Relativities

By Melvin Maddocks

THE PHYSICISTS

by C.P. Snow

Little, Brown; 192 pages; $15.95

When C.P. Snow was an eight-year-old in the drab Midlands city of Leicester, he read about the atom in a children's encyclopedia. An atom, the credulous lad was told, resembles the ulterior of a cathedral, in which tennis balls--the electrons--bounce about violently. This fanciful account gave the factory clerk's son "the first sharp mental excitement I ever had." He never quite got over it.

The plot that Snow the ex-physicist unfolds in this posthumously published work of nonfiction is better than any that Snow the novelist invented in his romans `a clef like The Search and The New Men. There is something marvelously Dickensian, for instance, about Ernest Rutherford, whose booming voice upset such sensitive instruments as Niels Bohr, the Henry James of atomic physics, who whispered his way through labyrinths of elegant theory to explain what Rutherford demonstrated. Then, with Einstein ("the best company of all the great physicists") hovering above the scene, the rest of Snow's pantheon is Introduced. In France there was Louis de Broglie, daring to propose that electrons or even whole atoms could behave like waves. In Germany there was Werner Heisenberg, who postulated that the position of an electron could only be "statistically" predicted, never precisely ascertained. By his Uncertainty Principle, Heisenberg casually undermined the laws of causality on which classical physics was based, leaving Paul Dirac, back in England, to pull all these revolutionary theories together by accommodating them to the theory of relativity.

It is a story that has been told before, but never with a sharper feeling of epic excitement or a sadder sense of destiny.

Where does Snow--a technical administrator during World War II, recruiting scientists in Britain--fit into the total picture he has sketched? He apparently presumed himself the model man of "two cultures." But in retrospect, he seems an outsider to both --the novelist who was a scientist to other novelists, the scientist who was a novelist to other scientists.

There was little doubt which peer group he valued more. To Snow, the nuclear physicists were, in fact, artists, opening the universe like a flower. Snow praises his inspired scientists for being "morally admirable" as well. After citing their "courage, truth-telling, kindness," he rather astonishingly asserts that "on the whole scientists make slightly better husbands and fathers than most of us." For Snow the agonizing irony is that these saintly men--Rutherford, "bored" by money; Bohr, "simply and genuinely kind"; Einstein, not only looking but be having like an Old Testament prophet--should end up being even indirectly responsible for Hiroshima.

Still, Snow remains a man of "inextinguishable hope" awaiting the good luck that might produce a safe efficiency of fusion energy and redeem the fall from grace. But his faithin science as the auto matic benefactor of mankind has clearly suffered a shock that trembles through these pages. The sad, sober words of the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant pull like an undertow: "We couldn't have done anything else, but we have killed a beautiful subject. " --By Melvin Maddocks

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