Sin Among the Scientists

THE SEARCH (342 pp.)--C. P. Snow--Scribner ($3.95).

"I didn't like the erotic bits," Lord Rutherford told the young novelist one day in 1934. But otherwise, Britain's most famous scientist conceded, he liked The Search--a first novel by a young spectroscopist named Charles Percy Snow. The book was one of the first to take scientists at their own high estimate of themselves, it presented science itself as a religion, and it even mentioned Rutherford himself as a high pontifical character of unapproachable magnificence.

Thanks in part to Rutherford (credited with having been first to split the atom), the world has had cause to take a long, hard, wary look at the scientist. This has impelled the publishers to reissue their Snow of yesteryear, and it can be read today not only as a good, plain narrative (Snow's later Strangers and Brothers series testifies to his skill), but as an insider's account of just how it feels to be an inmate of science's glass menagerie.

Crisis of Faith. Snow's novel follows the familiar pattern of a pietistic tract--vocation, doubts, doubts resolved, ordination, temptation, temptation defeated, final serenity of soul. Its hero and narrator is Arthur Miles, only son of a poor, Nonconformist family, who finds his vocation for science by reading H. G. Wells and looking at the evening star through a toy telescope. By arduously won scholarships, he finds himself at King's College, London, peering at crystals and within reach of the Royal Society ("my Mecca and my Westminster and my Rome"). A vision of sanctity comes to Miles (after he has correctly predicted the structure of a crystal he had never seen) like those of "the mystics who have described the experience of being at one with God."

The plot hinges on whether Miles will be appointed head of a new laboratory set up to study his own specialty. It is a Trollopian situation, as scientific panjandrums play politics with the skill and gusto of the Barchester Cathedral chapter contending over a vacant canonry. But the real story is a crisis in faith. Miles is distracted from his devotions by a girl named Audrey, and it is easy to see why Lord Rutherford did not like the erotic bits. She and Miles live it up at meetings of the Holborn Labour Party, and their sex life is described in the fiat and dogged style of Dr. Kinsey, but without the rich subject matter. It is certainly short of Ovid. Novelist Snow's introduction suggests that he put in the erotic bits to disprove the notion that scientists are "unemotional, naive, asexual." Data inconclusive.

Dash of the Child. Miles loses Audrey to a false, flashy friend, the sort of chap who is capable not only of swindling pals out of money but of cheating Truth itself --he sort of fiddles with a scientific experiment to make it come out the way he wanted. Disappointed in love and in his career, Miles loses faith; crystals are not enough.

Snow's curious novel, written during what he calls "The Age of Rutherford,'' is a brave attempt to bridge the gap between "two cultures which have scarcely any contact at all--the traditional nonscientific culture and an up-and-coming scientific one." But Snow's scientific characters must be judged on nonscientific levels and, on a traditional basis, may well amuse or alarm the unbeliever. "All children have a dash of the scientist," Snow remarks. On his own showing, scientists have more than a dash of the child.

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