Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [73]
In A Brief History of Time, Hawking tells the story of a 1981 conference on cosmology, held at the Vatican, which he attended. At one point during the proceedings he met Pope John Paul II, and the two men discussed the merits of cosmology. According to the Pope, it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the Big Bang, but not the Big Bang itself: ‘that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God,’ said the Pope. With typical dry wit, Hawking gleefully tells his readers that he had just given a presentation to the conference on that very topic. He didn’t tell the Pope, though. ‘I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo,’ he says.
Hawking is joking, obviously: he wasn’t worried at all, because the secret anarchists have rendered the Papacy toothless. In fact, science has religion running scared. Hawking is nothing but amused, it seems. Read between the lines and he seems to be saying, ‘Let the Pope have his fear of God: we scientists are afraid of nothing.’
Except, he could have added, one another. Scientists are happy to take occasional potshots at the Almighty, but it is much more common for them to assault their peers. As we will explore in the next chapter, science is a brutal, gladiatorial arena in which its anarchy finds extraordinary expression.
FIGHT CLUB
There’s no prize for the runner-up
‘I
played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard. It annoys me that this jumping, inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius.’ That was Tchaikovsky’s assessment of one of his more celebrated contemporaries. Such attitudes run through the history of the arts. Louis Spohr, a German violinist and composer, called Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony an ‘orgy of vulgar noises’. Édouard Manet wrote to his colleague Claude Monet about Renoir in less than glowing terms: ‘He has no talent at all, that boy. Tell him to give up painting.’
The arts, though, are a sycophant’s paradise compared with the sciences. At least the artists snipe about their colleagues behind their backs; scientists do it face to face. ‘Our speaker today is a man about whom we have heard so much, and from whom we have seen so little.’ That was the chemist Gilbert Lewis’s introduction when Irving Langmuir visited his department to give a seminar. Four years later, on 23 March 1946, an hour or so after having lunch with Langmuir, Lewis was found dead in his laboratory. The air was filled with the scent of almonds – and a flask of hydrogen cyanide was open on the laboratory bench.
To this day, no one knows whether Lewis killed himself, whether it was an accident, or whether something more disturbing took place. No autopsy was ever carried out on Lewis’s body. In Cathedrals of Science, a fascinating dissection of the history of chemistry, Patrick Coffey uncovers a trail of lies and half-truths linked to the incident. Langmuir’s visit to Berkeley that day was conveniently airbrushed out of the story for nearly sixty years. In Langmuir’s writings, dates were fudged: he visited the University of California in ‘1945 or 1946’ according to his celebrated ‘Pathological Science’ essay in which he takes Lewis’s science to pieces. Joel Hildebrand, who organised the lunch, later wrote – erroneously – that it was in 1945. Whether that was a subconscious slip or a deliberate attempt to remove Langmuir from the vicinity of Berkeley at the time of Lewis’s death, we will never know. Everyone involved is now dead.
Coffey concludes that Lewis most probably had a heart attack in his laboratory while he was working with hydrogen cyanide. He had led an unhealthy, tobacco-fuelled, hate-filled life and was