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domesticity that allowed Alfvén to be such a revolutionary in his professional life. He continually broke new ground after invading fields of research in which he had no formal qualifications. He summarily dismissed the views of experts, holding no truck with ‘received wisdom’. He never waited to be proved right before moving on to wreak havoc elsewhere. He received little acknowledgement for his contributions; even the physicists who used his work had no idea where it came from. That is largely because of his status as an outsider in the areas in which his contributions were most valuable; he was denied the privileged status his remarkable achievements should have brought him. Alfvén’s Nobel Prize was for work he had carried out in the 1930s, but it was not awarded until 1970. It is surely no coincidence that this was just a few months after the death of one Sydney Chapman.

Shortly after the announcement that Alfvén was to be awarded a Nobel, the physicist Alex Dessler wrote a telling piece in the journal Science. ‘For much of Alfvén’s career, his ideas were dismissed or treated with condescension; he was often forced to publish his papers in obscure journals; and he was continually disputed by the most renowned senior scientist working in the field of space physics,’ Dessler said. That ‘renowned senior scientist’ was Sydney Chapman. If the story of space physics were to be made into a superhero strip cartoon, Chapman would be portrayed as Alfvén’s nemesis. A British mathematician who applied his expertise to the physics of space, Chapman was, like Eddington, a lynchpin of the establishment. And he was not afraid to use his status to keep Alfvén in his place.

Chapman was a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a scientific advisor at the Geophysical Institute of Alaska, and an honorary fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Imperial College, London. ‘It would be difficult to overestimate the great influence which Chapman exerted on the scientific world at large,’ the writer of his obituary in the London Times noted, adding that ‘Chapman’s mild manner veiled a strong will and great determination.’ What is not mentioned in that obituary is his anarchic behaviour towards Hannes Alfvén. Science is meant to be a level playing field, with each idea standing on its own merit, regardless of its source; its status and acceptance should be subject only to the test of experiment. That was certainly not Alfvén’s experience.

Dessler followed up his statement about Alfvén with a confession: he had been one of Chapman’s unthinking disciples. It was only when he was persuaded to – by one Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar – that he was ‘shamed’ into looking at Alfvén’s work objectively. In that moment, Dessler had what can only be described as a road to Damascus experience. ‘My degree of shock and surprise in finding that Alfvén was right and his critics wrong can hardly be described,’ he wrote. Alfvén’s work had been ‘drowned’ by Chapman, he observed. ‘How could this have happened? After all, do we not believe in the objectivity of science?’

Those in the know never did believe in it. The great German physicist Max Planck once noted that ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.’ If the fact that Alfvén’s Nobel Prize came shortly after Chapman’s death is no coincidence, it is surely no accident that Chapman’s own ascendancy began at the untimely end of another scientist’s life.

On 15 June 1917, the Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland was found dead in a Tokyo hotel room. He had swallowed twenty times the recommended dose of his prescribed sleeping tablets, the barbiturate Veronal. It may have been suicide, but it seems more likely to have been the result of a psychotic episode induced by long-term use of the drug; seeing its effects on their patients, many doctors had long ceased prescribing it. Whatever the truth, it was a sad and ignominious end to the career of