing a larger team of permanent researchers to introduce new areas was due, ironically, to financial constraints imposed by the scepticism of the IAEA’s Scientific Advisory Committee. To put it bluntly, the scientific development of the ICTP was strongly determined by economic conditions, rather than by its intrinsic “artificiality.”

5.1.4 The Permanent Scientific Staff

In addition to the visitors and the Associates, the ICTP had a very small permanent scientific staff. As we saw in chapter 3, the Centre was conceived as an institution with a limited number of permanent scientists. However, until 1980 the number of permanent scientists was in fact much smaller than what had been planned, only two:

Abdus Salam and Paolo Budinich. I also pointed out that Trieste did not have a strong 304 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution tradition in theoretical physics at the time of the negotiations. Consequently, it was recommended that two full professorial chairs and four assistant professorial chairs in theoretical physics should be created at the University of Trieste. Budinich, backed by Amaldi in Rome, managed to persuade the Italian government to provide for these recommendations.

As soon as the Centre was created, Budinich undertook the arduous task of inviting the most prominent Italian theoretical physicist of the day, Tullio Regge, to accept one of the new chairs. In January 1964, Budinich travelled to the United States in order to publicise the new centre and extending the invitation to several physicists, tic Visited Princeton to contact Regge. Marshak had intimated Budinich that Regge would not be indifferent to economic arguments. Budinich encouraged Salam to insist.21 After all, Trieste’s comparative advantage depended on the future of the

ICTP. The Physics Institute of the University, without the ICTP, was an isolated and unattractive institution. Thus, Regge would consider Trieste only if the ICTP was consolidated as an active scientific institution. Regge’s wish was to have a dual position that allowed him to spend at least four months of the year at the Institute for

Advanced Studies at Princeton and the remainder in Italy, conditions which Budinich was ready to accept.22 Budinich also knew that Regge’s wife, who was from Friuli-

21 P. Budini to Salam, 31 January 1964, D. 139, ASP. 22 The Institute of Advance Studies offered Regge a permanent position. Regge’s idea was to have both a position at the Institute of Advanced Studies and a chair in Italy. It was improbable that Princeton would accept that Regge would be absent most of the year. Budinich wrote to Amaldi asking him to intercede with Oppenheimer in order to arrange the double appointment for Regge. Amaldi replied that he would intervene only under Regge’s request. Finally, Regge decided not to modify his contract with the Institute. See Budini to Amaldi, 16 March 1964, Amaldi to Budini, 23 March 1964, Budini to Amaldi, 3 April 1964 (Box 295, folder 1/2, EAP).

305 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

Venezia Giulia, was very enthusiastic about a move to Trieste, and hoped that this

would help to persuade Regge. Salam had to convince him that the Centre had a

promising future. After several months of negotiations, Regge did decide to

collaborate with the Centre, but declined the chair in Trieste.

Budinich approached several other Italian physicists, including

Raffale Gatto, Nicola Cabibbo and Daniele Amati, but only the latter came to

Trieste.23

Why did Budinich and Salam encounter, such difficulties? Although working near Salam’s group, especially in the mid-1960s, was an attractive idea for many, the future of the ICTP remained uncertain. From its inception, it had operated on a conditional and unstable basis. As we have seen, Salam strove against this instability by attempting to introduce the Centre into the regular budget of the United

Nations agencies and by seeking additional international funds in order to cut its heavy dependency on Italy. Every certain number of years the Centre’s budget had to be re-negotiated, preventing Salam from offering any permanent position for a longer period. The main consequence of ICTP’s instability was its vulnerability, apparent in the case of the boycott of the Centre (see below), and the impossibility of inviting a small yet prestigious group of scientists to stay in Trieste on a permanent basis.

Therefore, the hostility of countries like the United States, Canada, the United

Kingdom and India prevented the stabilisation of the ICTP both financially and politically, and therefore scientifically.

:j "Report on the Travel to England and USA by Prof. Paolo Budini (9-24 January, 1964),” enclosed in

306 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

The “local population” constituted two groups; the Italians and the group surrounding Salam. Only Salam and Budinich, and some years later one of Salam’s collaborators, held long-term contracts with the IAEA. Salam’s group will be discussed in relation to the ICTP in the next chapter concerned with research activities, but the Italian group, led by Budinich and his former student Luciano

Fonda, will be discussed here. Immediately after the establishment of the ICTP,

Budinich invited Fonda to occupy the other chair of theoretical physics at the

University of Trieste. After graduating from that University in 1955, Fonda had gone to the University of Indiana (Bloomington, USA) and in 1959 joined the Institute of

Advanced Studies (Princeton) where he collaborated with Regge. At the age of 29,

Fonda had won a national competition to become Professor of Theoretical Physics in

Itf iv. (Fermi, who was the youngest full professor in Italian history of physics was 26 when was appointed at Rome.) Several criticisms followed his appointment and

Fonda had to work hard in order to demonstrate that his election had not been a product of political manouvres, as many physicists speculated. In 196ft after a short period at the University of Palermo, he engineered a transferral to Parma, where he formed a small group of theoreticians, mainly composed of young physicists from

Northern Italy, especially Milan.* 24 When Budinich invited him to join the Institute in

1963, Fonda brought with him two physicists from the Parma group, Gian Carlo

Ghirardi and Augusto Rimini. Giuseppe Furlan and Luciano Bertocchi who

P. Budini to Salam, 31 January 1964, D.139, ASP. 24 Between 1960 and 1962, the most active senior researchers at Milan were on leave in the United States. This generated a sort of crisis in the theoretical physics school at Trieste and the young

307 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution collaborated with several ICTP initiatives (and Bertocchi became deputy-Director in the 1980s) arrived shortly afterwards and set up their own research programmes.

All of these men were employed by the University of Trieste, but it is certain that their ties with the ICTP were stronger. In the early 1960s, the Physics

Department at the University, divided into the Institute of Theoretical Physics and the

Institute of Experimental Physics, was composed almost exclusively of experimentalists, including a particle physics group led by Giuseppe Fidecaro that collaborated with CERN. By the mid-1960s, a fruitful collaboration had been established between a research group on atmospheric physics and a very active group from the Geophysics Institute, led by Antonio Marussi. Before 1963, there was only

Budinich and a handful of students working in theoretical physics, but during the

1960s the situation improved dramatically. The main beneficiary of the conditions imposed on the ICTP at its creation was the Italian theoretical physics group. They benefited in at least three ways. Firstly, the group expanded enormously: between

1963 and 1968, the Institute of Theoretical Physics grew from one to four full professors [professore ordinario), including one astrophysicist. In physical and practical terms, it had at its disposal the ICTP facilities of approximately 700 m2, not a small area if we consider that the experimentalists had, including laboratories, 2.400 m2.23 Secondly, the physical split of the department produced more autonomy in *

generation clustered at the new nuclear centre at Ispra. When the institute was transferred to the EURATOM, most of them had to move (Gian Carlo Ghirardi, Interviewed by author). :3 “Progetto schematico per un dipartimento di Fisica presso la nuova Sede della Facoltà di Scienza,” Mimeo, 1968, Archivi del Dipartimento di Fisica, Physics Department, University ofTrieste. In 1971, it was reported that “the building that hosts the Institute of Experimental [Physics] is now completely saturated” (“Programma di sviluppo per il quiquennnio 1971-1975,” ibid).

308 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution administrative terms. The creation of the ICTP was recognised by the University as

Budinich’s achievement, and in a sense proved his political and administrative qualities. In addition, Luigi Stasi, an extraordinarily able administrator who was the chief officer of the University’s central administration during the 1950s, was appointed administrator of the Institute. In practice he administrated the Italian funding of the ICTP and the Institute, for the boundary between the two institutions tended to blur.26 Thirdly, as part of the re-enforcing measures, the Scuola di

Perfezionamento was created, which will be discussed below. Immediately after the establishment of the ICTP, the Institute of Theoretical Physics moved from the

University of Trieste campus to Centre’s temporary seat in Piazza Oberdan, in central

Trieste. In 1968, when the Centre was definitively transferred to Miramare in the suburbs of Trieste, both the scientific and the administrative staffs of the Institute mo ved with it. Not surprisingly, the experimentalists resented the direction taken by

Institute of Theoretical Physics, which preferred to strengthen its international links through the ICTP, than to instigate a conscious policy of collaboration with the local scientific community. They saw the Institute of Theoretical Physics as an extension of the ICTP. They were not mistaken.

At least during the first fifteen years ‘ , the enlargement and strengthening of the theoretical physics group had little direct effect on the other activities of the physics department, or on any other department at the University.

26 Luigi Stasi, “Witness of the Dream of Trieste,” in From a Vision to a System, edited by A.M. Hamende, 207-213 (Trieste: Fondazione Intemazionale per il Progresso e la Libertà delle Scienze, 1996).

309 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

Physical distance and administrative separation meant that the Institute of Theoretical

Physics was an enclave within the university system of Trieste. This is contradictory to the ICTP’s own mandate and discourse in several respects. First, because when the

ICTP was created the intention was that it should interact rigorously with the local experimental groups. It is contradictory also because of the discourse forged at the

ICTP regarding the social role that theoreticians should play in developing countries.

Salam claimed that theoretical physicists were crucial for the consolidation of other professions, and that theoretical physics was the first step towards scientific and technological revolution in these countries, presumably on the assumption interaction with other members of their local scientific communities occurred. In complete contrast to such ideology, the Italian physicists, the core of the permanent staff at the

ICTP, were completely isolated from the rest of the academic community in Trieste.

They barely taught outside the theoretical physics institute, and even their relations with the experimentalists in their own department oscillated between mutual indifference and distrust.

The isolation of Salam’s group, with respect to the local community was equally apparent, and even the Italian physicists saw them as an enclave within the

ICTP. Their collaboration at the ICTP courses was marginal, and the Italians thought that Salam and his group used the Centre only to further their research without bearing their share of the teaching load.27 For his part, Salam disregarded Budinich as a physicist, although he and his collaborators maintained cordial but distant relations

27 Gian Carlo Ghirardi, interviewed by author.

310 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution with Fonda, Ghirardi and Rimini, who had established a fruitful collaboration for many years.“ From the mid-1960s Fonda, who had worked on phenomenological analysis with his tutor Roger Newton at Indiana, developed with Ghirardi a line of problems concerned with formal theories of scattering, and focusing on the connection between S-matrix and unstable systems.28 29 In the 1970s, Fonda was completely immersed in the politics of science in Trieste. Ghirardi took over the group’s leadership and in the following years, they obtained important results in stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics. From 1976 onwards, Ghirardi and his collaborators focused on the conceptual and mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics in relation to measurement theory. Their rigorous demonstration that

Einstein’s locality cannot be violated in EPR-type (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) systems gained them an international reputation.30 Simultaneously, as we shall see,

Salam continued work at the ICTP in developing his programme on gauge theories.

Ah'tough their research programmes ran separately, this does not mean that two groups did not interact, actually there was a mutually beneficial exchange.

28 Salam shared his opinion about Budinich’s physics with his collaborators, interviewed by the author. Other visitors told the author that they even ignored that Budinich was a physicist; they thought he was member of the ICTP’s administrative staff. I have been asked by my interviewees to maintain their names in reserve. 29 A particularly important result was the demonstration that the occurrence of poles of S-matrix in certain region of the Riemann surface is independent from the formal scheme. See for instance, G. Calucci, G.C. Ghirardi, and L. Fonda, “Correspondence between Unstable Particles and Poles in S- Mairix Theory,” Physical Review 166 (1968): 1719. 20 It came partly through the active interest showed by J.S. Bell in their work. In Bell’s words, Ghirardi et al.’s work was “the most exciting thing happening in the field” (quoted ICTP, International Centre for Theoretical Physics 1964-1989 (Trieste: ICTP, 1990), 61.

311 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

5.2 Courses and Workshops

Was the ICTP intended to be a research centre or a training centre, or both? This unresolved issue provided the tension at the heart of the ICTP as a scientific institution. On the one hand, Salam conceived the ICTP as a centre of excellence in terms of scientific research, and many of those who had participated in the debate about the creation of the Centre shared this view. The challenge for an institution such as the ICTP was precisely to demonstrate that it could compete with top research centres. This also explains the high proportion of Indian physicists, whose qualifications were probably the highest among those from developing countries. On the other hand, the ICTP had a commitment to foster theoretical physics in the Third

World, which entailed dealing with a vast spectrum of scientific backgrounds and the great heterogeneity of Third World scientific traditions.

Probably the best example of how the ICTP tried to maintain a balance between training and research is in the field of solid-state physics. Although the

Centre offered courses in many other areas such as high-energy physics, plasma physics, and nuclear physics, solid-state physics was that in which the Centre created an enduring and strong tradition as an institution providing training at various levels.

5.2.1 Workshops

The ICTP workshops were relatively large, international summer meetings which provided a forum to discuss recent research results of the forty or so participants, some of whom visited the Centre in order to work with Lundqvist. They were originally planned as the gathering of a working group focused on a particular

312 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution problem. For instance, in 1970 Lundqvist proposed working on static and dynamic screening of imperfections in solids, but the proposed pre-prints for the workshop forced Lundqvist to widen its scope and to organise “topical meetings.”31 Thus, the workshops tended to cover a wide area of subjects around a very general theme proposed by Lundqvist and, later, also by Federico-Garcia Moliner, Paul Butcher and

Norman March. The geographical distribution of the participants, particularly in terms of the lecturers, was dominated by researchers affiliated with academic institutions in the industrialised world.32 Third World participants were, in general terms, the audience. The aim of the Centre was, after all, to “break the isolation” of scientists from developing countries by keeping them abreast of what the invisible college considered the foremost problems in the field. Scientists from tire Third

World would then ideally inform their local scientific communities and set up research programmes following one of the lines of research introduced at the workshop. Hence the ICTP was to become a source of standardisation in scientific research around the world. The reason why a physicist from Indonesia can understand

3. physicist from Sweden owes more to the ICTP than to any metaphysical explanation about the objectivity of science. Of course, this does not mean that the local processes of reception, recreation and production of new results were identical and defined by their experience at the ICTP. The natural continuation of the present

31 ICTP, Fourth Annual Report 1970, ICTP: Mimeo, 1971, ICTP Archives. 32 In 1970, only 14 out of 41 researchers came from developing countries (ICTP, Annual Report 1970, ICTP: Mimeo, 1971, ICTP Archives), and in 1972, only 5 out of 52 lectures presented at the Workshop were given by scientists from that part of the world (ICTP, Eighth Annual Report 1972, ICTP: Mimeo, [undated], ICTP Archives)

313 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

research should be to select specific cases in order to study these processes in specific

local contexts.

5.2.2 Courses

An important outcome following the creation of the ICTP was the establishment of the Scuola di Perfezioncimento in Fisica (Advanced School of Physics), sponsored by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, the IAEA and UNESCO, a one year course, equivalent to a Masters Degree, offered by the University of Trieste. In the early

1960s these schools started to be created in other universities in Italy, but it was necessary to have at least two full professors before authorisation from the

Italian government. The creation of the ICPT was therefore instrumental in the establishment of this course because of the number of new lecturers and professors hired by the University in fulfilment of the IAEA’s conditions. Several physicists that came to the ICTP were enrolled as students of the School, some of which were paid through the IAEA fellowships, which gave about US$35.000 each year to the

University. The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered several fellowships to physicists from the Third World, as a consequence of which it became perhaps the most international of the Schools on the Peninsula, and one of the richest in the country. In its first ten years at least, the proportion of enrolled physicists from Asia,

Africa, the less developed European countries (Greece, Portugal and Spain) and Latin

America, oscillated between 70 and 80 percent.33 For many of these students, this was the beginning of a relationship with the Centre that continued throughout their careers

314 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution as scientists and politicians of science. Several students of the Advanced School, such as A. Abdul-Magd (Egypt), Carlos Aragone (Uruguay), M. Grypeos (Greece), L.

Masperi (Argentina), P. Cordero (Chile), C.O. Nwachuku (Nigeria, and who was also student at Imperial College), later became Associates. Retrospectively, they have regard their experience of the School as essential to their future careers for giving them the opportunity to establish contacts with fellows from other developing countries. Some of these students were introduced to particle physics in the School, a field in which they continued working in their countries through the support of the

ICTP.* 34

Like the workshops, the ICTP courses were annual events, usually held in the w'nter and spring, between January and April. An important antecedent was the

“International Course on the Theory of Condensed Matter,” organised by John

Ziman, F. Bassani (from University of Pisa) and G. Gaglioti (Ispra, Italy), in 1967.35

Ziman, Professor at Bristol University and member of the Royal Society, and Salam had met in Cambridge, in the mid-1950s. Ziman was a fellow at King’s College, and a lecturer of theoretical physics at the department of physics.36 A few years earlier, he had strongly opposed the creation of the Centre on the ground that “any University is

ICTP Annual Reports, 1965-1975, ICTP Archives. 34 Luis Masperi, email to author. 35 The initiative was enthusiastically received. More than one hundred physicists representing thirty- five countries (twenty-two developing) and thirty-six lectures participated (ICTP, Fourth Annual Report 1967-1968, Mimeo, November 1968, 6, ICTP Archives). 16 When Neville Mott arrived in Cambridge in the 1950s he noticed that theoretical physics was concentrated in the Mathematics department, which he saw as a great handicap for the physics department. He invited Ziman to lecture around the time Salam was returning from Pakistan (Ziman, Interviewed by author).

315 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution an international Centre,” and, therefore, the ICTP’s function could be fulfilled by existing institutions. In 1967, immediately after Ziman was elected at the Royal

Society, Salam invited Ziman to Trieste. From that position, Salam may have thought, Ziman could be instrumental in raising the status of the Centre.37 By then, the ICTP was already a reality and, against all predictions, was starting to gain international visibility. Salam’s charisma, the hospitality of Trieste’s physicists, and the enthusiasm showed by Third World physicists at the Centre, convinced him that it could be an important instrument for Third World development. In 1970, the school was held again, this time with the intention of making it a regular event. Once again

Ziman was in charge, joined by his Spanish student Federico Garcia-Moliner and

Lundqvist.

In contrast to the workshops, the courses aimed at introducing junior and

Third World physicists (the equivalence is significant) with little or no background to solid-state physics. The meetings recreated one or various university courses, concentrated into a few weeks, scheduling about four lectures each day, five days a week. They were envisaged as “instant graduate schooI[s],” the purpose of which was to cover “an unusual range of solid-state physics and theoretical chemistry.” The course taught advanced mathematical formalisms and phenomenological interpretations in order to “provide a basis for a fundamental understanding” of different topics in the field. It was divided into two parts, the first part of which each lecturer gave between 10 to 12 lectures on general subject ranging from quantum-

’7 Referring to Salam’s decision to invite him after his election, Ziman observed that: “Salam wasn’t exactly a snob, but he did understand very well stratification” (Ziman, Interviewed by author). 316 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution mechanics techniques and basic theory of semiconductor devices, to electronic structure and basic many-body theory. In the second part, a number of specialised fields were covered, “indicating the range of current problems.”38 The courses held throughout the 1970s and beyond39 tried to focus on specific topics though, as a rule, they continued to be conceived as general overviews. Although there was no connection between the contents of these courses and any industrial or technological application, they were presented as topics relevant to this kind of applications. This was due partly to the utilitarian discourse that the ICTP started to adopt in the 1970s

(see below), but this rhetoric also reflected Ziman’s reaction to what he called

Salam’s “intellectual snobbery” referring to the notion that particle physics was the only “fundamental” science and, hence, particle physicists would necessarily lead the next scientific and technological revolution.40

The criteria used behind the organisation of the ICTP courses show the kind of audience that they were aimed at. Ziman explains:

It’s quite clear that it would have been absurd at Trieste to have done a course on the very latest riddles of superconductivity theory. ..when these are people who had just began to understand... theory of solids...... The [typical] participant in these courses was somebody who had done just a PhD in either experimental or low level theoretical work and actually what they really needed was to be much more broad in their understanding [of physics]. What we gave was a veiy general course covering a major subsection of the field, which was partly theoretical and partly phenomenological... The courses were deliberately designed in that sort of way.41

38 ICTP, Eighth Annual Report 1972, ICTP: Mimeo, [undated], 4, ICTP Archives. 59 See ICTP, International Centre for Theoretical Physics 1964-1989, Trieste: ICTP, 1990, 85-87. 40 Ziman, Interviewed by author. 41 Ziman, Interviewed by author

317 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

The difference between the courses and the workshops corresponds to two contrasting conceptions of the ICTP. While Salam, and in lesser degree Lundqvist, sought to create a research tradition, Ziman thought that the Centre could aspire only to form a solid basis in theoretical physics within the Third World. Indeed, the lecturers of the courses were not mainstream researchers in the field, for the degree of specialisation did not require that they be so. Instead of having first rate researchers,

Ziman preferred to have lecturers with very clear English, such as the several

Scandinavian physicists who were actually invited to Trieste. Ziman himself, despite being deeply involved with the school, never showed any interest in pursuing research in Trieste, nor did he even consider sending his students there to carry out research. In his view, the lack of a permanent solid-state physics group prevented the existence of any research tradition at the Centre. In an interview with the author

Ziman explained somewhat bluntly:

I didn’t think that the research have got anywhere very much... and it would strike me if there was really outstanding research [at ICTP]. If I had a student from the Third World who wanted to do research in some branch of solid-state theory, I must say, 1 wouldn’t send him to Trieste to do it. I would send him to Cambridge or wherever where 1 knew [were] much more established schools of the activity.42 Creating such a tradition required many years of continuous work on several problems of a given branch of physics, and the ICTP lacked both the time and personnel to have cemented a tradition.

One could speculate that the decision to hold the courses during the winter and the workshops in the summer was a manifestation of this double function of the

ICTP. In the winter, physicists in Europe and the United States are overloaded with

318 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution research and teaching at their own institutions and have strict limitations on travel.

Conversely, for young lecturers in Northern Europe, Trieste offered a mild climate in ■ a beautiful Mediterranean site. This period corresponds to the summer in the South, when the mobility of scholars from this part of the world increases, if we ignore the obvious economic constraints. As for research, the busiest months at the Centre were

June to September. I suggest that the ICTP took this environmental factor into account.

The courses had a crucial function as preparatory schools for those planning to attend the workshops. As has been repeatedly stressed in this dissertation, many Member

States at the United Nations agencies criticised the ICTP for not having enough scientists from the Third World participating in their initiatives. Simultaneously, the

ICTP had to demonstrate its scientific excellence. The question was, how to achieve both at once, given the limitations imposed by the scientific level of many applicants?

The way in which the courses were designed suggest that their goal was, like the review papers and handbooks discussed by Ashmore et al., to help an “ignorant outsider” to become a “newly sophisticated paraparticipant.”43 This was not a peculiarity of the solid-state only; it was a modus operandi of the ICTP. Luciano

Bertocchi, who organised several courses and workshops on particle physics, made the same distinction between the courses and workshops. According to him, courses had to be so elementary as “to have to teach how to sum up angular momenta in 42

42 Ziman, Interviewed by author.

319 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academic institution quantum mechanics,” whereas workshops were aimed at experienced physicists. The goal was, he observed, to prepare Third World physicists in order for them to be able to "understand” what was happening in the workshop.43 44 A similar divide between active and passive participants can be found in nuclear physics and mathematics.

Active participation in the workshops depended not just on scientific qualifications, although this was probably the main obstacle, but also on two additional factors rarely treated by the literature. These factors included experience at international meetings and language abilities. For the majority of the participants from the Third World, these meetings were their first international experience. They had to learn to recognise what constitutes a relevant question within a specific debate; to learn how to present an argument or a counter-argument; to understand how the balance of power is related to certain scientific results and theories; and to find allies in advancing a thesis or an alternative proposal. The lack of “training” in this kind of tacit knowledge is the main reason for their sense of isolation. Furthermore, these scientists travelled to Trieste almost exclusively to “catch up” with their colleagues in the North. It was also the intention that these meetings would give them experience to allow them to become, in the future, active participants. Unquestionably, the ICTP was very important in this respect for some of these scientists, particularly to the youngest who, in addition, participated in further international meetings at the ICTP and elsewhere, sometimes helped by the ICTP itself. For them, the ICTP was a

43 Malcolm Ashmore, Greg Myers, and Jonathan Potter, “Discourse, rhetoric, reflexivity: seven days in the library,” in Handbook of Science, Technology and Society, edited by Sheila Jasanoff, G. Markle, Trevor Pinch and J. Petersen, 321-342 (London: Sage Pub, 1995), 322. 44 Bertocchi, Interviewed by author. 320 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution crucial school of international relations in science. As for the language skills, a poor level of English was an obstacle to enjoy fully the informal discussions, but was enough to follow the activities as “paraparticipants.” Regardless of its impact on their scientific performance at the international level, this experience also had a symbolic meaning. For most Third World scientists, this was the first time they were invited abroad to an international course or workshop, in itself this was a form of recognition and a stimulus. Although they attended mostly as “paraparticipants,” they felt that the ICTP had given them the opportunity to see how scientific exchange operated in industrialised countries, and upon their return they expected to be able to reproduce this environment. Thus the ICTP was to act as a place where

“underdeveloped” communities learned from the “advanced” ones the standard social practices of scientists in the North.

In terms of research, the ICTP courses were vital for some research groups in the Third World countries in search of a pertinent problem. “Every time I come here,

I endeavour to publish a paper or take home a problem to solve,” is the typical answer by Third World physicists who pay regular visits to the ICTP. A Mexican physicist, for instance, points out that the ICTP is “a fantastic place to explore new ideas in [his] field of research.” Some physicists decided to change their field of research, as Dr.

Chen Yun Mei, from China, explains: “It was due to [Prof. J. Eells’] help and encouragement as well as to discussions with Prof. R. Verjovsky...and other visiting scientists at ICTP familiar with the field, that I was able to shift to research in this

321 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution field [harmonic maps].”4" The solid-state group at Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, is another example. Prof. Angela Camacho had done her PhD dissertation on magnetic properties of liquids in Germany. In a Spring College at the ICTP, in 1984, she learned that semiconductors offered an unexplored field of research in which her group could make a contribution. Her colleague in Colombia, Prof. Luis Quiroga, who had received his PhD in France, had worked on magnetic resonance methods applied to liquids. In collaboration with Sergio Rodriguez, a Chilean professor at

Indiana University, they started to work on magnetism and solid semiconductors.

The ICTP contact was also crucial to improve their publication record, benefiting from the longer experience of their Spanish and Mexican collaborators in “selling the produets of [their] research” in international journals and forums.46

5.2.3 Expansion o f the ICTP activities

I have so far referred only to courses in branches of theoretical physics, although the

ICTP courses slowly expanded to cover other areas. Initially, Salam was reluctant to develop in areas other than particle physics. This was evidenced when, in the late

1960s, Sciama suggested work in cosmology; it was only some years later, when cosmology was clearly a colony of grand unified theorists, that Salam reconsidered the idea.47 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a utilitarian view of science had begun

4i Aileen Qaiser by The ICTP and its Scientific Visitors (Trieste: International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 1992), pages 7,88, and 26. Quoted from interviews with Oyo Olatunde, from Nigeria, Dr. Ricardo F. Vila-Freyer, from Mexico, and Dr.Chen Yun Mei. 44 Angela Camacho and Luis Quiroga, interviewed by author. 47 Sciama, Interviewed by author. The colonisation of cosmology by particle physicists was studied in David Kaiser, "A Tale ofTwo Cities: Evolving Disciplinary Dynamics between Particle Physics and 322 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution to dominate governmental milieus in the United States and Europe.48 In Third World countries, this had long been the predominant view of politicians and administrators pressed by basic and urgent problems. It did not take long before the utilitarian discourse, latent in the 1960s, emerged in inter-governmental bodies such as the

IAEA and, more clearly UNESCO. In 1970, UNESCO joined the IAEA in the running of the Centre. This was but the first manifestation of a significant expansion in “applicable fields.”

While the IAEA and the Ford Foundation allowed ICTP’s autonomy, despite their reservations regarding Salam’s discourse, UNESCO attempted to redirect the

Centre’s activities towards more “applied fields.” In 1969, a Committee chaired by

H.B.C. Casimir was convened in order to advise the IAEA and UNESCO about the future programme of the ICTP. It stressed that “while recognizing the importaiice of particle physics as one of the most advanced areas of theory and the definitive need for work in this field, [the Committee] is of the opinion that the Centre could have a greater impact than it now has by further broadening its scope.” The committee concluded that: “priority should be given to condensed-matter theory,” which “could have direct technological benefits in developing countries.” Further, the document pointed out that “priority should be allotted to the general area of “applicable mathematics and theoretical physics.” It was suggested that the Centre should encourage Third World physicists “to study problems outside their narrow

Cosmology,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society (Santa Fe, New Mexico 1993). 48 See, for instance, Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: the History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 323 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

specialities,” and develop a training facility in certain branches of mathematics such as control theory, game theory and mathematical economics.49 The IAEA welcomed these suggestions, but Eklund and Salam knew that it would be impossible to expand if new sponsors were not found. The resources finally came from UNESCO and the

UNDP, which financed the entire solid-state physics programme, while Ziman became a UNESCO consultant.

Courses in mathematics such as “Computing analysis and its applications ” started in 1971. Several courses in which “application” was emphasised followed: in

1972, “Global Analysis and its applications;” in 1975, “Complex analysis and its applications in 1976 “Applications of non-linear functional analysis to differential equations;” and so forth.

This meaning of “application” is not what the utilitarian discourse viewed as

“applied science”: UNESCO and other bodies such as the Swedish International

Development Agency (SIDA) stressed that the ICTP should develop “applied sciences” directly concerned with social and economic development. However, the

ICTP on mathematical “applications” were not necessarily devoted to solve practical or technological problems. The idea behind these courses was to explore areas of mathematics which could be applied to other scientific fields, particularly to theoretical physics. Deliberately, Salam insisted that, rather than talking of “applied science,” the Centre should make clear that it was still committed to pure “applicable

Jl) The other members were D. Amati, P.W. Anderson and L. L prince-Ringuet; IAEA, “International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Report of the consultative committee on the Centre’s future programme,” IAEA’s Board of Governors, GOV/INF/223, 27 April, 1970.

324 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution science,” That is topics that could be developed in order to produce some kind of technological benefit in the future. Again, the question of how to fill the gap between theory and technological product remained unanswered, and furthermore, one could argue that the scientific level of the participants put strict limitations to the scope of the courses. Although a minority of attendees who could easily follow the more advanced lectures, in general, because of the heterogeneity of the audience, these were introductory schools. It would have been naive, to say the least, to pretend that any realistic technological application could be detailed.

UNESCO’s pressure to make the ICTP move beyond “pure” science continued throughout the 1970s. In 1974, another committee, this time chaired by

Leon Van Hove, kept to the line set in the 1969 report when it asked: “Even if it is granted that theory might be useful, is there not a mismatch between advanced theory and practical needs?” The Centre ought to introduce new fields, it pointed out,

“Adding these major fields - and possibly a number of activities in other fields - should not be regarded as a departure from the basic concept of the Centre, but only as a means to broaden its impact, particularly for the less developed countries.”50

Indeed, the chief question that concerned UNESCO was what impact would the ICTP have after 10 years of existence. While in principle people like Needham and Huxley at UNESCO saw science used as a means of promoting peace and development, therefore, they willingly promoted it without much concern about short-term impact, in the 1970s the Organisation turned its attention to the implications of science in 30

30 IAEA, “International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Report of an Ad Hoc consultative Committee,” Board of Governors, GOV/INF/293, 21 May 1975. 325 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academic institution

societies. It was not an isolated effort, but rather it echoed numerous critical voices

who were raising serious questions about the actual benefits of science in general, and ,

physics in particular to (especially to Third World) society.51 52* This trend was closely

tied to the public exposure of the link between science and the military by documents

such as the Pentagon Papers.51 UNESCO, especially after the election of Amadou

M'Bow as Director-General, perceived Africa as one of its priorities; it was not

accidental that this coincided with the tragedy of great famines in Biafra during the

“second development decade.” For UNESCO, the backwardness of the basic

education system was a particularly urgent problem, after which higher levels of

training could be attended to.33

The ICTP had in the past hosted just a handful of Africans educated in Britain.

UNESCO considered that the ICTP had to work on a more basic level and in fields

;Uaied to African development. Slowly Salam accepted UNESCO’s stance and began

to talk Dublicly about the importance of fields like Oceanography and Meteorology

which, some years earlier, he had deemed inferior.54 This was due mainly to his

having realised that the Centre would not be able to survive without UNESCO’s

51 In 1973, UMESCO supported a study on “The Human Implications of Scientific Advance” and financed activities for the “Promotion of the Public Understanding of Science and its Relation to Society.” The official publication “Science in the 1970s” contained a central part on “Science and Man’s Needs;” see UNESCO, Approved Programme and Budget ¡973-1974. (Paris: UNESCO, 1973). 52 Neil Sheehan, The Pentagon papers: as published by the New York times (Toronto, New York,: Bantam Books, 1971). v In the 1960s and 1970s, concomitantly with the independence struggles, a process began to be known as the “Africanisation” of the education system, which consisted in taking over responsibilities that were in the hands of the colonisers. Most African Universities emerged in these years. See, for instance, T.O. Eisemon, C.H. Davis, and E.M. Rathgeber, “The transplantation of Science to Anglophone and Francophone Africa,” Science and Public Policy 12 (1985): 191-202. 54 Ziman, Interviewed by author.

326 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution support, and to ensure this, he was prepared, if not to redirect, at least to expand its activities. In the mid-1970s, the Centre started activities in what it called “physics of the Environment,” including courses in physics of oceans and atmosphere (1975), physics of the earth (1977), and physics of water logging and salinity (1980). This programme continued throughout the 1980s. Similarly, the ICTP held courses on lasers and molecular physics, on computing and microprocessors.

The Italian government viewed this turn to the “applied sciences” favourably, and gave particular support to schools in non-conventional energies, which were widely attended. When Budinich contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1977 to renegotiate the renewal of the Agreement between Italy and the United Nations agencies, he reported to Salam that: “The recent activities and programmes of the

Centre in the field of applied science are very much welcomed by Italian authorities and in particular the fact that the course on Solar Energy will [be] repeated in Trieste every two years.”55 56 In a similar vein, Salam pointed out to G. De Ferra,

Representative of Italian Government to the ICTP, that UNESCO’s Director-General had “asked [him, Salam,] to manifest to you his deep interest in the expansion of the

Centre’s activities towards applied and experimental disciplines,” suggesting that this switch would please Italy.36

55 Budini to Salam, Memo, 10 October 1977, D.347, ASP; italics in the original. 56 Salam to G. De Ferra (Representative of Italian Gov. to ICTP), 7 June 1977, D.l 77, ASP. Italy had developed a strong tradition in Solar Energy, motivated by the 1970s energy crisis. After a few years of promising results, funds were cut and research declined. Trieste remained as one of the few places holding courses throughout the 1980s.

327 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

This radical change led Salam reconsider the whole enterprise; by the late

1970s it was evident that the ICTP was no longer a centre devoted exclusively to theoretical physics. The issue was taken seriously and even a change of name was considered, apparently prompted by UNESCO’s concern with Africa. In 1975, Chief

Olu Ibuku, of the UNESCO Regional Officer of Science and Technology in Africa, suggested that Salam create a “Summer School in Physics Teaching.” According to

Ibuku, the project could be co-sponsored by an African Fund and run jointly with the

Science Education Project for Africa, the Association of African Universities and the

Deans of the Faculties of Science in Africa. Salam saw this as an opportunity to attract more resources, and his sensitivity towards the problem of physics in Africa increased. According to Ibuku, the main problem remained that the name of the

Centre represented a major limitation to the improvement of contacts with African scientists and governments. He explained to Salam that:

The title of the ‘International Centre for Theoretical Physics’ does not have sufficient appeal to those in government who make decisions on finances. For the most part, these finance officers do not see bearing of “theoretical” studies in science on the development of their economies, and hence are not very likely to assign high priority to funding one of their nationals for study in your Centre... From the African point of view, I do hope that some consideration will be given to a review of the title of the Centre.57

Salam placed Ibuku’s suggestion for consideration to the Scientific Council, and wrote to all the Associates asking whether they felt it convenient to change the name in order “to indicate as wide a scope as possible”. He explained that “the transformation [of the Centre] has been a response, firstly, to the realization that there

57 Olu Ibuku to Salam, 24 April 1975, D.1819, ASP.

328 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution are no other centres catering for disciplines in physical sciences for scientists from developing countries. And secondly, in response to greater emphasis on relevance and • applicability of the disciplines covered.” The following names were suggested in

Salam’s circular: International Centre for Science (there seems to have been consensus with regards to this name, but, according to Salam, was too wide since the

ICTP did not deal with chemistry or biology); International Centre for Natural

Sciences; International Centre for Physical Sciences; International Centre for

Advanced Studies (which recalls Princeton); International Centre for Natural

Philosophy. The poll was amply answered, and new names were suggested, including a premonitory “Abdus Salam Institute for Theoretical Physics.”58 59 Several

Associates celebrated that the Centre had decided to expand its activities to more applied fields. Others pointed out that UNESCO was not the only one concerned with the name, SIDA too was reluctant to support a “theoretical centre.”60 In the end, however, a decision was taken to not change the name. For over 10 years the ICTP had struggled to be known and it had succeeded in becoming a well known institution, changing its name may only have confused people.

58 Salam to Associates and Visitors of ICTP, 30-May-77, D.178, ASP. This letter was sent also to several physicists, among them to Dirac, Amaldi, Margarita Hack, (Cowarski (CERN), T.D.Lee, Van Hove and Weisskopf. 39 Postcard from R. Oelme to Salam, 27 June 1977, D.178, ASP. 60 Stig Lundqvist pointed out that: “I even believe that the 'theoretical physics' may have had a negative influence in funding [crossed out in the letter] the centre, since this term does not have a very good ring in many people's ears by seeming a bit too unpractical and esoteric. This has certainly been the case with the SIDA people” S. Lundqvist to Salam, 7 June 1977, D.178, ASP.

329 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

5.3 Conclusion

The most evident feature of the ICTP as an academic institution is its composition.

As we saw in previous chapters, despite the difficulties of dealing with countries behind the Iron Curtain, the ICTP attracted several visitors from Eastern Europe.

However, those difficulties were crucial for Salam’s plan of having an institution for

Third World physicists. This fact prompted the physicists in Europe and the United

States to see the ICTP mainly as an institution for Third World assistance, rather than as a research centre. This, however, does not mean that some ICTP Associates were not highly regarded, however it is important to add that their scientific credentials did not come from their affiliation to the ICTP.

The number of scientists visiting the Centre was enormous and their academic backgrounds differed greatly. The majority of the Associates represented the scientific elite in their home countries. They were young theoretical physicists, most

' f them trained in industrialised countries and with university positions in their home countries. The visitors to the Centre formed a more diverse group, ranging from graduate students who came to attend courses to senior physicists who, for a variety of reasons, had not been able to develop an international career. In both groups the recruitment process was through former ICTP fellows. Such a heterogeneous group of people constituted a multi-national network that maintained international contacts chiefly through the ICTP. Hence it was a support network that, when the future of the ICTP had to be decided in UNESCO and the IAEA, pressed their representatives to back its continuation. Ironically, although these scientists were aware of political difficulties in the United Nations agencies, they were not aware of the huge

330 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 5: The ICTP as an academie institution

constraints on the ICTP due to financial limitations. The location of the Centre in an

industrialised country, the presence of Salam and the banner of the United Nations,

produced the idea among Third World physicists that it was a relatively rich

institution and a highly respected research centre world-wide.

The question of whether the ICTP was a research or a training centre is one that the Centre has had to face since its creation, and even during the initial negotiations. The ICTP’s answer to this dilemma has been to attempt to be both because of the necessity of having to cope with the demands of individuals with hugely different scientific backgrounds. This was the origin of a clear difference between the ICTP’s workshops and courses. While the latter provided general vrrveys of the subject, in the workshops, where the students of the courses acted as

‘'paraparticipants,” were aimed at an informed audience of active researchers who could present their results and interact. Naturally, these meetings facilitated the Third

World scientists in learning what was considered pertinent in terms of research, and hence to define the direction of their own groups. Concomitantly, these exchanges catalysed South-South collaborations, which proved to be crucial for the future of theoretical physics in several Third World countries and institutions. However, the actual impact of the ICTP in the Third World would be a matter for further research and a natural step after the present study.

331 Chapter 6

Research Patterns at the

International Centre for

Theoretical Physics

If you make mistakes, you don’t worry. That is the intuitive milieu in theoretical physics. You need different types of gifts; you need good imagination, intuition, perception, seeing a correlation between facts. You do not need that long tradition of erudite knowledge.

Abdus Salam1

alam’s main challenge in 1964 was to demonstrate that it was possible to Sestablish a United Nations centre of excellence devoted to research in theoretical physics. This would not be an easy task, above all because Trieste lacked any tradition of research in theoretical physics. Thus, if Salam wanted the

Centre to gain an international reputation, he had to bring his own resources into play. That first-rate Third World physicists, who had spent long periods in Europe or in the United States, were appointed as Associates, and many scientists from industrialised countries were invited to join the centre, was, as Salam publicly acknowledged, the result of a conscious decision to increase the visibility of the

ICTP. However, the stringent financial conditions of the ICTP did not allow

Salam to appoint any of these physicists for long periods of time, and the centre

1 Anon., “Lonely Scientists -- Thinking Ahead with Abdus Salam," InternationalScience and Technology, December, 1964, 66-71.

332 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

operated under severe restrictions in terms of scientific staff. A sense of

uncertainty prevailed in the period before 1979, when Salam was awarded the

Nobel Prize, but remained even after this date.2 The financial stability of the

Centre depended on its scientific credentials, and Salam realised that the only way to keep the ICTP alive for the benefit of Third World scientists was to invent a scientific tradition. This was created by presenting the achievements of the Centre as the result of collaboration between the First, Second and Third Worlds. The collaboration in plasma physics, between the Socialist block and the industrialised countries, was in fact to last just a few years, and its significance was mainly symbolic. As the ICTP acknowledged in 1989, irrespective of its short life, it “was extremely important for, if the ICTP was to acquire momentum and support for its consolidation, it had to prove its efficiency right at the outset”.3 Collaboration with physicists from the Third World took place, but it was not the rule, and, when it did occur, often was conceived in terms of assistance. Such exchanges as were established by Third World physicists were usually only made possible by their having trained in the institutions of industrialised countries. Those scientists who interacted vis-à-vis mainstream researchers participated in the international circuit through channels parallel to the ICTP. I shall argue that the visibility of the

ICTP in the mid-1960s was due to Salam’s strategy of transferring part of the

Imperial College research programme to Trieste. Between 1964 and 1966 Salam

2 In November 1974, a Committee presided by Leon Van Hove Committee was established to report about the ICTP situation. It stressed that: “a feeling of uncertainty concerning the future of the Centre is rampant, both among its scientific leaders and its administrative staff,” and recommended the al location of stable sources of income because “the staff should be given a highest security of position” (IAEA, “Report of the ad hoc consultative committee of the International Cenrte for Theoretical Physics, Trieste to the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation” (Paris: UNESCO, 1975)). Similar complaints prevailed in letters and reports issued by the ICTP and by independent committees. J ICTP, International Centre for Theoretical Physics 1964-1989 (Trieste: ICTP, 1990), 71.

333 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

and his collaborators worked on a new theory that drew the attention of physicists

to the ICTP. It was crucial to put the ICTP on the map, but, alas, the theory

proved to be wrong and the Centre’s contribution was forgotten.

The Centre had a dual image. On the one hand, the great majority of

physicists from élite centres in Europe and the United States did not regard it as

scientifically significant. The Centre was important in meeting the needs of

physicists in developing countries, but was, to use the expression of a physicist

sympathetic to the initiative, “irrelevant for physics”.4 On the other hand, physicists from the South held an opposing view; the ICTP was, as several of my interviewees stated vehemently, one of the world’s leading research centres. I shall argue that these contrasting views resulted from incommensurable perceptions of the ICTP’s products, especially the pre-prints written by the visitors and Associates. This pattern, I suggest, corresponds to a specific understanding of the Centre’s role in the establishment of a Third World scientific tradition. The ICTP’s function was to offer a new space for Third World physicists to be trained to carry out research, and to present their results before an international audience. This pedagogical function was, however, never made explicit. By being presented as a research centre, the ICTP had to pay a very high price for its scientific prestige.

In 1974, following the tensions between the Arab-African coalition and

Israel within the United Nations system (particularly UNESCO), physicists from the United States and from Israel boycotted the ICTP. The marginality of the

Centre then became apparent. This episode is useful for illustrating the importance of understanding that controversies are settled in social spaces.

334 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

6.1 Putting the ICTP on the map

When the ICTP was founded, Salam had been a professor at Imperial College,

London, for only six years, and under his leadership Imperial College had been able to set up one the most dynamic groups in theoretical particle physics. As we saw, after a long negotiation with the College, he found a solution that suited the interests of the Physics Department at Imperial, the new centre and himself. Given that the problem was how to make his appointment compatible with his duties as director of the theoretical physics group at Imperial, Salam and Paul Matthews decided to split the group between London and Trieste. Half of the PhD students in theoretical particle physics moved to the ICTP while the scientific staff, constituted by Salam, Matthews and Kibble, would commute. In this way the group would not lose continuity and would benefit from the international flow of physicists in Trieste. Salam’s request for leave of absence to direct the Centre, granted in March 1964, was initially only for a period of one year.4 5

What were the internal dynamics of Salam’s group? At the centre of the group was Salam who was, to use the expression of one of his students, “the instigator;” he was a man “full of ideas,”6 not all which were necessarily brilliant, although they acted as effective stimuli. For his students it was very difficult to filter the good ideas from the bad, and Matthews, Kibble, and other collaborators such as Gordon Feldman, were required to do this. The latter confirms this:

Salam would have hundreds of ideas, and in a sense, Paul Matthews was a filter. And I know from my own experience, the same thing was true with me. In the Imperial College, usually Paul and I shared an office together, and Salam

4 Marcello Cini, interviewed by author. 5 ‘Rector’s Report,’ Imperial College o f Science and Technology South Kensington. Governing Body Minutes, 1964-1964, Par. 154, AIC. 6 Bob Delbourgo, email to the author 20 March 2000.

335 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

tended to be next door. And he would come in frequently with some new idea, and I normally was very negative...He called me the pisser because he said every time he came in, I would piss on his idea. But the point is that many of his ideas were not valuable or whatever. But there were two or five percent that were really great.7 Among the scientific community, Salam acquired the reputation of having an impertinent mind, in both the positive and the negative sense of the word: he was an audacious and original scientist, but some of his ideas were also a distracting factor. Not surprisingly, Salam’s students coincide in the view that he was a poor supervisor: “He always had many research problems to hand out, but, usually, he had not thought at all deeply about them,” recalls one of them.8 Nonetheless,

Salam’s extraordinary ability of recognising key problems in the field, his views about them, strength of character to defend his ideas, and tireless enthusiasm about physics, were tremendous forces that inspired the group.

In just a few years it became perhaps the most active of the few groups working in gauge theories during a period in which quantum field theories had been displaced by the S-matrix model. Salam was always very dismissive of the alternative approach insisting that it was an unsatisfactory description and that quantum field theory, gauge theory in particular, was of central importance because of it was more fundamental. He firmly believed that a more fundamental explanation would have come from improving the standard perturbation method for quantum field theory. The problem, like that which Salam had helped solve in the 1950s in relation to meson theories, was that these theories were not renormalisable. Throughout the 1960s, long before it was established as a standard model, and despite discouraging results, Salam was one of the few physicists in the world that maintained absolute confidence in the gauge theories.

7 Feldman, interviewed by author.

336 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

His confidence was transmitted through a research programme in which Imperial

College PhD particle physics students played a significant role. Salam’s students and colleagues focused on what Salam called the “gauge technique,” which consisted of the complex use of the so-called Ward identities (Salam had collaborated with Ward some years earlier), applied to the study of strong and weak interactions. The method did not work, but the important point was that they acquired enough expertise in the application of symmetry principles, and in mathematical problems regarding group theories. Some of the techniques developed by Salam’s and Matthews’ students were in fact later to become standard practices. The PhD dissertations they produced at this time can be seen retrospectively almost as textbooks for what would be taught fifteen years later in standard quantum field courses. Very few other groups worked with such tenacity in gauge theories in the 1960s, investigating the phenomenological implications of several Lagrangians built up by applying symmetry principles, showing that quantum field theory was as useful as the S-matrix formalism and that, technically, it was also able to predict crucial information including the masses of several particles. Yet Salam’s school has passed unnoticed by most historians of physics and instead, as shown in chapter 1, all the literature has focused on his genius. I contend the almost obvious fact that Salam’s contributions to particle physics were due not so much to his genius but to the collective work of the group he led. I shall illustrate how the research carried out by the group in London and in Trieste complemented each other, with reference to the development of the theory for strong interactions (roughly speaking, those dealing with nuclear 8

8 John Strathdee, email to the author, 12 June, 2001.

337 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns particles) by Salarti and two of his Imperial College students, Robert Delbourgo and John Strathdee.

Before discussing their work, I shall need to provide the scientific context in which their contribution took place. After the failure of the Yukawa theory,9 and the great difficulties Yang and Mills found in dealing with divergences, most particle physicists abandoned quantum field theory to study strong interactions focusing on S-Matrix and other schemes such as “Reggeism,” a method invented by Tulio Regge. In 1961, just two years before the Centre’s creation was approved in Vienna, Murray Gell-Mann, from the California Institute of Technology, introduced a new model to classify the known particles which he called the

'flghtfold way” because they were classified in groups of eight. A similar result was achieved simultaneously in London by the military attaché to the Israel’s

Embassy in London, who had decided to do a PhD in theoretical physics at

Imperial College, which happened to be the nearest college to the Embassy. His name was Yuval Ne’eman and his supervisor was Abdus Salam. The success of the model was ensured by the detection in 1964 of the £T particle, with exactly the same characteristics predicted by the theory. In early 1964, Gell-Mann (and independently George Zweig) suggested that the “Eightfold Way” could be mathematically justified by assuming that “fundamental” particles (hadrons and mesons) were made up of unobservable, smaller entities that he called “quarks”

(and Zweig “aces”). Very few physicists took the quark hypothesis seriously or

9 See Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson, eds. Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s: based on a Fermilab symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Pickering, Constructing Quarks. Between 1964 and 1966, Tom Kibble, in a joint work with his colleague at Edinburgh (from where Kibble had graduated), and Peter Higgs, invented a basic dynamical mechanism in particle physics called spontaneous symmetry breaking (initially know as the Higgs-Kibble mechanism and later just as the Higgs mechanism). Theoreticians like Steve Weinberg were regular visitors to Imperial College (in 1960 he spent his sabbatical in London). This kind of quantum field theorists were a minority in the particle physics community.

338 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns tried to investigate it by re-introducing and developing quantum field theory.10 At best, the quark model was viewed as a useful mathematical trick to classify particles, but without any physical reality, a situation that was to last until the mid-1970s.

That same year, another breakthrough came when the Turk Feza Gtirsey and Italian Luigi A. Radicati, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, proposed a new model designed to expanding the phenomenology of hadrons (the particles governed by strong interactions) through a symmetry principle. The model also offered a larger classification system that was able to accommodate more hadrons than the Eightfold Way.11 The aim was to generalise a symmetry principle invented by Eugene Wigner in 1936, in the frame of nuclear physics. Wigner observed that nucleons were indistinguishable in their strong interactions by virtue of the conservation of a new quantum number he introduced, the isospin. It was said that the these interactions were invariant or symmetrical under transformations of such numbers. The mathematical group of symmetry was the combination of the isospin group (SU(2)i)12 and the spin group of nucleons

(SU(2)s), the total group then being SU(4) (=SU(2)i®SU(2)s). The importance of this result lies in the fact that this symmetry served to classify neutrons and protons as members of one isospin family or “multiplet,” which was to remain central to the study of strong interactions in the years to come.13 Gursey and

10 Harry Lipkin, “Quark Models and Quark Phenomenology,” in The Rise o f the Standard Model. Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Lillian Hoddeson and et al., 542-560 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 546-547. 11 Besides Gursey and Radicati, Zweig had proposed a similar idea in August 1964, but from a different perspective (Pickering, Constructing Quarks, 93-95). 12 SU(n) stands for Standard Unitary Group of n parameters, and they are mathematical objects that serve to describe the transformation under which the interaction is supposed to be invariant. 13 See Pickering, Constructing Quarks, 55-56.

339 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

Radicati assumed that an analogy could apply to hadrons instead of nuclei.14 In

Wigner’s case the mathematical group that transformed isospins was SU(2), in hadrons it became SU(3), while Wigner’s SU(4) was replaced by SU(6). SU(6) thus became the first candidate considered seriously by particle physicists seeking to revive the Yang-Mills theory (and hence the quantum field theory) in the mid

1960s.

Gursey and Radicati’s theory had a serious problem, which physicists noticed immediately: it was not invariant under Lorentz transformations, which means that it did not take into account relativistic effects. This was inconsistent with the general formalism, and even worse, several characteristics of the model, such as the disparate masses of the particles within a single multiplet suggested that relativistic effects should be considered. By the fall of 1964, it became clear that searching for a relativistic version of SU(6) was urgent, and that it was the next logical step.

Salam learned about SU(6) during a visit to the United States and realised the importance of exploring it. SU(6) was far from being an exact symmetry, or even a satisfactory one, but Salam firmly believed that a definitive, exact symmetry would emerge only after a long history of trials and errors. The choice of exploring a particular group was like a gamble, the crucial thing being to have a good “intuition.” His belief that a physicist from the Third World might find this symmetry was a consequence of this vision (see chapter 2). After all, was it not the first time that so many advances in theoretical physics had been made by non-

Westem physicists? C.N. Yang, T.D. Lee, Madame Wu, Jaime Tiomno, Benjamin

14 This generalisation implied a serious problem concerned with the statistics of 1/2-spin particles, as commented in Lipkin, “Quark Model and quark phenomenology,” 550.

340 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

Lee, F. Gursey, and Salam himself, were just a few examples, but Salam did not seem to have taken into account is that all of them worked in Western institutions, or in permanent contact with them. This provided them the material and intellectual resources, stability and authority that are essential to, though not sufficient for the creation of an international reputation. As soon as he returned to

Imperial, Salam presented the SU(6) proposal at one of the Wednesday seminars.

He stressed that the group should re-direct its work towards the search of a generalised SU(6) theory. Matthews and the rest of the group agreed to this plan.

The decision to concentrate on this problem coincided with the splitting of the group. In a memorable meeting that most of the then students remember,

Salam and Matthews decided who would remain in London working with

Matthews and who would move to Trieste with Salam. The students themselves were not consulted, and naturally, they resented this “undemocratic” procedure typical of Salam’s administrative decisions.15 Nevertheless, between the fall of

1964 and 1966 the following Imperial College physicists joined the ICTP as visitors: Ray Rivers (UK), John Strathdee (USA), Daniel A. Akyeampong

(Ghana), Charles 0. Nwachuku (Nigeria), Jimmy Boyce (UK), Robert Delbourgo

(UK) and Harun-Ar-Rashid (Pakistan). Except for Delbourgo and Ar-Rashid, who had recently finished their PhDs, and Strathdee, who never finished his, all the rest were graduate students, and all, except Boyce, worked on some aspect of

SU(6) or its relativistic version. Some of these students had been working in completely different areas, but had changed direction after Salam’s excitement with SU(6). A case in point is Pakistani student Faheem Hussain who, on Salam’s suggestion, had been working on CP violation. A few months later, Matthews

,s Ray Rivers, interviewed by author; Faheem Hussain, interviewed by author.

341 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

realised that the problem did not have a clear solution and suggested that instead

Hussain should investigate the phenomenology of relativistic SU(6). Hussain,

Paolo Rotelli (Italy), M.A. Rashid (Pakistan), G. Murtaza (Pakistan) and Collin

Cook stayed in London working with Matthews.

The relativistic generalisation of the group was achieved by various authors immediately after the SU(6) paper.16 17 The hope was to find a larger group that could contain a relativistic generalisation of the spin group and the SU(3) related to isospin. These authors found that the non-trivial SL(6,C) was one of the simplest possibilities. However, the new symmetry group was mathematically very difficult to manipulate and, therefore, further developments in the investigation of its experimental predictions presented enormous obstacles. In addition, it was not a “unitary” group, which was one of the basic notions of S- n-atrix theory (with which any field theory ought to be compatible). This alternative seemed rather sterile.

By November 1964, Salam, Strathdee and Delbourgo obtained the first and perhaps the most important result in the SU(6) symmetry scheme. It first circulated as ICTP64/7 pre-print and was published a few months later in Physics

Review}1 The three authors, including Salam, appeared as affiliated only to the

International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. It transpired that SL(6,C) was not the only alternative. There was another group that, in principle, could do

16 T. Fulton, and J. Wess, “Symmetry Group Containing Lorentz Invariance and Unitary Spin,” Physics Letters 14, no. 1 (1965): 57-60; W. Riihl, “A Relativistic Generalization of the SU6 Symmetry Group,” Nvovo Cimento 37, no. 1 (1965): 301-18; J.M. Charap, and P.T. Matthews, “On the Covariant Extension of SU(6),” Proceedings of the Royal Society 286A (1965): 300-12. 17 See ICTP, Annual Report 1964-1965, ICTP: Mimeo, 1965, ICTP Archives. R. Delbourgo, A. Salam, and J. Strathdee, “Relativistic Structure of SU(6),” Physics Review 138, no. 2B (1965): 420-423; reprinted in A. Ali, C. Isham, T. Kibble, and Riazzuddin, eds. Selected Papers of A. Salam (with Commentary) (Singapore: World Scientific, 1994), 214-217.

342 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns the same arid Salam and his group had decided to work on U(6,6). At Imperial,

Matthews and J. Charap had been working on the U(6)0U(6) group. The result obtained by the Trieste group was a step forward, but fact, they felt deeply indebted to Matthews and Charap for “stimulating discussions, [and] who have developed U+(6)®U.(6) formalism independently.”18 Without suggesting that it was a deliberate or conscious strategy, the acknowledgement created the image of a separation between Imperial and the ICTP; a boundary that actually did not exist. The “two” groups were interested in the same problem (relativistic SU(6)), and were deeply imbued with the same research programme (quantum field theory). They were conditioned by similar techniques (gauge techniques), not to mention the permanent and regular contact they kept through meetings in London and Trieste.

The crucial result was that in terms of experimental predictions, the

Delbourgo-Salam-Strathdee theory was as good as the other relativistic versions of SU(6), with the additional advantage that it predicted a definitive value for the proton magnetic moment which was in fair agreement with the experiment.

However, there were several more phenomenological aspects that needed to be tested. There were several long and complex calculations that needed to be done before having a complete relativistic theory. For instance, summing spins in quantum mechanics is not as simple as summing two numbers, or even vectors (in a plane space). For each case, it is necessary to calculate the so-called “Clebsch-

Gordan” coefficients which accompany each component of the added spins. These calculations are more tedious than difficult. For SU(6) this job was done by

Murtaza and Cook in London. A month later, Salam, Delbourgo and Strathdee

'*■ Delbourgo et al., “Relativistic Structure of SU(6);” my italics.

343 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns published another paper in which they further generalised the SU(6) theory and found mathematical relations compatible with other results.19 20 Again, much work was required to carry out explicit calculations before compacting them into the form in which they should appear on the final paper. In this case, the authors were helped by graduate student M.A. Rashid in London, who was working on unitary symmetry schemes for strong interactions.

The U(6,6) theory presented serious problems. The main obstacle was that, like the other proposals, it violated “unitarity. Salam and his collaborators continued to work as though the problem was not as serious as it appeared; a typical pragmatic attitude encouraged by Salam. However, in the meantime Salam had others investigating means to avoid or remedy the obstacle. Daniel

Akyeampong, from the Trieste contingent, devoted part of his PhD thesis to the problem, however, his results proved rather inconclusive.21 Eventually, the

• iiiitarity” problem became too serious to be ignored and became the focus of thoughtful attacks on the theory.

Comparing experimental results with the available data was a crucial part of the work carried out by the group. The first part of Akyempong’s dissertation compared U(6,6) predictions for baryon-baryon scattering and experimental data.

In this case, he found them compatible, but the results of Faheem Hussain were less encouraging. Working in close collaboration with Rotelli in London, he constructed elements of the scattering matrix (S-matrix), from which it was

A. Salam, R. Delbourgo, and J. Strathdee, “The covariant theory of strong interaction symmetries,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 284 (1965): 146-158. 20 As noticed by M.A.B. Beg, and A. Pais, “SU(6) and semileptonic interactions,” Physical Review Letters 14 (1965): 51-53 and R. Blankenbecler, M.L. Goldberger, K. Johnson, and S.B. Treitman, “Some tests of Relativistics SU(6) schemes,” Physical Review Letters 14 (1965): 518-520.

344 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns possible to compute the experimental predictions of relativistic U(6,6). Further into the thesis he used his results to compare the predictions in the case of proton- antiproton annihilation into mesons. He found that “the experimental results are in clear contradiction with our predictions.”“ In fact, as Hussain noted, the problem was related to that found in consideration of the proton-antiproton annihilation processes, where the effects of unitarity were neglected. Hussain’s result caused

Salam and Matthews great concern and on one of Salam’s trips to London, they examined Hussain’s work hoping to find a mistake. They found nothing wrong and authorised its publication.

However, before the discouraging results by Hussain and Rotelli, the general feeling was of enormous optimism. During this period, a number of aspects of the theory were elaborated by other ICTP visitors. Several papers and pre-prints on relativistic SU(6) came from Salam’s group in London and Trieste.23

Those who had been moved to Trieste, identified themselves as members of the

ICTP. Other papers appeared as collaborations between ICTP fellows and

Imperial College physicists. Some times Salam signed as a fellow of the ICTP, and others as from Imperial, in an attempt to maintain a balance between the two.

Increasingly, relativistic U(6,6) was associated with the new centre. Salam trusted that the triumph of U(6,6) would be the antidote to the scepticism within the

IAEA and the scientific community. In January 1965, he reported: “Just now we21 22

21 Daniel A. Akyeampong, “Applications of Higher Symmetry Groups” (PhD Dissertation, Imperial College-University of London, 1966). 22 Faheemmullah Hussain, “Applications of group theory to elementary particle physics” (PhD Dissertation, Imperial College-University of London, 1966), 88. 2"' For instance: R. Delbourgo, A. Salam, and J. Strathdee, “U(12) and broken SU(6) symmetry,” Naovo Cimento 36 (1965): 689-692 (pre-print ICTP64/11), A. Salam, J. Strathdee, J. Charap, and P. Matthews, “P and C properties of U(12) multiplets,” Physics Review 15, no. 184-185 (1965) (pre-print ICTP65/11); R. Delbourgo and M.A. Rashid, “The ¿22 multiplet in U(12),” pre-print

345 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

are working at the very high pressure and the subject of elementary particles is

unfolding itself in a fascinating manner. We are at a definitive stage of the final

theory and things are fitting.”* 24 * *

Physicists celebrated the great achievement of Salam and his group.

Giirsey sent a postcard to Salam with a poem by sixteenth-century dervish Sultan

Abdal and the following note: “Even if I tried ‘to show the way’ you are the one

who reached the goal and saw Mecca. I feel proud of my younger brother

dervish.”23 The news reached pages of the Sunday Times before they were

published in scientific journals. Relativistic SU(6) was presented as the most

significant result in many years, Oppenheimer chaired the meeting where Salam presented his result, and Trieste became a well known place to particle physicists.

Between 1964 and 1966, the Centre was visited by practically everybody working in symmetry groups. Salam appointed Gursey as an ICTP Associate and he spent nine months in Trieste. Harry Lipkin, from Israel and Walter Thirring gave a seminars on extensions of SU(6). During the summer of 1965 Salam organised a workshop in Trieste, which the most important physicists working in field theory attended.27 This was the culmination of a first year of intense work by the

Imperial College group in Trieste and London and led by Salam and Matthews.

ICTP65/I4; R. Delbourgo, “Higher meson resonances and the 421 2* multiplet,” pre-print ICTP65/23. 24 Salam to S. Eklund, 12 January 1964, D.147, ASP. 23 Feza Giirsey to Salam, B.245, ASP. 6 Sunday Times, 27 January 1965. 27 Among the many contributions, we should mention Yoshio Nambu’s work on parastatistics and the introduction of “colour,” an influential model that would eventually be used in the foundation of Quantum Chromodj(namics. See IAEA. High-Energy Physics and Elementary Particles (Vienna: IAEA, 1965).

346 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

A fèw months later, Hussain’s result was confirmed by others; furthermore, a theorem was published demonstrating that it was not possible to combine internal and space-time symmetries.28 Delbourgo had to return to

London and the group practically dissolved. Salam continued his work with

Strathdee in relativistic symmetry theories, but no important results were achieved. However, regardless of any retrospective negative assessment we can make of this programme, for a period it was a great hope for the community of particle physicists.29 For the ICTP, it was a breakthrough. U(6,6), in the words of theoretician Gordon Feldman, “put the ICTP on the map.”30

6.2 The publishing pattern of the ICTP

A visible institution is not necessarily one that is deemed a top centre in terms of scientific production. This is demonstrated, at least in the opinion of physicists in the developed world, by the ICTP. Although the plasma physics activities, the preparatory Pugwash conference and the achievements of Salam’s group proved effective in calling attention of both scientists and politicians to the new centre, and despite public statements made by the older generation of physicists committed to scientific internationalism (most notoriously Oppenheimer and

Weisskopf), the younger generation was more critical about the ICTP as a research centre. Significantly, as mentioned in the previous chapter, most of the future Associates did not learn about ICTP while they were doing their PhDs in

28 S. Coleman, and J. Mandula, “All possible symmetries of the S-Matrix,” Physics Review 159 (1967): 1251. 29 Like other events that took place in the ICTP, this has been completely ignored by historiography (Pickering, Constructing Quarks) as well as by some of the protagonists themselves (Lipkin, “Quark Model and quark phenomenology,” 550-51). 30 G. Feldman, interviewed by author.

347 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

Europe or the United States, but only upon their returning to their home countries.

The view from the South, however, was exactly the opposite.

I suggest that the ICTP outputs, particularly the publications, had different meanings for each of these communities. Although publications are not the only products of scientific institutions, they are also commonly used by scientists as a measure of institutional performance. Needless to say, the criteria by which the publications record of an institution may be assessed are far from being objective, and I do not intend to undertake this task. Instead, I am interested in understanding the different meanings ascribed to the ICTP publications independently from their “objective” value.

The publications became an issue as early as 1966 through the case of physicist K. S. Tausk. Tausk, born in Austria in 1927 but educated in Brazil, was awarded a Licenciatura (equivalent to a BSc) in physics from the University of

Sao Paulo in 1952. In Brazil he had been working on measuring theory in quantum mechanics, but in 1965, when he went to ICTP as a visitor, he wanted to enrol in the Advanced School of Physics and change fields.31 However, he continued to work in measurement theory, and in 1966 he wrote a paper in which he criticised the standard theory as presented in a well known work by the Italian

Professor Angelo Loinger. Tausk’s work was “published” as an ICTP “internal report,” but in practice it circulated as an ICTP pre-print. Loinger’s reaction was to expose the ICTP as a source of misleading papers. In September 1966, Loinger wrote an open letter that appeared in a widely read Italian magazine, L ’Europeo, that pointed to the dubious rigour that, in his and other physicists’ opinion.

31 Memo from Luciano Fonda, to Salam, “Report on the Fellows of the Centre," 10 February 1967, D. 1713, ASP.

348 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns characterised the ICTP’s documents. He questioned the Italian financial support to the Centre, in an attack which, given the character of the chosen magazine, was explicitly political.32 Loinger thought that this kind of misconduct must also be exposed in scientific circles and he sent another open letter to the President of the

Italian Physics Society, Gilberto Bemardini. He criticised the large number of pre prints coming out of some institutions, suggesting that these “pseudo-works,” as he called them, should be suppressed. He suggested that the Society should institutionalise a new Prize “for the worst paper written every year,” and that the first Prize should be awarded to “K.S. Tausk for his ‘Relation of Measurement with Ergodicity, Macroscopic Systems, Information and Conservation Laws,’

ICTP Report 14/1966.”33 The letter elicited a reply from Budinich, Fonda and

Daniele Amati in which they argued that it was difficult to find objective criteria by which to judge a scientific paper. They insinuated that Loinger’s reaction was mainly due to the fact that Tausk had criticised his work, adding that Tausk’s work, which constituted his thesis at the Advanced School of Physics, had been approved by David Bohm and J.M. Jauch.34 In passing I should add that, given

Bohm’s reputation as an heterodox interpreter of quantum mechanics, this only served to cement the belief that, even at a senior level, the ICTP was populated by rather undisciplined minds. In a sense, Salam himself was another example of that.

32 Angelo Loinger, “Scienza e quattrini,” L'Europeo, September/October, 1966. JJ “Lettera aperta di A. Loinger al Presidente della Società Italiana di Fisica,” 9 September 1966, Papers of Sig. Stabile (Personal Archive). 34 “Lettera aperta di D. Amati, P. Budini, L. Fonda al Presidente della Società Italiana di Fisica,” 11 October 1966, Papers of Sig. Stabile (Personal Archive).

349 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

Loinger’s attack transcended national boundaries. He sent the pre-print to his friend Leon Rosenfeld, who had worked on the measuring problem with Niels

Bohr. Rosenfeld’s reaction could not have been more severe:

From the inexhaustible flow ofpreprints from your Institute I picked out the other day one with the somewhat bombastic title ‘Relation of Measurement with Ergodicity, Macroscopic Systems, Information and Conservation Laws’ by a certain K..S. Tausk... It is such incredible trash that I hardly could believe my eyes when I read it. I feel that I ought to write you about it in the event that (as I hope) this masterpiece has just escaped your attention... The author of the incriminated paper belongs to that category of people who, for some reason, seem eager to expose to the world their own inability to understand the simplest epistemological points of quantum mechanics. I can’t do more than add this preprint to the heap of similar piling up in a dark comer of my office.35

This case was exceptional for it involved an explicit and open confrontation, and it is plausible that it was also motivated by personal reasons.

The idea that the ICTP was not exerting any control over its pre-prints was widely shared by physicists in Europe and the United States. Yet it was an opinion that never again became public. Even within the ICTP, the permanent staff was aware that the reputation of the ICTP was being seriously affected by the quality of its pre-prints. Conversely, in developing countries, physicists saw the ICTP pre prints as the expression of Third World contribution to mainstream research.

The question then is: why did the ICTP follow a publishing policy characterised by a lack of internal control? I suggest four possible explanations.

First, one of the reasons for the invisibility of Third World physicists was that only a minority currently published in international journals.36 The standard notion of international publication entails the process of submitting works to the international scientific community for peer reviewing. This, however, is the final

’5 Leon Rosenfeld to Abdus Salam, 20 September 1966, D.2111, ASP (my italics). 6 The contribution to the physics literature by Africa, Asia and Latin America is estimated to be no larger than 10%.

350 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns step; scientists must first learn to write scientific papers, with the appropriate format, language, assumptions and degree of mathematical detail that are accepted by the members of each sub-discipline. As part of their incorporation into the international scientific community, Third World physicists had to learn this code.

The lack of a tradition in communicating through scientific literature, particularly in the field where the international community virtually limited to scientists in industrialised countries, was responsible for their inexperience in writing technical papers for an international audience. Furthermore, there was also a language problem for physicists whose mother tongue was not English. These were the kinds of “mental barriers” Salam thought urgently needed to be broken.

Consequently, one of the roles of the ICTP was to stimulate its visitors to write, and it was seen as an essential part of their training for research?1 This was almost an exercise, although the authors took their works very seriously precisely because they would be “published” as ICTP pre-prints. In this sense, writing up papers was one of the practices in which training and research merged at the

ICTP. Salam was not the only one who believed that this was one of the goals of the Centre. A few months before his death, Oppenheimer commented: “[t]he centre has obviously encouraged, stimulated and helped talented visitors from developing countries who, after rather long periods of silence, have begun to write and publish during their visit to the centre in Trieste”38 In principle, the training should include peer-reviewing, but in practice, the priority was to break the psychological barrier.37

37 So much so that there was a tacit, and sometimes less tacit competition among the ICTP fellows of the number of papers written up at the Centre. A former Associate told the author, for instance, that it was not uncommon to be explicitly asked by other fellows “how many papers have you written here?” (Angela Camacho, interviewed by author). ■’* J. Robert Oppenheimer to S. Eklund, 1 June 1965, Papers of Sig. Stabile (Personal Archive).

351 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

The second reason complements the previous one and is related to Salam’s

own view about publishing. As well as having tendency to produce solutions

without thinking deeply about the problem, he felt tempted to publish most of

these ideas. Once again, it was the duty of his collaborators, particularly Matthews

and Feldman, as well as Strathdee and Delbourgo, to act as filters. The origin of

his attitude towards publication was his experience in 1957-58, when, due to

Pauli’s rejection, Salam decided not to publish his ys-theory paper (see Section

1.5.2). Throughout his life, Salam thought that he would have deserved to share

the Nobel Prize with Yang and Lee for this work, and that Pauli’s advice had been

responsible for his not having received enough credit, rationalising the reasons

with it was important not to leave unpublished what one considered a good idea.

Severe internal controls could prevent a good idea from emerging. In Salam’s

view, the situation in particle physics was such that anyone might make an

important contribution, and it was one of the ICTP’s aims to help these potential

contributors to diffuse their ideas. The ICTP pre-print system offered an

opportunity to Third World physicists, who, for some reason could not publish in

international journals. In this sense, the ICTP pre-print system is a predecessor of the Los Alamos and the SISSA (Scuola Internazionale di Studi Superiori Avanzati

in Trieste, see below) systems, which became the standard tool of

communications among physicists since the early 1990s.39 Unfortunately, in the

jt) A pre-print scheme was originally proposed in 1964 by the Technical Information Division of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC) and made public by Michael Moravcsik (Michael Moravcsik, “Pro: Physics Information Exchange — A communication Experiment,” Physics Today 19, no. 6 (1966): 61-69). He pointed out that scientific information passed mainly through public and personal communications, rather than through journals, and that Third World scientists were isolated because they did not have access to that kind of communication. The proposal was to create a system in which, when a researcher completed a new paper, he would send a copy to a central office, in this case in at USAEC, Washington, D.C. The USAEC would then distribute the paper among the group of people subscribed to the list of interested researchers. » Regardless of Moravcisk’s genuine concern for Third World physicists, the USAEC’s intention was not so much to help the Third World scientists as to centralise scientific information in High

352 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

1960s and 1970s the ICTP lacked the credentials and the means to make this

scheme work. A pre-print system in which only Third World scientists

‘‘published” was viewed with suspicion by physicists in the North.

The other two reasons for prompting the ICTP fellows to publish are practical. One deals with the material limitations in terms of permanent scientific staff. It would had been impossible for Salam, Budinich and their collaborators, to track the publications of the hundreds of physicists that visited the ICTP every year. For the reasons explained above, it would have been contradictory to say that the ICTP would circulate a pre-print only after having being accepted by a refereed journal. The other reason is that the ICTP had to show the sponsor agencies results. The Centre was often attacked for not being aimed at Third

World physicists, and showing that a high proportion of “publications” were by visitors from developing countries served to answer such criticisms. Somewhat misleadingly, the figures presented in the Annual Reports referred to pre-prints, and the ICTP never recorded how many of these works were actually published in scientific journals.

Energy Physics in the United States. The proposal, called Physics Information Exchange (PIE), did not come to fruition, partly because of the opposition by several physicists in the United States, most notably the editor of the Physical Review, Simon Pasternak. Referring to Moravcsik’s proposal, Pasternak talk in the same terms as many scientists thought about the ICTP “publications”: “The fact that PIE would be unbounded, unedited, unrefereed, indexed and in many cases not even proofread by the authors, would merely make it a horrendous sloppy publication, but nonetheless is would be a publication” (Simon Pasternak, “Con: Criticism of the Proposed Physics Information Exchange,” Physics Today 18, no. 3 (1965): 62-69). In April 1965 André Hamende, from the ICTP, wrote to Moravcisk suggesting that, perhaps, “the Trieste Centre would be the right place to organize a preprint registry.” Eventually, the PIE project was replaced by an alternative one operated by SLAC and the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Institute of Physics, in which both authors and subscribers had to pay (US$1,000 per year plus US$50 for any extra copy). In this scheme, Third World scientists were barely mentioned and the range of prices practically excluded them. The ICTP finally distributed only papers produced at the Centre..On the PIE project and the ICTP see ASP, M.282-284, ASP: see especially M. Moravcsik to Salam, 12 October 1965, M. Moravcsik to Salam, 28 October 1965; and Salam to M. Moravcisk, 9 November 1965 (in M.182)

353 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

6.3 The High-energy Physics “November Revolution” and the Exclusion of the ICTP

In 1974-75, the confrontation reached a peak in the UN as well as in the United

Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). In New

York, Yasser Arafat was invited to address the General Assembly. The next year,

following a resolution adopted in Kampala by the Assembly of Heads of State of

the Organisation of African Unity, a resolution was passed condemning “Zionism

as a form of racism and racial discrimination.”40 Against this background, in

November 1974 three resolutions were voted by UNESCO’s General Assembly against Israel. Two of them condemned Israel policies towards the Palestinians

and the Muslim cultural heritage in Jerusalem. The third one addressed the status

of Israel as a member of UNESCO. Israel, the US and Canada requested voting powers as opposed to mere observation on activities related to the European region. The American and Canadian requests were approved, but Israel was turned down. The “Israel-Resolutions,” as they came to be known, were a symbolic act of insubordination in an institution traditionally dominated by the West. I would term this episode the “Diplomatic November Revolution.” As a result of this

revolt, the ICTP, which was officially sponsored by UNESCO, was boycotted by

Israeli and American physicists. The political aspect of the boycott will be

discussed elsewhere.41 Here, I will focus on how it affected the participation of

the ICTP in one of the most important events in the history of particle physics.

40 UN Doc. A/RES/3379 (XXX), Nov. 10, 1975. 41 On the Israel resolutions see C. Wells, The UN, UNESCO and the Politics o f Knowledge (London: MacMillan Press Ltd.., 1987). For space limitations my study could not included in this dissertation. It will be published as a separate paper.

354 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

The 1974-76 events in high-energy physics have been told and analysed by

various authors, including insiders, largely concerned with the intellectual

development of particle physics and the relations between theory, experiments

and machines.421 do not intend to reproduce it here, but a brief summary may be

appropriate.

While the detection of the omega particle in 1964 gave particle physicists

the confidence to believe that quarks constituted a useful notion to analyse the

subatomic zoo, there was no agreement yet on their ontological reality. The

announcement of the new particle was received as a positive sign at a time where

the myriad of new particles coming out from the accelerators could not be

satisfactory explained or classified by the few available theoretical models. It was

not clear how to interpret the new phenomena, but it was nevertheless, an

important stimulus. The outcome was the establishment of quantum chromodynamics, the late twentieth-century model of particle interactions. It was the community of particle physicists who coined the term “November Revolution” to refer to this period.43 On 11th November 1974, two American laboratories investigating the eV(positron-electron) annihilation detected an enormous resonance around 3.1 GeV.44 Burton Richter’s group at the Positron-Electron

Asymmetric Ring (SPEAR) storage ring at the Stanford Linear Accelerator 14 *

42 On the “November Revolution” see Pickering, Constructing Quarks, 180-188,213-228 and 253- 281. The most exhaustive volume of recollections of active particle physicists in the 1960s and 1970s is Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Michael Riordan, and Max Dresden, eds. The Rise of the Standard Model. Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Abdus Salam could not attend the meeting on which the volume is based due to the advanced state of his illness. 4'' As an example of the significance of this episode in the history of high energy physics, note that the frontispiece of the volume Hoddeson et al., The Rise o f the Standard M odel a ispicture of a computer reconstruction of a decay of the psi-prime particle. 14A resonance, in the experimental high-energy physicists’ jargon, is used to say that a particle was detected to have a mass equivalent to the energy where the resonance was found. Resonances are unstable and short-lived, and decay very fast.

355 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

(SLAC), called the new particle Psi (v|/), and the Brookhaven National

Laboratory-MIT collaboration, led by Samuel Ting, called it J. A few days later, the Italian laboratory at Frascati confirmed the discovery of the “J/vj/” particle.

The characteristics of the unexpected particle - long lifetimes and large mass - made the theoreticians think that it might be a manifestation of a new quark.

Since the mid 1960s, some theorists, motivated by theoretical assumptions such as a symmetry in the number of leptons and quarks, or the quark electric charge, suggested additional quarks. Sheldon Glashow, James D. Bjorken,

Daniele Amati and others advocated the existence of “charm” to be added to “up,”

“down,” and “strange.” More radically Leon Van Hove, and others at CERN, suggested an additional triplet of quarks, doubling the total number. Yoshio

Nambu and M.Y. Han, of the University of Chicago, motivated by the problem of quark statistics, proposed three triplets raising the number to nine quarks. None of tiiose schemes gathered much attention until the Weinberg-Salam gauge theory of unification was revived thanks to Gerard’t Hoft and Martin Veltman’s work on renormalization in the early 1970s. Another problem persisted: some modes of decay of a new intermediary particle predicted by the Weinberg-Salam model (the neutral current Z°) did not show up in the laboratories. Theorists Glashow,

Iliopolous and Maiani (“GIM”) invented a mechanism that re-introduced charm in order to solve this problem, then known as the “strangeness-changing” problem.

Glashow would recall this period in his Nobel Lecture four years later:

After languish for a decade, the problem of the selection rules of the neutral current was finally solved.. ..Due to the work o f ’t Hooft, Veltman, Benjamin Lee, and Zinn-Justin, it became clear that the Weinberg-Salam. ansatz was in fact a renormalizable theory. With GIM, it was trivially extended from a model

356 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

of leptons to a theory of weak interactions. The ball was now squarely in the hands of experimenters.45 Indeed, when the J/\|i particle was announced, it was immediately associated with charm, identifying J/\|/ with a composite system of a quark charm and its anti- particle. In 1975 and 1976 a “family of new particles” was detected. The

“Charmonium model,” an elaborated version of the charm-anticharm system, was apparently able to reconstruct the correct channels of decay of each particle and, therefore, to reproduce the whole of what might be called the family genealogy. It prevailed over the other alternatives, and, although it was later discarded, it served to establish charm as a new member of the particle zoo. The outcome of the

“High-energy November Revolution” was the establishment of quarks as real particles. In 1976 Richter and Ting received the Nobel Prize for physics, and the

Weinberg-Salam model with GIM became the “standard model” of particle physics.

However, the “Charmonium Model” had some competitors,46 one ol them being the Pati-Salam unification scheme of weak, electromagnetic and strong interaction. The model was presented at Fermilab in 1972, and published in a series of articles between 1973 and 1974.47 It was the product of the collaboration between Salam and young Indian physicists Jogesh Pati, at the University of

Maryland. This was the first attempt to construct a Great Unified Theory of all

45 Sheldon Glashow, “Towards a unified theory - Threads of a tapestry,” in Physics 1971-1980, edited by Stig Lundqvist (Singapore, London: World Scientific, 1992/1979), 542. 46 Although support was gained by charm in a few months, during 1975 speculations around the interpretation of the new particles were common place among particle physicists. G. Ekspong’s comment to Salam exemplifies this: “It is really exciting times, these 3.1 and 3.7 GeV particles. What are they; manifestations of neutral currents or charmonium?” (G. Ekspong to Salam, 12 December 1974, B.236, ASP) 47 J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Unified Lepton-Hadron Symmetry and Gauge theory of the Basic Interactions,” Physics Review D8 (1973): 1240-1251, J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Is Baryon Number Conserved?,” Physical Review Letters 31 (1973): 661-664, J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Lepton Number as the Fourth 'Color',” Physics Review DIO (1974): 275-289.

357 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

interactions (excluding gravity), and was the main research activity carried out by

Salam at the ICTP in the 1970s. The basic assumption was to consider leptons and

hadrons as similar objects, and therefore sitting in the same group representation.

This entailed the enlargement of the SU(3)C colour group (of the quantum

chromodynamic scheme) to SU(4 )l+r. The origin of the (mathematical) group

structure suggested by Pati and Salam can be traced back to two different

traditions: Salam and the work of his students from Imperial College on

relativistic SU(6), and Pati’s work related to selection rules in Fermion quarks at

Maryland, which was also indirectly connected to SU(6). The Han and Nambu

model was in fact a reformulation of theisame problem. Pati and C.H. Woo, both at

the Centre for Theoretical Physics of the University of Maryland, had explored

the experimental consequences of the Han-Nambu theory. The Pati-Salam model

inherited the Han-Nambu-type group for the hadronic part proposing various

alternatives for the assignment of the nine quarks.48 It also inherited the

theoretical prejudice that quarks carried integer electric charges. However, this

assumption was unnecessary in both the Han-Nambu and the Pati-Salam schemes.49 In 1974, Pati and Salam suggested “even experimental consequences” to their scheme. The first two referred to the existence of new particles, particularly a colour octet of vector gluons and the colour component of the

48 J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Unified Lepton-Hadron Symmetry and Gauge theory of the Basic interactions,” Physics Review D8 (1973): 1240-1251. 49 The reason for describing this technicality here will become clearer below. The point I beg the reader to bear in mind is the connection between the Pati-Salam and the Han-Nambu model, and that it was the first model of Grand Unification. The integer charged quarks had another consequence: it led to schemes with “free” quarks (or unconfined quarks). Later, Salam and Pati elaborated on this possibility (see J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Why Color Fails to Show in Electroproduction and Neutrino Scattering Experiments,” Physical Review Letters 36 (1976): 11- 14).

358 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

photon.50 It was expected that the former occurred in “normal hadronic

collisions,” having a mass between 3 and 10 GeV. As for the latter, it was

predicted to appear in e+e' annihilations. Pati and Salam proposed specific decay

modes for these particles in case they were unstable.

When SPEAR and Brookhaven announced the new particle, Pati and

Salam sent a communication to Physical Review Letters, entitled “Are the New

Particles Color Gluons?” The article began by pointing out that in their 1972-3

model “both charm and color were found essential,” and that “from the point of

view of that scheme, the discovered particles might indeed be charm-anticharm-

quark composites.. .or, alternatively, colored gauge bosons.” The paper presented

selections rules51 derived from the interaction Lagrangian of their model and the

spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism used to break the colour symmetry.

Based on these rules, Pati and Salam predicted the decay modes of these particles.

In other words, they offered a particle spectroscopy alternative to the one

predicted by the “charmonium model.” Additionally, they claimed that it was

necessary to begin a search in the energy regions in which their model predicted

the existence of new particles. They wrote: “[wjith this identification, we are led

to predict two more particles,” adding that: “[t]hey ought to exist within at most

50 to 100 MeV of \|t and \|/’: we urge a search for them.”If that search gave a positive result, they concluded “it would be in order to search for the remaining

members of the gluon octet.”52

50 J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Lepton Number as the Fourth ’Color1,” Physics Review DIO (1974): 275- 289. 51 These are rules that allow or forbid certain decays to happen. For instance, the conservation of a quantum number, like the electric charge, is ah elemental selection rule. 52 J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Are the New Particles Color Gluons?,” Physical Review Letters 34 ( 1975): 613-616; italics in the original.

359 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

Salam presented his predictions to Gosta Ekspong, one of his friends at

Stockholm University and chair of the CERN Science Committee. After explaining in detail his predictions in the frame of the Pati-Salam model, he concluded:

Physicists are polarized between what new quantum number we have found. The CERN favourite is charm and SU(4) - Amati-Prentki were the founders of this quantum number (with Bacry, Nuyts, Glashow, Bjorken and Okun). Against this is the rumour that Ting produces \|/j in pairs. This would favour colour. As I have been emphasising, if it is colour-then photon has colour pieces and fractional charge model is dead.33

His private correspondence during this period focused on advancing his interpretation by contacting prominent figures. The degree of detail found in some of these letters is extraordinary, especially those to colleagues at the Swedish

Academy. Some of his correspondents replied with questions about the new empirical results, in response to which Salam spelled out how his scheme was able to accommodate most of the new results. Salam now wanted his model to be tested empirically, which required scanning in small steps, across specific energy ranges determined by the model. A crucial element in the negotiations between theoreticians and experimentalists is to decide what to see and where to see it.54

Salam hoped the colour-gluons would be detected as well as charm:

.. .It seems to me that colour has definitely been discovered and perhaps also charm and integer charges. The important experiments now are the ones (1) to fill up the octet of colour mesons and (2) to discover the triplet and anti triplet mesons of charm.53

There were few possibilities for a “severe test” in a Popperian sense. Pati and Salam pointed out that some of their predictions might not occur, even within 51 *

3 Salam to G. Ekspong, 21 March 1975 B.236, ASP. 51 This is similar to what happens in astronomy. To test a model, the region of the sky to be explored and the wavelengths in which the phenomenon is “observable,” must be established and, therefore, negotiated between astronomers and astrophysicists.

360 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns their theoretical framework.56 They wrote in anticipation of this, “in the event they do not show up in (e'e+) experiments... these two missing particles can then be produced in associated production and singly in hadronic collisions.”57 Thus, the scheme was flexible, and had room for a number of auxiliary hypotheses. It predicted specific channels of decay of the new particles, but also provided rules of selections precluding unobserved phenomena. If the additional particles were detected, then physicists would have considered their alternative more carefully.

Using a Latourian terminology, Pati and Salam saw the v|/ particle as a potential ally for mobilising their Grand Unification Theory amongst the community. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to convince their human allies that it was worth starting the search for “their” particles.58

I have referred to the flexibility of the model. To display it is crucial to have direct access to experimentalists. Personal contact permits not only a clearer exposition of obscure points in the written versions, but also stresses the flexibility of the model in relation to certain interpretations and assumptions.

Merz has suggested that talking physics does not result in new knowledge.59

Nevertheless, it can contribute to a shift of balance during scientific controversy 39 363738 *

55 Salam to G. Ekspong, 21 March 1975, B.236, ASP. 36 Further corrections to their phenomenological interpretations were offered during those years. For instance, J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Why Color Fails to Show in Electroproduction and Neutrino Scattering Experiments,” Physical Review Letters 36 (1976): 11-14. They argued that the class of spontaneous broken colour-gauge theories offered a reasonable explanation to the negative results without giving up their model. The suggestion was ignored. 37 J. Pati, and A. Salam, “Are the New Particles Color Gluons?,” Physical Review Letters 34 (1975): 613-616. 38 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987.. 39 M. Merz, “Nobody can Force You When You are Across the Ocean-Face to Face and E-Mail Exchanges Between Theoretical Physicists,” in Making space for science: territorial themes in the shaping o f knowledge, edited by Crosbie Smith and John Agar, 313-329 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).

361 Alexis De GreifF Chapter 6: Research patterns by, for example, familiarising the community with a model, emphasising its strengths and offering ways to elude the obstacles. Social spaces for discussion are places of negotiation, and the more time the counterpart listens, the greater the chances of trading. Intellectual marginality results from social exclusion. Salam thought that the ICTP could offer him a good opportunity to present his model and discuss the latest results. At a centre like the ICTP, so intimately linked with its director’s career, it was impossible not to learn the “model of the house,” while in other forums, it might be perceived as another theoretical speculation.

A few weeks after the J/\|/ discovery, Salam proposed holding a meeting in

Trieste during the summer of 1975. Its title was “Phenomenology in High Energy

Physics and the Missing Particles,” referring to the possible companions of the

J/xj/s. Leading theoreticians and experimentalists were invited, including Richter, but as in the case of solid state physics and complex analysis, the Americans and the Israelis refused to participate. Some influential theorists in Israel likeNe’eman and David Horn had already rejected any collaboration with the ICTP, as did

Haim Harari. Harari finished his PhD in Israel in 1965, and visited the ICTP that same year. He became an Associate Member in 1967, although he only visited the

Centre to attend few conferences, but not to do research.60 In 1974-75, he was a visiting theoretician at SLAC and it was from there that he energetically campaigned against UNESCO and the ICTP. Refusing any collaboration with the

Centre, he told Salam that “the only possible reaction of the civilized world must be to reject any participation of UNESCO in any .. .event.” He also advised Salam that he intended to circulate the letter in which he had discouraged the

60 ICTP, ICTP Annual Reports, 1967, 1968, ICTP Archives.

362 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

participation of scientists in ICTP activities.61 Salam tried to persuade him and the

others to stop the boycott pointing out that it would damage the Centre and not

UNESCO.

Salam decided to contact the boycotting scientists early in July. Luciano

Bertocchi was in the United States and Salam suggested that he approach the

Israelis and the American scientists. Salam had two objectives in mind. Firstly,

Bertocchi was to explain the ICTP’s position regarding Israel - that the UNESCO resolution had no effect on the ICTP’s selection policy - and secondly, he was to survey the general attitude towards the Centre. Bertocchi had several meetings with boycotting scientists in the United States. In his report, Bertocchi wrote of a

“long discussion in Israel on whether or not one should boycott the Centre.” He explained to Salam that the only way the Centre could avoid a boycott was by issuing a statement denouncing UNESCO.62 Meanwhile, Salam learned about

SLAC’s official stance, through an internal memo signed at the laboratory by 15 physicists, stating that “no experimental results obtained at SLAC could be exhibited at a UNESCO institute like Trieste.”63 This was the coup de grace at the

Trieste meeting and actually the only ICTP activity that was cancelled as a result of the boycott.

We should address what the ICTP’s exclusion from the high-energy physics “November Revolution” meant to the Centre and Salam. Both he and Pati felt excluded from the debates being held in the United States, not because their model was rejected, but because it was being utterly ignored. The new particles

61 Haim Harari to Abdus Salam, 4 February 1975, B.246, ASP; my italics. 62 Luciano Bertocchi Report of his visit to US, Memo, 26 July 1975, ASP, G.l 18, ASP. 6j Abdus Salam to Harrison, 28 July 1975, G.l 18, ASP.

363 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

were discussed in August at a major SLAC conference. Harari gave a talk on the

'Theoretical Implications of the New Particles,” in which he made a survey of the

various theoretical models. On the questions “does \|/ possess a new quantum number? Is it ‘Colored'?” Harari referred to “[t]he many versions of the Han-

Nambu color,” stressing that “[a]ll such models suffer from common difficulties.”

Thus the only tacit reference to the Pati-Salam model was in a reference to ten models that had to be discarded. After a short comment he concluded that: “The rejection of the possibility that the \|/-particles are colored, returns us to the conventional theoretical framework of hadron physics.” Hence, the experimentalists should concentrate on testing the Zwei-Iizuka rule, the selection rule of the “conventional framework.” According to Harari, “the Zl-rule accounts for several features which are otherwise very mysterious.”64

When Salam and Pati learned about Harari’s talk at SLAC, both addressed protest letters to him, which were sent to SLAC and the Weizmann Institute. They argued that the interpretation of the SPEAR experiment given by Harari had been biased and pointed out that since some fundamental questions, such as the charge of quarks and the existence of “free” quarks, were not yet resolved, theirs a legitimate alternative that deserved attention.65 Harari replied: “I realize that neither of us can convince the other. After all, the beauty of physics is that we have an unbiased referee, named experiment, which eventually solves all disputes

w Haim Harari, “Theoretical Implications of the New Particles,” Paper presented at the International Symposium on Lepton and Photon Interactions at the High Energies (Stanford 1975), 322-323; italics added. 65 On the controversy over the electric charge of quarks (related to the quark confinement problem), Pickering points out that, in spite of the experimental failure to find fractionally charged quarks, theorists who opposed them were “in a clear minority.” However, in 1981, when bickering’s paper appeared, the debate was far from being over as he acknowledged warning the reader that: “[t]he reader who looks to this paper for a definitive statement on the existence of free quarks will be disappointed. The debate within the physics community has yet to be resolved” (Andrew Pickering, “The hunting of the Quark,” ¡sis 72 (1981): 216-236).

364 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns in a final and unambiguous way. We must wait for him.”66 This elicited a response from Salam, which revealed the kind of negotiations that occur between experimentalists and theoreticians:

I do not think we shall convince each other with correspondence alone. The best thing you have said is this: ‘let experiment be the arbiter.’ But that was just what my letter was about. Since you, my dear Harari, are the one who tells experimenters what the possible theoretical alternatives are for them to watch, I was hoping you would list the alternative we [Pati and Salam] present also among various alternatives presented - and then give your reasons for discarding this particular alternative. The experimenters can judge whether your reasons are to them convincing.67 68 This may be seen as a good example of what Pickering has identified as the

/ o symbiosis between experimentalists and theoreticians in high-energy physics.

However, the exclusion of the ICTP during the course of the “November

Revolution” points to another dimension of the question about scientific practice; in order to participate through “opportunism in context,” one must first have access to the social contexts of controversy. Isolation is a social quality that has implications upon the epistemological value associated with a scientific theory, and I contend that Pickering frames the context of controversy in a purely epistemological space, ignoring a central element of social interaction: the political dimension. As anthropologists and sociologists of science have pointed out, theories, like institutions, need powerful allies. Pati and Salam knew that their theory would not stand on its epistemological merits alone, and to survive must be circulated within the appropriate social circles. If they wanted their theory to be considered and “tested,” it was mandatory that all available resources be mobilised in order to familiarise their peers with its potential. Above all, this required the time to spell out its motivations, assumptions, implications and, more

66 Haim Harari to Salam and Pati, 11 December 1975, B.246, ASP. 67 Abdus Salam to H. Harari, 15 January 1976, B.246, ASP.

68 Pickering, Constructing Quarks, Chapter 14.

365 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns importantly, flexibility in accommodating new data. It was Pati and Salam’s main concern that their theory should be allowed adequate time and space. The private controversy with physicists in the United States went on for years, due to what

Salam and Pati saw as the “inaccuracies in interpreting [their model].”69 Colour versus Charm was discussed in a panel shared by Glashow, Bjorken, Pati and J.L.

Rosner. Pati told Salam that although he only “had 7 minutes,” he thought that their ideas had been “very well accepted.” Most importantly, he added, there were

“many experimentalists” present, and it had been possible, “in conversations,” to survey the position of some theorists: Feynman was “sympathetic to the ideas,” but Gell-Mann and Glashow were still “dogmatic and resentful.” Further on he added that “they [Gell-Mann and Glashow] agree in conversations with me, that the familiar objections against physical color have disappeared.” At any rate, this private opinion was not made public. A few months later, Martin Perl (from

SLAC) gave a talk in the New York, which elicited the following complaint from

Pati: “I was disappointed to learn that you did not at all refer to our suggestion, at

New York Meeting, while you referred to the suggestions of Feinberg and Lee.”

Perl apologised, pointing out that “I am an informal speaker and usually vary what

1 say,” and promised to mention the Pati-Salam alternative in the future.70

However, despite the private promises and good intentions, the Pati-Salam interpretation remained marginal in both congresses and publications.

The aim of the Conference at Trieste was precisely to tell “experimenters what the possible theoretical alternatives are for them to watch,” stressing the potentialities, rather than the difficulties of the Pati-Salam model. Salam,

69 See for instance J. Pati, to Harari, 9 February 1976, B.246, ASP. n J. Pati to Martin Perl (SLAC), 9 February 1976 and Perl to Pati, 21 February 1976, B.265, ASP.

366 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

however, never had this chance at the ICTP, although, in the summer 1976 the

Centre held a conference on the topic with the altered title “Lepton Interactions

and New P a rtic les Salam approached Panofsky, the director of SLAC, asking

him to suggest names of participants. Panofsky replied dryly that arrangements

should be made on a “personal basis,” and that he could “not guarantee that some

of the problems which beset your last conference may not arise again.”71

The 1976 conference was a failure for one reason: by then, as Pickering

points out, “the critical phase of the November Revolution was over.”72 There was

little space to convince the experimentalist to start a search for alternatives to

charm and confinement. A new “established tradition” being created, and the

ICTP could only learn what was happening elsewhere. Apparently, Salam did not

even go to the meeting. The “negative” and “positive facts” about the meeting were reported by Budinich and Furlan. Among the former they listed the

following: only about half the expected numbers attended; the limited

international participation was mainly composed of Italians and Yugoslavs; some speakers refused to attend and, the report noted, “it is our impression that some did just because they are friends;” and finally, presumably alluding to Salam’s absence, the “participation of scientists from the ICTP has been very limited at all

levels.”73 The positive facts listed did not compensate for the strong criticism of

Salam’s lack of interest. Budinich and Furlan thought some of the “reasons for only partial success,” might laid at Salam’s door: “We finally feel that the Centre

i sn't as appealing as it used to be. This may perhaps be due to a present trend,

71 Wolfgang K..H. Panofsky to Salam, 17 February 1976, G.121, ASP. 72 Pickering, Constructing Quarks, 268. 7j P. Budini, and G. Furlan “Remarks on Topical Meeting on Lepton Interactions and New Particles,” Report to Academic Board, 9 July 1976, D. ICTP, Box: 14. Miscelaneous. Academic Board, 1972-91, ASP.

367 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns making other places more attractive, but, in our opinion, the chief reason for this is that the Centre’s scientific life in particle physics is not comparable with what it was in previous years, both as far as the quantity and quality of visitors concern

[sic].” The Trieste physicists accepted that the Centre was an extension of

Imperial, that at least attracted visitors, but they wanted Salam in Trieste to help bring it out of isolation. Salam’s association with Pati and his engagement in the ambitious Grand Unification programme would only isolate the Centre further, which was also being damaged by his ties with the Third World. These factors led to the deterioration of the already tense relationship of Salam and Budinich. In the forthcoming years, Budinich would increasingly concentrate on the creation of another institution in Trieste. Since the early 1970s, Budinich had wanted to institutionalise the Advanced School of Physics, and finally in 1978, the Scuola

Internazioncde di Studi Superiori Avanzad, SISSA, was set up with Budinich as its first director. SISSA was therefore a by-product of the ICTP. Ironically, although the boundaiy between the ICTP and SISSA tended to blur (even physically they are located side by side in Miramare), after a few years SISSA became a respected scientific centre, having avoided the stigma of being considered a Third World institution.

6.4 Conclusion

A central issue in the contrasting views of the ICTP deals with its publication pattern. The low quality of these “publications” are, like the Centre’s other activities, related to the diversity of its population, and to Salam’s own view of the issue. More importantly, in the publishing question we see a reflection of the apparent dichotomy between training and research. Many physicists came to the

368 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

Centre in search of a pertinent problem and the chance to present their ideas to an international audience. The ICTP preferred to encourage them to write, thinking that graphofobia was one of the most serious barriers to the establishment of a scientific tradition in the developing world. Such a permissive attitude turned out to be paternalistic and damaging to the image of the Centre.

The meaning of the documents issued by the ICTP was different for physicists in the South to that understood by those in industrialised countries. At the ICTP, several scientists had their first experience in writing a scientific paper in English. Because of their pedagogical duties at home, the majority of the Third

World scientists that visited the Centre could research and write only while in

Trieste, and many saw “publishing” there as a great privilege. The ICTP pre-prints carried an authority in tire South that contrasted with the opinion of most researchers in the élite institutions in the North. It is possible that the ICTP did not have a decisive, positive impact on the patterns of research in the Third World, but it is difficult to find a group of individuals who are more grateful to an institution than the ICTP’s visitors and Associates. Psychologically, the ICTP definitively helped them to break important barriers. Scientifically, it enabled them to establish contacts with peers in the North and, perhaps more importantly, with other physicists experiencing similar, but different, challenges in the South.

Politically, their affiliation to the ICTP, and therefore with the “international scientific community,” was central to the consolidation of their authority at home.

The exclusion of the ICTP from the “High-energy Physics November

Revolution,” due to the “Diplomatic November Revolution,” was a manifestation of the ICTP’s scientific marginality. The boycott of the ICTP allow us to scrutinise the “boundary-work” problem further in the context of international

369 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns scientific co-operation between unequal partners. In his work on the “social history” of particle physics, Andrew Pickering points out that scientists make decisions about competing paradigms, methods and facts, based on what he calls

"opportunism in context.”74 Pickering’s definition of “context” is strictly epistemological or, at best, tied to pedagogical traditions in some scientific institutions. He seems to take for granted the “natural” institutional settings for scientific controversies, that is the scientific tradition of élite institutions.

Nevertheless, the ICTP episode seems to reveal the presence of a hierarchy among the scientific institutional network, and the fact that scientists decide what should be the legitimate social spaces for scientific debates. In other words, to exert

“opportunism in context” effectively, one must have access to the social spaces of cobate and deliberation, that is, to the suitable social contexts and contacts. Pati and Salam’s insistence that their competitors misread their papers and treated their work unfairly at conferences that they could not attend, denotes the crucial role scientists ascribe to an exchange in appropriate social spaces.

What was the role of the ICTP in Salam’s career? The ICTP allowed him to have a group of physicists - mostly, with the notable exception of Pati, from

Imperial College, London - working for him. One of the crucial points about this group was that they were skilled enough to develop Salam’s suggestions quickly, which allowed Imperial and the ICTP to become central players in the development of SU(6). It was a very focused group in terms of the research programme, their top priority being to develop and test their director’s ideas. The existence of this group of young scholars, working on the details and calculations, allowed Salam to continue producing in science while directing the ICTP and

74 Pickering, Constructing Quarks, 10-13.

370 Alexis De Greiff Chapter 6: Research patterns

advising the president of Pakistan. His thirty-year collaboration with John

Strathdee was made possible by the special arrangement that allowed Strathdee to

be appointed as an IAEA officer, although his main duty was to work with Salam

"on his research."1^ This is why Salam’s case is so atypical, particularly for a

Third World scientist. Being in command of a group of highly qualified physicists

dedicated to developing his ideas, in an international centre, that was visited

regularly by top physicists, was a privilege belonging to very few. Salam’s public

rhetoric about the possibility that any Third World scientist might contribute to

theoretical physics was based on his own experience but failed to underline that it was only through very exceptional circumstances that those like him could participate in mainstream theoretical physics.

13 Strathdee’s status was never clear. He started working on eleven months contract, but after 1969 he was put on a four year (renewable) contract and allowed to join the IAEA’s pension fund. Strathdee was referred to as “Research Officer” (Strathdee to the author).

371 Concluding Remarks

o close this dissertation, I wish to summarise in these final pages the main points Tdrawn from the previous chapters, offer a short reflection on the North-South scientific exchange, and suggest some further questions for future research. As stated in the introduction, this dissertation is addressed to two audiences, and therefore these final paragraphs should be read with this double perspective in mind. On the one hand, this is an invitation to historians of twentieth-century physics to explore the world beyond the United

States and Europe, hie leones non sunt. On the other, the questions tackled through the history of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics are not necessarily constrained to the history of science and are common to other instances of the complex and often uneven exchanges of resources between the Third and First Worlds. Hence these final reflections are also addressed to scholars and policy makers who deal with international scientific exchange policies, most especially those engaged in North-South projects.

In 1979 Abdus Salam, together with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg, received the Nobel Prize for physics for his contribution to the unification of the electroweak forces. There may, however, have been other factors influencing the decision of the Swedish Academy, including his position as director of an institute devoted to the promotion of science in the Third World. Here I only have space to suggest a few such areas that would profit from further research and reflection. Since its creation, the ICTP had hosted several members of the Swedish Academy and, according to Salam’s students and collaborators, this had not been accidental. As was shown, from 1958 Salam had started to

372 Alexis De Greiff Concluding Remarks think seriously about the Nobel Prize, and his friend Usmani had lobbied energetically in

Western scientific circles on his behalf. Salam kept a separate file in his archive containing the documentation regarding his candidature, which dates back to these years. Stig

Lundqvist, who was in charge of the solid state programme at the ICTP, had helped Salam to obtain funds from the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), and in 1971 became a member of the Nobel Prize Committee for Physics. In 1978 SIDA’s support was to be conclusive. Perhaps Lundqvist realised that only a prestigious recognition of its director could secure the future of the Centre. Other members of the Nobel Committee, particularly Jan Nilsson, Gosta Ekspong, Ivar Waller and Lamek Hulthen, were close to the

ICTP, and Salam’s correspondence demonstrates that some of them lobbied on his behalf and kept him informed of decisions taken by the Members of the Academy.1 Irrespective of these motivations, which are very revealing of the politics of the Nobel Prize, the award meant the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Centre. Although it was never a rich institution, given the growing demand by Third World scientists, the ICTP’s budget improved considerably after 1979, thanks especially to the Italian contribution, which doubled in 1981 and had reached US$ 3m by 1983 (compared to US$ 725,000 in 1979).2

With the conferral of the Nobel Prize upon Salam, our story, comes to an end.

However, the 1980s and early 1990s are years of enormous interest in terms of the evolution of Salam’s thought and his political activities. Since 1975, for instance, Salam’s

.optimism about the willingness of industrialised countries to contribute actively to Third

World development had been dimmed by years of frustration, caused both by attempts to

1 On the Nobel Prize saga see A74-A256, ASP. 2 The IAEA granted an increment of almost 50%, while UNESCO’s contribution remained the same. See Appendix 1, and ICTP. International Centre for Theoretical Physics ¡964-1989 (Trieste: ICTP, 1990), 166.

373 Alexis De Greiff Concluding Remarks

stabilise the Centre and the boycott affair, as he eloquently declared in a famous speech at

Stockholm University.3 His efforts thus turned more resolutely towards the promotion of

South-South collaboration and self-reliance, focusing particularly on problems regarding

science in Islamic countries and the establishment of institutions like the Third World

Academy of Science.4 In the mid-1980s, Salam campaigned to become Director-General of

UNESCO, but being without the support of a national delegation, due to his having broken

with the Pakistani regime in 1974, he failed. A study of the Nobel Prize and UNESCO

sagas, as well as of the changes to the ICTP during the 1980s and 1990s - which included

the creation of similar centres in Trieste and elsewhere — would be natural continuations of

the present work.

Going back to the establishment of the Centre, I want to stress that although the

ICTP was seen as a Third World initiative, both because Salam was a Pakistani and because

the idea was backed by several Third World délégations at the IAEA, in terms of

motivation, design and creation the Centre was a Western product. Salam’s central

motivation was deeply rooted in two contrasting experiences of his early life. His training

in-Cambridge and Princeton allowed him to learn that the stimuli necessary for taking an active part in the scientific community, beyond formal interaction and the acquisition of the basic technical skills, are the informal and personal contacts that help to build an understanding of which problems are considered relevant and what are the allowable limits of theoretical speculation. However, when Salam returned to Pakistan, in 1951, this type of contact with the world of Western physics vanished. Consequently, when the concept of the

3 Abdus Salam, “Ideals and Realities (Lecture given at the University of Stockholm, 23 September 1975),” Bulletin o f the Atomic Scientists, September 1976, 9-15.

4 See Abdus Salam, Renaissance o f science in Islamic countries (Singapore, London: World Scientific, 1994).

374 Alexis De Greiff Concluding Remarks

ICTP was suggested, he envisaged it as a new Copenhagen Institute for Third World,

allowing an experience similar to his own at Cambridge, London and Princeton. He

believed that moving a few competent people for limited periods of time would supply

Third World physicists with the necessary resources to contribute to mainstream research in

theoretical physics. Furthermore, he thought that theoretical physicists were to be the agents

of modernisation, and a scientific revolution in the Third World the answer to

underdevelopment. Several scientists in the Third World saw in this model the solution to their internal and international isolation, and so quickly adopted Salam’s discourse. Salam thus became a widely celebrated propagandist of the “science for development” thesis - a sort of Third World C.P. Snow, with the notable difference that Salam continued research in physics. Despite the fact that his theses were far from original, he was considered a revolutionary, committed to the liberation of the Third World through pure science.

However, Salam’s modernisation project was in essence the kind of Leopardian solution that the West promoted in the Third World. While the scientific revolution was supposed to modernise the mode of production in the underdeveloped areas, the relations of production, and therefore the redistribution of political and economic power, remained unaltered.

With regard to the actual creation of the Centre, we saw that it came to fruition thanks to the active interest of Italy, Trieste in particular, in hosting a United Nations international institution devoted to research in physics. This was motivated by the conscious decision to use the Centre to help lessen Trieste’s isolation. The Italian

Government’s decisive contribution to the financing of the Centre was considered a means of situating Italy among the donor countries within the new scenario of international relations between the North and the South, governed as it was by the ideology of

375 Alexis De Greiff Concluding Remarks

development. The decision to host the ICTP therefore crystallised Italy’s aspiration to be

integrated among the developed nations, and hence is a manifestation of the effort to

overcome its sense of inferiority and peripheral status within Europe. From the local point

view, however, Trieste was more interested in opening channels with its historical

hinterland - Central Europe. The Cold War imposed severe restrictions on this aim, and

Salam profited from these circumstances, which allowed him to strengthen the North-South

character of the ICTP. However, the question of whether the ICTP should emphasise

North-South or East-West exchange was a continuing source of tension. Now that there is

no longer a Socialist bloc, and Salam has passed away, the Centre will be forced to find a

new equilibrium.

The generalised perception that this Centre in the North was a Third World

institution, arose from the fact that its scientific population came from the South. This

image of a “developing” institution was reinforced by the stereotype of Italian institutions prevalent among Americans and North Europeans. It was to cause serious difficulties for the scientific and even political legitimisation of the ICTP. External actors, such as certain delegations at the IAEA and UNESCO and, as we saw in detail, the Ford Foundation, had enormous difficulties in understanding the role of a centre for both the advancement of science and Third World development. What they could not understand was that doing research had a symbolic meaning in the reaffirmation of national independence for societies that were essentially hybrid. The Third World combined rural-based economies and growing cities; large portions of illiterate population and small, but increasingly influential groups of highly qualified scientists; authoritarian regimes and constitutional republics; states economically dependent on the West but with a strong sense of nationalistic pride.

376 Alexis De Greiff Concluding Remarks

The ICTP reflected this complex process of peripheral modernisation often simplistically associated with the chronic backwardness of the Third World, and without noticing its • strong Western heritage.

One of the points I want to stress is the gap between discourse and practice in an institution like the ICTP. The assumption that theoretical physics is “cheap,” used by Salam and others to justify the Centre, proved to be wrong. The ICTP history demonstrates that financial stability is a crucial condition for competition with elite scientific institutions, and this stability requires significant investment in infrastructure, updated libraries, maintenance, computing facilities and so forth. The fact that the centre was part of the UN system was, in this sense, a great handicap. Always, but especially after the Second World.

War, national interests have been essential to securing financial support for scientific and technological undertakings and, although the Italian government contributed significantly, the ICTP was not linked to any industrial, academic or military network. Salam’s idea that tne Centre would be part of international network of academic institutions was grounded in the utopia, shared by several Third World intellectuals, of a World government driven by the United Nations and financed by the industrialised countries. After fifty years, we have witnessed the complete failure of this model.

. The belief that to do research in theoretical physics it is necessary to have only intuition, pencil and paper, is the oversimplification of a process that requires the continuing support of institutions prepared to gather, on a stable basis and for relatively extended periods of time, intellectual and material resources, as has been pointed out by other scholars. Therefore, the globalisation of scientific knowledge depends on the workings of social organisations, a process that goes beyond graduate studies. Acquiring

377 Alexis De Greiff Concluding Remarks technical skills and knowledge is by no means a sufficient condition, and if a young PhD intends to continue contributing to the discipline, they must maintain social contacts with members of the international scientific community after finishing formal training. Given that resources necessary to contribution in areas like theoretical physics are by and large concentrated in the North, scientists from the Third World who intend to participate in the production of this kind of knowledge need to establish and maintain direct contact with their colleagues in industrialised countries. In this regard we are allowed to ask if the ICTP effectively acted as the new Copenhagen Institute that Salam had imagined. There is no unequivocal answer to this question. On the one hand, the ICTP succeeded in creating a stimulating environment, where Third World physicists felt they were doing mainstream research and had the sense of being recognised by other ICTP fellows. This environment favoured collaborations and the exchange of ideas and experiences between scientists from the Third World and in this sense, the ICTP was a success. However, these contributions were much less visible to , and therefore less appreciated by, the invisible college, which did not view the ICTP as a research centre of excellence. This was partly due to the lack of internal controls exerted by the permanent staff over the intellectual production of the visitors, an important difference from Bohr’s institute. We may suggest that each institute absorbed their director’s attitudes towards research and publishing. We must nevertheless be careful in assessing the ICTP’s performance, for, if, using the lenses of the scientific elite to evaluate the Centre, we conclude that it failed, we may be applying a wrong criteria.

The ICTP was established on the basis of a mistaken expectation, that creating a space for sporadic interaction with scientists from industrialised countries would allow physicists working in the Third World to become active members of the international scientific community. In this context the time factor is crucial, for it was unrealistic to expect that a

378 Alexis De Greiff Concluding Remarks scientist, who spent nine months a year in a place where access to even the most recent literature was difficult, could, with just a few weeks in Trieste, catch up with the relevant problems, carry out research, and publish an important contribution. This is what differentiates Salam’s successful group from the other ICTP fellows. The Imperial College physicists came to the Centre for extended periods to work on problems they had identified with the help of Salam’s continuous dialogue with other members of the invisible college.

One could conclude that the fears expressed by the IAEA’s Scientific Advisory Committee proved to be true: the ICTP was an artificial research centre, which was forced to concentrate on only one area of research. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that this was the fault of the ICTP, for the future of the Centre was determined precisely by the financial constraints instigated by the members of SAC. The ICTP was an institutional example of a self-fulfilled prophecy.

Several questions remain to be answered, and here I would like to list just a few of them: What was the impact of the ICTP in the development of physics in Third World countries? How did the ICTP missionaries adapt Salam’s rhetoric to their local political, social and scientific realities? Did the ICTP actually help to stop the brain-drain problem?

What was the relationship between the ICTP and the other scientific institutions that emerged in the Trieste area during the 1980s? Did the reputation of the ICTP change in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, and what has been the role of SISS A in this process? In this work, I have preferred not to use case studies to investigate which specific techniques, theories or concepts were mobilised through the ICTP. This is because I consider that this approach could deviate from my main concern; the Centre’s evolution, its relation with the external world, and the politics of the collaboration between physicists from the First and

379 Alexis De Greiff Concluding Remarks the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s. This dissertation, however, provides a concrete institutional and political background to further detailed investigations of the globalisation of knowledge after the Second World War. As we have seen, the ICTP was based on the assumption that intellectual resources moved in a North-South direction, but this may not necessarily have been the case. We should investigate whether the ICTP channelled results into the North that were absorbed by the international scientific community, in a process that erased their origin and historical trajectory.

Finally, I hope that this work leads others to reflect on international scientific collaboration between unequal partners. There are aspects, such as the negotiations at the

IAEA and the ICTP-Ford Foundation relationship, of which the characteristics seem to be independent of the kind of institution analysed. It would therefore be important for co:'iparative studies of other international projects aimed at Third World development to be carried out. The present study suggests that, if “developing countries” aspire to a realistic and effective international scientific exchange policy, it is crucial that scientists and policy makers realise that academia reproduces the same asymmetrical relations that appear in the social, political and economic worlds . Perhaps the Third World should accept its

“isolation,” but without thinking that the only means of achieving respectability and credibility is to gain intellectual approval from the North. I must confess that writing these words in the last page of a dissertation submitted to obtain a PhD from Imperial College,

London, may seem paradoxical. The question is whether Third World intellectuals will prolong their condition of subalterns, still present in the post-Colonial period.

380 Appendix 1

Financial Contributions to the ICTP

__ 00 O CN CN ns CN OO vs vs r- SO 00 _ rs Ft o o O 'O r-*- ns 00 •— 00 r- CN *—• r- c*s CN rs in ,_ T r- O' CN m VS o r-. SO Os OS sO in C'l rs _ os ■■ CN 1)

00 _ Os c- rc ns O' . r-* SO Os OO SO c** Os Tf vs C- Ft O o ' © ns Os so CN Os VS OS VS Os Os so 00 rs 00 sO Os r- r- vO so SO vs so so so s r- o oo CN O' Os c- CN CO QS >S es —

so CO Ft *t vs ns O SO O' © Os rs o CC SO •-* CO rrj vs cn w— r* 00 ns r- c- c- oo o oo Os Os rs rs CN vs' Os so OO SO Ft Ft Ft ns ns r- VS OS oo 00 o O' 00 Ft ns Ft Ff OS <

vs Ft P-* oo SO

oo Os ns oo Ft CN CN r-* Os r> sO r* Os VS _ sO o 00 vs c n r*. so o VS ‘CS SO Ft wmm Ff Os Ff o rs Ft vs K CN ns Ft ns CN vs Ft ns ns VS OS SO Ft sO rs « vs CN CN CN CN rs 00 O CN rs _C 3 GO

Ft Os VS VS ’«r Ft CN ns rs sO SO o Os 00 ns rs oo F t Os 00 rs 00 s o CN Ft rs CN O r- ns VS F t v f CN rs s o sO Ff 00 O s Ft — 00 sO 00 s O SO r*« rs oo — — CN CN CN CN CN CN CN CN CN rs oo CN rs ce o

r r « n VO 0 0 Os o f H < N r s ' f V i VO r-~ 0 0 as o f H r s VO VO VO VO VO VO t~~ n n r ~ r ~ r ~ t - r - 0 0 0 0 o e O' as O' O' as O' as OS O' O' O' O' as O' O' O' O' O' O' ' f -4 f H f H f H F*H F"N f H f H 1 -H r H

Table Al-1: Financial Contribution to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 1987 constant US$ x 1000.1 2

1 The most significant share of the “unstable” resources came from the Ford Foundation, the Swedish International Development Agency and the United Nations Development Programme. 2 These figures have been calculated crossing the financial information contained in ICTP Annual Reports (ICTP Archives) for the years 1973 and 1990. (Deflation factor: NY GDP MKTP XD).

381 ' ae nfgrsi al -l. •'in BasedfiguresonA Table lxs DeGreiff Alexis Figure Al-1: Percentage of the financial contribution to International Centre for Centre International to contribution financial the of Percentage Al-1: Figure

Contribution (%) pedx 1:AppendixFinancialcontributions Appendix 2

ICTP Associates. List and Statistics (1965-1980)

List of Associates

Table A2-1: List of the ICTP Associates in the period 1965-1980.*

Y E A R S 2 1 NAME COUNTRY A g e w h en Institution where obtained R e s e a r c h

a p p o in te d P h D A r e a 3 A sso ciate

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 Hassan, M.Y.M. E g y p t 3 3 Institute of Nuclear Research NP

(Warsaw, Poland)

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Adjei, S A. G h a n a

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Gambhir, Y.K. In d ia

1 9 6 6 - 6 7 Giambiagi, J.J. A rg e n tin a 4 4 U. of Buenos Aires EPP

(Argentina)

1 Sources: ICTP, Report to the ICTP Scientific Council, 1973, ICTP Archives; ICTP Associate Office Database; ICTP, Directory of Theoretical Physicists from Developing Countries, Mimeo, ICTP Library. Note: this table contains only the Associates, not “group Associates.” Blank spaces: no available information. 2 Year when the candidate was appointed “Associate.” ’ The following abbreviations are used: NP: Nuclear Physics EPP: Elementary Particle Physics SSP: Solid State Physics PP: Plasma Physics

383 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Bollini, C.G. A rg e n tin a 4 2 U. of La Plata (Argentina) EPP

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Pignotti, A. A rg e n tin a

1 9 7 1 -7 2 Lopez-Davalos, A. A rg e n tin a 3 4 Balseiro Institute (Argentina) SSP

1 9 7 1 -7 2 M a jlis , N. A rg e n tin a 3 4 U. of Birmingham (UK) SSP

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Alascio, B. A rg e n tin a 3 5 U. of Tucumân (Argentina) SSP

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Alessandrini, V. A rg e n tin a 31 U. of La Plata (Argentina) EPP

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Plastino, A. A rg e n tin a 3 2 U. of La Plata (Argentina) EPP

1 9 7 3 - 7 4 Pedraza, A. A rg e n tin a

1 9 7 5 -7 6 Maqueda, E.E. A rg e n tin a

1 9 7 5 - 7 6 Masperi, L. A rg e n tin a 3 5 Balseiro Institute EPP

1 9 7 7 - 7 8 B e s , D . A rg e n tin a

1 9 7 7 - 7 8 Perazzo, R.P.J. A rg e n tin a

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Savino, E.J. A rg e n tin a

1 9 7 9 -8 0 Welssmann, M. A rg e n tin a

1 9 7 6 -7 7 Aguirre, C. B o liv ia

1 9 7 7 - 7 8 Arellano, M.E. B o liv ia

1 9 7 9 - 8 0 Guzman, L.A. B o liv ia

1 9 6 4 - 6 5 T lo m n o , J B ra zil 4 4 Princeton University (USA) EPP

1 9 6 8 - 6 9 J a c o b , G . B ra zil 3 8 Federal University of Rio EPP

Grande Do Sul (Brazil)

1 9 7 0 -7 1 Ferreira, E.M. B ra zil 4 0 Imperial College (UK) EPP

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 Fleming, H. B ra z il 3 4 U. of Sao Paulo (UK) EPP

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 Srivastava, P.P. B ra zil 2 9 U. of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) EPP

384 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Swieca, J.A. B ra zil 3 6 U. of Sao Paulo (Brazil) EPP

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Medeiros, J.T.N. B ra z il

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Piguelli Rosa, L. B ra zil

1 9 6 5 -6 6 Saavedra, I. C h ile 3 3 U. of Manchester (UK) EPP

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Cordero, P. C h ile 31 University College of London

(UK)

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Moraga, L.A. C h ile

1 9 7 3 -7 4 W o lfe s , J. C h ile

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Muñoz Herrera, M.A. C h ile

1 9 7 9 -8 0 L u n d , F. C h ile

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Claro, F. H. C h ile

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Vargas, R.A. C o lo m b ia

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Cocho Gil, G. M e x ic o 3 5 Princeton University (USA) EPP

1 9 7 0 -7 1 de Alba, E. M e x ic o 3 2 UNAM (Mexico) SSP

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Martínez, M. M e x ic o

1 9 7 9 -8 0 H o rn , M . P e ru

1 9 7 9 -8 0 Valdivia Gutierrez, O. P e ru

1 9 6 8 -6 9 K a ln a y , A . Venezuela/Ar U. of Buenos Aires EPP

g e n tin a (Argentina)

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Aragone, C. U ru g u a y 3 5 U. of Rom e (Italy) Astrophysics

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Saravia, L.R. U ru g u a y

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 Chela Flores, J. V e n e z u e la 3 0 Chelsea College (UK) EPP/SSP

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Negrete, P. V e n e z u e la 3 4 U. of British Columbia

(C a n a d a )

385 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2 :1CTP Associates

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Naderi, M.A. A fg a n is ta n

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Afzal, S.A. B a n g la d e s h U. of South Hampton (UK) NP

1 9 7 4 -7 5 A li, S .T . B a n g la d e s h

1 9 7 4 -7 5 N a th , L .M . B a n g la d e s h 3 9 U. of Edimburgh (UK) EPP

1 9 7 5 -7 6 H u s a in , D. B a n g la d e s h 3 9 U. of Birmingham (UK) EPP

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Hadonou Yovo, C. B e n in

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Sagbohan, W.O. B e n in

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Nkoma, J.S. B o ts w a n a

1 9 7 1 -7 2 De Alwis, S.P. C e y lo n

1 9 8 0 -8 1 H e , S .Y . C h in a P .R .

1 9 7 7 -7 8 L ofo, L.B . Dem. Rep. of

C o n g o

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Abul-Mag, A.Y. E g y p t 2 9 Kharkov University (USSR) NP

1 9 6 9 -7 0 Rihan, T.H. E g y p t 4 0 Kharkov University (USSR) NP

1 9 7 1 -7 2 Bakri, M.M. E g y p t 4 2 U. of Koln (Germany) SSP

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Obada, A.S.F. E g y p t 2 9 Cairo University (Egypt) NP

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Sharaf, M.A. E g y p t

1 9 7 6 -7 7 W a h b y , W . E g y p t

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Hassan, A.R.E. E g y p t

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Morsey, M.W, E g y p t

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Osman, A.M. E g y p t

1 9 6 7 - 6 8 Akyeampong, D. G h a n a 2 9 Imperial College (UK) EPP

1 9 6 9 -7 0 Allotey, F.K.A. G h a n a 3 7 Princeton University (USA) SSP

386 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 7 4 -7 5 K ofin ti, N. K. G h a n a

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Adu-Gyamfi, D. G h a n a

1 9 6 9 -7 0 Grypeos, M. G r e e c e 3 3 U. of Birmingham (UK) EPP

1 9 6 4 -6 5 Udagaonkar, B.M. In d ia

1 9 6 6 -6 7 S in g h , V . In d ia 2 9 U. of California-Berkeley EPP

(USA)

1 9 6 8 -6 9 P a n d y a , S. In d ia 4 0 U. of Rochester (USA) EPP

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Ramachandran, R. In d ia 3 8 U. of Chicago (USA) EPP

1 9 6 9 -7 0 Panchapakesan, N. In d ia 3 7 U. of Delhi (India) EPP

1 9 6 9 - 7 0 Pradhan, T. In d ia 4 0 U. of Chicago (USA) EPP

1 9 7 0 -7 1 Choudhury, S.R. In d ia 31 U. of Delhi (India) EPP

1 9 7 0 -7 1 J a in , K .P . In d ia 2 7 Agra University (India) EPP

1 9 7 0 - n Joshi, S.K. In d ia 3 5 Allahabad University (India) EPP

1 9 7 1 -7 2 Griosh, D.K. In d ia 2 6 (MSc) Orissa U. (India) SSP

1 9 7 1 -7 2 Santhanam, T.S. In d ia 31 Matscience, Madras (India) EPP

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 G h o s e , P. In d ia 3 3 India Association for the EPP

Cultivation of Science,

Calcutta (India)

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 K a w , P .K . In d ia

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 Khannan, M.P. In d ia 3 3 U. of Rochester (USA) EPP

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 K u m a r, N, In d ia

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 Pathak, K.N. In d ia 31 Indian Institute of SSP

Technology, Kampur (India)

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 Rajaraman, R. In d ia 3 3 Cornell University (USA) EPP

387 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Samaranayake, V.K. In d ia

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Upadhyaya, U.N. In d ia 3 4 Poona University SSP

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Waghmare, Y.R. In d ia 3 5 Physics Research EPP

Laboratory, Ahmedabad

(In d ia )

1 9 7 3 -7 4 P a n t, M .M . In d ia 3 6 (MSc) Allahabad University SSP

(In d ia )

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Rupta, R.P. In d ia

1 9 7 3 -7 4 S a h , P. In d ia 4 0 U .of London SSP

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Tewary, V.K. In d ia

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Tripathy, D.N. In d ia 3 5 Saha Institute of Nuclear SSP

Research (India)

1 9 7 4 -7 5 Agarwal, B.K. In d ia 3 3 Allahabad University (India) EPP

1 9 7 4 -7 5 D a s , M .P . In d ia

1 9 7 4 -7 5 Sharma, S.K. In d ia

1 9 7 5 - 7 6 Biswas, S.N. In d ia 4 9 Adelaide Univerity (Australia) EPP

1 9 7 5 -7 6 Khadkikar, S. B. In d ia 3 9 U. of Bombay (India) EPP

1 9 7 5 - 7 6 Khanna, K.M. In d ia 3 9 Indian Institute of SSP

Technology, Kharagpur

(In d ia )

1 9 7 5 - 7 6 Ramakrishnan, T. In d ia

1 9 7 5 - 7 6 Satpathy, L. In d ia 3 6 Calcutta University (India) EPP

1 9 7 6 - 7 7 Kesavan, S. In d ia

1 9 7 7 -7 8 A h m a d , I. In d ia 3 7 Aligargh Muslim Univerity NP

(In d ia )

1 9 7 7 - 7 8 B u ti, B. In d ia 3 4 U. of Chicago (USA) EPP/PP

388 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 7 7 -7 8 C h a n d , R. In d ia 3 3 U. of Chicago (USA) EPP

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Varma, R.K. In d ia 3 6 Imperial College (UK) EPP

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Viswanathan, K.S. In d ia

1 9 7 8 - 7 9 D e o , B .B . In d ia

1 9 7 9 - 8 0 Gupta, M.M. In d ia

1 9 7 9 -8 0 Prakash, M.R. In d ia 6 0 Tata Institute of Technology A p p lie d

(In d ia ) Mathematics

1 9 8 0 -8 1 A h m a d , M . In d ia

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Baskaran, G. In d ia

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Mohamed, K.A. In d ia

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Mookerjee, A. In d ia

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Mukhopadhyay, G. In d ia

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Ramamurthy, V. S. In d ia

1 9 6 d -6 £ Baiquni, A. In d o n e s ia 4 8 U. of Chicago (USA) EPP

1 9 7 1 - 7 2 Barmawi, M. In d o n e s ia 3 9 U. of Chicago (USA) EPP

1 9 7 1 - 7 2 Suprapto, B.B. In d o n e s ia 3 7 Purdue University (USA) SSP

1 9 7 3 - 7 4 Parangtopo, S. In d o n e s ia

1 9 7 3 - 7 4 S u w a rd i In d o n e s ia

1 9 7 0 -7 1 R ia h i, F . Ira n 31 ETH (Switzerland) EPP

1 9 7 3 - 7 4 Zahedi-Moghadam, A.A. Ira n 3 8 U. of Paris (France) SSP

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 Misho, R.H. Ira q 3 9 Michigan State University SSP

(USA)

1 9 6 7 - 6 8 H a ra ri, H. Is ra e l

1 9 7 7 - 7 8 Ghassib, H.B. J o rd a n

389 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Otieno-Malo, J.B. K e n y a 3 6 Brandeis Univerity (USA) SSP

1 9 7 1 -7 2 S o n g , H .S . K o re a

1 9 7 9 -8 0 L e e , H .K . K o re a

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Cheon, I.T. K o re a 3 4 Kyoto University (Japan) EPP

1 9 6 8 -6 9 A ly, H .H . L e b a n o n 3 8 U. of Bristol (UK) EPP

1 9 7 1 -7 2 Bitar, K.M. L e b a n o n 2 9 Yale University (USA) EPP

1 9 6 9 -7 0 Andriambololona, R. M a d a g a s c a r

1 9 7 1 -7 2 L im , K .L . M a la y s ia 3 3 U. of Adelaide (Australia) NP

1 9 7 8 -7 9 L e e , B .S . M a la y s ia

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Traore, B.M. M a li

1 9 6 9 -7 0 Baghdadi, M. Moroccc/Syri

1 9 7 1 -7 2 Belmahi, Q. Morocco/Syri 3 7 Intitute for Physics, Geneva SSP

a (Switzerland)

1 9 7 1 - 7 2 ' Amatya, A.M.S. N e p a l

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Shrestha, C.B. N e p a l 3 7 (MSc) Lomonosov Moscow EPP

State University (USSR)

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Maduemezia, A.A. N ig e ria

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Nwachuku, C.O. N ig e ria

1 9 6 9 -7 0 Williams, V.A. N ig e ria 3 7 U. of Manchester (UK) SSP

1 9 7 0 -7 1 O jo , A . N ig e ria 31 Columbia University (USA) PP

1 9 7 5 -7 6 N d u k a , A . N ig e ria

1 9 7 6 - 7 7 O k e k e , O . N ig e ria

1 9 7 6 -7 7 Olusola, O.B. N ig e ria

390 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Fubara, D.M. N ig e ria

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Garde, S.C. N ig e ria

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Hazoume, R.P. N ig e ria

1 9 6 4 -6 5 R ia z u d d in P a k is ta n 3 4 Cambridge University (UK) EPP

1 9 6 6 -6 7 Fayyazuddin P a k is ta n 3 6 Imperial College (UK) EPP

1 9 6 7 -6 8 Harun-ar Rashid, A. M. P a k is ta n 3 4 U. of Glasgow (UK) EPP

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Rashid, M.A. P a k is ta n 3 3 Imperial College (UK) EPP

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Shamsher, Ali, M. P a k is ta n 2 8 Manchester University (UK) NP

1 9 7 0 -7 1 B utt, N .M . P a k is ta n 3 4 U. of Birmingham (UK) SSP

1 9 7 0 -7 1 Razmi, M.S.K. P a k is ta n 31 Imperial College (UK) EPP

1 9 7 0 -7 1 Schowdhury, S.M.M.R. P a k is ta n

1 9 7 1 -7 2 R a h m a n , M . P a k is ta n 3 8 Southamptom (UK) NP

1 9 7 2 - 7 3 A la m , M .A . P a k is ta n

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Hussain, F. P a k is ta n

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Nayyar, A.H. P a k is ta n

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Sarker, A.Q. P a k is ta n 3 6 U. of Birmingham (UK) EPP

1 9 7 2 -7 3 W azed Miah, M.A. P a k is ta n

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Shoaib, K.A. P a k is ta n

1 9 7 5 -7 6 Choudhury, A.R. P a k is ta n

1 9 7 5 -7 6 K h a n , I. P a k is ta n

1 9 7 5 -7 6 K h a n , N .A . P a k is ta n

1 9 7 6 -7 7 J a m e e l, M . P a k is ta n 3 7 U. of Edinburgh (UK) EPP

1 9 7 7 -7 8 A h m e d , K. P a k is ta n 3 8 Imperial College(UK) EPP

391 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Murtaza, G. P a k is ta n 3 8 Imperial College (UK) EPP

* 1 9 7 7 -7 8 S a d iq , A . P a k is ta n

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Q a d ir, A . P a k is ta n

1 9 8 0 -8 1 Ramirez, B.l. Philippines

1 9 7 0 -7 1 R a c z k a , R. P o la n d

1 9 8 0 -8 1 A h s a n , J. Saudi Arabia

1 9 7 1 -7 2 Dabbousi O.B. S a u d i

Arabia/Syria

1 9 7 0 -7 1 George, T.L. Sierra Leone 3 3 U. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Astrophysics

(UK)

1 9 7 7 .- /7 Bassey, M.W. Sierra Leone

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Awunor-Renner, E.R. Sierra Leone

1 9 7 8 -7 9 Godwin, V.E. Sierra Leone

1 9 7 1 -7 2 W o n g , K .C . S in g a p o re

1 9 7 1 -7 2 Y a p , C .T . S in g a p o re 3 6 U. of Sussex (UK)

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Leong, T.K. S in g a p o re

1 9 7 9 -8 0 Baaquie, B.E. S in g a p o re

1 9 7 5 -7 6 Tennakone, K. S ri L a n k a

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Kumaravadivel, R. S ri L a n k a

1 9 6 8 -6 9 T a h a , M .O . S u d a n 31 Cambridge University (UK) EPP

1 9 6 9 -7 0 Ahmed, M.A.K. S u d a n 2 9 U. of Durham (UK) EPP

1 9 7 2 -7 3 Abdel Rahman, A.M.M. S u d a n

1 9 7 3 - 7 4 Shamboul, A.E.B. S u d a n

1 9 7 6 - 7 7 Eltayeb, I.A.R. S u d a n

392 Alexis DeGreiff Appendix 2: ICTP Associates

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Babiker, M.E.H. S u d a n

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Hassan, M.H.A. S u d a n

1 9 7 3 -7 4 N ja u , E .C . T a n z a n ia

1 9 7 8 -7 9 Shayo, L.K. T a n z a n ia

1 9 7 0 -7 1 Samathiyakanit, V. T h a ila n d 3 0 Institute Theoretical Physics, SSP

Gottemburg (Sweden)

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Kritayakirana, K. T h a ila n d

1 9 7 3 -7 4 Tekou, A.B. T o g o

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Ahose, M.K. T o g o

1 9 6 4 -6 5 G ü rs e y , F. T u rk e y

1 9 6 8 -6 9 Tarimer, N. T u rk e y 3 5 M IT (U S A ) EPP

1 9 7 9 -8 0 Sendaula, M. U g a n d a

1 9 7 8 -7 9 Chuan, C.X, V ie tn a m

1 9 7 0 -7 1 S u n jic , M . Y u g o s la v ia

1 9 6 7 -6 8 Mitra, A.N. 3 8 Cornell University (USA) EPP

1 9 7 7 -7 8 Dussel, G.G.

393 Alexis De Greiff Appendix 2: 1CTP Associates

Statistics4

Table A2-2: Average age of the ICTP associates.

Average age = 35,33684211

Standard Deviation = 3,526648199 (10%)

Table A2-3: Research Areas studied in the ICTP.

Research Areas EPP=60

SSP= 24

NP = 11 0_ CL CNJ II

Other =3

4 The following statistics are based on the information from 100 Associates retrieved from the Directory of Third World Physicists (op cit., footnote 1), which represents 50% of the total population. Figure A2-1: Distribution of Associates by Country. by Associates of Distribution A2-1: Figure DeAlexisGreiff

Cewföy l the otherAll countries combined Morocco/Syria Sierra Leone Bangladesh Singapore Venezuela Argentina Indonesia Sri Lanka Malaysia Tanzania Thailand Lebanon Uruguay Pakistan Bolivia Bolivia Mexico Nigeria Turkey Ghana Sudan Egypt Brazil Benin Nepal Korea Chile Togo India Peru Iran Total Number Associates of 395 Appendix ICTPAssociates2: Sources Cited