Dilip Simeon's blog: SA Aiyar: Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre

Dilip Simeon's blog: SA Aiyar: Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03bds48

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24159594

Political Violence

When I heard about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially the first one, I was stunned but pleased, because I thought it would end the war and then I wouldn't have to go, and other people wouldn't have to go, and America would win a glorious victory. Later I felt very ashamed of that kind of feeling, but I feel it's necessary to mention because of the attraction that large-scale destruction can have if it seems to be on your side, and for what we take to be virtuous purposes.
                                                             -Robert Jay Lifton

                                                        War and Political Violence     

                  
                                              Resovling Conflicts Without War- Erich Fromm

Muzamil Jaleel

http://www.manushi.in/articles.php?articleId=1644&ptype=campaigns

An Example of Rigorous Clinical Reporting

Manushi strongly recommends the following three part reports in The Indian Express dated 26, 27, 28 September, 2012 by Muzamil Jaleel. Even while Muzamil  writing on a highly  a controversial issue and exposing the shoddy “evidence” being presented to courts for booking Muslim youth under draconian laws on charges of promoting/supporting terrorist activity inIndia these articles represent high standard of professional journalism because: 1. They are based on solid investigative work by careful examination of police records.  2. The author lets the facts speak for themselves  and avoids the use of judgmental adjectives or emotive outbursts. Instead he maintains a clinical tone in narrating facts. Such a carefully worded and investigative report in a calm tenor has the effect of forcing readers to think seriously about the implications of such a crude and dishonest job being done by our police in investigating those arrested on charges of abetting terrorist activities.  Muzammil Jaleel has consistently maintained this quality even when reporting from strife torn Kashmir, his home state. Given below are the three articles written by Muzamil Jaleel: 1.  “2 years, 5 cities, 6 cases – and ‘proof’ everywhere is the same magazine” Published on Sep 26 2012   On April 16, 2006, Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh was tense. There had been communal clashes a week ago during Eid-e-Milad. In the afternoon, policemen from the Kotwali police station arrested two women, 20-year-old Aasiya and 23-year-old Rafia, daughters of one Abdul Hafiz Qureshi. The police, in their seizure memo, claimed to have recovered “incriminating material” from Aasiya — three copies of an April 2004 issue of a Hindi magazine, Tehrik-e-Millat, and a SIMI donation receipt towards “office construction fund” (receipt no. 0033359, dated January 25, 2006) with the name “Kumari Aashiya Khan” in Hindi for an amount of Rs 500.  (To read more: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/2-years-5-cities-6-cases---and--proof--everywhere-is-the-same-magazine/1007920/0) 2. “Over a month, four ‘terror’ arrests in Indore for ‘shouting slogans” Published on Sep 27 2012 It’s just not Urdu writings or a magazine copy that can get you booked under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). In many cases — including five over the course of one month, April 2008, four of them in Indore alone — the script was the same: a mukhbir or informer tipped off police about men “shouting anti-government slogans” outside mosques or in front of their homes, and the men were arrested and then left to battle it out in court. (To read more: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/over-a-month-four--terror--arrests-in-indore-for--shouting-slogans-/1008344) 3.       “The posters that landed retired SIMI secy in jail” Published on Sep 28 2012  Cases registered 12 years ago — before SIMI was even banned — on flimsy charges and an investigation that has been rapped for loopholes left Munir Deshmukh a wanted man for years and have kept him in jail for the past 21 months. Once the SIMI national secretary, Deshmukh retired from the organisation in February 2001, seven months before it was banned. (To read more: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-posters-that-landed-retired-simi-secy-in-jail/1008884)   For more reports by Jaleel, see his blog: http://en.wordpress.com/tag/muzamil-jaleel/ ******** Posted on 15 November 2012

Heisenberg Visits Bohr

http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/bohr-heisenberg-meeting.htm

During the spring of 1941, Heisenberg’s research team in Leipzig obtained evidence of neutron multiplication in a reactor experiment—a chain reaction was a practical possibility. Several months later, German researchers also saw it was possible that element 94 (plutonium), which could be produced in a working reactor, could power a nuclear bomb. As the German army advanced into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, after having conquered most of Western Europe, Heisenberg accepted an invitation to speak at a German cultural institute in German-occupied Copenhagen, Denmark. Heisenberg arranged to meet with his long-time Danish colleague, Niels Bohr, during his stay in Copenhagen.

Bohr met with Heisenberg sometime during the week of September 15-21, 1941. There is no contemporary record of what was said during the private meeting, but Bohr was clearly upset by it afterward.

An account of the Bohr-Heisenberg meeting was offered in a book published in German in 1956 by a Swiss journalist, Robert Jungk. The translations into Danish in 1957 and into English in 1958 (Brighter than a Thousand Suns) contained an excerpted letter from Heisenberg to Jungk, in which Heisenberg gave his recollection of the meeting. After seeing the Danish edition, Bohr drafted a response to Heisenberg. But he did not send it, perhaps because he was concerned about hurting Heisenberg and his family. Responding to inquiries from historians and others about the meeting, Bohr continued to draft accounts of what had transpired at the meeting, but in each case he decided not to publish them nor to send them to Heisenberg. After Bohr’s death in 1962, the Bohr family sealed these documents among his private papers.

There has been lengthy debate and speculation about Heisenberg’s motives and statements during the meeting, culminating most recently in the Tony-award-winning play Copenhagen by the British playwright Michael Frayn. What did Heisenberg believe could be done, and should be done, about atomic bombs? What did he want from Bohr? These questions called up many powerful issues and emotions involving Nazi Germany and nuclear war. As a result of the debate, the Bohr family decided to release the documents to the pubic in February 2002, ten years in advance of their usual 50-year limitation on access to private archival papers. The eleven documents are now available on the Web in facsimile, in Danish transcription, and in English translation. See also documents on Heisenberg posted by his son.

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http://werner-heisenberg.unh.edu/Jungk.htm

Two Letters from Werner Heisenberg to Robert Jungk,
the author of "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns".

November 17, 1956

Dear Dr. Jungk,

I want to thank you very much for having your publisher send me a copy of your fine and interesting book about the atomic scientists. Since I have been sick these last few days, I had the opportunity to read it through in its entirety and I find that, overall, you characterized the atmosphere among the atomic scientists very well. The fact that you have addressed a few delicate issues may perhaps present some difficulties also for one or the other of them. But these dangers are likely not very great. That you printed the Frank (sic!) report and Bohr's memorandum to Roosevelt at the end seems to me a special distinction of your book. For in retrospect one can hardly deny that right there the natural scientists were better at judging and analyzing the political processes than the statesmen of that time.

Nevertheless, in some details of your book I need to make a few little remarks which may serve you in a second printing by correcting minor mistakes (which tend to be unavoidable with such an undertaking).

First on page 52: This point is really quite important to me. You describe Weizsäcker's political conviction (I assume perhaps derived from conversations with Teller) and near the end you word it "He (Teller) had to assume that his old friend and fellow student would stay loyal to Hitler." Although the subsequent sentence then disputes this assertion, I do believe that the above sentence conveys a completely false impression of Weizsäcker's political conviction. I saw Weizsäcker almost daily during the years 1931 to 1935 and am probably more familiar with his political opinions back then than anyone else. First off, Weizsäcker loathed Hitler's personality and the crimes committed by his movement just as much as any other decent human being. To this revulsion undiminished later on as well, there may have, over time, been added a mix of horrified admiration, when he saw from up close (through his family) how Hitler managed to twist power out of the hands of all those highly qualified people whose efforts were directed towards positive ends in German politics, and how, in addition, he was given from abroad practically without resistance the very concessions that Brüning and Stresemann had always sought in vain. To speak of any kind of loyal feelings from Weizsäcker towards Hitler is quite certainly far off.

With the beginning of the war there arose of course for every German physicist the dreadful dilemma that each of his actions meant either a victory for Hitler or a defeat of Germany, and of course both alternatives presented themselves to us as appalling. Actually, I suppose that a similar dilemma must have existed for the physicists active on the allies' side as well, for once they were signed on during the war, they also were signed on for Stalin's victory and Russia's foray into Europe. Overall, the German physicists acted in this dilemma as conservators of sort of that which was worthy and in need of conserving, and to wait out the end of the catastrophe if one was lucky enough to still be around.

Further: page 91. I can remember the meeting with Fermi in Goudsmit's home quite well, but not at all that Fermi would have mentioned the Uranium problem. The possibility that atomic weapons might already be used in the coming war, I certainly did not consider seriously at that time; perhaps repressed it out of an inner fear. At any rate, I cannot remember, as I said, the mention of the Uranium problem, and maybe that lack of memory itself is a sign of the repression back then. The conversation with Pegram only took place somewhat later, and I told Pegram at the time with utter conviction that Hitler would lose the coming war, yet I felt I needed to stay in Germany to contribute to preserving the good in as much as it still existed. During this conversation as well, I did not seriously consider that the atomic bomb would possibly be part of a war with Hitler. On the one hand, I was hoping that the war would end sooner and on the other hand, I had a gut feeling that the difficulties with the construction of an atomic bomb (which I had not given any thought to at that time) would be extremely great.

About p.100. You are talking here near the end of the second paragraph of active resistance against Hitler, and I believe - I apologize for writing this so directly - that this passage bespeaks a complete misunderstanding of a totalitarian dictatorship. In a dictatorship active resistance can only be used by people who are perceived as participants in the system. If someone speaks publicly against the system, he most certainly is robbing himself of any possibility of active resistance. Because either he utters this criticism of the system only occasionally in a politically harmless fashion, then his political influence can be easily blocked; for instance with young people one can spread the word: Oh well, the old Professor X may be a nice old man, but of course he is incapable of understanding the enthusiasm of youth, or such thing. Or else, the dissident actually tries to motivate students for political action, then he would within a few days end up in a concentration camp, and even his martyr death would remain practically unknown because to speak of him is not allowed. I do not wish to have this remark misconstrued to imply that I myself have been in a resistance move against Hitler. On the contrary, I have always felt very ashamed before the people of July 20th, (some of whom were my friends), who at the time have put their effort into serious resistance, sacrificing their lives. But even their example shows that real resistance can only come from people who appear to be going along. Our most famous example was Canaris, who, by the way, also at times assisted us in retaining our circle of physicists.

About page 175: In the little episode during my bicycle trip to Urfeld, circumstances were as follows. Since all male civilians were drafted to the "Volkssturm", it was not an uncommon occurrence that these civilians fled from the front to the back country. To prevent this, the SS had posted SS guards at the roads to capture such fugitives, whereupon not infrequently they were hanged without a lengthy military tribunal. I had basically prepared for this peril by getting an identity document from the institute. An SS man recognized, however, that such a document could be fashioned quite easily at the institute and told me he would have to bring me in front of his commanding officer. This dangerous turn I was able to prevent by bribing him with the package of Pall-Mall cigarettes. By the way, my departure from the institute was of course neither a flight from the troops of Colonel Pash, nor from the "Volkssturm"; it was prepared carefully at the institute and only conceived out of my belief that I needed to be at the side of my family during the time of the final battles. Therefore I had remained in Hechingen until the moment when the "Volkssturm" was already dissolved and the French tanks were rolling in. I then drove off at 3 am from Hechingen on my bicycle.

Now for a few minor details: On p.177 it should read Urfeld, not Urbach. On p.224: I have read almost all the works by the English novelist Anthony Trollope, not Tobias Smollet. And finally p. 225: At the first report, I indeed did not believe in the atomic bomb, because I knew what incredible technical effort was needed to produce atomic bombs. Only at the second radio report where precisely that huge effort was reported, did I come to terms with the fact that in America actually many Billions had been spent on the atomic bomb and that hundreds of thousands of people had worked on it. The idea that the Americans had dropped a pile, I certainly did not consider seriously after the second broadcast, since that would have had only a very limited effect through radio- active contamination. And also because it would have been, in fact, quite simple since we took it for granted that the Americans could produce piles very easily should they be interested in them. But the difference between pile and bomb was completely clear to us, and, I believe, already the next day in a seminar we calculated the approximate dimensions and the workings of a bomb. Perhaps I may mention in connection to this that once in 1944, an emissary from Goering came to my institute, indicated that news had come to Germany through espionage that the Americans were close to dropping an atomic bomb over German territory, and he asked me whether I thought this was possible. I replied at the time that although I thought it still very unlikely at this time (summer 1944), since the production of the atomic bomb necessitated quite an enormous technical effort, I could, however, not completely rule it out.

p.227: The final sentence of the British officer was not addressed to Hahn; actually, Hahn was not present at this conversation at all, and I am firmly convinced that out of sheer tact even the British officer would not have answered in this fashion. This was a conversation taking place between, if I remember correctly, the British officer, Weizsäcker, and me. In this conversation which dealt with the moral right of the bombing, the officer eventually felt, in a kind of discomfiture, pressed to the statement that we ought to understand: to them the life of a British or an American soldier was more important than the lives of 70 000 Japanese civilians. One of us then replied "But there you are really very close to the moral terms of Herr Hitler". The officer, with whom we had otherwise been on very friendly terms, left us upon this with a very disturbed expression on his face. Very obviously the officer had not meant to wound us with his assertion, and probably he himself was later rather unhappy over this statement.

It would be nice if you could include a few corrections at the second printing, and I assume that you will get suggestions for such corrections from other atomic scientists as well. Once again many thanks for your interesting book.

With many regards

Yours

(Signed)

Los Angeles
12-29-56

Dear and Highly Esteemed Professor Heisenberg,
I want to thank you very much for your kind letter with the accompanying corrections. On January 15^th a new edition of my book will appear in which I have already taken note of this communication.
Some of it, however, I was only able to include as a "footnote", in order to not disturb the "layout" too much. In January and February, I am now going to work on the English language edition which will appear in Great Britain with two publishers simultaneously (Gollancz and Hart-Davis) and in the USA with Harcourt, Brace and Co. The book will appear in France already in the spring and in the fall in all West-European countries.
Should you - aside from the corrections- have the desire or the inclination to help fill in one of the many gaps which my book still has of course, I would be very grateful for it. In particular, it would be of interest to me to learn more precisely about your Copenhagen conversation with Bohr during the Second World War. Also I would have liked to know more about the false alarm after the war, when two alleged agents who were later discovered to be frauds, were threatening to abduct you from Göttingen.
Only on one point was I not able to accommodate your letter. Mr von Weizsäcker himself told me a while back in Göttingen that although he had a loathing for the leaders of this "movement"(that is, not just after 1939), in its beginnings he had a certain sympathy or, let's say, understanding for National Socialism, because it appeared to him that there was the thrust of profound forces operating here. For this attitude I have had and still have quite a bit of understanding, since I have lived in and with the German Youth Movement, whose criticism of "intellectualism" was captured by the Nazis and forged into such a crudely mindless weapon.
By the way, my hope is that in the USA my book will also clear up the myth of the "Nazi" Heisenberg, which Norbert Wiener only a few months ago has warmed up again in the second volume of his autobiography.
With warm wishes for the coming year, I am respectfully
Yours,
(Signed) Robert Jungk

Jan. 18^th, 1957

Dear Dr. Jungk!
Many thanks for your letter, asking me to write in a little more detail about my Copenhagen conversations with Bohr during WWII. In my memory which may, of course, deceive me after such a long time, the conversation roughly unfolded the following way. My visit to Copenhagen took place in the fall of 1941; I seem to remember that it was about the end of October. At that time, as a result of our experiments with uranium and heavy water, we in our "Uranium Club" had come to the following conclusion: It will definitely be possible to build a reactor from uranium and heavy water which produces energy. In this reactor (based on a theoretical work by v. Weizsäcker) a decay product of 239-uranium will be produced which just like 235-Uranium is a suitable explosive in atomic bombs. We did not know a process for obtaining of 235-Uranium with the resources available under wartime conditions in Germany, in quantities worth mentioning. Even the production of nuclear explosives from reactors obviously could only be achieved by running huge reactors for years on end. Thus we were quite clear on the fact that the production of atomic bombs would be possible only with enormous technical resources. So we knew that in principle atomic bombs could be built, although we estimated the necessary technical effort to be even rather larger than in the end it turned out to have been. This situation seemed to us to be an especially favorable precondition as it enabled the physicists to influence further developments. For, had the production of atomic bombs been impossible, the problem would not have arisen at all; but had it been easy, then the physicists definitely could not have prevented their production. The actual givens of the situation, however, gave the physicists at that moment in time a decisive amount of influence over the subsequent events, since they had good arguments for their administrations - atomic bombs probably would not come into play in the course of the war, or else that using every conceivable effort it might yet be possible to bring them into play. That both kinds of arguments were factually fully justified was shown by the subsequent development; for, in fact, the Americans could not employ the atomic bomb against Germany any more. In this situation we believed that a talk with Bohr might be of value. This talk then took place on an evening walk in the city district near Ny-Carlsberg. Because I knew that Bohr was under surveillance by German political operatives and that statements Bohr made about me would most likely be reported back to Germany, I tried to keep the conversation at a level of allusions that would not immediately endanger my life. The conversation probably started by me asking somewhat casually whether it were justifiable that physicists were devoting themselves to the Uranium problem right now during times of war, when one had to at least consider the possibility that progress in this field might lead to very grave consequences for war technology. Bohr immediately grasped the meaning of this question as I gathered from his somewhat startled reaction. He answered, as far as I can remember, with a counter-question "Do you really believe one can utilize Uranium fission for the construction of weapons?" I may have replied "I know that this is possible in principle, but a terrific technical effort might be necessary, which one can hope, will not be realized anymore in this war." Bohr was apparently so shocked by this answer that he assumed I was trying to tell him Germany had made great progress towards manufacturing atomic weapons. In my subsequent attempt to correct this false impression I must not have wholly succeeded in winning Bohr's trust, especially because I only dared to speak in very cautious allusions ( which definitely was a mistake on my part) out of fear that later on a particular choice of words could be held against me. I then asked Bohr once more whether, in view of the obvious moral concerns, it might be possible to get all physicists to agree not to attempt work on atomic bombs, since they could only be produced with a huge technical effort anyhow. But Bohr thought it would be hopeless to exert influence on the actions in the individual countries, and that it was, so to speak, the natural course in this world that the physicists were working in their countries on the production of weapons. For an explanation of this answer one has to include the following complication which, although it was not talked about as far as I can remember, but of which I was conscious, and which may also have been on Bohr's mind, consciously or unconsciously. The prospect of producing atomic bombs while at war was at the time immeasurably greater on the American side than on the German, due to the whole prior history. Since 1933 Germany had lost a number of excellent German physicists through emigration, the laboratories at universities were ancient and poor due to neglect by the government, the gifted young people often were pushed into other professions. In the United States, however, many university institutes since 1932 had been given completely new and modern equipment, and been switched over to nuclear physics. Larger and smaller cyclotrons had been started up in various places, many capable physicists had immigrated and the interest in nuclear physics even on the part of the public was very great. Our proposition that the physicists on both sides should not advance the production of atomic bombs, was thus indirectly, if one wants to exaggerate the point, a proposition in favor of Hitler. The instinctive human position "As a decent human being one cannot make atomic weapons" thus coincided with an advantage for Germany. How far this was influencing Bohr, I cannot know of course. Everything I am writing here is in a sense an after the fact analysis of a very complicated psychological situation, where it is unlikely that every point can be accurate. - I myself was very unhappy over this conversation. The talk was then resumed a few weeks or months later by Jensen, but was equally unsuccessful. Even now, as I am writing this conversation down, I have no good feeling, since the wording of the various statements can certainly not be accurate anymore, and it would require all the fine nuances to accurately recount the actual content of the conversation in its psychological shading.
The second question in your letter concerned the alleged plans for my abduction from Göttingen in the year 1947. This event can in retrospect only be viewed in a humorous vein, of course. It caused a lot of grief for the Britons who had to care for us and guard us, and they even had to relocate us, that is Hahn and me, for a period of some time from Göttingen. Like clockwork there appeared in the middle of the night in front of my Göttingen house two masked figures who had been promised a high reward if they were delivering me to an agent. These two men turned out after their capture to have been two Hamburg harbor workers who wanted to come into some good money on the cheap. In fact, however, the man who had engaged the harbor workers was identical to the one who had informed the British of the whole caper; he was a fraud who wanted to line himself up for a good position in the Secret Service. Only a year later the whole sham blew up and it has given us much to laugh about, naturally.
What you write about Weizsäcker, I can agree on. Only, there is a great deal of difference between this "Understanding for National Socialism in its beginnings" and the terminology "Loyalty towards Hitler" that you have used in your book. Why, one could in the first years very clearly combine a certain "Understanding for National Socialism" with the loathing of the person of its leader, Hitler, by, let's say, being desolate that "A genuine, idealistic desire of the German people was abused by a figure as unsavory as Hitler". The overlap "Hitler equals National Socialism", while proven through the subsequent years, was not yet clear to many Germans in the early beginnings.
Should you revise the passage about my conversation with Bohr in your book, I would be obliged, if I could see the text before publication and make corrections, if necessary.

With many warm greetings,
Yours
(Signed)

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A Historical Perspective on Copenhagen
                             
                -David C. Cassidy
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Draft of letter from Bohr to Heisenberg, never sent. In the handwriting of Niels Bohr's assistant, Aage Petersen. Undated, but written after the first publication, in 1957, of the Danish translation of Robert Jungk, Heller als Tausend Sonnen, the first edition of Jungk's book to contain Heisenberg's letter.

1. Translation.

1

Dear Heisenberg,

I have seen a book, “Stærkere end tusind sole” [“Brighter than a thousand suns”] by Robert Jungk, recently published in Danish, and I think that I owe it to you to tell you that I am greatly amazed to see how much your memory has deceived you in your letter to the author of the book, excerpts of which are printed in the Danish edition.

Personally, I remember every word of our conversations, which took place on a background of extreme sorrow and tension for us here in Denmark. In particular, it made a strong impression both on Margrethe and me, and on everyone at the Institute that the two of you spoke to, that you and Weizsäcker expressed your definite conviction that Germany would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a different outcome of the war and to be reticent as regards all German offers of cooperation. I also remember quite clearly our conversation in my room at the Institute, where in vague terms you spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons and that you said that there was no need to talk about details since you were completely familiar with them and had spent the past two years working more or less exclusively on such preparations. I listened to this without speaking since [a] great matter for mankind was at issue in which, despite our personal friendship, we had to be regarded as representatives of two sides engaged in mortal combat. That my silence and gravity, as you write in the letter, could be taken as an expression of shock at your reports that it was possible to make an atomic bomb is a quite peculiar misunderstanding, which must be due to the great tension in your own mind. From the day three years earlier when I realized that slow neutrons could only cause fission in Uranium 235 and not 238, it was of course obvious to me that a bomb with certain effect could be produced by separating the uraniums. In June 1939 I had even given a public lecture in Birmingham about uranium fission, where I talked about the effects of such a bomb but of course added that the technical preparations would be so large that one did not know how soon they could be overcome. If anything in my behaviour could be interpreted as shock, it did not derive from such reports but rather from the news, as I had to understand it, that Germany was participating vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic weapons.

Besides, at the time I knew nothing about how far one had already come in England and America, which I learned only the following year when I was able to go to England after being informed that the German occupation force in Denmark had made preparations for my arrest.

All this is of course just a rendition of what I remember clearly from our conversations, which subsequently were naturally the subject of thorough discussions at the Institute and with other trusted friends in Denmark. It is quite another matter that, at that time and ever since, I have always had the definite impression that you and Weizsäcker arranged the symposium at the German Institute, in which I did not take part myself as a matter of principle, and the visit to us in order to assure yourselves that we suffered no harm and to try in every way to help us in our dangerous situation.

This letter is essentially just between the two of us, but because of the stir the book has already caused in Danish newspapers, I have thought it appropriate to relate the contents of the letter in confidence to the head of the Danish Foreign Office and to Ambassador Duckwitz.

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Letter from Werner Heisenberg to his wife Elisabeth written during his 1941 visit in Copenhagen. This letter was first published and posted in its entirety on 6/5/2003.

Copenhagen, Tuesday night( September 1941 added in Elisabeth's handwriting)

My dear Li! Here I am once again in the city which is so familiar to me and where a part of my heart has stayed stuck ever since that time fifteen years ago. When I heard the bells from the tower of city hall for the first time again, close to the window of my hotel room, it gripped me tight inside, and everything has stayed so much the same as if nothing out there in the world had changed. It is so strange when suddenly you encounter a piece of your own youth, just as if you were meeting yourself. I liked the trip coming over here too: In Berlin we had pouring rain, over Neustrelitz storm and rainshowers as if from buckets, in Rostock it cleared up, from Wenemünde on the sky was scrubbed clean, almost cloudless, but still a stiff north wind; so it remained until I arrived here. Late at night I walked under a clear and starry sky through the city, darkened, to Bohr.

Bohr and his family are doing fine; he himself has aged a little, his sons are all fully grown now. The conversation quickly turned to the human concerns and unhappy events of these times; about the human affairs the consensus is a given; in questions of politics I find it difficult that even a great man like Bohr can not separate out thinking, feeling, and hating entirely. But probably one ought not to separate these ever. Mrs. Bohr too was well, she asked me a lot about you and the children, especially about Maria. The pictures I will show to her tomorrow night, I have a nice enlarged foto of Maria which I had made for Mama. Later I was sitting for a long time with Bohr alone; it was after midnight when he accompanied me to the streetcar, together with Hans. (Bohr)

Thursday night. I will take this letter with me to Germany after all and send it from there. From everything I have heard, the censorship would delay the arrival several days as well, so it makes no sense to me that a censor should read this letter. Unfortunately, you then have to wait for my letter for almost eight days. I for my part have not received any mail here either.- Yesterday I was again with Bohr for the whole evening; aside from Mrs. Bohr and the children, there was a young English woman, taken in by the Bohrs, because she can not return to England. It is somewhat weird to talk with an English woman these days. During the unavoidable political conversations, where it naturally and automatically became my assigned part to defend our system, she retired, and I thought that was actually quite nice of her.- This morning I was at the pier with Weizsäcker, you know, there along the harbor, where the "Langelinie" is. Now there are German war ships anchored there, torpedo boats, auxiliary cruisers and the like. It was the first warm day, the harbor and the sky above it tinted in a very bright, light blue. At the first light buoy near the end of the pier we stayed for a long time looking at life in the harbor. Two large freighters departed in the direction of Helsinor; a coal ship arrived, probably from Germany, two sailboats, about the size of the one we used to sail here in the past, were leaving the harbor, apparently on an afternoon excursion. At the pavilion on the Langelinie we ate a meal, all around us there were essentially only happy, cheerful people, at least it appeared that way to us. In general, people do look so happy here. At night in the streets one sees all these radiantly happy young couples, apparently going out for a night of dancing, not thinking of anything else. It is difficult to imagine anything more different than the street life over here and in Leipzig.- In Bohr's institute we had some scientific discussions, the Copenhagen group, however, doesn't know much more than we do either. Tomorrow the talks in the German scientific institute are beginning; the first official talk is mine, tomorrow night. Sadly the members of Bohr's institute will not attend for political reasons. It is amazing, given that the Danes are living totally unrestricted, and are living exceptionally well, how much hatred or fear has been galvanized here, so that even a rapprochement in the cultural arena - where it used to be automatic in earlier times - has become almost impossible. In Bohr's institute I gave a short talk in Danish, of course this was just like in the olden days ( the people from the German Scientific Institute had explicitly approved) but nobody wants to go to the German Institute on principle, because during and after its founding a number of brisk militarist speeches on the New Order in Europe were given. - With Kienle and Biermann I have spoken briefly, they were, however, for the most part busy with the observatory.

Saturday night. Now there is only this one night left in Copenhagen. How will the world have changed, I wonder, when I come back here. That everything in the meantime will continue just the same, that the bells in the tower of city hall will toll every hour and play the little melody at noon and midnight, is so weird to me. Yet the people, when I return, will be older, the fate of each one will have changed, and I do not know how I myself will fare. Last night I gave my talk, made a nice acquaintance too. The architect Merck who had built the Reich Sports Arena in Berlin is slated to build a new German school here in Copenhagen, and he came to my talk. On a joint trip aboard the streetcar we had a pretty good time conversing. I always enjoy people who are especially good at something.- Today at noon there was a big reception at the German embassy, with the meal being by far the best part of it. The ambassador was talking animatedly in English to the lady seated next to him, the American ambassador. When she left, I believe I heard her say to somebody: We will meet again, definitely at Christmas, unless something quite unexpected comes up. One has to take these diplomatic dinners in a humorous vein.

Today I was once more, with Weizsäcker, at Bohr's In many ways this was especially nice, the conversation revolved for a large part of the evening around purely human concerns, Bohr was reading aloud, I played a Mozart Sonata (a-Major). On the way home the night sky was again starstudded. - By the Way: two nights ago a wonderful northern light was visible, the whole sky was covered with green, rapidly changing veils.

It is now a quarter of one a.m. and I am rather tired. Tomorrow I will post this letter in Berlin, so you will receive it Monday most likely. In one week I will be with you again and tell you everything that happened to me. And then we all will be together for the winter in Leipzig.

Good night for now! Your Werner

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The Darling

About a month after I started this blog, I had to start another one HateHaterHated to keep more negative thoughts? Now there are nine blogs each serving a slightly different purpose. This parent blog is the formless one. Sometimes it is fascinating reflecting why something is where it is. Why did I post Chekhov's "The Darling"  in HateHaterHated ? I remember maliciously thinking of some one who was like Olenka. It is this malice that I want to explore.

I was trying to enter the mind of Olenka, and I failed. What will it be like to be a "darling" of Olenka. The image that arose in my mind was that of a lioness which had smothered her cub to death but never the less was licking it...

Then remembered this from 'Crabwalk' --

No one knows what he was thinking and is thinking now. Every mind is sealed, not just his. A no-man's land for word hunters. No point to opening up the skull. Besides, no one says out loud what he thinks. And anyone who tries to is already lying in the first words that come out. Sentences starting with 'At the moment he was thinking...' have never been anything but crutches. Nothing is locked tighter than a mind. Even progressively harsher torture doesn't produce complete confessions. Even in the moment of death,a person can cheat in his thoughts. ......................... page 215

What is Science

George Orwell

What is Science?

In last week's Tribune, there was an interesting letter from Mr. J. Stewart Cook, in which he suggested that the best way of avoiding the danger of a ‘scientific hierarchy’ would be to see to it that every member of the general public was, as far as possible, scientifically educated. At the same time, scientists should be brought out of their isolation and encouraged to take a greater part in politics and administration.

As a general statement, I think most of us would agree with this, but I notice that, as usual, Mr. Cook does not define science, and merely implies in passing that it means certain exact sciences whose experiments can be made under laboratory conditions. Thus, adult education tends ‘to neglect scientific studies in favour of literary, economic and social subjects’, economics and sociology not being regarded as branches of science. Apparently. This point is of great importance. For the word science is at present used in at least two meanings, and the whole question of scientific education is obscured by the current tendency to dodge from one meaning to the other.

Science is generally taken as meaning either (a) the exact sciences, such as chemistry, physics, etc., or (b) a method of thought which obtains verifiable results by reasoning logically from observed fact.

If you ask any scientist, or indeed almost any educated person, ‘What is science?’ you are likely to get an answer approximating to (b). In everyday life, however, both in speaking and in writing, when people say ‘science’ they mean (a). Science means something that happens in a laboratory: the very word calls up a picture of graphs, test-tubes, balances, Bunsen burners, microscopes. A biologist, and astronomer, perhaps a psychologist or a mathematician is described as a ‘man of science’: no one would think of applying this term to a statesman, a poet, a journalist or even a philosopher. And those who tell us that the young must be scientifically educated mean, almost invariably, that they should be taught more about radioactivity, or the stars, or the physiology or their own bodies, rather than that they should be taught to think more exactly.

This confusion of meaning, which is partly deliberate, has in it a great danger. Implied in the demand for more scientific education is the claim that if one has been scientifically trained one's approach to all subjects will be more intelligent than if one had had no such training. A scientist's political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman. The world, in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it. But a ‘scientist’, as we have just seen, means in practice a specialist in one of the exact sciences. It follows that a chemist or a physicist, as such, is politically more intelligent than a poet or a lawyer, as such. And, in fact, there are already millions of people who do believe this.

But is it really true that a ‘scientist’, in this narrower sense, is any likelier than other people to approach non-scientific problems in an objective way? There is not much reason for thinking so. Take one simple test — the ability to withstand nationalism. It is often loosely said that ‘Science is international’, but in practice the scientific workers of all countries line up behind their own governments with fewer scruples than are felt by the writers and the artists. The German scientific community, as a whole, made no resistance to Hitler. Hitler may have ruined the long-term prospects of German science, but there were still plenty of gifted men to do the necessary research on such things as synthetic oil, jet planes, rocket projectiles and the atomic bomb. Without them the German war machine could never have been built up.

On the other hand, what happened to German literature when the Nazis came to power? I believe no exhaustive lists have been published, but I imagine that the number of German scientists — Jews apart — who voluntarily exiled themselves or were persecuted by the règime was much smaller than the number of writers and journalists. More sinister than this, a number of German scientists swallowed the monstrosity of ‘racial science’. You can find some of the statements to which they set their names in Professor Brady's The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism.

But, in slightly different forms, it is the same picture everywhere. In England, a large proportion of our leading scientists accept the structure of capitalist society, as can be seen from the comparative freedom with which they are given knighthoods, baronetcies and even peerages. Since Tennyson, no English writer worth reading — one might, perhaps, make an exception of Sir Max Beerbohm — has been given a title. And those English scientists who do not simply accept the status quo are frequently Communists, which means that, however intellectually scrupulous they may be in their own line of work, they are ready to be uncritical and even dishonest on certain subjects. The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook. The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly and secretly working away at the atomic bomb, are a demonstration of this.

But does all this mean that the general public should not be more scientifically educated? On the contrary! All it means is that scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc., to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess: and his political reactions would probably be somewhat less intelligent than those of an illiterate peasant who retained a few historical memories and a fairly sound aesthetic sense.

Clearly, scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind. It ought to mean acquiring a method — a method that can be used on any problem that one meets — and not simply piling up a lot of facts. Put it in those words, and the apologist of scientific education will usually agree. Press him further, ask him to particularize, and somehow it always turns out that scientific education means more attention to the sciences, in other words — more facts. The idea that science means a way of looking at the world, and not simply a body of knowledge, is in practice strongly resisted. I think sheer professional jealousy is part of the reason for this. For if science is simply a method or an attitude, so that anyone whose thought-processes are sufficiently rational can in some sense be described as a scientist — what then becomes of the enormous prestige now enjoyed by the chemist, the physicist, etc. and his claim to be somehow wiser than the rest of us?

A hundred years ago, Charles Kingsley described science as ‘making nasty smell in a laboratory’. A year or two ago a young industrial chemist informed me, smugly, that he ‘could not see what was the use of poetry’. So the pendulum swings to and fro, but it does not seem to me that one attitude is any better than the other. At the moment, science is on the upgrade, and so we hear, quite rightly, the claim that the masses should be scientifically educated: we do not hear, as we ought, the counter-claim that the scientists themselves would benefit by a little education. Just before writing this, I saw in an American magazine the statement that a number of British and American physicists refused from the start to do research on the atomic bomb, well knowing what use would be made of it. Here you have a group of same men in the middle of a world of lunatics. And though no names were published, I think it would be a safe guess that all of them were people with some kind of general cultural background, some acquaintance with history or literature or the arts — in short, people whose interests were not, in the current sense of the word, purely scientific.

1945

THE END

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http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien

In general, we look for a new law by the following process: First we guess it; then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right; then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.

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As Feynman says, first we guess it. Here is Dirac's version of what is involved in guessing.  To an outsider, the faith that physicists have in Mathematics may appear incomprehensible..... On several occasions, when experiments seemingly contradicted theory,  it is this faith that had many physicists question the experiment ...And yes, the experiments had been wrongly interpreted.

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The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature

By Paul Dirac 

In this article I should like to discuss the development of general physical theory: how it developed in the past and how one may expect it to develop in the future. One can look on this continual development as a process of evolution, a process that has been going on for several centuries.

The first main step in this process of evolution was brought about by Newton. Before Newton, people looked on the world as being essentially two-dimensional-the two dimensions in which one can walk about-and the up-and-down dimension seemed to be something essentially different. Newton showed how one can look on the up-and-down direction as being symmetrical with the other two directions, by bringing in gravitational forces and showing how they take their place in physical theory. One can say that Newton enabled us to pass from a picture with two-dimensional symmetry to a picture with three-dimensional symmetry.

Einstein made another step in the same direction, showing how one can pass from a picture with three-dimensional symmetry to a picture with four­dimensional symmetry. Einstein brought in time and showed how it plays a role that is in many ways symmetrical with the three space dimensions. However, this symmetry is not quite perfect. With Einstein’s picture one is led to think of the world from a four-dimensional point of view, but the four dimensions are not completely symmetrical. There are some directions in the four-dimensional picture that are different from others: directions that are called null directions, along which a ray of light can move; hence the four-dimensional picture is not completely symmetrical. Still, there is a great deal of symmetry among the four dimensions. The only lack of symmetry, so far as concerns the equations of physics, is in the appearance of a minus sign in the equations with respect to the time dimension as compared with the three space dimensions [see top equation in diagram].

We have, then, the development from the three-dimensional picture of the world to the four-dimensional picture. The reader will probably not be happy with this situation, because the world still appears three-dimensional to his consciousness. How can one bring this appearance into the four-dimensional picture that Einstein requires the physicist to have?

What appears to our consciousness is really a three-dimensional section of the four-dimensional picture. We must take a three-dimensional section to give us what appears to our consciousness at one time; at a later time we shall have a different three-dimensional section. The task of the physicist consists largely of relating events in one of these sections to events in another section referring to a later time. Thus the picture with four­dimensional symmetry does not give us the whole situation. This becomes particularly important when one takes into account the developments that have been brought about by quantum theory. Quantum theory has taught us that we have to take the process of observation into account, and observations usually require us to bring in the three-dimensional sections of the four-dimensional picture of the universe.

The special theory of relativity, which Einstein introduced, requires us to put all the laws of physics into a form that displays four-dimensional symmetry. But when we use these laws to get results about observations, we have to bring in something additional to the four-dimensional symmetry, namely the three-dimensional sections that describe our consciousness of the universe at a certain time.

Einstein made another most important contribution to the development of our physical picture: he put forward the general theory of relativity, which requires us to suppose that the space of physics is curved. Before this physicists had always worked with a flat space, the three-dimensional flat space of Newton which was then extended to the four­dimensional flat space of special relativity. General relativity made a really important contribution to the evolution of our physical picture by requiring us to go over to curved space. The general requirements of this theory mean that all the laws of physics can be formulated in curved four-dimensional space, and that they show symmetry among the four dimensions. But again, when we want to bring in observations, as we must if we look at things from the point of view of quantum theory, we have to refer to a section of this four-dimensional space. With the four-dimensional space curved, any section that we make in it also has to be curved, because in general we cannot give a meaning to a flat section in a curved space. This leads us to a picture in which we have to take curved three­dimensional sections in the curved four­dimensional space and discuss observations in these sections.

During the past few years people have been trying to apply quantum ideas to gravitation as well as to the other phenomena of physics, and this has led to a rather unexpected development, namely that when one looks at gravitational theory from the point of view of the sections, one finds that there are some degrees of freedom that drop out of the theory. The gravitational field is a tensor field with 10 components. One finds that six of the components are adequate for describing everything of physical importance and the other four can be dropped out of the equations. One cannot, however, pick out the six important components from the complete set of 10 in any way that does not destroy the four-dimensional symmetry. Thus if one insists on preserving four-dimensional symmetry in the equations, one cannot adapt the theory of gravitation to a discussion of measurements in the way quantum theory requires without being forced to a more complicated description than is needed bv the physical situation. This result has led me to doubt how fundamental the four-dimensional requirement in physics is. A few decades ago it seemed quite certain that one had to express the whole of physics in four­dimensional form. But now it seems that four-dimensional symmetry is not of such overriding importance, since the description of nature sometimes gets simplified when one departs from it.

Now I should like to proceed to the developments that have been brought about by quantum theory. Quantum theory is the discussion of very small things, and it has formed the main subject of physics for the past 60 years. During this period physicists have been amassing quite a lot of experimental information and developing a theory to correspond to it, and this combination of theory and experiment has led to important developments in the physicist’s picture of the world.

The quantum first made its appearance when Planck discovered the need to suppose that the energy of electromagnetic waves can exist only in multiples of a certain unit, depending on the frequency of the waves, in order to explain the law of black-body radiation. Then Einstein discovered the same unit of energy occurring in the photoelectric effect. In this early work on quantum theory one simply had to accept the unit of energy without being able to incorporate it into a physical picture.

The first new picture that appeared was Bohr’s picture of the atom. It was a picture in which we had electrons moving about in certain well-defined orbits and occasionally making a jump from one orbit to another. We could not picture how the jump took place. We just had to accept it as a kind of discontinuity. Bohr’s picture of the atom worked only for special examples, essentially when there was only one electron that was of importance for the problem under consideration. Thus the picture was an incomplete and primitive one.

The big advance in the quantum theory came in 1925, with the discovery of quantum mechanics. This advance was brought about independently by two men, Heisenberg first and Schrodinger soon afterward, working from different points of view. Heisenberg worked keeping close to the experimental evidence about spectra that was being amassed at that time, and he found out how the experimental information could be fitted into a scheme that is now known as matrix mechanics. All the experimental data of spectroscopy fitted beautifully into the scheme of matrix mechanics, and this led to quite a different picture of the atomic world. Schrodinger worked from a more mathematical point of view, trying to find a beautiful theory for describing atomic events, and was helped by De Broglie’s ideas of waves associated with particles. He was able to extend De Broglie’s ideas and to get a very beautiful equation, known as Schrodinger’s wave equation, for describing atomic processes. Schrodinger got this equation by pure thought, looking for some beautiful generalization of De Broglie’s ideas, and not by keeping close to the experimental development of the subject in the way Heisenberg did.

I might tell you the story I heard from Schrodinger of how, when he first got the idea for this equation, he immediately applied it to the behavior of the electron in the hydrogen atom, and then he got results that did not agree with experiment. The disagreement arose because at that time it was not known that the electron has a spin. That, of course, was a great disappointment to Schrodinger, and it caused him to abandon the work for some months. Then he noticed that if he applied the theory in a more approximate way, not taking into ac­ count the refinements required by relativity, to this rough approximation his work was in agreement with observation. He published his first paper with only this rough approximation, and in that way Schrodinger’s wave equation was presented to the world. Afterward, of course, when people found out how to take into account correctly the spin of the electron, the discrepancy between the results of applying Schrodinger’s relativistic equation and the experiments was completely cleared up.

I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment. If Schrodinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation. That equation is now known as the Klein-Gordon equation, although it was really discovered by Schrodinger, and in fact was discovered by Schrodinger before he discovered his nonrelativistic treatment of the hydrogen atom. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one’s work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further developments of the theory.

That is how quantum mechanics was discovered. It led to a drastic change in the physicist’s picture of the world, perhaps the biggest that has yet taken place. This change comes from our having to give up the deterministic picture we had always taken for granted. We are led to a theory that does not predict with certainty what is going to happen in the future but gives us information only about the probability of occurrence of various events. This giving up of determinacy has been a very controversial subject, and some people do not like it at all. Einstein in particular never liked it.

Although Einstein was one of the great contributors to the development of quantum mechanics, he still was always rather hostile to the form that quantum mechanics evolved into during his lifetime and that it still retains.

The hostility some people have to the giving up of the deterministic picture can be centered on a much discussed paper by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen dealing with the difficulty one has in forming a consistent picture that still gives results according to the rules of quantum mechanics. The rules of quantum mechanics are quite definite. People know how to calculate results and how to compare the results of their calculations with experiment. Everyone is agreed on the formalism. It works so well that nobody can afford to disagree with it. But still the picture that we are to set up behind this formalism is a subject of controversy.

I should like to suggest that one not worry too much about this controversy. I feel very strongly that the stage physics has reached at the present day is not the final stage. It is just one stage in the evolution of our picture of nature, and we should expect this process of evolution to continue in the future, as biological evolution continues into the future. The present stage of physical theory is merely a steppingstone toward the better stages we shall have in the future. One can be quite sure that there will be better stages simply because of the difficulties that occur in the physics of today.

I should now like to dwell a bit on the difficulties in the physics of the present day. The reader who is not an expert in the subject might get the idea that because of all these difficulties physical theory is in pretty poor shape and that the quantum theory is not much good. I should like to correct this impression by saying that quantum theory is an extremely good theory. It gives wonderful agreement with observation over a wide range of phenomena. There is no doubt that it is a good theory, and the only reason physicists talk so much about the difficulties in it is that it is precisely the difficulties that are interesting. The successes of the theory are all taken for granted. One does not get anywhere simply by going over the successes again and again, whereas by talking over the difficulties people can hope to make some progress.

The difficulties in quantum theory are of two kinds. I might call them Class One difficulties and Class Two difficulties. Class One difficulties are the difficulties I have already mentioned: How can one form a consistent picture behind the rules for the present quantum theory? These Class One difficulties do not really worry the physicist. If the physicist knows how to calculate results and compare them with experiment, he is quite happy if the results agree with his experiments, and that is all he needs. It is only the philosopher, wanting to have a satisfying description of nature, who is bothered by Class One difficulties.

There are, in addition to the Class One difficulties, the Class Two difficulties, which stem from the fact that the present laws of quantum theory are not always adequate to give any results. If one pushes the laws to extreme conditions—to phenomena involving very high energies or very small distances—one sometimes gets results that are ambiguous or not really sensible at all. Then it is clear that one has reached the limits of application of the theory and that some further development is needed. The Class Two difficulties are important even for the physicist, because they put a limitation on how far he can use the rules of quantum theory to get results comparable with experiment.

I should like to say a little more about the Class One difficulties. I feel that one should not be bothered with them too much, because they are difficulties that refer to the present stage in the development of our physical picture and are almost certain to change with future development. There is one strong reason, I think, why one can be quite confident that these difficulties will change. There are some fundamental constants in nature: the charge on the electron (designated e), Planck’s constant divided by 2 π (designated h-bar) and the velocity of light (c).  From these fundamental constants one can construct a number that has no dimensions: the number h-bar*c/e^2. That number is found by experiment to have the value 137, or something very close to 137. Now, there is no known reason why it should have this value rather than some other number. Various people have put forward ideas about it, but there is no accepted theory. Still, one can be fairly sure that someday physicists will solve the problem and explain why the number has this value. There will be a physics in the future that works when h-bar*c/e^2 has the value 137 and that will not work when it has any other value.

The physics of the future, of course, cannot have the three quantities h-bar, e and c all as fundamental quantities. Only two of them can be fundamental, and the third must be derived from those two. It is almost certain that c will be one of the two fundamental ones. The velocity of light, c, is so important in the four-dimensional picture, and it plays such a fundamental role in the special theory of relativity, correlating our units of space and time, that it has to be fundamental. Then we are faced with the fact that of the two quantities h-bar and e, one will be fundamental and one will be derived. If h-bar is fundamental, e will have to be explained in some way in terms of the square root of h-bar, and it seems most unlikely that any fundamental theory can give e in terms of a square root, since square roots do not occur in basic equations. It is much more likely that e will be the fundamental quantity and that h-bar will be explained in terms of c^2. Then there will be no square root in the basic equations. I think one is on safe ground if one makes the guess that in the physical picture we shall have at some future stage e and c will be fundamental quantities and h-bar will be derived.

If h-bar is a derived quantity instead of a fundamental one, our whole set of ideas about uncertainty will be altered: h-bar is the fundamental quantity that occurs in the Heisenberg uncertainty relation connecting the amount of uncertainty in a position and in a momentum. This uncertainty relation cannot play a fundamental role in a theory in which h-bar itself is not a fundamental quantity. I think one can make a safe guess that uncertainty relations in their present form will not survive in the physics of the future.

Of course there will not be a return to the determinism of classical physical theory. Evolution does not go backward. It will have to go forward. There will have to be some new development that is quite unexpected, that we cannot make a guess about, which will take us still further from Classical ideas but which will alter completely the discussion of uncertainty relations. And when this new development occurs, people will find it all rather futile to have had so much of a discussion on the role of observation in the theory, because they will have then a much better point of view from which to look at things. So I shall say that if we can find a way to describe the uncertainty relations and the indeterminacy of present quantum mechanics that is satisfying to our philosophical ideas, we can count ourselves lucky. But if we cannot find such a way, it is nothing to be really disturbed about. We simply have to take into account that we are at a transitional stage and that perhaps it is quite impossible to get a satisfactory picture for this stage.

I have disposed of the Class One difficulties by saying that they are really not so important, that if one can make progress with them one can count oneself lucky, and that if one cannot it is nothing to be genuinely disturbed about. The Class Two difficulties are the really serious ones. They arise primarily from the fact that when we apply our quantum theory to fields in the way we have to if we are to make it agree with special relativity, interpreting it in terms of the three-dimensional sections I have mentioned, we have equations that at first look all right. But when one tries to solve them, one finds that they do not have any solutions. At this point we ought to say that we do not have a theory. But physicists are very ingenious about it, and they have found a way to make progress in spite of this obstacle. They find that when they try to solve the equations, the trouble is that certain quantities that ought to be finite are actually infinite. One gets integrals that diverge instead of converging to something definite. Physicists have found that there is a way to handle these infinities according to certain rules, which makes it possible to get definite results. This method is known as the renormalization method.

I shall merely explain the idea in words. We start out with a theory involving equations. In these equations there occur certain parameters: the charge of the electron, e, the mass of the electron, m, and things of a similar nature. One then finds that these quantities, which appear in the original equations, are not equal to the measured values of the charge and the mass of the electron. The measured values differ from these by certain correcting terms—Delta e, Delta m and so on—so that the total charge is e + e and the total mass m + Delta m. These changes in charge and mass are brought about through the interaction of our elementary particle with other things. Then one says that e + Delta e and m + Delta m, being the observed things, are the important things. The original e and m are just mathematical parameters; they are unobservable and therefore just tools one can discard when one has got far enough to bring in the things that one can compare with observation. This would be a quite correct way to proceed if Delta e and Delta m were small (or even if they were not so small but finite) corrections. According to the actual theory, however, Delta e and Delta m are infinitely great. In spite of that fact one can still use the formalism and get results in terms of e + Delta e and m + Delta m, which one can interpret by saying that the original e and m have to be minus infinity of a suitable amount to compensate for the Delta e and Delta m that are infinitely great. One can use the theory to get results that can be compared with experiment, in particular for electrodynamics. The surprising thing is that in the case of electrodynamics one gets results that are in extremely good agreement with experiment. The agreement applies to many significant figures—the kind of accuracy that previously one had only in astronomy. It is because of this good agreement that physicists do attach some value to the renormalization theory, in spite of its illogical character.

It seems to be quite impossible to put this theory on a mathematically sound basis. At one time physical theory was all built on mathematics that was inherently sound. I do not say that physicists always use sound mathematics; they often use unsound steps in their calculations. But previously when they did so it was simply because of, one might say, laziness. They wanted to get results as quickly as possible without doing unnecessary work. It was always possible for the pure mathematician to come along and make the theory sound by bringing in further steps, and perhaps by introducing quite a lot of cumbersome notation and other things that are desirable from a mathematical point of view in order to get everything expressed rigorously but do not contribute to the physical ideas. The earlier mathematics could always be made sound in that way, but in the renormalization theory we have a theory that has defied all the attempts of the mathematician to make it sound. I am inclined to suspect that the renormalization theory is something that will not survive in the future, and that the remarkable agreement between its results and experiment should be looked on as a fluke.

This is perhaps not altogether surprising, because there have been similar flukes in the past. In fact, Bohr’s electron-orbit theory was found to give very good agreement with observation as long as one confined oneself to one-electron problems. I think people will now say that this agreement was a fluke, because the basic ideas of Bohr’s orbit theory have been superseded by something radically different. I believe the successes of the renormalization theory will be on the same footing as the successes of the Bohr orbit theory applied to one-electron problems.

The renormalization theory bas removed some of these Class Two difficulties, if one can accept the illogical character of discarding infinities, but it does not remove all of them. There are a good many problems left over concerning particles other than those that come into electrodynamics: the new particles—mesons of various kinds and neutrinos. There the theory is still in a primitive stage. It is fairly certain that there will have to be drastic changes in our fundamental ideas before these problems can be solved.

One of the problems is the one I have already mentioned about accounting for the number 137. Other problems are how to introduce the fundamental length to physics in some natural way, how to explain the ratios of the masses of the elementary particles and how to explain their other properties. I believe separate ideas will be needed to solve these distinct problems and that they will be solved one at a time through successive stages in the future evolution of physics.At this point I find myself in disagreement with most physicists. They are inclined to think one master idea will be discovered that will solve all these problems together. I think it is asking too much to hope that anyone will be able to solve all these problems together. One should separate them one from another as much as possible and try to tackle them separately. And I believe the future development of physics will consist of solving them one at a time, and that after any one of them has been solved there will still be a great mystery about how to attack further ones.

I might perhaps discuss some ideas I have had about how one can possibly attack some of these problems. None of these ideas has been worked out very far, and I do not have much hope for any one of them. But I think they are worth mentioning briefly.

One of these ideas is to introduce something corresponding to the luminiferous ether, which was so popular among the physicists of the 19th century. I said earlier that physics does not evolve backward. When I talk about reintroducing the ether, I do not mean to go back to the picture of the ether that one had in the 19th century, but I do mean to introduce a new picture of the ether that will conform to our present ideas of quantum theory. The objection to the old idea of the ether was that if you suppose it to be a fluid filling up the whole of space, in any place it has a definite velocity, which destroys the four-dimensional symmetry required by Einstein’s special principle of relativity. Einstein’s special relativity killed this idea of the ether.

But with our present quantum theory we no longer have to attach a definite velocity to any given physical thing, because the velocity is subject to uncertainty relations. The smaller the mass of the thing we are interested in, the more important are the uncertainty relations. Now, the ether will certainly have very little mass, so that uncertainty relations for it will be extremely important. The velocity of the ether at some particular place should therefore not be pictured as definite, because it will be subject to uncertainty relations and so may be anything over a wide range of values. In that way one can get over the difficulties of reconciling the existence of an ether with the special theory of relativity.

There is one important change this will make in our picture of a vacuum. We would like to think of a vacuum as a region in which we have complete symmetry between the four dimensions of space-time as required by special relativity. If there is an ether subject to uncertainty relations, it will not be possible to have this symmetry accurately. We can suppose that the velocity of the ether is equally likely to be anything within a wide range of values that would give the symmetry only approximately. We cannot in any precise way proceed to the limit of allowing all values for the velocity between plus and minus the velocity of light, which we would have to do in order to make the symmetry accurate. Thus the vacuum becomes a state that is unattainable. I do not think that this is a physical objection to the theory. It would mean that the vacuum is a state we can approach very closely. There is no limit as to how closely we can approach it, but we can never attain it. I believe that would be quite satisfactory to the experimental physicist. It would, however, mean a departure from the notion of the vacuum that we have in the quantum theory, where we start off with the vacuum state having exactly the symmetry required by special relativity.

That is one idea for the development of physics in the future that would change our picture of the vacuum, but change it in a way that is not unacceptable to the experimental physicist. It has proved difficult to continue with the theory, because one would need to set up mathematically the uncertainty relations for the ether and so far some satisfactory theory along these lines has not been discovered. If it could be developed satisfactorily, it would give rise to a new kind of field in physical theory, which might help in explaining some of the elementary particles.

Another possible picture I should like to mention concerns the question of why all the electric charges that are observed in nature should be multiples of one elementary unit, e. Why does one not have a continuous distribution of charge occurring in nature? The picture I propose goes back to the idea of Faraday lines of force and involves a development of this idea. The Faraday lines of force are a way of picturing electric fields. If we have an electric field in any region of space, then according to Faraday we can draw a set of lines that have the direction of the electric field. The closeness of the lines to one another gives a measure of the strength of the field—they are close where the field is strong and less close where the field is weak. The Faraday lines of force give us a good picture of the electric field in classical theory.

When we go over to quantum theory, we bring a kind of discreteness into our basic picture. We can suppose that the continuous distribution of Faraday lines of force that we have in the classical picture is replaced by just a few discrete lines of force with no lines of force between them. Now, the lines of force in the Faraday picture end where there are charges. Therefore with these quantized Faraday lines of force it would be reasonable to suppose the charge associated with each line, which has to lie at the end if the line of force has an end, is always the same (apart from its sign), and is always just the electronic charge, – e or + e. This leads us to a picture of discrete Faraday lines of force, each associated with a charge, – e or + e. There is a direction attached to each line, so that the ends of a line that has two ends are not the same, and there is a charge + e at one end and a charge – e at the other. We may have lines of force extending to infinity, of course, and then there is no charge.

If we suppose that these discrete Faraday lines of force are something basic in physics and lie at the bottom of our picture of the electromagnetic field, we shall have an explanation of why charges always occur in multiples of e. This happens because if we have any particle with some lines of force ending on it, the number of these lines must be a whole number. In that way we get a picture that is qualitatively quite reasonable.

We suppose these lines of force can move about. Some of them, forming closed loops or simply extending from minus infinity to infinity, will correspond to electromagnetic waves. Others will have ends, and the ends of these lines will be the charges. We may have a line of force sometimes breaking. When that happens, we have two ends appearing, and there must be charges at the two ends. This process—the breaking of a line of force—would be the picture for the creation of an electron (e-) and a positron (e+). It would be quite a reasonable picture, and if one could develop it, it would provide a theory in which e appears as a basic quantity. I have not yet found any reasonable system of equations of motion for these lines of force, and so I just put forward the idea as a possible physical picture we might have in the future.

There is one very attractive feature in this picture. It will quite alter the discussion of renormalization. The renormalization we have in our present quantum electrodynamics comes from starting off with what people call a bare electron—an electron without a charge on it. At a certain stage in the theory one brings in the charge and puts it on the electron, thereby making the electron interact with the electromagnetic field. This brings a perturbation into the equations and causes a change in the mass of the electron, the Delta m, which is to be added to the previous mass of the electron. The procedure is rather roundabout because it starts off with the unphysical concept of the bare electron. Probably in the improved physical picture we shall have in the future the bare electron will not exist at all.

Now, that state of affairs is just what we have with the discrete lines of force. We can picture the lines of force as strings, and then the electron in the picture is the end of a string. The string itself is the Coulomb force around the electron. A bare electron means an electron without the Coulomb force around it. That is inconceivable with this picture, just as it is inconceivable to think of the end of a piece of string without thinking of the string itself. This, I think, is the kind of way in which we should try to develop our physical picture—to bring in ideas that make inconceivable the things we do not want to have. Again we have a picture that looks reasonable, but I have not found the proper equations for developing it.

I might mention a third picture with which I have been dealing lately. It involves departing from the picture of the electron as a point and thinking of it as a kind of sphere with a finite size. Of course, it is really quite an old idea to picture the electron as a sphere, but previously one had the difficulty of discussing a sphere that is subject to acceleration and to irregular motion. It will get distorted, and how is one to deal with the distortions? I propose that one should allow the electron to have, in general, an arbitrary shape and size. There will be some shapes and sizes in which it has less energy than in others, and it will tend to assume a spherical shape with a certain size in which the electron has the least energy.

This picture of the extended electron has been stimulated by the discovery of the mu meson, or muon, one of the new particles of physics. The muon has the surprising property of being almost identical with the electron except in one particular, namely, its mass is some 200 times greater than the mass of the electron. Apart from this disparity in mass the muon is remarkably similar to the electron, having, to an extremely high degree of accuracy, the same spin and the same magnetic moment in proportion to its mass as the electron does. This leads to the suggestion that the muon should be looked on as an excited electron. If the electron is a point, picturing how it can be excited becomes quite awkward. But if the electron is the most stable state for an object of finite size, the muon might just be the next most stable state in which the object undergoes a kind of oscillation. That is an idea I have been working on recently. There are difficulties in the development of this idea, in particular the difficulty of bringing in the correct spin.

I have mentioned three possible ways in which one might think of developing our physical picture. No doubt there will be others that other people will think of. One hopes that sooner or later someone will find an idea that really fits and leads to a big development. I am rather pessimistic about it and am inclined to think none of them will be good enough. The future evolution of basic physics—that is to say, a development that will really solve one of the fundamental problems, such as bringing in the fundamental length or calculating the ratio of the masses—may require some much more drastic change in our physical picture. This would mean that in our present attempts to think of a new physical picture we are setting our imaginations to work in terms of inadequate physical concepts. If that is really the case, how can we hope to make progress in the future?

There is one other line along which one can still proceed by theoretical means. It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.

This view provides us with another way in which we can hope to make advances in our theories. Just by studying mathematics we can hope to make a guess at the kind of mathematics that will come into the physics of the future. A good many people are working on the mathematical basis of quantum theory, trying to understand the theory better and to make it more powerful and more beautiful. If someone can hit on the right lines along which to make this development, it may lead to a future advance in which people will first discover the equations and then, after examining them, gradually learn how to apply them. To some extent that corresponds with the line of development that occurred with Schrodinger’s discovery of his wave equation. Schrodinger discovered the equation simply by .looking for an equation with mathematical beauty. When the equation was first discovered, people saw that it fitted in certain ways, but the general principles according to which one should apply it were worked out only some two or three years later. It may well be that the next advance in physics will come about along these lines: people first discovering the equations and then needing a few years of development in order to find the physical ideas behind the equations. My own belief is that this is a more likely line of progress than trying to guess at physical pictures.

Of course, it may be that even this line of progress will fail, and then the only line left is the experimental one. Experimental physicists are continuing their work quite independently of theory, collecting a vast storehouse of information. Sooner or later there will be a new Heisenberg who will be able to pick out the important features of this information and see how to use them in a way similar to that in which Heisenberg used the experimental knowledge of spectra to build his matrix mechanics. It is in evitable that physics will develop ultimately along these lines, but we may have to wait quite a long time if people do not get bright ideas for developing the theoretical side.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2010/06/25/the-evolution-of-the-physicists-picture-of-nature/

Graham Farmelo on Paul Dirac and Mathematical Beauty