After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The man who lived long enough to accuse the United States government of genocide for its intervention in Vietnam,14 and who was a leading light in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1960s, was first inspired to anti-war protest in the earliest days of the First World War. Whatever his personal follies, there was a great nobility in this. Russell, for all his nineteenth-century appearance, was a quintessentially twentieth-century man. The evolution from philosopher to publicist, albeit in a good cause, would not have been possible other than in an age of mass media. Those of us who continue to revere the memory of the ancient Lord Russell, the removal of whose recumbent form into police vans formed an essential part of any peace ritual of the 1950s and early 1960s, believe his protests to be both sincere yet absurd; noble but theatrical.* The tainted century in which Russell gleefully played his totemic role allowed for little purity. Russell was not one of those rare beings – not like Einstein, Bonhoeffer, Gandhi or Wittgenstein – the pure in heart. He was a complex of impurities, whose very superficiality made him an increasingly appropriate mouthpiece for the age, as the decades unrolled. At the beginning of the First World War, he wrestled not only with the disagreement of many colleagues and friends, but with his own inner patriotism. He was ‘tortured’ by patriotism. ‘I have at times been paralysed by scepticism, at times I have been cynical, at other times indifferent, but when War came I felt as if I heard the voice of God. I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile the protest might be.’15 It cost him his academic job at Cambridge.

  It would be frivolous not to see the importance of his discussions with Wittgenstein, esoteric as they must appear to nearly all of us. For much of the time, they disintegrate into near-farce. (Take, for instance, the moment when Wittgenstein paces up and down in Russell’s room for three hours in silence. ‘Once I said to him: “Are you thinking about logic or about your sins?” “Both”, he replied and continued his pacing.’)16

  Yet of all the centuries, the twentieth was the most given to destructive ideas. Millions of Europeans were to be carried away with enthusiasm for movements whose ideas were based upon extravagant falsehoods. Beside Stalinist communism, or National Socialism, the wilder heresies of the past seem positively rational. The millenarian ravings of Anabaptists or Bohemian Brethren in the seventeenth century are the soul of reasonableness beside the ideas propounded by Himmler’s SS; the most extreme superstitions of the Holy Orthodox censors in Tsarist Russia could not rival the thought-control of Stalin. In a century which could produce grotesque intellectual evils of this magnitude, it mattered very much that human beings should learn how to think clearly, and to determine what, if anything, could be seen as the truth.

  While the philosophers returned to the very origins of Western thought and began to rethink the bases of logic and mathematics, science was undergoing profound revolutions. While Wittgenstein and Russell bothered their heads with the old chestnut of whether matter existed, and if so, how we can beyond doubt say that we know it exists, physicists were discovering that matter was not as had been previously described.

  The second half of the nineteenth century had witnessed a burst of extraordinary scientific discoveries which would change the perspective with which human beings understood their planet, their place in the scheme of things, the manner in which matter cohered, moved, worked. James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), a Scottish physicist working in Cambridge, developed the theory of the electromagnetic field. It was working on his theories which enabled Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Joseph Larmor to discover the properties of the electron. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the son of a Dutchwoman and a German draper, discovered X-rays on 8 November 1895. Julius Plücker, William Crookes and Eugen Goldstein pioneered the discovery of cathode rays, which were to be the instrument of so much twentieth-century research in physics, as well as the eventual invention of television – ‘seeing by electricity’. The existence of electromagnetic waves enabled physicists to develop wireless. Guglielmo Marconi was able to make commercial use of wireless telegraphy. During the First World War, scientists developed designs centred upon the thermionic valve, which enabled, for example, aeroplanes in flight to maintain radio contact with the ground. All these examples demonstrate what a short time elapsed between scientists having an idea in a laboratory and technologists applying those ideas with world-changing effect.

  In 1900, in the scientific and secular equivalent of a papal conclave, the world’s most eminent physicists gathered for a conference in Paris to discuss the progress being made in their subject. It seemed as if the electron was the unique building block between electricity and matter. It explained X-rays, the ion and radioactivity – the property identified in various elements, notably plutonium and uranium, by Marie Curie, her husband Pierre and her brother-in-law Jacques-Paul. What was lacking in 1900 was a theory which would explain atomic structure itself. The quantum theory was first propounded by Max Planck (1858–1947) at about the time of the Paris conference. Planck, working in the university of Berlin after 1889, was really the father of modern physics. His theoretical solution to the problem of radiation inside a closed cavity was to bring to an end ‘classical’ physics as it had existed since Newton’s time. A humane, complicated man, Planck’s life was an embodiment of Germany’s tragedy. He represented all that was best about its high intellectual traditions. At the same time, he was a patriot, which is why his reputation took some knocks in the years after his death. As early as the mid-1890s, he was defending a Jewish physicist whom the government wished to expel from his laboratory for his socialist leanings. During the First World War, he prevented the German academy from expelling eminent foreign members. At the beginning of the war he was one of ninety-three German intellectuals who signed a manifesto defending the German invasion of Belgium. He was the only one of them brave enough to recant publicly, when the slaughterous consequences of that invasion became known. Later in life, he was to be faced with no less horrible personal choices. As a champion of intellectual freedom, he abominated National Socialism, but his act of defiance was to keep open his laboratories at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin – an act of collaboration in the eyes of those who had taken the, in some ways easier, path of exile. He was deprived of his teaching posts in 1938. One of his sons was killed in the First World War. During the second, another was executed for complicity in a plot to assassinate Hitler. When the war ended, his house destroyed by RAF bombardment, the aged Planck was found with his wife huddled in the woods.

  It was against the background of the twentieth-century nightmare that Max Planck’s scientific work was to be done. The crucial theory, the quantum theory, which emanated from Planck, was that radiation is emitted or received in energy ‘packets’ which he called quanta. The formula which works at all frequencies v was something which he worked out purely theoretically, and it was a number of years before other physicists could test its veracity. Energy (E) = hv, where h is the Planck constant – h = 6.55 x 10–27 (erg sec). Walking with his small son on the day that he formulated this theory, Planck told him in 1900 that the modern age had begun. Working on Planck’s theory, Albert Einstein was able to account for the photoelectric effect. With amazing rapidity, Einstein was able to develop his theories of relativity – the special theory or SRT, which revised the notions of space and time, based on the idea of an equivalence between energy and mass – E = mc2 – and general theory or GRT, which reinterpreted gravitation as an effect of the curvature of space-time. This opened the way to a so far unachieved unified field theory which would generalize all the interactions that operate on matter, both subatomic and electromagnetic.

  It was as if the scientists and the philosophers, working along parallel lines, were worrying about comparable problems. The Enlightenment or empirical views of John Locke and Isaac Newton were fading before European eyes. In a celebrated speech in 1908 to assembled German scientists, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski declared that ‘space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade awa
y into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality’. Wittgenstein could not be sure that there was not a rhinoceros in Russell’s room. Russell’s old tutor McTaggart had worried about the existence of time. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity provided the kind of ‘independent reality’ which Minkowski had sensed evaporating. But the world was not fixed or composed in quite the way that the old classical physicists had supposed.

  In 1919 a total solar eclipse was studied at two locations – at Principe Island off the West African coast and at Sobral in Brazil. Photographs were taken and they showed a deflection of light which supported Einstein’s theory of general relativity – one of the most fundamental theories in the history of science.17 It begins with a comparatively minor puzzle. Einstein himself expressed it often in this way. An observer on an embankment sees a light flash from the middle of a passing railroad carriage, equipped with a mirror at each end. An observer seated in the centre of the carriage would see the light returned from the mirrors simultaneously. The observer on the embankment would see the flash from the forward mirror after that from the rear. The speed of light is the same in both directions, but the light has farther to go to meet and return from the forward than from the rear mirror. From such a commonplace example, the genius of Einstein could extrapolate a principle about the nature of light, gravity, energy itself, a theory of such complexity that almost no one understood it, but which, in the photographic evidence of the sun’s eclipse in 1919, was demonstrated to be valid.

  Albert Einstein himself was to become one of those totemic or emblematic figures beloved of the twentieth century. As in the case of Bertrand Russell, it did not take much to transform him into a cartoon character. He was in some ways ready-made – small, heavily moustached, untidy and Bohemian in dress, the quintessential absent-minded professor. Physics from the later decades of the nineteenth century had gathered such momentum that some other scientist would surely have developed a theory of relativity without Einstein. But science, no less than ancient Greek epic, requires its heroes, and Einstein’s very remarkable predictions about the nature of gravitational force, followed by photographic demonstration, confirmed his iconic status. Stephen Hawking in the late twentieth century became a bestselling author largely on the basis of having claimed in a new-fangled book to have seen into the mind of that old-fashioned phenomenon, God. Einstein had two lives, that of the serious academic, and of the media pundit. To a public who had very little idea what his theories were, Einstein seemed to have reasserted the existence of natural law.18

  While Einstein developed a theory with widespread implications about the nature of the universe itself, other giants of physics were making their own micro-explorations about the structure of matter.

  The career of Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) was one of the most glittering examples of the scientific revolution which took place in the first two decades of the twentieth century. He was born in New Zealand, of Scottish stock, and had an outdoor boyhood on farms. Scholarships took him from Canterbury College, Christchurch, to Cambridge. He studied under Sir J. J. Thomson in the Cavendish Laboratory at a period when physics appeared to be making revolutionary strides every few years. A month after Rutherford’s arrival in Cambridge came news of Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays. In 1896, Antoine Henri Becquerel showed that uranium compounds emit radiations similar to X-rays. When he was only twenty-six, Rutherford became a professor at McGill University, Montreal, and it was there, with Frederick Soddy, that he discovered that radioactivity is a phenomenon accompanying the spontaneous transformation of the atoms of radioactive elements into different kinds of matter. What Rutherford discovered was that matter is not indestructible. The Nature of Things, as understood since the days of Lucretius, in some ways since the days of Aristotle, was now different.

  Returning to England, Rutherford became Longworthy Professor of Physics at Manchester University in 1907. It was three years after Chaim Weizmann arrived in Manchester to work as a chemistry demonstrator, and a year before Wittgenstein arrived to work on aeronautics. Manchester was quite a place in those days. It was here that Rutherford was able to complete the work begun at McGill which demonstrated that helium is present in all radioactive minerals. He identified the alpha-particle as a positively charged atom of helium. By the use of a device pioneered by Professor Hans Geiger, he could count the number of alpha-particles produced in the disintegration of radium. It was for this work that he received the Nobel prize in 1908. It came as a surprise to Rutherford that he was awarded the prize for chemistry. He considered himself a physicist, and later in life he derided all scientific activity outside physics as stamp-collecting.

  Something quite new about the very nature of atomic structure was on the point of being revealed to science. A discovery which would lead inexorably to the possibility among other things of a nuclear bomb.

  Together with his team of researchers at Manchester, Rutherford conducted a series of experiments which determined what the atom looked like. It was not a solid thing, but an empty space, defined only by the movement of its outermost electrons. At its centre – this was the revolutionary discovery – lay the atomic nucleus. When an experiment by a young researcher named Ernest Marsden established this, on Rutherford’s instructions and to his satisfaction, Rutherford was to say it was ‘quite the most incredible event that ever happened to me in my life’. Inside the nucleus lay almost all the mass of a whole atom, packed to an incredible density.

  When, in 1911, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr visited Rutherford’s laboratory, he became convinced that the nuclear atom explained the whole mystery of atomic structure. Electrodynamics was now explained. A nuclear hydrogen atom with one electron could destroy itself instantly by radiation emitting the electron.

  From now onwards, the universe was a different place. It was not a static or solid thing, or collection of things, all indestructible. It was an infinitude of little voids, each tiny nucleus of which was potentially destructive. Mass and energy were equivalents. Matter, whose very existence Idealist philosophers could still question, was charged with energy, an energy which could, with the right artificial adjustments, be tapped or controlled. Dust and stones were not lifeless. They were as energetic as tigers and much more potentially destructive.

  It was a very long time before the implications of such ideas reached the public imagination, and could be adapted, with such terrifying consequence, for military or political purpose. But by the end of the First World War, scientists who had been away to fight returned to their laboratories to discover that they were literally in a different universe.

  * Which says that a statement is meaningful if, and only if, it is in principle verifiable. Whether the Verification Principle is itself verifiable, and what bearing it has on the a priori truths of mathematics, are two major problems encountered by its defenders.

  † Das Sprachspiel, the language game, was Wittgenstein’s coinage.

  * Prison Warder: ‘What do you do, then?’ Russell, ‘I think.’ Warder: ‘Well, do you think you can clean these toilets?’ – That Was The Week That Was.

  12

  Chief

  In February 1920, H. W. Wilson, leader-writer for the Daily Mail, and the ‘mental backbone of the paper’1 – according to its proprietor – delivered this judgement: ‘As I write more and more clearly you appear as the force which won the war.’2 He was not writing to President Wilson, nor to Lloyd George, nor to one of the Allied generals. He was writing to his proprietor Lord Northcliffe, one of the most energetic and colourful newspaper-owners who ever lived. The prime minister of Australia, W. M. (Billy) Hughes, spoke of Northcliffe as ‘one of the great forces for the making of victory during the war’.3

  One of the reasons Northcliffe regarded Wilson as the ‘mental backbone’ of his most popular newspaper was, no doubt, his underling’s readiness to be His Master’s Voice. ‘I hear you are swanking about Fleet Street, being patted on the back for the excellent leade
rs which I write and don’t get paid for,’ the Chief once told Wilson.4 Innumerable sycophantic letters from Wilson to his proprietor are preserved in the British Library, and they provide a reflection of the press chief’s ascendancy. In October 1903, Wilson is writing to ‘Dear Mr Harmsworth’; in 1905, he wrote, ‘Dear Sir Alfred’; in 1906, ‘My dear Lord’. Having dinner with Harmsworth after he had acquired his Northcliffe title was ‘like translation to the Elsyian fields, where, according to the best authorities, the visitor banquets on the most superb comestibles, and is permitted to discourse with the wise and the great. The only trouble is that the return from such an existence to everyday life is like the descent into Purgatory of those who have tasted bliss complete.’ One of Wilson’s tasks was to supply Northcliffe with his expanding library of books about Napoleon. Soon ‘My dear Lord’ of the correspondence becomes simply ‘My dear Chief’. It was as ‘Chief’ that Northcliffe was generally known. He signed his telegrams ‘Chief’. When the Germans in February 1917 bombarded Broadstairs, Wilson wrote: ‘I do beg you not to risk your life there. It is an unnecessary risk, and Napoleon condemned that. The Germans know perfectly well that you are the soul and the heart of this war, and that if you were out of the way, the various puppets now in office would probably run and make peace.’5 In a later letter, thanking Chief for a cheque, Wilson grovellingly told Northcliffe that ‘like that other N’ he was ‘under posterity’s eye’.6

  Many jokes were made about Northcliffe’s power and influence. ‘Have you heard? The Prime Minister has resigned and Northcliffe has sent for the King’ was a familiar one.7 There was no doubt in the politicians’ minds that there was truth in the joke. The correspondence between Northcliffe and his leader-writers and his editors, both at the Daily Mail and at The Times (which put up slightly more resistance to his diktats and whims), makes it quite clear that he believed himself to have the power to remove or to instate British leaders, and possibly other world leaders too. He unquestionably played a role in unseating Asquith as Prime Minister in 1916; he saw himself (and so did Lloyd George) as the man who had put in Lloyd George, and three years later he mulled over the possibility of replacing Lloyd George with Winston Churchill. ‘It is a question of whether Winston would not make a better Prime Minister than Lloyd George. He is untrustworthy but he knows more and has a clearer head; moreover in danger he has shown himself bold. His handling of the army question has certainly been a success. And slippery though he is, he is less slippery than Lloyd George whom no one trusts.’8