Explaining the World
A Comprehensible World: On Modern Science and its Origins.
by Jeremy Bernstein.
Random House. 269 pp. $5.95.
It is hard to tell, looking through mass circulation magazines, whether the two-culture gap in the United States is widening or narrowing. Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies’ Home Journal now carry regular horoscope columns. On the other hand, perhaps more surprisingly, the New Yorker now has on its staff a professional physicist, Jeremy Bernstein, age thirty-eight, who teaches at New York University and has written more than thirty-seven technical papers.
In the introduction to his new book, A Comprehensible World, Bernstein tells how he got the job. He had just returned to his post at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, Long Island, after a year in France on a National Science Foundation fellowship. Lacking anything better to do—he was a bachelor living in a quiet wooded area—an old ambition to be a journalist seized him. After typing out some sparkling recollections of his summer on the island of Corsica, where he had taught physics to French students, he sent the manuscript to the New Yorker and forgot about it. Several months later William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, phoned to say he wanted to publish it. That was six years ago and Bernstein has been writing for the New Yorker ever since. His first two books, The Analytical Engine, about computers, and Ascent, about his hobby of mountain climbing, were based on New Yorker contributions. His third book, A Comprehensible World, is a collection of varied New Yorker articles and book reviews.
They are a delight to read or reread. Bernstein has an ability, uncommon among his peers, to write about difficult topics in a way that intelligent laymen can understand, and to write about them with wit and literary distinction. When mirror reflection symmetry, known to particle physicists as the law of parity conservation, was overthrown in 1957 most physicists despaired of explaining to any non-physicist what had happened. To oversimplify, the law of parity says that nature, in all her basic laws, shows no preference for left or right. If a motion picture is taken of any event, the film reversed, then projected on a screen, the mirror-reflected events look perfectly natural. This ambidexterity of the universe was shattered when it was discovered that there is, so to speak, a left-handed bias in all weak interactions of particles. If a film of such events could be shown in mirror-reversed form, it would depict events that cannot occur. Physicists are still struggling with the full, revolutionary implications of the discovery. Bernstein not only was capable of explaining it, he also was a friend of T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang, the two Chinese physicists who later shared a Nobel prize for their theoretical work that had led to the overthrow of parity. Bernstein had even collaborated with them on a technical paper. His long New Yorker article about them, which provides the second chapter of his book, is a masterpiece of science writing. It documents a major turning-point in the history of modern physics, draws a vivid picture of two remarkable scientists, and is a superb popular account of why physicists were so astonished and agitated when the news that parity was not conserved first flashed from laboratory to laboratory.
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Most of the other chapters are crisp, admirably written reviews of important books about science, illuminated by Bernstein’s wide-ranging knowledge of literature and politics, and a philosophical attitude strongly influenced by his Harvard teacher, Philip Frank, to whose memory the book is dedicated. Among the books reviewed are Erwin Schrödinger’s My View of the World, Barbara Cline’s The Questioners: Physicists and the Quantum Theory, George Gamow’s A Planet Called Earth, Stephen and Jane Toulmin’s The Discovery of Time, Marie Boas’s The Scientific Renaissance, Jacques Barzun’s Science: The Glorious Entertainment, and Walter Sullivan’s We Are Not Alone. There is also a short but generous tribute to Arthur Clarke, whom Bernstein rightly considers one of the best, perhaps the best, of living science-fiction authors, followed by a longer tribute to Stanley Kubrick, the filmmaker who directed Lolita, Paths of Glory, and Dr. Strangelove. Clarke recently collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, the motion picture on which Kubrick is still working. Through Clarke, Bernstein got to know Kubrick and to watch the filming of some of the movie’s spectacular scenes.
“How About a Little Game?”—the title of the chapter on Kubrick—is so appropriately metaphorical that Random House could have used it for the title of the book. “A Comprehensible World” comes from a charmingly paradoxical statement by Einstein—“One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility”—which Bernstein puts at the front of his volume; but isolated from its context it strikes me as too ambiguous, too unpoetic. “How about a little game?” is the question Kubrick was always asking Bernstein. In his twenties Kubrick had been a chess hustler, earning a precarious living by playing for cash at those stone chess tables in the southwest corner of Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. In a series of chess contests with Kubrick, Bernstein was inexplicably winning every fifth game until the twentieth, when he tentatively reached for one of Kubrick’s knights. Kubrick pulled an old hustler’s trick. He slapped his forehead as if in great pain. Bernstein immediately followed through with what he believed to be a clever coup, only to hear Kubrick cry out as he leaped to his feet and pounced on Bernstein’s queen, “I knew you were a potzer!”
Potzer? It is a chess hustler’s term. Bernstein defines the potzer as “a relatively weak player with an inflated ego.” How about a little game? This is the ancient question that the Universe, or Something in back of the universe, began to ask those bewildered featherless bipeds who had started to proliferate on the sun’s third planet, as soon as their apish brains could comprehend the science game. It is a curious game. There is no definitive rule book and part of the game is trying to find out what the basic rules are. They seem to be mathematically simple, beautiful, multi-various, arbitrary, and increasingly difficult to discover. The game has never been more exciting or dangerous than at present. No one is better than Bernstein at conveying this contemporary scientific mood of exhilaration—There’s an exposed knight! Grab it!—but he is also wise enough to know that, even though the planet’s players keep improving, they are all still potzers.
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