greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.
Lawrence, orders of magnitude less articulate than Oppenheimer, was also fiercely driven; the question is what drove him. A paragraph from a letter to his brother John, written at about the same time as Oppenheimer's essay, is revealing: “Interested to hear you have had a period of depression. I have them often — sometimes nothing seems to be OK — but I have gotten used to them now. I expect the blues and I endure them. Of course the best palliative is work, but sometimes it is hard to work under the circumstances.” That work is only a “palliative,” not a cure, hints at how blue the blues could be. Lawrence was a hidden sufferer, in some measure manic-depressive; he kept moving not to fall in.
To all these emotional troublings — Oppenheimer's and Lawrence's, as Bohr's and others' before and since — science offered an anchor: in discovery is the preservation of the world. The psychologist who studied scientists at Berkeley with Rorschach and TAT found that “uncommon sensitivity to experiences — usually sensory experiences” is the beginning of creative discovery in science. “Heightened sensitivity is accompanied in thinking by overalertness to relatively unimportant or tangential aspects of problems. It makes [scientists] look for and postulate significance in things which customarily would not be singled out. It encourages highly individualized and even autistic ways of thinking.” Consider Rutherford playing his thoroughly unlikely hunch about alpha backscattering, Heisenberg remembering an obscure remark of Einstein's and concluding that nature only performed in consonance with his mathematics, Lawrence flipping compulsively through obscure foreign journals:
Were this thinking not in the framework of scientific work, it would be considered paranoid. In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from “normal” positions, and taking risks by departing from reality. The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter's ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established — and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks. It is specifically because science provides such a framework of rules and regulations to control and set bounds to paranoid thinking that a scientist can feel comfortable about taking the paranoid leaps. Without this structuring, the threat of such unrealistic, illogical, and even bizarre thinking to overall thought and personality organization in general would be too great to permit the scientist the freedom of such fantasying.
At the leading edges of science, at the threshold of the truly new, the threat has often nearly overwhelmed. Thus Rutherford's shock at rebounding alpha particles, “quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life.” Thus Heisenberg's “deep alarm” when he came upon his quantum mechanics, his hallucination of looking through “the surface of atomic phenomena” into “a strangely beautiful interior” that left him giddy. Thus also, in November 1915, Einstein's extreme reaction when he realized that the general theory of relativity he was painfully developing in the isolation of his study explained anomalies in the orbit of Mercury that had been a mystery to astronomers for more than fifty years. The theoretical physicist Abraham Pais, his biographer, concludes: “This discovery was, I believe, by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein's scientific life, perhaps in all his life. Nature had spoken to him. He had to be right. ‘For a few days, I was beside myself with joyous excitement.’ Later, he told [a friend] that his discovery had given him palpitations of the heart. What he told [another friend] is even more profoundly significant: when he saw that his calculations agreed with the unexplained astronomical observations, he had the feeling that something actually snapped in him.”
The compensation for such emotional risk can be enormous. For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery — that most unstable existential moment — the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.
Bohr especially understood this mechanism and had the courage to turn it around and use it as an instrument of assay. Otto Frisch remembers a discussion someone attempted to deflect by telling Bohr it made him giddy, to which Bohr responded: “But if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them.” Much later, Oppenheimer once told an audience, Bohr was listening to Pauli talking about a new theory on which he had recently been attacked. “And Bohr asked, at the end, ‘Is this really crazy enough? The quantum mechanics was really crazy.’ And Pauli said, ‘I hope so, but maybe not quite.’” Bohr's understanding of how crazy discovery must be clarifies why Oppenheimer sometimes found himself unable to push alone into the raw original. To do so requires a sturdiness at the core of identity — even a brutality — that men as different as Niels Bohr and Ernest Lawrence had earned or been granted that he was unlucky enough to lack. It seems he was cut out for other work: for now, building that school of theoretical physics he had dreamed of.
On June 3, 1920, Ernest Rutherford delivered the Bakerian Lecture before the Royal Society of London. It was the second time he had been invited to fill the distinguished lectureship. He used the occasion to sum up present understanding of the “nuclear constitution” and to discuss his successful transmutation of the nitrogen atom reported the previous year, the usual backward glance of such formal public events. But unusually and pre- sciently, he also chose to speculate about the possibility of a third major constituent of atoms besides electrons and protons. He spoke of “the possible existence of an atom of mass 1 which has zero nucleus charge.” Such an atomic structure, he thought, seemed by no means impossible. It would not be a new elementary particle, he supposed, but a combination of existing particles, an electron and a proton intimately united, forming a single neutral particle.
“Such an atom,” Rutherford went on with his usual perspicacity, “would have very novel properties. Its external [electrical] field would be practically zero, except very close to the nucleus, and in consequence it should be able to move freely through matter. Its presence would probably be difficult to detect by the spectroscope, and it may be impossible to contain it in a sealed vessel.” Those might be its peculiarities. This would be its exceptional use: “On the other hand, it should enter readily the structure of atoms, and may either unite with the nucleus or be disintegrated by its intense field.” A neutral particle, if such existed — a
Rutherford's assistant James Chadwick attended this lecture and found cause for disagreement. Chadwick was then twenty-nine years old. He had trained at Manchester and followed Rutherford down to Cambridge. He had accomplished much already — as a young man, two of his colleagues write, his output “was hardly inferior to that of Moseley” — but he had sat out the Great War in a German internment camp, to the detriment of his health and to his everlasting boredom, and he was eager to move the new work of nuclear physics along. A neutral particle would be a wonder, but Chadwick thought Rutherford had deduced it from flimsy evidence.
That winter he discovered his mistake. Rutherford invited him to participate in the work of extending the nitrogen transmutation results to heavier elements. Chadwick had improved scintillation counting by developing a microscope that gathered more light and by tightening up procedures. He also knew chemistry and might help eliminate hydrogen as a possible contaminant, a challenge to the nitrogen results that still bothered Rutherford. “But also, I think,” said Chadwick many years later in a memorial lecture, “he wanted company to support the tedium of counting in the dark — and to lend an ear to his robust rendering of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’”
“Before the experiments,” Chadwick once told an interviewer, “before we began to observe in these experiments, we had to accustom ourselves to the dark, to get our eyes adjusted, and we had a big box in the room in which we took refuge while Crowe, Rutherford's personal assistant and technician, prepared the apparatus. That is to say, he brought the radioactive source down from the radium room, put it in the apparatus, evacuated it, or filled it with whatever, put the various sources in and made the arrangements that we'd agreed upon. And we sat in this dark room, dark box, for perhaps half an hour or so, and naturally, talked.” Among other things, they talked about Rutherford's Bakerian Lecture. “And it was then that I realized that these observations which I suspected were quite wrong, and which proved to be wrong later on, had nothing whatever to do with his suggestion of the neutron, not really. He just hung the suggestion on to it. Because it had been in his mind for some considerable time.”
