THE ASCENT OF MAN

 JACOB BROWNOWSKI

MACDONALD FUTURA PUBLISHERS                        1973

PART XI

 

Chapter 11: Knowledge or Certainty

• One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the 20^th century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
• But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method of knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.
• We are face to face with the crucial paradox of knowledge. Year by year we devise more precise instruments with which to observe nature with more fineness. And when we look at the observations, we are discomfited to see that they are still fuzzy, and we feel that they are as uncertain as ever.
• The paradox of knowledge is not confined to the small, atomic scale; on the contrary, it is as cogent on the scale of man, and even of the stars. 
• We had hoped that the human errors would disappear, and that we would ourselves have God’s view. But it turns out that the errors cannot be taken out of the observations. And that is true of stars, or atoms, or just looking at somebody’s picture, or hearing the report of somebody’s speech.
• Ancient university towns are all wonderfully alike – very provincial, not on the way to anywhere. No one comes to these backwaters except for the company of professors.
• And the professors are sure that this is the center of the world. There is an inscription in the Rathskeller which reads “Outside Göttingen there is no life.’
• This epigram, or should I call it epitaph, is not taken as seriously by the undergraduates as by the professors.

The university is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.

The link between Göttingen and the outside world was the railway. That was the way visitors came from Berlin and abroad, eager to exchange the new ideas that were racing ahead in physics. It was a by-word in Göttingen that science came to life in the train to Berlin, because that is where people argued and contradicted and had new ideas. And had them challenged, too.

• In the years of the First World War, science was dominated at Göttingen as elsewhere by Relativity. But in 1921 there was appointed to the chair of physics Max Born, who began a series of seminars that brought everyone interested in physics here.
• Born had a remarkable personal, Socratic gift. He drew young men to him, he got the best out of them, and the ideas that he and they exchanged and challenged also produced his best work.
• Did physics in the 1920s really consist of argument, seminar, discussion, dispute? Yes, it did. Yes, it still does.

Think of the puzzles that the electron was setting just at that time. The quip among professors was (because of the way university time-tables are laid out) that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays the electron would behave like a particle; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays it would behave like a wave. How could you match those two aspects, brought from the large-scale world and pushed into a single entity, into this Lilliput, Gulliver’s Travels world of the inside of the atom? That is what the speculation and argument was about. And that requires, not calculation, but insight, imagination – if you like, metaphysics.

I remember a phrase that Max Born used when he came to England many years after, and that still stands in his autobiography. He said: ‘I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy’. Max Born meant that the new ideas in physics amount to a different view of reality. The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects, out there, for it cannot be fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us, and the knowledge that it yields has to be interpreted by us. There is no way of exchanging information that does not demand an act of judgment. Is the electron a particle? It behaves like one in the Bohr atom.

But de Broglie in 1924 made a beautiful wave model, in which the orbits are the places where an exact, whole number of waves closes round the nucleus. Max Born thought of a train of electrons as if each were riding on a crankshaft, so that collectively they constitute a series of Gaussian curves, a wave of probability. A new conception was being made, on the train to Berlin and the professorial walks in the woods of Göttingen: that whatever fundamental units the world is put together from, they are more delicate, more fugitive, more startling than we catch in the butterfly net of our senses.

• All those woodland walks and conversations came to a brilliant climax in 1927. early that year Werner Heisenberg gave a new characterization of the elctron. Yes, it is a particle, he said, but a particle which yields only limited information.
• Heisenberg called this the Principle of Uncertainty. His principle says that no events, not even atomic events, can be described with certainty, that is, with zero tolerance.
• Yet the Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science or outside it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance. We should call it the principle of Tolerance.
• Science has progressed step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place within a certain tolerance.
• And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or even in any form of thought that aspires to dogma.

It is a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that, here in Göttingen, scientists were refining to the utmost exquisite precision the principle of Tolerance, and turning their backs on the fact that all around them tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair.

The sky was darkening all over Europe. But there was one particular cloud which had been hanging over Göttingen for a hundred years. Early in the 1800s Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had put together a collection of skulls that he got from distinguished gentlemen with whom he corresponded throughout Europe. There was no suggestion in Blumenbach’s work that the skulls were to support a racist division of humanity, although he did use anatomical measurements to classify the families of man. All the same, from the time of Blumenbach’s death in 1840 the collection was added to and added to and became a core of racist, pan-Germanic theory,which was officially sanctioned by the National Socialist Party when it came into power.

When Hitler arrived in 1933, the tradition of scholarship in Germany was destroyed, almost overnight. Now the train to Berlin was a symbol of flight. Europe was no longer hospitable to the imagination – and not just the scientific imagination. A whole conception of culture was in retreat: the conception that human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty. Silence fell, as after the trial of Galileo. The great men went out into a threatened world. Max Born. Erwin Schrödinger. Albert Einstein. Sigmund Freud. Thomas Mann. Bertolt Brecht. Arturo Toscanini. Bruno Walter. Marc Chagall. Enrico Fermi. Leo Szilard, arriving finally after many years at the Salk Institute in California.

• The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited.

When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots’ belief that they have absolute certainty.

• By 1929 Szilard was certain that Hitler would come to power, and that war was inevitable. He kept two bags packed in his room, and by 1933 he had locked them and taken them to England.
• He realized that if you hit an atom with one neutron, and it happens to break up and release two, then you would have a chain reaction.
• He wrote a specification for a patent which contains the word ‘chain reaction’ which was filed in 1934.
• When in 1945 the European war had been won, and he realized that the bomb was now about to be made and used on the Japanese, Szilard marshaled protest everywhere he could.
• Always Szilard wanted the bomb to be tested openly before the Japanese and an international audience, so that the Japanese should know its power and should surrender before people died.
• As you know, Szilard failed, and with him the community of scientists failed. He did what a man of integrity could do. He gave up physics and turned to biology – that is how he came to the Salk Institute – and persuaded others too.
• Now we knew that it was high time to bring to the understanding of life, particularly human life, the same singleness of mind that we had given to understanding the physical world.

The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan on 6 August 1945 at 8.15 in the morning. I had not been long back from Hiroshima when I heard someone say, in Szilard’s presence, that it was the tragedy of scientists that their discoveries were used for destruction. Szilard replied, as he more than anyone else had the right to reply, that it was not the tragedy of scientists: ‘it is the tragedy of mankind’.

• There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.
• The concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, by dogma, by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
• In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’
• We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

 

Chapter 12: Generation Upon Generation