• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

[* But Truman’s responsibility for the witch-hunt atmosphere of the late 1940s and early 1950s is considerable. His 1947 Executive Order 9835 authorized inquiries into the opinions and associates of all federal employees, without the right to confront the accuser or even, in most cases, to know what the accusation was. Those found wanting were fired. His Attorney General, Tom Clark, established a list of ‘subversive’ organizations so wide that at one time it included Consumer’s Union.]

The playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, about the Salem Witch Trials, in this period. When the drama opened in Europe, Miller was denied a passport by the State Department on the grounds that it was not in the best interests of the United States for him to travel abroad. On opening night in Brussels the play was greeted with tumultuous applause, whereupon the US Ambassador stood up and took a bow. Brought before HCUA, Miller was chastised for the suggestion that Congressional investigations might have something in common with witch trials; he replied, ‘The comparison is inevitable, sir.’ Thomas was shortly afterwards thrown in jail for fraud.

One summer in graduate school I was a student of Condon’s. I remember vividly his account of being brought up before some loyalty review board:

‘Dr Condon, it says here that you have been at the forefront of a revolutionary movement in physics called’ – and here the inquisitor read the words slowly and carefully – ‘quantum mechanics. It strikes this hearing that if you could be at the forefront of one revolutionary movement... you could be at the forefront of another.’

Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: ‘I believe in Archimedes’ Principle, formulated in the third century BC. I believe in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton’s laws...’ And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampere, Boltzmann and Maxwell. This physicist’s catechism did not gain him much. The tribunal did not appreciate humour in so serious a matter. But the most they were able to pin on Condon, as I recall, was that in high school he had a job delivering a socialist newspaper door-to-door on his bicycle.

Imagine you seriously want to understand what quantum mechanics is about. There is a mathematical underpinning that you musl first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics. matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school - roughly fifteen years. Such a course of study does not actually involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply.

The job of the popularizer of science, trying to get across some idea of quantum mechanics to a general audience that has nol gone through these initiation rites, is daunting. Indeed, there are no successful popularizations of quantum mechanics in my opin ion, partly for this reason. These mathematical complexities are compounded by the fact that quantum theory is so resolutel) counterintuitive. Common sense is almost useless in approaching it. It’s no good, Richard Feynman once said, asking why it is thai way. No one knows why it is that way. That’s just the way it is.

Now suppose we were to approach some obscure religion 01 New Age doctrine or shamanistic belief system sceptically. We have an open mind; we understand there’s something interesting here; we introduce ourselves to the practitioner and ask for ar intelligible summary. Instead we are told that it’s intrinsically toe difficult to be explained simply, that it