The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [166]
The composition of our present structure is based on previous structures. Ours is the latest in a series of structural changes which has less to do with what has been discovered of reality than how views of reality have altered from one structure to another. For scientific activity has been influenced by factors within the overall structure that may have had little to do with the supposedly autonomous activities of science.
During the First World War, scientists in Germany looked forward to a postwar period in which science and technology would grow and prosper with increasing prestige, financial support and high social status. They expected Germany to win the war. The sudden and catastrophic defeat by the Allies, as well as the imposition of what were regarded as humiliating terms of surrender, caused a fundamental change in German thinking which was profoundly to affect one aspect of science above all.
Magnetic patterns in the sea-bed parallel to a ridge. The black and white stripes indicate reversals in the polarity of the rocks.
German belief in order and a rational world had been shaken by the defeat. Mistakes had been made, and the nation felt a strong desire for strengthened unity to counter the general feeling of despair. Survival and recovery seemed to need a philosophy that emphasised the organic, the emotional, the irrational wellsprings of human life rather than what was seen as the cause of defeat, the ‘dead hand’of the old mechanistic view. Science had taken things apart, reduced them to fragments and imposed laws that were deterministic, rather than offering hope and unity. For Germany, the Newtonian view was judged responsible for failure. It was to be rejected.
Within a few years of the war, educational reforms brought a drastic reduction in the teaching of mathematics and physics in schools. The hostility to science was palpable. The Prussian Secretary of Education, Carl Becker, said: ‘The basic evil is the overvaluing of the purely intellectual… We must acquire again reverence for the irrational.’
The continuing economic and political problems of the years between 1918 and 1930 brought on a sense of crisis. Feelings were intensified by the overwhelming success of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, almost universally read by German intellectuals. In the book Spengler defined the kind of knowledge Germany needed if it were to survive. Each culture, he held, was autonomous and separate, with its own forms of knowledge. There were no universal criteria by which to judge truth. A sense of ‘destiny’was essential to the health of a nation. It would provide an irrational, inner sense of truth which should dispense with the destructive views of science, that looked to cause and effect to explain the universe. Exact science could never be objective. Causality was dangerous and destructive. It had failed Germany.
A German cartoon of 1921 lampooning the failure of classical science. Spurned by the authorities, the penniless astronomer turns astrologer, gives advice to war profiteers and makes a fortunes, with which he buys his own instruments.
This universal hostility to the causal view permeated every aspect of German life. Those who supported it would lose financial support, grants, positions. The repudiation of ‘causality’was unique to the German sphere. It preceded the emergence of a new ‘non-causal’view in German science, which regarded the operation of the universe as a matter not of cause and effect but of chance and probability. With Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg and the ‘principle of uncertainty’at the heart of quantum physics came the end of experimental certainty. The observer altered the universe in the act of observing it. There was no causal reality to be observed.
Quantum physics might have developed elsewhere, later. The fact is that it developed in Weimar Germany in a social and intellectual environment that specifically encouraged a view of physics which did not naturally evolve out