On April 18, 1810, Gauss was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and on April 25, 1810. Wilhelm von Humboldt issued to Gauss in the name of the section for public instruction in the ministry of the interior a call to Berlin, offering him 1,500 thalers and a position as ordentliches Mitglied of the academy. He wrote: “You are in no wise obligated to teach courses, you are only requested to lend your name as a full professor to the new university and, as much as your leisure and health allow, to teach a course from time to time.”
In an accompanying private letter he added: “At the university I release you, as you desire, from every obligation, and there is therefore nothing that could impede you on the path of quiet, secluded, and peaceful research.”
Alexander von Humboldt and others attempted to persuade Gauss to accept the Berlin offer. It is not known definitely why he refused. Perhaps he did not want to leave the Göttingen observatory, which was under construction. Some have thought that he did not trust the Prussian government. Gauss was probably reluctant to leave the fresh graves of his wife and son; the call occurred just at the time when he was courting his second wife and making preparations for marriage.
In 1821 negotiations were renewed to get Gauss to Berlin.114 Frau Waldeck, his mother-in-law, wrote a letter to Olbers on May 14, 1821, trying to get him to intervene. She begged him to keep secret the fact that she had written, and stated that Gauss was very unhappy in Göttingen. There were difficulties between him and Harding, the other astronomer. In addition, he did not have sufficient time for research. She also stated that Gauss was quite worried about the future.
Olbers communicated the secret that Gauss was more inclined than ever to leave Göttingen to Councilor von Lindenau, at that time minister of Sachsen-Gotha, formerly director of the observatory on the Seeberg. Lindenau turned to General von Müffling, the influential chief of the general staff in Berlin, a man who had done much for the geodetic surveys. Negotiations now began. Gauss demanded a free residence and an annual salary of 2,400 thalers. After almost four years of bickering and letter writing without end Gauss received the following counterproposal in November 1824: He was to get 1,700 thalers as ordentliches Mitglied of the academy, 300 thalers as secretary of the mathematical class, 600 to 700 thalers from the ministry as a consultant on all questions referring to mathematical study. The offer was not a bad one. Why did not Gauss accept? The most logical explanation is that he felt insulted by the long-drawn-out procedure. He formally gave two reasons for rejection: The Hanoverian government had given him an increase in pay and had approved the entrance of his son Joseph into the artillery corps. In the years 1828–1836 Alexander von Humboldt tried unsuccessfully to reopen negotiations to get Gauss to Berlin.
During the last negotiations in 1825 Leopold von Buch, the famous Berlin geologist, wrote to Gauss: “From the first day on you would assume the dominating place in the academy, which is due you . . . what beneficial results for the whole land, for all Germany your mere presence, the rule of such a mind would produce. Tear us out of the barbarism into which we are in danger of sinking. The chairs of Euler, Lagrange, and Lambert call loudly.”
In 1821 plans were under way to build a new observatory in Hamburg. Gauss was very much interested in the position of director; he asked Olbers to get information about it and to recommend him for the place, stating that he would accept it if the financial terms were satisfactory. Olbers in replying tried to persuade Gauss not to consider the place. He stated that such positions in the free states and small republics were poorly paid and that there was usually unpleasantness in dealing with the senate and other officials. Olbers told Gauss he would have no trouble in securing a new position as soon as it became known he wanted to make a change.
Gauss was offered a free residence and six thousand marks salary in Hamburg, about nine-fifths of what he got in Göttingen. He felt that living costs in Hamburg would not be greater than in Göttingen. However, Gauss feared that a large part of his wife’s estate would be lost if he made a change. Olbers admitted that the offer of six thousand marks was a good one, but he advised Gauss to accept the Berlin offer as soon as possible.
As late as 1842 an effort was made to call Gauss to the University of Vienna.115 Schumacher visited there that year and evidently acted as intermediary.
Gauss occasionally denied or strongly doubted prevailing views on topics in astronomy, without fully communicating his own opinion. Among other things he considered an organization and mental life on the sun and on the planets very probable, and occasionally remarked how in this question gravitation acting on the surface of celestial bodies was of predominant interest. He said that with the general constitution of matter, therefore, only beings as small as June bugs could exist on the sun with a twenty-eight-fold greater gravitation; on the other hand our bodies would be pressed together and all our members crushed. Then he continued in humorous fashion: “Yes, on the sun there is room for us all, but each one of us will need his servant.”
Gauss considered it possible to set up a telegraphic communication between moon and earth and in reference to this question had calculated the size of the necessary mirrors, which yielded the result that such communication could be instituted without great cost. He used to say that it would be a greater discovery than that of America if we could communicate with our moon neighbors, but did not consider it probable that the moon was inhabited by a population of higher intelligence.
Richard Adams Locke (1800–1871) published in August, 1835, his gigantic moon hoax in the New York Sun. Locke went down in journalistic history as the first feature-story writer and the perpetrator of the greatest hoax of all time. He purported to describe miraculous discoveries of life on the moon made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope. The report was ascribed to a “supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science,” a journal which had ceased to exist several years earlier. Churchwomen in Springfield, Massachusetts, started a fund to send missionaries to the moon. There were French, British, and German versions of the story. Gauss and Augustus De Morgan erroneously attributed the story to Jean-Nicolas Nicollet (1756–1843), an able French astronomer who fled to America and who became acquainted with Eugene Gauss while exploring the Upper Mississippi Valley. Gauss regarded the hoax as very crude and merely an example of how gullible the public is. When Sir John heard of the affair he was “overcome.” Paris newspapers published pictures of the moon’s inhabitants going through the streets singing “Au clair de la lune.” The New York Daily Advertiser thought Herschel had immortalized his name and placed it “high on the page of science.” Edgar Allan Poe, who knew and admired Locke and wrote he had the finest forehead he had ever seen, tore up the second installment of his own fiction story, “Hans Pfaall,” because he felt Locke had left nothing for a fiction writer to offer about the moon. Finally Locke admitted he had written the story and that the whole thing was a fake. Incidentally, it may be added that the French scientist Arago was entrapped by the story. The story was published in book form in 1852 in New York under the title The Moon Hoax. Locke also wrote another hoax. The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park, but it attracted little attention.
In a letter to Olbers dated September 3, 1805, Gauss gave an interesting sidelight on his methods of work and difficulties he frequently encountered:
Perhaps you remember . . . my complaints about a theorem which . . . had defied all my attempts to find a satisfactory proof. This theorem is referred to in my Disquisitiones arithmeticae, page 636116 . . . it is just the determination of a sign of a root that has always tortured me. This lack has spoiled for me everything else that I found; and for four years a week has seldom passed when I would not have made one or another vain attempt to solve this problem—recently very lively now again. But all brooding, all searching has been in vain, sadly I have had to put down the pen again every time. Finally I succeeded several days ago— not as a result of my tedious searching but by the grace of God, I might say. The puzzle was solved as lightnin
g strides; I myself would not be able to show the guiding thread between that which I previously knew, that with which I had made the last attempts—and that by which I succeeded. Strangely enough the solution of the puzzle now appears easier than many other things that have not held me up as many days as this has years, and certainly nobody will have any idea of the long squeeze in which it placed me, when I someday lecture on this topic.
Gauss stated in several places that valuable insight on problems came to him upon waking up. His discovery of the inscription of the regular polygon of seventeen sides falls in this category; and in his Collected Works (V, 609) he wrote that he discovered the laws of induction on January 23, 1835, at 7 a.m. just before getting up. Descartes and Helmholtz also testified to the great value of such early morning thoughts.
As a student in Göttingen Gauss used to maintain jokingly that his teacher Kästner was the foremost mathematician among the poets and the foremost poet among the mathematicians. As late as December 22, 1845, in writing to Schumacher he said about Kästner: “Kästner had a very eminent native wit, but strangely enough, he had it in all subjects outside of mathematics, he even had it when he talked about mathematics (in general), but was often completely deserted by it inside mathematics.”
In an address before the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1874 Emil du Bois-Reymond called Gauss a grand master of thought; he had in mind especially the extreme care with which Gauss prepared his works. On July 21, 1836, Schumacher wrote Gauss: “I don’t know anyone who possesses to such a high degree as you the talent of expressing himself sharply and briefly.”
Three days later Gauss modestly mentioned his friend’s praise in this manner: “The compliment which you . . . make me on account of my talent of expressing myself briefly and sharply, I must reject, at least in so far as it refers to a language117 other than German or, at most, Latin.”
Many years earlier (1821) Gauss had explained this difficulty to Schumacher: “In a foreign language attention to the direction, so that I myself am quite satisfied with the finish and naturalness, always costs me as much time as the topic itself.”
Gauss had great difficulty in finding a publisher for his Theoria motus (1809). When Perthes finally did accept it, he insisted that it appear in Latin. This meant a tremendous amount of extra work for Gauss, but he understood the publisher’s reasons and did not criticize him. In those disturbed Napoleonic years Gauss was glad enough to find a publisher.
In 1845 on the day before his sixty-eighth birthday Gauss perhaps somewhat wearily wrote to Schumacher: “I shall never again write Latin about scientific things.”
Then on December 4, 1849, he explained more fully the difficulty of using Latin, again in a letter to Schumacher:
In times when I had to write most of my works in Latin, very often I had to turn back and forth for a long time the thought hovering before me until I had found a somewhat satisfactory turn and yet one which often in no wise quite satisfied me. Yet such never occurs as long as one moves in the purely mathematical field (I might say in the technical-mathematical), but principally where one considers the subject and the characteristic of its nature from a higher, equally philosophical— as Lagrange used to say, metaphysical—standpoint.
XXII
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Religio Scientiae : A Profession of Belief From the Philosopher and Lover of Truth
Gauss’ mature philosophy of life was closely connected with his strongly religious nature, which was characterized by tranquillity, peace, and confidence. All pretense was especially repugnant to him, and he treated all charlatanism, especially on the scientific side, with disdain and often with bitter irony. He once said that the most despicable human being is the one who persists in his errors after he has recognized them. A thirst for truth connected with an urge for justice was the leading element in his character. The principle of least compulsion was the mathematical embodiment of that basic ethical thought which he recognized as binding on the universe.
All philosophical studies possessed a powerful charm for Gauss’ mind, although he often disliked the ways by which scholars arrived at certain viewpoints. He once said to a friend: “There are questions on whose answers I would place an infinitely higher value than on the mathematical, for example, concerning ethics, concerning our relationship to God, concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies quite unattainable above us and quite outside the area of science.”
By science he understood that strictly defined logical structure whose foundation rests on certain truths generally recognized by the human mind, truths which once admitted furnish an immeasurable field of the most complicated researches connected with each other by a strong chain of thought. Therefore he placed arithmetic118 at the top and in reference to questions which we cannot fathom he was wont to use the words: Ό θεòς άριθμετίζει, by which he recognized logic as valid for the whole universe, even for those areas where our human mind cannot penetrate.
Gauss was continually meditating on religious and philosophical subjects, but unfortunately he seldom spoke or wrote on them. He was always attempting to harmonize his scientific experience with his philosophy of life. He considered all philosophical ideas subjective and he kept them quite separate from genuine science since he knew that they lacked a rigorous basis.
In Gauss’ character was a notable tendency to strew out before him like leaves in the wind his thoughts (often accompanied by deep emotions) on these eternally unsolved problems. But often they were blown away just as suddenly as they had come, either by some humorous turn or by a quick shift of conversation to the most unimportant matters of daily life, or they were covered by the impenetrable veil of secrecy. One day he said to a friend that it was immaterial to him whether Saturn has five or seven satellites—there is something higher in the world. Having said that, he immediately became silent, but his eye sparkled and a stream of thoughts passed through his mind.
The most popular long poem published in England in the eighteenth century was James Thomson’s The Seasons. In a sense it covers the history of ideas and the relationship of the fields of human knowledge. The poem reflects the trends of the time in these fields. Thomson was deeply indebted to the scientific work and theories of Newton, whom Gauss revered so highly. Gauss possessed a copy of the poem, read it repeatedly, and enjoyed it thoroughly. He went to his notes and copied down the following passage which made a special appeal to him and seemed to epitomize so completely his own views and feelings:
Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure—
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!119
It is not known just what Gauss believed on most doctrinal and confessional questions. He did not believe literally in all Christian dogmas. Officially he was a member of St. Albans Church (Evangelical Lutheran) in Göttingen. All baptisms, burials, and weddings in his family occurred there. It is also not known whether he attended church regularly or contributed financially. A faculty colleague called Gauss a deist, but there is good reason to believe that this label did not fit well.
Gauss possessed strong religious tolerance which he carried over to every belief originating in the depths of the human heart. This tolerance is not to be confused with religious indifference. He took special interest in the religious development of the human race, especially in his own century. With reference to the manifold denominations, which frequently did not agree with his views, he always emphasized that one is not justified in disturbing the faith of others in which they find consolation for earthly sufferings and a safe refuge in days of misfortune. He demanded the same tolerance from others respecting his own views.
Gauss’ religious consciousness was based on an insatiable thirst for truth and a deep feeling of justice extendin
g to intellectual as well as material goods. He conceived spiritual life in the whole universe as a great system of law penetrated by eternal truth, and from this source he gained the firm confidence that death does not end all.
One day he said: “For the soul there is a satisfaction of a higher type; the material is not at all necessary. Whether I apply mathematics to a couple of clods of dirt, which we call planets, or to purely arithmetical problems, it’s just the same; the latter have only a higher charm for me.”
For him science was the means of exposing the immortal nucleus of the human soul. In the days of his full strength it furnished him recreation and, by the prospects which it opened up to him, gave consolation. Toward the end of his life it brought him confidence. Gauss’ God was not a cold and distant figment of metaphysics, nor a distorted caricature of embittered theology. To man is not vouchsafed that fullness of knowledge which would warrant his arrogantly holding that his blurred vision is the full light and that there can be none other which might report truth as does his. For Gauss, not he who mumbles his creed, but he who lives it, is accepted. He believed that a life worthily spent here on earth is the best, the only, preparation for heaven. Religion is not a question of literature, but of life. God’s revelation is continuous, not contained in tablets of stone or sacred parchment. A book is inspired when it inspires. The unshakeable idea of personal continuance after death, the firm belief in a last regulator of things, in an eternal, just, omniscient, omnipotent God, formed the basis of his religious life, which harmonized completely with his scientific research.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, Titan of Science_A Study of His Life and Work Page 34