Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [28]
Moving down to the ninth item on Martinson’s list, we find another of Einstein’s misdemeanours. He was guilty of ‘overlooking others’ use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data’. But are we really surprised? After all, Arthur Eddington’s data supported Einstein’s theory, and we have already seen how well disposed Einstein would have been to that.
Questions about Eddington’s use of data have been raised many times. What has received less attention is his most essential motivation: not to prove Einstein’s beautiful theory right, but to bring an end to hostilities between nations.
Arthur Eddington was a Quaker. Though the Quakers are often seen today as a mild-mannered group, welcoming everyone and insisting on nothing, that was certainly not the case at the turn of the nineteenth century. Eddington’s values were forming in the years when the Quakers were radicals. They rejected traditional Christian views, were happy to rely on their brains rather than the Scriptures for guidance, and most of all were eager to see good in all human-kind, regardless of colour or creed. Quakers had begun the campaign for the abolition of slavery in the seventeenth century, decades before William Wilberforce lent his weight to the movement.
When the First World War broke out, then, Eddington was ready to fight – but only for the cause of pacifism. His active, radical Quakerism spurred him to look for ways in which he might wage war on the division between nations. He had made clear his feelings that the war should not affect the working relations between scientists on opposite sides of the conflict. In April 1918, when he was called up to active service in the British army, an opportunity to further that cause presented itself.
Eddington refused to join up, becoming a conscientious objector. This provoked a long series of hearings at which various influential colleagues tried to argue that because of his position as Director of the Cambridge Observatory he should be excused military service. Eddington, no doubt to the utter exasperation of his influential colleagues, undercut these objections. His scientific importance was not the reason he sought exemption, he said. ‘My objection to war is based on religious grounds,’ he told the Cambridge tribunal board that heard his case. ‘I cannot believe that God is calling me to go out and slaughter men.’
It was a dangerous tactic. The much depleted British army was desperate for more recruits. Conscientious objection was no longer considered a valid reason for avoiding service, and Quaker colleagues, such as Ebenezer Cunningham, a mathematician at St John’s College, had just had their objections to the call-up swept aside. Objectors, the object of scorn and persecution among British soldiers and the British public alike, were being conscripted despite their protests, and being assigned to minesweeping and other perilous tasks.
Eddington was saved from this fate only when the Astronomer Royal, Frank Dyson – perhaps understanding Eddington better than most – gave him a dignified way out. Dyson had been intrigued by Einstein’s general theory of relativity since its announcement in 1915. He was sceptical about its claims, and had sought ways to prove or disprove it. The only way forward seemed to be to find a way to test its prediction that the presence of mass bends space. The bending of space, Einstein said, meant that light would not always travel in a straight line. If he was right, the light from distant stars would follow a curved path as it passed near the Sun, for example. That curve would make those stars appear to be slightly displaced in the sky.
It sounds an easy