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Einstein, History, and Other Passions : the Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century

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Einstein, History, and Other Passions : the Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century Einstein, history, and other passions : the rebellion against science at the end of the twentieth century The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Holton, Gerald James. 2000. Einstein, history, and other passions : the rebellion against science at the end of the twentieth century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Published Version http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674004337 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23975375 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA EINSTEIN, HISTORY, ANDOTHER PASSIONS ;/S*6 ? ? / ? L EINSTEIN, HISTORY, ANDOTHER PASSIONS E?3^ 0/" Cf72fM?y GERALD HOLTON A HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS C%772^r?<%gf, AizziMc^zzyeZZy LozzJozz, E?zg/%??J Q AOOO Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Addison-Wesley was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in capital letters. PHYSICS RESEARCH LIBRARY NOV 0 4 1008 Copyright @ 1996 by Gerald Holton All rights reserved HARVARD UNIVERSITY Printed in the United States of America An earlier version of this book was published by the American Institute of Physics Press in 1995. First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2000 o/ CoMgre.w C%t%/og;Hg-zM-PMMt'%tz'c7t Dzztzz Holton, Gerald James. Einstein, history, and other passions : the rebellion against science at the end of the twentieth century / Gerald Holton. p. cm. Originally published: Woodbury, NY : AIP Press, O 1995. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00433-7 1. Science—Miscellanea. 2. Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955— Knowledge—Science. 3. Science—Study and teaching. 1. Title. Q173.H7342 1996 306.4*5*0904— dc20 95-50608 Dedicated to the innumerable men and women in the twentieth century who devoted their lives to the advancement of science and the betterment of the human condition—who believed, with Thomas Jefferson, that "knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, knowledge is happiness." t a ,676 CONTENTS ix PART ONE SCIENCE IN HISTORY 1. What Place for Science at the "End of the Modern Era"? 3 2. The Public Image of Science 40 3. "Doing One's Damnedest": The Evolution of Trust in Scientific Findings 38 4. Imagination in Science 78 3. Understanding the History of Science 103 PART TWO LEARNING FROM EINSTEIN 6. Einstein's Influence on the Culture of Our Time 123 7. Einstein and the Goal of Science 146 8. Of Physics, Love, and Other Passions: The Letters of Albert and Mileva 170 9. "What, Precisely, Is Thinking?" ... Einstein's Answer 194 Ncffy 209 223 fw&v 227 PREFACE ONE OF THE burning questions of the day concerns the rightful place of science in our culture. The main purpose of this book is to make this debate more understandable—hrst by baring its historic roots and then by focusing, as a concrete example, on Albert Einstein's profound and lasting impact on our civilization. What can we learn about the powers and limitations of science by tracing Einstein's way of thinking, his view of the world, even his personal life? Ours is an especially opportune time to examine these questions. In every society, the way in which science—as a body of knowledge, as a source of technical applications, as a generator of models for thinking and acting, as a troubling challenger of established ideas—is viewed and used affects its moral authority, much like the other significant components of a culture, such as religion and art. Indeed, in C. P. Snow's sharp formulation, science and its applications can determine human destiny, "that is, whether we live or die." It has been so through­ out history. Sultan Muhammad II used technical innovations to pound Byzantium into submission in 1453; an Asian emperor in the nine­ teenth century made the fateful error of isolating his people from Western knowledge and might; in World War II, the perfection of radar provided a crucial edge for warding off the fascists' challenge to Western civilization itself. Equally essential has been the role of science and technology in mankind's ancient wars against ignorance, disease, and other blights and human burdens. Even the notion of human rights has been expanded by scientific findings; thus, modern anthropologists have exposed the falsity of the centuries-old idea about "inferior races," on which bigotry has long rested comfortably; and biomedical advances x in contraception have had a iiberating effect on women around the world. But every age rethinks what its culture is and should be, what roles its components play. And as in many periods in the past, we are today again in the middle of a serious debate. Some academics, students, statesmen, policy makers, religious leaders, and other citizens— embracing a variety of ideological positions, and some of them fright­ ened by abuses of science and technology as the result of corporate or governmental policies—are challenging the very legitimacy of science and technology in our culture and social fabric. For a decade or so, among influential intellectuals outside science, and gradually among segments of the general population, a seismic shift has occurred in the belief, espoused since the Enlightenment, that science and technology are on balance predominantly positive forces. Ironically, this counter-movement is asserting itself just when the understanding of natural phenomena, the methods for reaching such understanding, and the agreement among scientists on responsible conduct, are all at their highest point. Yet the notion of progress, outside the laboratory, is considered by many "an idea whose time has passed," to quote the call to a recent conference at one of America's most prestigious universities. The term Mfo-LzMMitc is becoming a badge which some wear proudly. As Isaiah Berlin noted in his most recent book, no one predicted that the current version of the recurring historic phenomenon, called the Romantic Rebellion, against such notions as rationality and objectivity, would attain dominance in the last third of the twentieth century, that we would see again "the rejec­ tion of reason and order as being prison houses of the spirit." In this atmosphere, it has become easy to overturn a long-standing social contract. President Roosevelt, at the end of World War II, received a report from a group of scientists, engineers, and other intellectuals (the so-called Vannevar Bush report), which promised "a fuller and more productive life" if scientific research were allowed to flourish. That set the stage for major financial and political support of science. Now, major industrial laboratories and the new majority in the United States Congress are drastically cutting back spending for civil­ ian research and development, even though economists have shown that the annual rate of social return on investments in research and development is remarkably high. Similarly, while the authority of sci- xi entire thought has been decreasing—and the scientific community so far has been on the whoie ineffective in reevaluating and reasserting its sense of self—an ever-widening gap separates the corpus of knowledge and the scientific worldview on the one hand and the popular under­ standing of these on the other. In some of the foremost universities in the United States, the attention to science and mathematics required from college students in the total curriculum ranges from zero to a mere 6 percent. Into this vacuum of scientific illiteracy among our future leaders are rushing bizarre notions about science, scientists, and their roles in society. These are eloquently propagated by ambitious factions with a wide range of motivations, from the ideological to the supernatural. The spokespeople for this movement include, for example, well-placed aca­ demics and New Age fanatics; museum curators who were reported to be intent on showing that science equals "pollution and death"; a widely read radical who claims that Newton's PriHap/ef is merely a "rape manual"; and a social scientist who announced, "There is no Nature," only "a communication network" among scientists. In the present climate, such depictions of science have become more and more prominent in the marketplace of ideas, going far beyond the reasonable and necessary scrutiny of abuses and limitations of this, as of any, human enterprise. The early chapters of this book provide the historical context and taxonomical order of the present controversy over the rightful place of science in our society. They set the stage for considering the interactions—some plainly visible, others subterranean but equally vita!—between the world of science and the other components of our culture. What are the major images of science among the public? What are the signs of dangerous excess, both of uncritical "scientism" on one side and of antiscience on the other? How did trust in scientific findings evolve, and what are its limits? How indeed does the individual scien­ tific imagination work, including both reason and intuition, logic and thematic choice? What does it take to understand an event in the history of science? These matters, discussed in Part One, are followed in Part Two by exemplifications from the life and work of a scientist who had a trans­ forming effect on our era. There I trace in specific terms the influence of Albert Einstein on the culture of his century. His carefully thought- xii through considerations of the meaning of progress and goals for sci­ ence remain fully applicable today.
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