Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [86]
In every area there are ‘worthies’ who dominate discussion and shape the outcome of the peer review process. As Carl Lindegren has pointed out:
One likes to think of science as divorced from personalities because one seeks the guidance of a principle rather than a person. Thus, the individual scientist experiences a feeling of freedom since he has the impression he lives in a community in which the law and not the man is the ultimate arbiter. This truly democratic practice has led to the fallaciously democratic practice of determining the validity of a scientific view by finding out how many other scientists agree with it. Voting in this context is so much influenced by past training and indoctrination that it tends to reject the new and to reaffirm the old.
So, having celebrated the victories of tenacious scientists, perhaps it is time we took a look at the darker side of the battle for scientific supremacy – the struggles of the outsiders who ultimately made their mark, but were never invited in. Sometimes, the secret anarchists can be immeasurably cruel.
DEFENDING THE THRONE
Machiavelli would be proud
H
igh in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains in central Spain, Robert Jordan is preparing to blow up a bridge. The detonation will help the Republican army to relieve the siege of Madrid, possibly the most horrific episode in the Spanish Civil War. For years now, the Nationalists have had the Republican-held city cut off. They have bombed it from the air, inflicting mayhem, injury and death on its hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. The survivors now lack shelter and food, and are so dispirited that they are contemplating surrender.
The need is pressing, but Jordan is wavering. To get the job done he may have to murder a hero: the once-great resistance fighter Pablo, who is no longer a help but a hindrance to the struggle. As if that weren’t hard enough, Jordan knows that he is unlikely to get out alive himself. Blowing up the bridge will provoke a firefight. He will almost certainly die in the aftermath.
Should he do it? There are plenty of good reasons not to. After years in the wilderness, he has just found love. And this is not his fight: he is an outsider, an American brought in to support the struggle against the Fascists. His last act will be only a tiny contribution to this vast, heaving, bloody mess in a country thousands of miles from his home. Is it really worth losing your comforts, your hopes and dreams, over what you could justifiably call someone else’s cause? This is the question Ernest Hemingway poses in his moving tragedy For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is a question that also faces the anarchists of science. What price discovery?
Science is civil war without the bloodshed. There are sieges, and there are bridges to be blown. There are people who must be removed: those who used to be heroes but are now complacent and ineffective must be forced aside for the good of the cause. But, like Pablo, some of this old guard still have arms and ammunition, and will fight to the very end. Many an anarchist lost their life fighting for the future of Spain. And many scientific anarchists know what it is to lose everything in the pursuit of discovery.
Take Chandrasekhar Subrahmanyan. He, like Robert Jordan, crossed continents to play his part in a battle. Yet, also like Jordan, much of his energy was taken up in dealing with a troublesome, belligerent but powerful rival. In Chandra’s case, the establishment figure was the astronomer Arthur Eddington.
Eddington is generally regarded as one of the greatest British astronomers. We have already seen how he helped to make Einstein’s name by confirming the predictions of general relativity – using some rather anarchic means. In 1935, though, his anarchy reached its peak.