Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [9]
2. The republic of science
The scientists had faith that, whatever they were conjuring with, whatever danger inhered in the explosive potential of the nucleus, they would, as a group, never allow their discoveries to be used by nation states against humanity. For they had their higher allegiances, whose purposes transcended those of petty polities shaped by the whims of nationalism or politics and susceptible to abuse by despots. They were part of what the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi would call ‘the republic of science’. The republic had its own rules, cultures, practices. New initiates served as apprentices to elder masters, were taught how to do their work and evaluate the work of their colleagues. The point was, as Rhodes describes it, to create a ‘political network among men and women of differing backgrounds and differing values’, by establishing conventions of judgment and trust. The scientific republic did not replace the nation state but rested in consolidating fashion atop all such states.8
Above all, the republic must allow its constituents to work alongside each other, if not literally then with full knowledge of what all its other members are doing. Polanyi likened the process to assembling a jigsaw puzzle: while each person involved in the assembly contributes his or her skills to matching colors and shapes to make the pieces fit, in the end the puzzle must be a group enterprise, wherein skills, and puzzle components, are merged to form a whole. Each scientist (to depart from the metaphor) must see the entire problem laid out, and must contribute to its solution. There was no real hierarchy among scientists: ‘The authority of scientific opinion remains essentially mutual; it is established between scientists, not above them.’ That discoveries concerning the atom would be shared, through journal articles, at conferences, in coffee houses and taverns and labs, was a matter of faith among the world’s physicists before the Second World War. One could not patent or nationalize the atom.9
James Chadwick was caught in Germany at the onset of the First World War and interned at a prison camp outside Berlin. A number of German scientists supplied him with enough equipment to set up a small laboratory, in which he worked with other scientist prisoners. In the midst of the war’s carnage in May 1918, Chadwick wrote reassuringly to Rutherford that he was about to start work ‘on the formation of carbonyl chloride in light’—scientist language for phosgene gas. The pace of scientific exchange quickened considerably with the end of the war, during Oppenheimer’s ‘heroic time’. (‘It involved’, Oppenheimer wrote, ‘the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands ...It was a time of earnest correspondence and hurried conferences, of debate, criticism and brilliant mathematical improvisation.’) In Munich’s cafes, students of the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld scrawled formulas on the marble tabletops; waiters at the Cafe Lutz were told never to wipe the tables without permission. Oppenheimer was one of many young American scientists who came to Gottingen during the 1920s (he was there nicknamed ‘Oppie’, or ‘Opje’, which he had difficulty getting used to). A group of remarkable Hungarian Jews—Polanyi, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Theodor von Karman, Leo Szilard—left their home country during the 1920s and 1930s, driven out by political instability, state violence, and a rising tide of anti-Semitism. The Japanese physicist Nishina, who would be the first scientist contacted by the Japanese government to explain what had happened at Hiroshima, worked with Rutherford and Bohr, and in 1927 hosted Albert Einstein in Tokyo.10
Like Nishina, many came to study with Bohr