FN and Lou

 

Generally Nietzsche was not concerned with the impression he was making on people. During these migrant years, people remembered his quietness, his passivity, his soft voice, his poor but neatly kept dress, the scrupulous good manners he showed toward all, particularly women, and the eerie absence of expression produced by the fact of his mouth being permanently invisible behind the mustache and his eyes behind blueor green-lensed glasses, his whole face further deeply shaded by the green visor. But for all that, he was no shadow, he was never overlooked; his presence was all the more noticeable for the noli me tangere aura within which he moved. He made the discovery that “The gentlest, and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large mustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there-he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large mustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent-and as such he will be treated.” 

Paut Rée came to Genoa in February 1882, bearing the typewriter. The Malling-Hansen Writing Ball was a hemispherical contraption resembling a brass hedgehog with each bristle ending in a letter. When depressed by a finger, the bristle printed that letter onto the page. The machine had attracted some notice when it was exhibited in Paris. Nietzsche’s hopes were high that it might enable him to write by touch, thus sparing his eyes. It was not an immediate success. “This machine is as delicate as a small dog and causes a lot of trouble.” It had been damaged in transit and was not working properly but even after it was repaired it was no easier for his eyes to peer at typewriter keys than at the nib of a pen inching along the page. Fortunately, for the moment, Paul Rée was at hand to help. They went to the theater to see Sarah Bernhardt play La Dame aux camélias but the divine Sarah was no greater success than the typewriter: at the end of the first act she collapsed. The audience waited an hour for her to come back and when she did, she burst a blood vessel. Nevertheless, her statuesque form and commanding manner roused in Nietzsche tender memories of Cosima. 

In March, Rée moved on to Rome to rejoin Malwida von Meysenbug, who had transferred her “Academy of Free Spirits” from Sorrento to Rome, where it was now called “The Roman Club.” Rée burst in one evening, harassed and broke, having lost all his money on the way, gambling in Monte Carlo. Apparently a benevolent waiter had lent him the money to get this far. Malwida scuttled out to pay off the waiting cab while Rée joined the circle of assembled free spirits, and found himself immediately spellbound by the startling personality of Lou Salomé,” an elegant and cosmopolitan twenty-one-year-old half-Russian girl of great magnetism, originality and intelligence. Lou was traveling with her mother, ostensibly for her health but in fact to take advantage of greater intellectual opportunities than Russia liked to offer its women. Lou’s father, a Russian general ennobled for his part in the Napoleonic wars, was dead, whereupon Lou and her mother had traveled from St. Petersburg to Zurich for Lou to pursue her intellectual ambitions. She attended lectures at Zurich University but she had started to spit blood, a signal to move south. A letter of introduction brought her to Malwida’s Roman salon where, not for the first time or the last, Lou plunged into the role of intellectual femme fatale. Lou Salomé bewitched many eminent intellectuals during her long lifetime, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud. 

Nietzsche’s name was pronounced as that of a god by Rée and Malwida at the Roman Club. Naturally, Lou expressed a strong wish to meet him. Nietzsche was still in Genoa, and Lou immediately started a close relationship with his friend Rée. When Malwida’s literary salon closed its doors at midnight, Rée would escort Lou home. Soon they were strolling the streets around the Colosseum every night between the hours of midnight and two. Such behavjor naturally shocked Lou’s mother. Even the progressive feminist Malwida protested. “Thus I discovered,” Lou wrote disingenuously, “the extent to which idealism in such matters can interfere with the urge toward personal freedom.”'? She was never averse to playing siren or Circe. By her own admission she had early determined that she would get her way at all times. She regarded truth-telling as “enforced stinginess” that should never be allowed to interfere with a primary goal. “I was mightily spoiled at home, so I felt omnipotent. Without my image in the mirror I would be homeless,” she wrote in her memoirs, which are devastatingly clear-eyed about her own personality while magnificently careless of other truths. 

Rée wrote ecstatically to Nietzsche about the “energetic, unbelievably clever being with girlish, even childish qualities . . The Russian girl you must absolutely get to know.””° 

Sniffing one of Malwida’s marriage plans, Nietzsche replied jokily from Genoa that if this meant marriage, he’d put up with it for two years, but no longer. What Nietzsche did not know was that Lou was as averse to the idea of marriage as he was. All her life, she preferred to live with two men at a time. She did, in fact, marry five years later but only because her suitor stabbed himself in the chest and threatened to finish the job if she refused. They remained married for forty-five years, devoted to each other throughout, though the marriage was never consummated and she was perfectly happy for the housekeeper to be her husband’s long-term mistress while Lou imported her own devoted admirers into the marriage, the of whom was Rée. 

In Genoa, Nietzsche saw the opera Carmen for the first time. As soon as he could, he saw it again. Before he died he would see it twenty times. Carmen replaced his obsession with Tristan und Isolde. With music by Bizet and a libretto based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée, the opera had no pretensions toward the sublime or even the extraordinary. Unlike Wagner, it offered no adventures of the soul and might even be called a materialist opera. Carmen requires no super-sized orchestra. Its tunes are tremendously hummable. It lasts a short time. It ignores the metaphysical. It is not about gods and legends, not yout kings and queens. It tells a tabloid tale 

of lust among the lower class. Don José is an undistinguished little corporal whose well-regimented, narrow life collides with the Dionysian in the shape of Carmen, a passionate and sexually voracious girl who works in a cigarette factory. Carmen is a femme fatale who (like Lou Salomé) takes and discards men on her own terms. The incomprehending and uncontrollable uproar of lust, jealousy and possessiveness that Carmen rouses in Don José inevitably leads to him murdering her in a Dionysian frenzy. 

Having expressed her wish to travel to Genoa to meet Nietzsche, Lou became angry on hearing that he would not wait there for her to come. He had decided to leave Genoa for Messina. In terms of Nietzsche's health, the decision made little sense. If Genoa was getting too hot for him in the month of March, Sicily was hotter still. But his recent summers in the mountains had now made him decide that summering at higher altitudes brought him closer to the electricity in the clouds, aggravating his condition. Instead, he would try a summer at the furthest distance achievable from heaven: sea level. Besides, Carmen had roused a hunger for the south. 

“The vulgar element in everything that pleases in Southern Europe .. . does not escape me; but it does not offend me, just as little as does the vulgarity that one encounters on a walk through Pompeii [he was probably referring to the erotic art] and basically even when reading any ancient book. Why is this? Is it because there is no shame and everything vulgar acts as confidently and self-assuredly as anything noble, lovely, and passionate in the same kind of music or novel? “The animal’ has its own right, just like che human being; let it run about freely-and you too, my dear fellow man, are still an animal, despite everything!””’ 

The other pull to Messina was Wagner, who was spending the winter there with Cosima. There had been no contact between 

Nietzsche and Wagner for three years, but Nietzsche had frequently dreamt of him and Cosima. His dreams were friendly, positive and ungrudging. He would like to see them again. 

He wrote eight lighthearted little poems called The Idylls of Mes

sina, mostly about boats and goats and maidens, and he boarded a 

boat for Messina with a high heart. He was horribly seasick. By the time he arrived in Sicily, he was physically wrecked and Wagner and Cosima had already left. Wagner had suffered chest spasms in Palermo and run home. The scorching sirocco was blowing from the Carthaginian coast, a wind well known for depressing the spirits and gritting every surface and crevice with tiny, unbearable particles of sand. The only redeeming feature of Nietzsche’s uncomfortable trip to Sicily was the sight of the volcano of Stromboli, whose legends of flying ghosts would later enter his tale of Zarathustra. 

Cards and letters from Rée continued to arrive hymning the intelligence of Lou Salomé. Nietzsche received a letter from Malwida that was almost a summons: “A very remarkable girl (I believe Rée has written to you about her)... seems to me to have arrived at much the same results you have so far in philosophical thinking, i.e. at practical idealism with a discarding of every metaphysical assumption and concern for the explanation of metaphysical problems. Rée and I agree in the wish to see you together with this extraordinary being...” 

Another dreadful boat ride brought him back from Sicily. When he had recovered, he boarded a train for Rome. 

 Before she had even met Nietzsche Lou had determined to live with him and Rée in a ménage @ trois. She envisioned it an Heilige Dreteinigkeit, a Holy Trinity of philosophizing free spirits “filled almost to bursting with spirituality and keenness of mind.” 

Her fantasy took shape during the time leading up to Nietzsche's arrival in Rome, as she prowled miasmic midnights round the Colosseum with Rée pontificating on philosophy and tantalizing her with endless talk of his brilliant friend. 

“T will confess honestly,” she wrote, “that a simple dream first convinced me of the feasibility of my plan, which flew directly in the face of all social conventions. In it I saw a pleasant study filled with books and flowers, flanked by two bedrooms, and us walking back and forth between them, colleagues, working together in a joyful and earnest bond.”! The disposition of the two bedrooms between the three of them was not made clear. 

Lou did not hide her unconventional plan from Malwida, who called it a brazen fantasy and began to worry. Lou’s ineffectual and permanently outmaneuvered mother talked of summoning her brothers against the disreputable scheme. Everyone was against it. Even Rée, Lou said, was “somewhat perplexed,” though he was wholeheartedly in love. Within the first three weeks of knowing her he had asked her to marry him, including in the proposal the unusual condition that there would be no sex, because it disgusted him. Lou was also disgusted by sex following a traumatic episode in her late teens in St. Petersburg when her trusted intellectual mentor, a married elderly Dutch priest with daughters of her own age, had suddenly forced himself upon her. Rée’s proposal of a mariage blanc would have been to her taste had she been fond of her reputation. It would certainly have conferred respectability. But Lou never gave a fig for her reputation. Throughout her long life, she loved nothing better than to épater les bourgeois. 

WHILE LOU AND HER MOTHER WENT TO THE OVERBECKS IN Basel, Nietzsche went straight from Lucerne to Naumburg to prepare The Gay Science for his publisher. He hired the services of a bankrupt tradesman, who took dictation while Elisabeth read from the manuscript in which he announces for the first time the death of God. He tells it like this: “Haven't you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, ‘I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!’ Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? ... The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him-you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling ...Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?

Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? ... Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing of the divine decomposition?-Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all mur. derers! The holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? ... Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There never was a greater deed-and whoever is born after us will on ac. count of this belong to a higher history than up to now!’” 

The crowd look at him disconcertedly and the madman observes, “This deed is still more remote to them [the post-deists] than the remotest stars-and yet they have done it themselves!” He throws the lantern that gives the new light down onto the ground. Leaving the crowd in the marketplace, he forces his way into the churches that lie in his path. In each church he strikes up a requiem for the soul of God, using a form of words that is a blasphemous parody of the requiem for the dead. The people, though they no longer believe in God, are offended by his behavior and they evict him forcibly from their churches. 

“What then are these churches now,” he asks them, “if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”' 

Later in the same book, Nietzsche rehearses another idea that he will enlarge on in his later philosophy: that following the death of a god, his statue will still be shown for centuries in a cave where it will continue to cast a tremendous and gruesome shadow on the wall. God is dead, yes. But, given the ways of men, Nietzsche prophesies, there will remain for thousands of years the shadow of the morality he imparted. It is the stern job of the Argonaut of the spirit to vanquish the shadow, as well as the god himself.? 

Both stories placed a heavy burden on the shoulders of nineteenthcentury rationalists (such as Rée) who, having killed God, did not seem to realize the consequence that you cannot keep the ethical content of Christianity without its theology. The rational materialists must also address the consequence switch in moral power. In this lurked the possibility of vast and catastrophic consequences for mankind. “Incipit tragoedia,’ Nietzsche prophesied at the end ,tragedy looms. 

Bocklin and fn

 Peter Gast never failed rapturously to believe in Nietzsche’s books and Nietzsche in his turn wholeheartedly supported Gast’s musical compositions. Gast was the composer he might have been himself. He praised his genius to his friends and he hounded them for money to support Gast’s comic opera // matrimonio segreto, whose music was entirely free of Wagner’s deadly and delicious metaphysical befogging. In March, the two of them left Riva for Venice, where Gast had made his home. Ostensibly Nietzsche was in Venice to speed on Gast’s opera but in fact he was driving his friend to distraction with what Gast called “Samaritan work.” This consisted of reading aloud to Nietzsche twice a day and taking dictation, as well as repeatedly rescuing his friend from a jumble of minor physical problems and mishaps. 

Money stretched far in Venice. Nietzsche rented a very cold, vast room in the Palazzo Berlendi, reached by the most splendid marble staircase, and his window commanded an iconic view that was of enormous significance to his own generation and several to come. 

“I have taken a room with a view to the Island of the Dead,”® he wrote. 

There must have been something in the funerary view that compensated the rising generation for the collapse of traditional illusions. That same year that Nietzsche was there, the Symbolist Bécklin was painting The Island of the Dead, a picture that would hang on the walls of Lenin, Strindberg, Freud and Hitler, and as a cultural badge on the walls of every Berlin intellectual from the 1880s to the 1930s, as Nabokov observed. Wagner was so struck by Bécklin’s grasp of the mood of the moment that he invited him to design the sets for his new opera, Parsifal, in Bayreuth. Bécklin declined and so the commission went to Paul von Joukowsky instead. 

Nietzsche’s window commanded the Bocklin view of smooth, luminous water broken by funeral boats transporting the dead toward the enclosing walls of the cemetery island. Above the walls rose tall, dark cypress trees, pointing like fingers up to the heavens and the mystery that lies beyond the grave. The view would inspire Nietzsche to write “The Tomb Song,” one of his most beautiful poems, 

in which the graves on the island include the tombs of his youth, of the gentle, strange marvels of love and of the songbirds of his hopes, 

Venice heated up; its mosquitos became active. Nietzsche abandoned the watery city without a backward look. Peter Gast got back to his own work, with relief. 

For two years, Nietzsche wandered. In each new place, hope sprang that he had found his Arcadia. The beauty of the diverse prospects caused him to tremble and adore the earth, so profligate with its marvels, as though nothing could be more natural than to experience life as a transposed Greek hero, as both heroic and idyllic, “Et in Arcadia ego... And that is how individual men have actually lived, that is how they have enduringly felt they existed in the world and the world existed in them .. .”?° 

But in each new Arcadia he would eventually discover some intolerable imperfection: either it was too high, or too low, or too hot or too damp or too cold, or it was situated wrongly beneath the electric clouds and the all-seeing sky. There was always a good reason for the wanderer to move on. 

In the summertime, he took up residence in the cool alpine regions but when the mountains became too cold and the brightness of the first snowfall threatened his eyes, he embarked on disastrous train journeys (lost luggage, lost spectacles, lost sense of direction) to the warmth of the French Riviera or Italy. And then, in July 1881, he discovered his Arcadia in Sils-Maria, one of the many pretty hamlets dotting the ravishing landscape of the Upper Engadine around St. Moritz. Sils-Maria seized his soul as Venice never had. “I would have to go to the high plateaus of Mexico overlooking the Pacific to find anything similar (for example, Oaxaca), and the vegetation there would of course be tropical,’ he wrote with crazy lack of reason to Peter Gast, going on in the same letter to reassure Gast that his secretarial duties might soon be coming to an end as he had heard of a new typewriter invented by a Dane. He had sent the inventor a letter of enquiry. 

The Swiss tourist boom was just beginning. There were several] modest hotels in Sils-Maria but even so they would have been too ex

Plato's Republic

 Before discussing how Republic shook the world, we might ask whether any book shakes the world. Certainly the world changes, and many of its important changes can be plotted using the rise and fall of those ideas by which people live: ideas like freedom and democracy, or justice, citizenship or knowledge. Religions shake the world, and in practice a religion is just a fossilized philosophy a philosophy with the questioning spirit suppressed. Still, there are people who would say that even if changes in the world can be charted through ideas, such as those of Republic, Plato will not have been responsible for the changes themselves.

Progress

 By Lasch

A Secular Religion? 

THe idea of progress, according to a widely accepted interpretation, represents a secularized version of the Christian belief in providence. The ancient world, we are told, entertained a cyclical view of history, whereas Christianity gave it a clearly defined direction, from the fall of man to his ultimate redemption. “It is no accident,” Carl Becker wrote in 1921, “that the belief in Progress and a concern for ‘posterity’ waxed in proportion as the belief in Providence and a concern for a future life waned. The former belief-illusion if you prefer-is man’s compensation for the loss of the latter.” Thanks to its Christian background, the Western world found it easy to imagine history as a “process generally moving upwards by a series of majestic stages,” as Ernest Lee Tuveson explained. For twentieth-century historians, skeptical about the value of religion in any form, an understanding of the Christian origins of progressive ideology reveals the “radical inconsistency” at its core, in Becker’s words, the untenable assumption of historical “finality.” Almost everyone now agrees that progress-in its utopian form at least-is a “‘superstition” that is ‘nearly worn out,” as Dean William Ralph Inge put it in 1920; that we can now appreciate its religious roots largely because “the idea has begun to lose its hold on the mind of society,” as Christopher Dawson pointed out a few years later; and that the hope of some final state of earthly perfection, in short, is the ‘‘deadest of dead ideas,” as Lewis Mumford wrote in 1932-“‘the one notion that has been thoroughly blasted by the facts of twentieth-century experience.” 

Utopian visions of the future were definitively discredited by their association with the totalitarian movements that came to power in the thirties. Belief in a secular millennium, rooted in the Christian tradition, seemed to have furnished modern barbarism with much of its spiritual energy. “The more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements,” wrote Norman Cohn, “the more remarkable the similarities appear.” Fascists and communists replaced supernatural explanations of history with secular explanations, but they clung to the apocalyptic fantasy that a final, decisive struggle would establish absolute justice and perfect contentment. “What had once been demanded by ‘the will of God’ was now demanded by ‘the purposes of History.’ ” 

The collapse of utopia made it clear that a belief in progress could be salvaged-and the same calamities that discredited utopian hopes seemed to make it all the more important to salvage some form of hope-only by disavowing its perfectionist overtones.* “The world today believes in progress,” Sidney Pollard flatly declared in 1986, because “‘the only possible alternative to the belief in progress would be total despair.” Faith in progress could no longer rest on a vision of human perfection, but a more modest conception of progress was not only possible but essential to the “survival” of human society, as E. H. Carr put it in 1963. Since “some such conception” alone could “‘persuade the present generation to make sacrifices for future generations,” Carr proposed a more thoroughly secularized doctrine of “unlimited progress.” Without postulating an end to history, he argued, men and women could still look forward to improvements “subject to no limits that we can... envisage, towards goals which can be defined only as we advance towards them.” Only intellectuals questioned the reality of progress. The condition of the masses had undeniably improved. The “mere accumulation of resources,” to be sure, was not enough to justify a belief in progress, unless it brought “increased technical and social knowledge, . . . increased mastery of man’s environment.” But progress in this broader sense, Carr maintained, could still not be ruled out. 

His observations exemplify the dominant view of the matter. If “the belief in progress has exhibited remarkable toughness in twentieth-century America,” as Clarke Chambers noted in 1958, it is because liberals and socialists have divorced it from the “‘heavenly city of the eighteenthcentury philosophers,” tied it to the cause of democracy and abundance, and brought it down to earth. No one claims any more that progress is inevitable or that it will culminate in some state of final perfection. No one denies that moral improvement often fails to keep pace with material improvement. But the general rise in living standards 1s obviously desirable in itself. The “average length of life has been steadily extended,” Charles Frankel wrote some time ago, illiteracy “progressively eliminated,” work made less back-breaking, leisure time increased, and the “basic conditions of human life,” in short, “changed for the better” and “changed more radically in the last hundred and fifty years than in all history before that time.”* The fact of technological progress simply cannot be denied, according to Barrington Moore, and it is “accompanied by changes in social structure” that provide the “prerequisites of freedom.” Material comfort does not assure a good life, but a good life is impossible without it. Material improvements, moreover, can be taken as evidence of a refusal to tolerate conditions formerly taken for granted-poverty, hunger, epidemic disease, inequality, racial bigotry. “Despite the difficulty of balancing gains and losses,” Morris Ginsberg argued in 1953, humanitarian sentiment “is gaining in strength. ... In no previous age has so much been done to relieve suffering, and to abolish poverty, disease and ignorance in all parts of the world.” A. J. Ayer likewise sees the “average man” as “more humane, more pacific and more concerned with social justice than he was a century ago.” 

Progress is the “working faith of our civilization,” wrote Christopher Dawson in 1929. Later writers agree. ‘“‘No single idea has been more important in Western civilization,” Robert Nisbet argues. “‘. .. This idea has done more good over a twenty-five-hundred-year period .. . and given more strength to human hope... than any other single idea in Western history.”* J. H. Plumb joins Nisbet in upholding the idea of progress as a “great human truth.” Warren Wagar condemns the “‘neo-Augustinian theologians, the obscurantists, and all the pious and aesthetic and mystical refugees” who question man’s ability to prevail. A. J. P. Taylor, along with Wagar and Carr, dismisses cultural pessimism as the vice of disgruntled intellectuals. Talk about the decline of civilization, Taylor says, means “only that university professors used to have domestic servants and now do their own washing-up.” 

Dirac by Farmelo

In Eddington’s words, “The fascinating point is that as the development process proceeds, actual numbers are exuded from the symbols.’ By this, Eddington meant that the underlying symbolic language yielded, after mathematical manipulation, numbers that experimenters could check. The value of the theory depended on whether these predictions agreed with the readings on counters, dials and detecting screens. If the theory did that successfully and was logically consistent, it must be judged a success, according to Dirac, no matter how peculiar it looked. 

Fowler appreciated that his student had done something special, Dirac’s theory, much more ambitious than Heisenberg’s prototype description of the artificial case of an electron jiggling about in a straight line, sought to describe the behaviour of all quantum particles in all circumstances throughout all time. He knew, however, that the most important priority was to demonstrate that his theory could account for the most important general observations that experimenters had made about atoms. In a few lines of algebra, Dirac demonstrated that energy is conserved in his theory as it is in the everyday world and that when an atomic electron jumps from one energy level to another, it gives out a quantum of light whose energy is equal to the difference between the two levels. This indicated that the theory was able to reproduce Bohr’s successes, without having to assume that electrons are in orbit, like planets round a star, doomed to cascade into the nucleus. For Dirac, it was meaningless to use such graphic images quantum particles can be described only using the precise, rarefied language of symbolic mathematics. 

Although Dirac had been inspired by Heisenberg’s paper, the two men had sharply different approaches to their subject. Heisenberg proudly referred to his paper as ‘the great saw’, a tool to cut off the limb on which the old Bohr theory rested.** Dirac, on the other hand, sought to build a bridge between Newtonian mechanics and the new theory. His dream was that all the mathematics that Hamilton and others had used to recast Newton’s theory of mechanics would have exact counterparts in the new theory. If Dirac was right, physicists would be able to use the infrastructure of ‘classical mechanics’ the stuff of hundreds of textbooks in the construction of the new theory, which had been named the year before by Heisenberg’s senior colleague, Max Born: ‘quantum mechanics’. 

 It would take several years before quantum mechanics crystallised into a complete theory. During that time it was a work in progress by about 50 physicists. In retrospect they resembled a group of construction workers who had agreed on a common project to build a new theory of the behaviour of matter though not on how to accomplish it.

 Quantum mechanics was still only a rudimentary fury. Much remained to be clarified about the interpretation of its mathematical symbols what did they really mean? It was impossible to say any more about the motion of subatomic particles?

 Dirac had recently heard  That an alternative version of quantum theory had appeared one that looked completely different from Heisenberg's. The author of the new version was the Austrian theoretician Erwin Schrodinger working in zurich. He was 38 years old. Schrodinger had developed his quantum theory independently of Heisenburg and a few weeks later.  Show dingir discovered an equation that describe the behaviour of quanta of matter in terms of their associated waves and then applied the theory in a series of dazzling papers. The great virtue of schroedinger's theory was that it was easy to use. For the many scientists intimidated by the abstract mathematics in Heisenberg's approach schrodinger offered the balm of familiarity his theory was based on an equation that closely resembled those most physicists had mastered as undergraduates when they were studying water and sound waves . Better still in schroedinger's theory the atom could be at least to some extent visualised.

Within a few weeks of mastering Schrodinger’s equation, Dirac used it to make one of his most famous contributions to science, |t concerned the most basic particles that exist in nature, usually described as ‘fundamental’ because they are believed to have no constituents at all. Classic examples are photons and electrons. Today, two established experimental facts form the bedrock of studies about fundamental particles. First, for each type of fundamental particle, every single one of them in the universe is the same and identical to all other particles of the same type every electron in every atom on Earth is indistinguishable from every electron in galaxies millions of light years away, just as all the trillions of photons given out each second from a light bulb are the same as the photons given out by the most distant star. For electrons and photons, if you have seen one, you have seen them all. Second, the types of fundamental particles fall into one of two classes, much as almost all human beings can be classified as males or females. The first class is exemplified by the photon, the second by the electron. In 1926, no one knew that there were two such classes. 

The differences between the behaviours of electrons and photons exemplify the sharp contrast in behaviour between the two known classes of particle. For a collection of electrons, say in an atom, each available energy state can usually accommodate no more than two electrons. The situation is quite different for photons: each energy state can host any number of them. One way to visualise this difference is to imagine a pair of bookcases with horizontal shelves arranged vertically above one another in ascending order of energy the higher the shelf, the higher the energy to which it corresponds. The shelves of the ‘electron bookcase’ represent the energy states available to electrons, while the shelves of the ‘photon bookcase’ correspond to the states available to photons. For the ‘electron bookcase’, each shelf can accommodate at most two books: once the shelf is occupied, it is full and no others can join it. The ‘photon bookcase’ is different because its shelves can each house any number of books. It is as if electrons are unsociable, whereas photons are gregarious. 

Pauli first realised the aversion of electrons to their own company in 1925 when he suggested his exclusion principle. This explained the puzzle of why all the electrons in an atom do not all orbit the nucleus in the same, lowest-energy orbit: it is because the electrons simply are not allowed to fit into the same state they are forced by the exclusion principle to occupy higher-energy states. This is why the different types of atom manifest as different chemical elements ~ behave so differently. In common experience, neon is a gas and sodium is a metal, yet the atoms of neon gas are very similar to the sodium atoms: outside their nuclei, they differ only in that a sodium atom contains one more electron than a neon atom, That additional electron determines the differences between the two elements, and the Pauli exclusion principle explains why sodium’s extra electron does not simply join the others and form an almost identical type of atom; rather, it occupies a higher-energy quantum state that is responsible for the differences between the behaviour of the two elements. For the same reason, if there were no exclusion principle, the world around us would have none of the huge variety of forms, textures and colours that we take for granted. Not only would our senses have nothing to perceive, they would not exist. Nor, indeed, would human beings or even life itself. 

And

Another of the out-of-the-blue ideas that Dirac apparently conceived in Copenhagen is now the basis of all modern descriptions of the fundamental constituents of the universe. Such descriptions are based on the nineteenth-century concept of a ‘field’, which had superseded Newton’s vision that nature’s basic particles move under the influence of forces exerted by other such particles, often over long distances. Physicists replaced the notion that the Sun and the Earth exert gravitational forces on each other by the more effective picture that the Sun, the Earth and all the other matter in the universe collectively give rise to a gravitational field which pervades the entire universe and exerts a force on each particle, wherever it is located. Likewise, an all-pervasive electromagnetic field exerts a force on every electrically charged particle. Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism and Einstein’s theory of gravity are examples of classical ‘field theory’, each featuring a field that varies smoothly throughout space and time, not mentioning individual quanta. Such classical theories describe the universe in terms of a smooth, underlying fabric. Yet, according to quantum theory, the universe is fundamentally granuJar: it is ultimately made of tiny particles such as electrons and photons. Loosely speaking, the texture of the underlying fields should, according to classical ideas, be rather like a smooth liquid, whereas quantum theory suggests that it would be like a vast collection of separate grains of sand. To find a quantum version of Maxwell’s classical electromagnetism was one of the theoreticians’ most pressing problems, and Dirac’s next innovation was to solve it. 

Quite what put him on to the solution is something of a mystery. Although he was probably aware of the first steps taken a few months before by Jordan, Dirac later said that he first hit on the idea when he was playing with Schrodinger waves as if they were mathematical toys, wondering what would happen if they behaved not as ordinary numbers but as non-commuting quantities.>* The answer began a new way of describing the quantum world. 

Dirac found a way of mathematically describing the creation and destruction of photons, both commonplace processes. Particles of light are continually created in vast numbers all over the universe in stars and also here on Earth, when an electric light is switched on, a match is struck, a candle is lit. Likewise, photons are continually destroyed annihilated for example, when they disappear into human retinas and when leaves convert sunlight to life-giving energy. Neither of these processes of creation and annihilation can be understood using Maxwell’s classical theory, which has no way of describing things that appear out of nowhere or disappear into oblivion. Nor did ordinary quantum mechanics have anything to say in detail about the processes of emission or absorption. Yet Dirac showed that this wizardry can be described in a new type of theory, a compact mathematical description of the creation and destruction of photons. He associated each creation with a mathematical object, a creation operator, which is closely related to but quite distinct from another object associated with annihilation, an annihilation operator. 

In this picture, at the heart of modern quantum field theory, the electromagnetic field pervades the entire universe. The appearance of every photon is simply an excitation of this field at a particular place and time, described by the action of a creation operator. By a similar token, the disappearance of a photon is the de-excitation of the field, described by an annihilation operator. 

Dirac had begun to set out a quantum version of Maxwell’s unified field theory of electricity and magnetism. He had learned about that theory only three years before, in Cunningham’s lectures in Cambridge, and was now standing on Maxwell’s shoulders. So far as Dirac was concerned, his theory put an end to the hand-wringing bout the apparent conflict between two theories of light: a wave theory seemed to account for propagation, while a particle theory way heeded to explain the interactions with matter. The new theory avoided the embarrassment of having to choose between the wave and particle descriptions and replaced the two sharply contrasting pictures with a single, unified theory. Evidently pleased with himself, Dirac wrote that the pictures were in ‘complete harmony’. But he wag not interested in sharing the good news with his parents, who read on their weekly postcard their son’s familiar message: ‘There is not much to say now.’ 

In his paper, Dirac applied his theory and compared his results with the successful predictions Einstein had made a decade before, in 1916. Einstein had used old quantum ideas to calculate the rate at which atoms can emit and absorb light, producing formulae that appeared to describe these processes successfully. The question Dirac had to answer was: does the new theory compare favourably with Einstein’s? 

Einstein’s theory had accounted for the interaction of light and matter in terms of three fundamental processes. Two of them were familiar enough: the emission and absorption of a photon by an atom. But Einstein also predicted a previously unknown way of ‘persuading’ an atom to jump from one energy level to a lower one, by stimulating it with another photon whose energy is exactly equal to the difference between the two energy levels. The result of this process of ‘stimulated emission’ is that two photons emerge from the atom: the original one and another one given out when the atom jumps to the lower energy level. This process takes place in the ubiquitous laser there is at least one in every CD and DVD player and in every bar-code reader and so is the most common technological application of Einstein’s science. Dirac’s theory produced exactly the same formulae as Einstein’s and had the other advantages that it was more general and mathematically more coherent. As he probably realised, he had gone one better than Einstein. 

At the end of January, as he was preparing to leave Copenhagen, Dirac posted his paper to the Royal Society. It turned out that he was the first to introduce the mathematics of creation and annihilation into quantum theory.

&

Robert Oppenheimer, who had fled Cambridge and was flourishing in Max Born’s Department of Theoretical Physics as a Ph.D. student of rare ability, self-confidence and superciliousness. Ever the intellectual peacock, Oppenheimer ensured that his colleagues knew he was thinking about more than physics: his eclectic reading list included F. Scott Fitzgerald’s collection of short stories Winter Dreams, Chekhov’s play Ivanov and the works of the German lyric poet Johann Holderlin.! He was also composing verse, a hobby that puzzled Dirac. ‘I don’t see how you can work on physics and write poetry at the same time,’ he remarked during one of their walks. ‘In science, you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.’ For decades to come, Oppenheimer liked to recount this anecdote over cocktails, no doubt having polished Dirac’s original phrasing to give it the bite of one of Wilde’s paradoxes.” 

&

JANUARY 1927-SPRING 1927 

Meanwhile, the debates about the interpretation of quantum theory had not abated, least of all in Copenhagen, where Heisenberg was struggling to understand the theoretical limits of what can be known about a quantum. He achieved this brilliantly with his uncertainty principle, which made him into the nearest the quantum fraternity had to a household name. 

The principle emerged only after anguished and protracted gestation, which apparently began with a letter from Pauli during the previous October.?> Heisenberg believed that the correct way to think about the quantum world was in terms of particles, and that the more popular wave-based ideas were merely useful supplementaries. Somehow, Heisenberg wanted to find a way of making definite statements about the measurements that could be made on quantum particles, especially about the limitations on what experimenters can know about them. Heisenberg had talked with Einstein about this, and, when Dirac was in Copenhagen developing transformation theory, he had also discussed it with him.?° 

The nub of what became known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is that the knowledge experimenters have of a quantum’s position limits what they can know about its speed, at the same instant. The more they know about a quantum’s position, the less they can know about its speed. So, for example, if experimenters know an electron’s location with perfect precision, then it follows that they can know nothing whatsoever about its speed at the same moment; on the other hand, if they know the exact value of the electron’s speed, they will be totally ignorant of its position. There is, Heisenberg argued, no way round this: regardless of the accuracy of the measuring apparatus or the extent of the experimenters’ ingenuity, the principle puts fundamental limitations on knowledge. It turns out that even the most accurate knowledge imaginable of the location of an ordinary object puts only negligible constraints on knowledge of its speed (likewise with the location and speed reversed), so the principle is unimportant in everyday life. This is the root of the physicists’ joke about the motorist who tries to con the traffic police by pleading not guilty of speeding on the grounds ‘I knew exactly where I was, so I had no idea how fast I was travelling’: the plea would be perfectly admissible if it were made by a sentient electron. 

In his paper, Heisenberg explained his principle by picturing what happens when an experimenter uses a photon of light to probe the behaviour of an electron demonstrating that the very act of probing disturbs the electron.

The metaphor of nature as a colossal clockwork mechanism, popular since Newton's day, had long been apt for most purposes. But no longer. Quantum mechanics was based fundamentally on mathematical abstractions and could not be visualised using concrete images ~ that is why Dirac refused to discuss quantum mechanics in everyday terms, except in later life, when he began to use analogies between the behaviour of quanta and the way ordinary matter behaves. Yet Dirac often remarked that he did not think about nature in terms of algebra, but by using visual images. Since he was a boy, he had been encouraged to develop visual imagination in his art and technicaldrawing classes, which were an ideal grounding for his studies of projective geometry. None of the other pioneers of quantum mechanics had been given an education in which geometric visualisation played such a prominent part. Five decades later, when he looked back on his early work in quantum mechanics, Dirac declared that he had used the ideas of projective geometry, unfamiliar to most of his physicist colleagues: 

{Projective geometry] was most useful for research, but I did not mention it in my published work [. . .} because I felt that most physicists were not familiar with it. When I had obtained a particular result, I translated it into an analytic form and put down the argument in terms of equations.

The Quiet American

I drew in the smoke and she began to prepare my second pipe. I asked her again, “Was your sister really not at home, Phuong?” 

“I told you-she was out.” It was absurd to subject her to this passion for truth, an Occidental passion, like the passion for alcohol. Because of the whisky I had drunk with Pyle, the effect of the opium was lessened. I said, “I lied to you, Phuong. I have been ordered home."

“A rash man,” he said and dismissed the subject. He began his set speech, forgetting that i had heard it two years before _-it reminded me of my own gramophone records for newcomers. Caodaism was a religious synthesis... the best of all religions . . . missionaries had been despatched to Los Angeles ..., the secrets of the Great Pyramid... He wore a long white soutane and he chain-smoked. ‘There was something cunning and corrupt about him: the word “love” occurred often. I was certain he knew that all of us were there to laugh at his movement; our air of respect was as corrupt as his phoney hierarchy, but we were less cunning. Our hypocrisy gained us nothing, not even a reliable ally, while theirs had procured arms, supplies, even cash down. 

“Thank you, your Eminence.” I got up to go. He came with me to the door, scattering cigarette-ash. 

“God’s blessing on your work,” he said unctuously. “Remember God loves the truth.” 

“Which truth?” I asked. 

“In the Caodaist faith all truths are reconciled and truth is love.” 

He had a large ring on his finger, and when he held out his hand I really think he expected me to kiss it, but I am not a diplomat. 

Under the bleak vertical sunlight I saw Pyle; he was trying in vain to make his Buick start. Somehow, during the last two weeks, at the bar of the Continental, in the only good bookshop in the rue Catinat, I had continually run into Pyle. The friendship which he had imposed from the beginning he now emphasized more than ever. His sad eyes would inquire with fervour after Phuong, while his lips expressed with even more fervour the strength of his affection and of his admiration...God save the mark-for me. 

A Caodaist commandant stood beside the car talking rapidly. He stopped when I came up. I recognized him-he had been one of Thé’s assistants before Thé took to the hills. 

“Hullo, commandant,” I said, “how’s the General?” 

“Which general?” he asked with a shy grin. 

“Surely in the Caodaist faith,” I said, “all generals are reconciled.” 

And

Saint Victor Hugo in the uniform of the French Academy with the halo round his tricorn hat pointed at some noble sentiment Sun Yat Sen was inscribing on a tablet, and then I was in the nave. ‘There was nowhere to sit except in the Papal chair, round which a plaster cobra coiled, the marble floor glittered like water and there was no glass in the windows. We make a cage for air with holes, I thought, and man makes a cage for his religion in much the same way-with doubts left open to the weather and creeds opening on innumerable interpretations. My wife had found her cage with holes and sometimes I envied her. There is a conflict between sun and air. I lived too much in the sun. I walked the long empty nave-this was not the Indo-China I loved. The dragons with lion-like heads climbed the pulpit, on the roof Christ exposed his bleeding heart. Buddha sat, as Buddha always sits, with his lap empty. Confucius’s beard hung meagrely down like a waterfall in the dry season. This was play-acting: the great globe above the altar was ambition: the basket with the movable lid in which the Pope worked his prophecies was trickery. If this Cathedral had existed for five centuries instead of two decades, would it have gathered a kind of convincingness with the scratches of feet and the erosion of weather? Would somebody who was convincible like my wife find here a faith she couldn’t find in human beings? And if I had really wanted faith would I have found it in her Norman church? But I had never desired faith. The job of a reporter's to expose and record. I had never in my career discovered the inexplicable. The Pope worked his prophecies with a pencil in a movable lid and the people believed. In any vision somewhere you could find the planchette. I had no visions or miracles in my repertoire of memory. 

And

“Where did you meet her?” 

“She was dancing at the Grand Monde.” 

“Dancing,” he exclaimed, as though the idea were painful. 

“It’s a perfectly respectable profession,” I said. “Don’t worry.” 

“You have such an awful lot of experience, Thomas.” 

“T have an awful lot of years. When you reach my age .. .” 

“I’ve never had a girl,” he said, “not properly. Not what you'd call a real experience.” 

“A lot of energy with your people seems to go into whistling.” 

“T’ve never told anybody else.” 

“You’re young. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” 

“Have you had a lot of women, Fowler?” 

“I don’t know what a lot means. Not more than four women have had any importance to me-or me to them. The other forty-odd-one wonders why one does it. A notion of hygiene, of one’s social obligations, both mistaken.” 

“You think they are mistaken?” 

“I wish I could have those nights back. I’m still in love, Pyle, and I’m a wasting asset. Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we lok around and see who is wanted too.” 

And

“I couldn’t have faced Phuong,” he said, and the name lay there like a banker’s bid. I took it up. 

“So it was for her,” I said. What made my jealousy more absurd and humiliating was that it had to be expressed in the lowest of whispers-it had no tone, and jealousy likes histrionics. “You think these heroics will get her. How wrong you are. If I were dead you could have had her.” 

“I didn’t mean that,” Pyle said. “When you are in love you want to play the game, that’s all.” That’s true, I thought, but not as he innocently means it. To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsifed and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour-the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was no longer in love but I remembered. 

And

“That there's no such thing as gratitude in Politics,” 

“At least they won't hate us like they hate the French ; “Are vou sure? Sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies and sometimes we feel hate for our friends.” 

“You talk like a European, Thomas. These people aren't complicated.” 

“Is that what you’ve learned in a few months? You'll be calling them childlike next.” 

“Well-in a way.” 

“Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.” But what good was it to talk to him? There was an unreality in both our arguments. I was becoming a leader-wnter before my time. I got up and went to the bookshelf. 

FN

Does it not seem as though some faith were leading him on, some consolation offering him compensation? As though he perhaps desires this prolonged obscurity, desires to be incomprehensible, concealed, enigmatic, because he knows what he will thereby also acquire: his own morning, his own redemption, his own daybreak? ... He will tell you himself of his own accord, this seeming Trophonius [son of Apollo, who was swallowed up by the earth and lived on, underground, as an oracular god], and suberranean, as soon as he has ‘become a man’ again. Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole.”? 

A passage from the preface to Daybreak, and a portrait of himself during the Wanderjahre, the wilderness years during which the purblind ex-philologist mole of yore wandered the mountains and shores of Europe transforming himself into the blind seer of vast, prophetic horizons. 

The burrowing mole was at home below the tree line where the canopy softened the light to a green gloom. More importantly, it hid him from the clouds, which were full of electricity and persisted in a merciless persecution of him. Ever since Benjamin Franklin had apparently drawn down the electric energy from the clouds in his kite experiment of 1752, it was not altogether outrageous for the individual to imagine himself an electricity conductor, though today the notion of absorbing electricity from the atmosphere is considered a delusional symptom of mental illness, often associated with schizophrenia. 

Nietzsche had always been peculiarly susceptible to electric storms. From his school days at Pforta onwards, his contemporaries had noticed that his most inspired and ecstatic outflows of creativity and musical improvisation were produced during thunderstorms. Dionysus’s father, Zeus, had appeared as a thunderbolt, and with an increasing feeling of kinship to Dionysus, Nietzsche believed that he was probably more susceptible to the power of the electricity in the clouds than any other man on earth. He wondered about going to Paris, to display himself as a specimen at the exhibition of electricity that was taking place there, and he decided that electricity was even more deleterious to his health than Wagner's music. “I am one of those machines which can explode,” he wrote; “,.. the electrical pattern in the cloud cover and the effects of the wind: I am convinced that 80% of my suffering results from these influences.”* The attacks now often involved three days of raging pain and vomiting, accompanied by the feeling of being half paralyzed, sensations of seasickness and real difficulty speaking. And yet also, high in the thin mountain air, he found himself at umes overwhelmed by sudden gushes of extreme happiness of an exquisite intensity that he had never before experienced. He felt himself so thinned, so deliciously etiolated, that he had the sensation of moving through the landscape like a zigzag doodle drawn on paper by a superior power wanting to try out a new pen. He began to rate the mountains by the capacity of their forests to hide him from the all-seeing sky. 

Daybreak went further along the road of materialism. It was written during one of his periods of interest in contemporary scientific speculation, together with his delighted discovery of the seventeenthcentury Jewish philosopher Spinoza. “My solitude is now a solitude for two! I am really amazed, really delighted! I have a precursor!” He wrote a poem to Spinoza, in whom he saw mirrored his own “denial of free will, purposes, evil, the moral world order and the non-egotistical. ... Of course the differences are enormous, but they are differences more of period, culture, field of knowledge.”3 He read Robert Mayer’s Mechanics of Heat, Boscovich’s theory of non-material atoms, and Force and Matter (1855) by the materialist medical doctor Ludwig Biichner, whose bestselling book spread the gospel that “the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings.” F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism (1866) asserted that man was only a special case of universal physiology, and thought was only a special chain in the physical processes of life. When Nietzsche was looking back on this year and writing about it in Ecce Homo, the autobiography he wrote in 1888 when he was zigzagging between sanity and insanity, he described himself in thrall to a burning and exclusive fascination with physiology, medicine and natural science. This is what he set out to explore in Daybreak: the idea that man is merely a bodily organism whose spiritual, moral and religious beliefs and values can be explained by the physiological and medical. General interest at that time was growing in the idea that man might control the future by controlling his own evolutionary development through diet. It is an attitude famously summed up by the philosopher and anthropologist Feuerbach, who had died only a few years earlier: “Tf you want to improve the people, give them better food instead of declamations against sin. Man is what he eats.”¢ And yet, in direct contradiction to this, Daybreak also introduces speculation on the significance of the exaltation and ecstasy of madness on the history of ethics and morality. Nietzsche proposes that beneath the fearful pressure of millennia of custom, the only way to break out was “by a dreadful attendant: almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea, which broke the spell of a venerated usage and superstition. Do you understand why it had to be madness which did this?” Madness was total freedom, It was the speaking trumpet of the divinity. If madness was not conferred, it must be assumed. 

“All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad ... How can one make oneself mad when one is not mad and does not dare to appear so? ... Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may only at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: so that I may come to believe in myself! I am consumed by doubt, I have killed the law, the law anguishes me as a corpse does a living man: if Iam not more than the law I am the vilest of all men.”5 

The book ends with a clarion call to dare all: 

“We aeronauts of the spirit ... whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down. Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India-but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers. Orr-” 

Few authors are brave enough to end a book on “Or?-” 

Blitzed

In late September 1944, in the pale light of the bunker, the ear doctor, Giesing, noted an unusual coloration in Hitler’s face and suspected jaundice. The same day, on the dinner table there was a plate holding “apple compote with glucose and green grapes”! and a box of “Dr. Koester’s anti-gas pills,’ a rather obscure product. Giesing was perplexed when he discovered that its pharmacological components included atropine, derived from belladonna or other nightshade plants, and strychnine, a highly toxic alkaloid of nux vomica, which paralyzes the neurons of the spinal column and 1s also used as rat poison. Giesing indeed smelled a rat. The side-effects of these anti-gas pills at too high a dose seemed to correspond to Hitler’s symptoms. Atropine initially has a stimulating effect on the central nervous system, then a paralyzing one, and a state of cheerfulness arises, with a lively flow of ideas, loquacity, and visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delirium, which can mutate into violence and raving. Strychnine in turn is held responsible for increased light-sensitivity and even fear of light, as well as for states of flaccidity.'°© For Giesing the case seemed clear: “Hitler constantly demonstrated a state of euphoria that could not be explained by anything, and I am certain his heightened mood when making decisions after major political or military defeats can be largely explained in this way.”!’ 

In the anti-gas pills Giesing thought he had discovered the causes of both Hitler’s megalomania and his physical decline. He decided to treat himself as a guinea pig: for a few days Giesing took the little round pills himself, promptly identified that he had the same symptoms, and decided to go on the offensive. His intention was to disempower Morell 

Track Marks 

While the Red Army was taking more and more towns in East Prussia in November 1944, Hitler’s veins were so wrecked that even the expert shot-giver Morell could hardly penetrate them. The skin of the veins, perforated too many times, was inflamed, scarred, and a peculiar shade of brown. Morell had to take a break: “I canceled injections today, to give the previous puncture holes a chance to heal. Left inside elbow good, right still has red dots (but not pustules), where injections were given. F. says this wasn’t the case before.”'” 

It actually made a crunching noise every time Morell gave him a shot. Each jab created a new wound that joined the previous one, and it produced an elongated, growing crust, what junkies call “track marks,” when one jab is followed by the next to form an unlovely line. Even Hitler was gradually becoming nervous and worrying about what the huge number of injections was doing to him: “When I gave him the intravenous injection the Fiihrer thought I wasn’t rubbing the area long enough with alcohol so that he often developed small red pustules at the needle holes.” But Morell had another explanation for the condition: “Blood low in oxygen, from months sitting in the bunker with no daylight or fresh air, and venous, as becomes apparent when applying a tourniquet, and consequently not sufficiently coagulable, and the needle hole staying red.” Hitler remained suspicious: “Fihrer still attributes this to bacteria, and thinks bacteria might be entering his body with the injections.” 

Out of necessity, Morell wanted to stop the orgy of shots for a while. But in the end Hitler swept all qualms aside and his auto-aggressive qualities came to the fore. In spite of the unpleasantness that the countless injections caused him, he didn’t stop demanding them, and when receiving his doctor the first thing he said was that he didn’t need treat

ment but that he did need an injection: 

vy cont UR TUO UP TEEEEEEIETIC TL Pal Pl Wun. 

But what effect was this uncontrolled consumption of multiple drugs having on Hitler's intellect, on his mind? Was the dictator still com. pos mentis? The philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had experimented mainly with hashish but also with Eukodal a decade previously (orally, which considerably diminishes its addictive potential), described the psychological effect of being permanently intoxicated: 

It is perhaps no self-deception if I say that in this state you develop an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, and that the thought of the outside becomes almost a torture. It is ... a dense spider’s web in which the events of the 

world are scattered around, suspended there like the bodies of dead insects sucked dry. You have no wish to Icave this cave. Here, furthermore, the rudiments of an unfriendly attitude towards everyone present begin to take shape, as well as the fear that they might disturb you, drag you out into the open.'”! 

The chemist and author Hermann R6mpp wrote that long-term abuse of opiates causes “damage to the character and the will. ... Intellectual creativity is impaired, although there is no actual loss of earlier intellectual possession. Even the most upstanding characters will not 

baulk at swindling and deceit.” Paranoia and a morbid mistrust of one’s immediate surroundings also arise.'” 

In fact, Hitler’s bunker mentality had discovered in Eukodal the ideal end-time drug for the hapless final battle. His numbness, his rigid view of the world, his tendency toward the fantastical and the unscrupulous transgression of all boundaries all of this was ominously supported by the opioid that he used so frequently in the last quarter of 1944. During this time, when the Allies were entering the Reich from both East and West, the powerful narcotic erased any doubts about victory, any empathy for civilian victims, and made Hitler even more unfeeling about both himself and the outside world. 

On this tranquillizing painkiller the Fuhrer was fully in command of himself: this was the true Hitler, and that was how he had always been. The overestimation of his own significance and misjudgment of his opponents were both captured in his blueprint, Mein Kampf published in 1925. His opioid addiction only cemented an already existing rigidification, a tendency to delegate violence, and contributed to the fact that in the last phase of the war and in the genocide of the Jews he never once thought of relenting. 

So the goals and motives, the ideological fantasy world, were not the result of drugs but established much earlier. Hitler did not murder because he was living in a haze quite the contrary: he remained sane until the end. His drug use did not impinge on his freedom to make 

decisions. Hitler was always the master of his senses, and he knew ex. actly what he was doing. He acted always in an alert and cold-blooded way. Within his system, based from the beginning on intoxication anda flight from reality, he acted systematically and with terrible consistency to the end. He was anything but insane. A classic case of actio libera in causa: he could go on taking as many drugs as he liked to keep himself 

in a state in which he could commit his crimes. It does not diminish his monstrous guilt. 

Earthly Powers

 VWAuwVE ve wesw Bsweweew | veep 

Somebody, probably Carlo himself, that expert in ecclesiastical history, set out the whole story. Pelagius, a British monk in Rome in the early fifth century, was deeply disturbed when he heard a bishop quote from Augustine’s Confessions: “Thou commandest continence; grant what thou commandest and command what thou wilt.” This seemed to Pelagius to be a denial of moral responsibility. At the same time a commentator on the epistles of Saint Paul usually named Ambrosiaster, seemed to affirm that the transmission of Adam's sin was effected biologically, human souls being derived, like human bodies, from the parents. “In Adam all sinned as in one lump.” Pelagius, upset by this, wrote his own Pauline commentary and asserted that there was no hereditary transmission of sin, since this would be a denial of free will. Man sinned by an elected imitation of Adam’s sin, not through an inherent fault of human nature. Jn all sin. said Pelagius, there had to be personal assent. The consequence of Adam’s sin was a mere bad example which his successors voluntarily embraced. infants had to be baptized into the faith, but the baptism was not a device of absolution from inherited sin. All this caused a hell of a row. Jerome called Pelagius a fat dog weighed down with Scotch porridge, his brains thick and quddied, a stupid rather than sinful denier of elementary truths-the necessity of infant baptism as an expunger of hereditary sin, the saving power of God’s erace. the comparative impotence of man as a free agent thinking himself capable, without that grace, of voluntarily embracing the good. Augustine, expectedly, went wild. 

Pope Innocent I said: Heresy. Augustine was happy. Then came Pope Josimus (417-18). Zosimus was rather pleased with Pelagius’s emphasis, in a new book, on free will, as well as his lofty view of morality and papal authority. He told Augustine and the rest of the Africans that Pelagius must be adjudged orthodox. Augustine, expectedly, went wild. But Pelagius had, in Sicily (how these people got around), written a socialistic pamphlet denouncing the irresponsibility of the rich toward the poor and the sinfulness of the maintenance of governmental power by means of torture and wanton execution. Augustine drew the attention of the Emperor at Ravenna to this preaching of social revolution. On April 30, 418, an imperial edict banished Pelagius and _ his followers from Rome as a menace to peace. Zosimus had to bow to the ultimate secular authority. He formally condemned Pelagius as a heresiarch, and the Church ever since had endorsed that condemnation. But, Carlo (it had to be Carlo) seemed to say, the condemnation, being made under duress, had no true validity, and there were grounds for accepting (he was discreet and cautious here) the Pelagian thesis as more consonant with the True Reformed premise of the goodness and dignity of man than the Augustinian doctrine of his natural depravity. I had got to that word depravity when Carlo came out with a snore that seemed devised by his unconscious to wake him.

And 

“Ah,” as Mario, having forgotten first to remove the meat dishes, brought the cheese in, no Gorgonzola there but nearly everything else, a stinking anthology of Italian caseation, “that must remain a secret.” And then, carving himself a sunk of lactic decay, he said solemnly, “Death.” 

“It does smell like death, yes. The corpse of milk, Jim Joyce used to call it

“Tom,” I said, “was a saint.” Val Wrigley had said that, but he’d been right. 

“What do you think you mean by a saint?” 

“Tom was a man who did no harm to anyone, who brought a good deal of harmless pleasure into people’s lives, who was chaste and charitable, who suffered pain uncomplainingly, who died saying God’s will be done.” 

“He said that?” 

“No, he made jokes. He made the doctors laugh and the nurses cry at his courage. He insisted on dying undoped. He wanted to meet God, he said, as he used to meet his audiences-smiling but bemerding himself with fear. He was too good, perhaps. His wife left him because of that. Women can’t stand goodness. Some people said it was she who was the saint. Always going to mass and confession and saying her bloody rosary. Talking about the delights of chastity. And then she went off with a low comedian.” Carlo frowned at the technicality. “Tom was what is known as a light comedian. Without a red nose. Not dirty. Not like George Robey who peels a banana and says one skin two skin three skin five skin.” Carlo’s blank face reminded me of the temperamental and cultural gap between us. He would not be a humorous pontiff. 

“A saint,” he said, “is something different from what you seem to think. I’ve known cats and dogs that were saints by your definition. A saint,” he said, “has to modify the world in the direction of being more aware of the presence of God In it.” 

“Feeding an illusion,” I said with some bitterness. “God’s removed himself from the world. As we’ll see. 

And

He, who spent some time in Malaya, will confirm the existence in the Malay language, as also in the Chinese, of a feature called the numerical coefficient. The Malay word for one is satu, the Malay word for a house is rumah, but you don’t translate one house as satu rumah. |t has to be sa-buah rumah, where the buah literally means a fruit but is used here to signify something bulky. Biji literally means a seed, but one egg is translated as sa-biji telor, biji being the right numerical coefficient for a small smooth object. According to Benjamin Lee Whorf, the Navaho Indians have an even subtler system of classification. The Navaho world of inanimate objects is split into long things and round things, and these affect the verb stems of the language. You need one verb stem for a round thing and another for a long. 

Jung

 

The count attracted an eclectic variety of people to his School of Wisdom, many of them wildly eccentric and fascinating to Jung, especially some of the titled members of the audience who flitted on the fringes of the groups of experts summoned to enlighten them. Jung prided himself on “getting along very well with these people [the aristocrats]. I knew how to deal with them up to the point where the brashness began, which they all possessed.” Through the Keyserlings, Jung and Emma met the Grossherzog (grand duke) of Hesse-Darmstadt, who invited them to be his houseguests while Jung gave lectures to his court. The grand duke was a simple man who spent his time hiding shyly behind the large embroidery frame his servants carried everywhere he went. He especially liked Emma because she sat quietly next to him, smiling her approval as he pulled his stitches through the frame. The grand duke had an “occultist” on his staff who reminded Jung of an eighteenth-century courtier: “a dark figure who just fit into the harmlessness of this royal court. Now he had culture this dark count!” 

Both the grand duke’s and Keyserling’s courts were “prickly with intellect and also a bit modish.” There Jung met the ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who often pranced around in his favorite trousers, made from a lion’s skin complete with tail, which he “occasionally wagged” for emphasis. Jung had many conversations with the egotistical Frobenius and cited his writings fairly often from that time on, but Jung was wary of the friendship.” He appreciated Frobenius’s “unbelievable vitality, such a smart man, but his ideas went overboard.” Mainly, he disapproved of the ethnologist’s “lack of culture” and “lack of proper upbringing,” blaming them for his “lack of understanding of other people’s ideas.” 

Jung held a snobbish idea of aristocracy, perhaps inherent in one born in Basel, that most snobbish city in the Swiss democracy. For the most part, he approved of aristocratic license and sided with the concept of noblesse oblige, especially among those who aped what he thought to be (without having had real firsthand observation) the behavior of the English aristocracy. 

And

certain fundamental principles with which Freud’s name is associated,” YelJowlees asked Jung to explain how his views differed from Freud’s.

In his long and reasoned reply, Jung judiciously avoided all direct criticism of Freud, even as he deflated Freud’s authority. He did not allow Freud to be seen as his only rival, his polar opposite, or even his only equal; nor did he allow Freud’s theory to stand inviolate and alone as the only opposition to his. Instead, he introduced Adler’s psychology, thus placing both himself and Freud as cwo theoreticians merely numbered among others. Jung said his main contribution to psychology was his own “subjective confession,” stemming from something “personal” and allowing him to express “psychological facts” in his own way.*! He said Freud and Adler should also confess that their ideas originated within their own “subjective point of view” as well, because only when “we admit our personal prejudice” are we “really contributing towards an objective psychology.” His purpose before this British audience was to “give you some interesting ideas and let you see how I tackle things.”*? He considered himself a “craftsman,” with psychotherapy merely the craft he practiced in his own individual way, “a very humble way with nothing particular to show.” He did not “believe for a moment” that his view was “absolutely right,” because “nobody is absolutely right in psychological matters.”

For him, psychology was “not a religious creed but a point of view.”?* And the “problem” within his individual point of view was having to “wrestle with the big monster of the historical past, the great snake of the centuries, the burden of the human mind, the problem of Christianity.” He admitted his task would be much simpler if he “knew nothing”; but because of his ancestry, his education, and his wide-ranging interests, he knew “too much,” which made his responsibility toward his patients that much greater. Although he expressed the following sentiment in self-defense, it was an accurate description of his mood of the moment: “If the whole world disagrees with me, it is perfectly indifferent to me. I have a perfectly good place in Switzerland, I enjoy myself, and if nobody enjoys my books, I enjoy them. I know nothing better than being in my library, and if I make discoveries in my books, that is wonderful.” 

In his fifth and last lecture, the audience asked Jung to depart from his theory of dream analysis and explain instead how to put the transference to “practical use” within the process.*° Jung’s explanation led to a discussion of the role religion served within various psychotherapeutic systems, particularly his own. He told the audience that throughout thirty-plus years of analytic practice, he had made an informal statistical count of his patients’ religious affiliations: most were either Jewish or Protestant; practicing Catholics numbered “about six.”?” It proved to him that the Catholic Church’s “rigorous system of confession” was indeed a “therapeutic institution,” as were groups such as the Oxford Moral Rearmament Movement,:® to which a number of his patients and followers had Rravitated. 

Jung concluded that archetypal images required “a suitable form for their projection,” and that “the collective unconscious is really a serious factor in the human psyche.”?” He turned instinctively to Germany for his examples: 

In the collective unconscious of the individual, history prepares itself, and when the archetypes are activated in a number of individuals and come to the surface, we are in the midst of history, as we are at present. The archetypal image which the moment requires gets into life and everybody is seized by it. 

“I saw it coming,” Jung reminded his audience. “I said in 1918 that the ‘blonde beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany.” Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy these were not “ideas” but rather archetypes: “Give an archetype to the people and the whole crowd moves like one man, there is no resisting it.” 

None of the persons who asked questions made any reference to Jung’s view of contemporary politics, which was about to embroil him in a controversy that would taint him as a Nazi sympathizer or brand him as an active collaborator. His general political obtuseness, coupled with some of his writings, statements, and participation in suspect conferences, would create a dense cloud that hovers over his reputation long years after his life ended. All this was yet to come, but the rumbles were already there by the time of the Tavistock lectures. Still, with the innate politeness of the British, Jung’s audience focused inctead on the nuts and bolts of analytic practice.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States and a Harvard graduate, was the featured speaker, and Jung had ample time to observe him. The headline of his interview in the New York Times read “‘Roosevelt Great,’ Is Jung’s Analysis,” but his true impressions were more complicated than what he told the reporter: before he came to the United States, he thought of Roosevelt as “an opportunist, perhaps even an erratic mind”; once he heard him speak at Harvard, he thought him a “strong man, a man who is really great.” “Perhaps,” he added suggestively, “that’s why many people do not like him.” Jung was certainly among them, although he did not say so in print. He thought Roosevelt “had the dictator stuff in him,” and he disliked his wife even more, calling Eleanor “the nightmare on the way to being dreamt.” Jung thought America had been better off under Herbert Hoover, for he was “easy to see through.” 

And

.. What I experienced there meant the conclusion of the Christian problem for me.” His subsequent thoughts about religion are especially revealing because he filtered his experiences through the prism of Christianity, concentratjng his thoughts around questions of good and evil. Train travel between internal destinations and sight-seeing in the cities exposed him to the sheer crush of humanity, the grinding poverty of the people, and the utter desperation of their circumstances. Jung thought all the religious images and monuments were imbued with an aura of sensuality that he found troubling, particularly the obscene sculptures that adorned the Temple of Konarak. They gave him ample opportunity to think about “the problem of evil, in how far it must be accepted since it is also a part of God’s will.” 

He posed his thesis in two different ways, that “Indian Spirituality [contains] just as much of evil as of goodness, or to say it differently: lacks as much of evil as it lacks of goodness.” What Western civilization called “the moral problem” did not play a role in Eastern societies because people felt themselves “apart” from any of the emotions Westerners equated with good and evil. Jung believed Easterners achieved the equilibrium of fatal acceptance through yoga, “the status of the Nirdvandva where they free themselves from these opposites.” For Eastern cultures, “the goal is not moral perfection but... liberation from objects.” 

Reservations surfaced at this point in his thinking: how could a person be liberated from something he neither committed nor experienced? For him, “true liberation” was possible only if he acted “honestly” in some instances and knew when or even whether to act at all in others. Everything he encountered in India managed to contradict such reasoning. He thought it was because he had never before been “under the direct influence of a foreign culture.” As if anticipating contradiction, he discounted his entire African experience: “You could say I passed through it as a tourist.” The only Arab he spoke to in Africa was his interpreter, so he learned nothing of Muslim cultures, and when he spoke to the natives in Swahili, it was in “simple, primitive” language. He had not “encounter[ed] great minds or important personalities”; nor had he discussed with the natives any significant issues pertaining to the culture and society of Eastern Africa. Even in the civilized cities of Egypt, he remained “just as much of a foreigner.” 

India was different. For the first time ever he felt himself “under the direct influence of a foreign culture,” and the only way to assess it was to compare it with his own. Everyone he spoke to in India was highly educated, many in some of the greatest universities of the West. Those he met ranged from “the guru of the Maharaja of Mysore” to the authors of sophisticated treatises on Kundalini yoga and the “cult of Kali Durga at the Kalighat in Calcutta.”!!” 

Jung found it “tremendously interesting to talk to people for whom the moral problem is not of foremost importance.” It was not “single people or single places” who created confusion in his mind about how he should regard In

428 + JUNG 

dia in general; nor could he “put [his] finger on” what puzzled him specifically. Everything, he believed, turned on the question of good and evil. Fowler McCormick equated it with “the nature of evil as evidenced by the Goddess Kali, the great destroyer, associated with the color red.”!!® McCormick recalled that “everywhere there was evidence of animal sacrifice, everything filthy, dried blood, betel nut. In Calcutta, Jung began to have dreams associated with red.” 

Jung’s conversations with learned men did not suffice to “make the integration of evil acceptable,” but they forced him for the first time to accept such concepts as “relative, so to speak. . .. Once they are made conscious, the good is no longer the good and the evil is no longer the evil, and the devil no longer has a tail.” 

And

Ill and too weak to write on the voyage home, he spent much of his time in a deck chair reliving his Grail dreams and probing their meaning. He had always kept his research apart from anything connected to the Grail legend because he regarded it as l4mma’s special domain. They had discussed it from every conceivable point of view, and he knew “all the details” of the various legends surrounding it, so “the big question” for one already familiar with “the symbols of Christianity” was, what is the special significance of the Grail? Was it, he asked, simply “a variation of Communion ... an infinitely precious gift one receives for having been a good knight?” If so, how then to reconcile those who belonged to “the [Arthurian] circle of the Grail [who] committed murder and slaughter.” What remained and was therefore paramount in Jung’s self-analysis was “the visibility of the Grail or the Grail’s castle.” Ultimately, “it is the secret of individuation, and that is a mystery and human comprehension simply ends there.” 

Jung described individuation as “a mystery one will never understand.” To find it was “a lonely search” perhaps akin to the “process of dying,” for one had to give oneself “over to the impersonal” in order to seek it. “Only few could bear such a search,” he thought, attributing these curious, unfocused thoughts and images to “the distance from Europe, the completely different surroundings” in which he found himself in India. He thought he may have had such dreams there because his overall question was how and why the evil he encountered in India was “not a moral dimension,” but rather “supported by an honest profession as a divine power.”!” 

Another comparison/contrast with Christianity happened on the hill of Sanchi: “Buddhism dawned on me for the first time, but I could not yet put it into words.” He was “deeply moved to the point of complete bewilderment,” and for the first time understood what the life of Buddha stood for, “namely the realization of the self... that the self stands above all gods and really represents the mystery of the world and the human existence.” For Jung, the Buddha was completely different from Christ, who was also a representation of the self: “The Buddha overcomes the world but out of insight. Christ does not overcome out of insight but as an event, for he is the victim.” Jung had already read extensively 

And

Writing generally but with both essays in mind, Jung told Baynes that 1940 was the “fateful year” for which he had been waiting throughout the last twenty-five. Although he had believed since 1918 that “a terrible fire would spread over Europe beginning in the North East,” he did not foresee that it would lead to “such a disaster” and had “no vision beyond 1940 concerning the fate of Europe.” Unaware that his terminology would result in two catchphrases that would define the end of the twentieth century, Jung told Baynes a new era was dawning, “the meridian of the first star in /the age of] Aquarius . . . the premonitory earthquake of the New Age” (author’s emphasis). 

Nietzsche

 The first Untimely Meditation to be written was “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer.” David Strauss was a theologian and Kantian philosopher who forty years previously had had a tremendous success with his two-volume book The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu), a purportedly “scientific” investigation into Jesus Christ as an historical character. The book was a scandal and a sensation. It was translated into English by George Eliot (whom Nietzsche enjoyed presenting as typical of the British race: sexually peculiar and intellectually slack). The Earl of Shaftesbury condemned it as the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of Hell. When Nietzsche had read Strauss’s book during his school days at Pforta he had written to his sister saying that if he was asked to believe in Jesus as an historical character it was of no interest to him at all, but as a moral teacher, that was a different matter worthy of the deepest investigation. 

Strauss was now nearing seventy. He had recently published a follow-up book, The Old and the New Faith (Der alte und der neue Glaube), which again achieved great popularity. The book fitted the mood of the time by pioneering with almost manic cheerfulness the idea that it was possible to exist in the modern world as a new breed of rationalist Christian, a fundamental contradiction if ever there was one-impossible within the definitions either of rationality or of faith. As Nietzsche observed: if one breaks out of the fundamental idea, the belief in God, one breaks the whole thing to pieces. A revolution in belief requires a revolution in morality, a consequence that appeared to have eluded Strauss in what Nietzsche, with evident enjoyment, crushingly referred to as his “portable oracle for the German philistine.”

And

RETURNING TO BasEL, Nietzsche wrote the second Untimely Meditation, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” which would be published the following year, 1874. Addressing the relation of history and historiography (the writing of history) to life and culture, it pointed out that the German obsession with the past was disabling action in the present. 

The essay distinguished between three uses of history: the antiquarian which seeks to preserve the past, the monumental which seeks to emulate it, and the critical which seeks to liberate the present. All three must be held in a delicate balance to achieve the suprahistorical: an orientation toward eternally valid examples of the past, together with a deliberate forgetting of the past in the interests of the present. 

Nietzsche had been pursuing a concentrated study of the latest books on scientific subjects such as the nature of comets, the history and development of chemistry and physics, the general theory of movement and energy, and the construction of space.? They had led him to return to the hobbyhorse he had been riding through the previous Untimely Meditation on David Strauss: nagging at the great question of science and religion, and excoriating his contemporary theologians for undermining the very faith they professed, by seeking to reconcile the two. It was one of the great questions of the age, and one he would never relinquish. He coined a new word to describe the effect of science: Begriffsbeben (“concept-quake”). “Life itself caves in and grows weak and fearful when the concept-quake caused by science robs man of the foundation of all his rest and security, his belief in the enduring and the eternal. Is life to dominate knowledge and science, or is knowledge to dominate life?”*° To be sure, mankind climbed, or thought he climbed, up to heaven on the sunbeams of scientific truth, but science-heaven was as much a necessary lie as its religious counterpart. Eternal truth belonged no more to science than to religion. Each new scientific discovery had a habit of exposing previous eternal scientific truths as fictions. Truth was pulled into a new shape as the filaments of the spider’s web became stretched and distorted, or even pulled apart altogether. 

The last few pages conclude with advice for the young. To cure them of the malady of history he unsurprisingly recommends that the way to sort out the unruliness of existence is to look to the Greeks, who gradually learned to organize the chaos by following the advice of the Delphic oracle: become what you are. 

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

 " The enjoyment of a spectacle is something you have never known," he said.

 Blount was not a freak although when you first saw him he gave you that impression. It was like something was deformed about him but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be. Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard college or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.

 The place was still not crowded- it was the hour when men who have been up all night meet those who are freshly wakened and ready to start a new day. The sleepy waitress was serving both beer and coffee. There was no noise or conversation, for each person seem to be alone. The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.

Paul Dirac

 From: The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo

The theories give ‘a radically new way of looking at Nature’. The first of Einstein’s theories is usually dubbed the ‘special theory‘ because it deals only with observers who move in straight lines at constant speeds with respect to one another; for example, passengers on two trains moving smoothly on parallel tracks. Einstein based his theory on just two simple assumptions; first, that when each of the observers measures the speed of light in a vacuum, they will always find the same value, regardless of their speed; and, second, that measurements made by the observers will lead them to agree on all the laws of physics. Einstein’s great insight was to see that if these assumptions were followed to their logical conclusion, a new understanding of space, time, energy and matter emerged. 

A casualty of Einstein’s theory was the widely accepted belief that the universe is pervaded by an ether, which Broad argued had become superfluous: there was supposed to be a peculiar kind of matter, called Ether, that filled all Space. On these theories the Ether was supposed to produce all kinds of effects on ordinary matter, and it became a sort of family pet with certain physicists. As physics has advanced, less and less has been found for the Ether to do.

Contrary to the theory, the existence of such a substance would imply that there is a uniquely privileged frame of reference, so relativity implies that the ether is an unnecessary assumption and may well not exist, unless experiments say otherwise. Einstein also noted that measurements of space and time are not, as almost everyone else thought, independent but are inextricably linked, leading to the idea of a unified space-time, a concept introduced by his former teacher Hermann Minkowski, a German mathematician. Finally, Einstein Showed that an inevitable consequence of this new way of thinking was his equation E = mc2, implying that the mass of a small coin is equivalent to the vast energy needed to run a city for days or indeed to raze it. An apocalyptic vision of this power had already been presented by H. G. Wells, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, in his novel The World Set Free. 

For most purposes, the predictions of Einstein’s special theory were extremely similar to the corresponding ones made by Newton’s theory. The two sets of predictions, however, were noticeably different at speeds approaching the speed of light in a vacuum: Einstein claimed that, under these conditions, his theory was more accurate, though it would be several decades before the superiority was convincingly demonstrated by experimenters. In the meantime, Einstein’s reasoning made it possible to amend the description of anything given by Newton’s theory and produce a ‘relativistic’ version = one that agreed with the principles of the Special theory of relativity. Two years later, Dirac took up a new hobby, aiming to produce relativistic versions of Newtonian theories = an activity he pursued like an engineer upgrading tried-and-tested designs to ones that perform to a higher specification: ‘There was a sort of general problem one could take, Whenever one saw a bit of physics expressed in a non-relativistic form, to transcribe it to make it fit in with special relativity. It was rather like a game, which I indulged in at every opportunity.’

Einstein’s second theory of relativity applied to all observers, including ones who are accelerating; for example, observers who fall freely under the action of gravity. In this ‘general theory of relativity’, Einstein proposed a geometric picture of gravity, replacing Newton’s concept that an apple and every other mass is subject to a force of gravity by a radically new way of describing the situation. According to Einstein, every mass exists in a curved space-time = roughly analogous to a curved sheet of rubber and the motion of the mass at every point in space-time is determined by the curvature of space-time at that point. Because the theory is relativistic, information cannot be transmitted faster than light, and all energies contribute to mass (via E = mcz) and therefore to gravity. It turns out that, in the Solar System, where almost all matter has comparatively low density and travels much more slowly than light, the predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity are in extremely good agreement with Newton’s. But, in some situations, they can be distinguished, and one of the most straightforward ways of doing so involved measuring the bending of starlight by its gravitational attraction to the Sun during a solar eclipse: Einstein’s theory predicted that this deflection would be twice Newton’s value. This was the prediction that Eddington and his colleagues believed they had verified in their solar-eclipse experiments. 

.....

The mathematics degree did not present a sufficient challenge to keep Dirac occupied, so Hassé encouraged him to take as many of the undergraduate physics courses as his timetable allowed. Once again, Dirac chose to study fundamental subjects which were not covered in his syllabus. In one course, he studied the electron, the particle discovered twenty-five years before in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge by J. J. Thomson, a man equally adept at investigating nature theoretically and despite his ham-fistedness experimentally. Several of Thomson’s colleagues thought he was joking when he argued that the electron was smaller than the atom and was a constituent of every atom; to many scientists, the idea that there could exist matter smaller than the atom was inconceivable. Yet he was proved right, and, by the time Dirac first became acquainted with the electron, textbooks routinely ascribed electric current to the flow of Thomson’s electrons. 

Dirac also attended lectures in atomic physics given by Arthur Tyndall, a kindly and articulate man with a keen eye for scientific talent. Tyndall introduced Dirac to what was to prove one of the central insights of twentieth-century physics: the idea that the laws of ‘quantum theory’, which describe nature on the smallest scale, are not the same as the scientific laws that describe everyday matter. Tyndall illustrated this by describing how the energy of light arrives not in continuous waves but in separate, tiny amounts called quanta. At first, this idea was not taken seriously, as virtually all scientists were convinced that light behaves as waves. Their faith rested on the unarguable success of the theory of light published several decades before by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, the Cavendish Laboratory’s hrst professor. According to this theory, checked by many experiments, the energy of light and all other types of electromagnetic radiation is delivered not in lumps but continuously, like Water waves lashing against a harbour wall. 

Quantum theory had been discovered largely by accident by Max Planck, the Berlin-based doyen of German physics. He happened on the idea of quanta when he was analysing the results of some apparently obscure desktop experiments that investigated the radiation bouncing around inside the reflecting walls of ovens at steady temperatures (the experiments aimed to help German industry improve the efficiency of lighting devices). The quantum emerged stealthily from the darkness of those ovens through the ingenuity of Planck, who brilliantly guessed a formula for the variation in the intensity of the radiation with its wavelength, at every temperature setting of the oven. In the closing weeks of 1900, Planck found he could explain the formula for the ‘blackbody radiation spectrum‘ only if he introduced a concept that seemed completely contrary to Maxwell’s theory: the energy of light (and every other type of radiation) can be transferred to atoms only in quanta. 

The conservative Planck did not view this quantisation as a revolutionary discovery about radiation but as ‘a purely formal assump tion’ needed to make his calculations work. Einstein first recognised the true importance of the idea in 1905, when he took the concept of radiation quanta literally and demonstrated that the reasoning Planck had used to derive his black-body radiation spectrum formula was hopelessly flawed. The challenge was to do better than Planck by finding a logical derivation of the formula. 

When Planck discovered the quantum of energy, he also realised that its size is directly determined by a new fundamental constant, which he denoted h and others dubbed Planck’s constant. It figures in almost every equation of quantum theory, but nowhere in the previously successful theories of light and matter, retrospectively labelled ‘classical theories’. The minuscule size of the constant means that the energy of a typical quantum of light is tiny; for example, a single quantum of Visible light has only about a trillionth of the energy of the beat of a fly’s wing. 

In these lectures, Tyndall introduced Dirac to a new way of thinking about light, to new physics. But although Tyndall was admired for his clear presentations, quantum physics was then vague, provisional and messy, so it was impossible for him to present to Dirac the kind of tidy, well-reasoned course that he preferred, underpinned by clear principles and concise equations. This may explain why, if Dirac’s later recollections are correct, his first course in quantum theory made virtually no impact on him. His main interest remained relativity. 

And

In Cambridge, he had iound again that the concept of beauty was in vogue. The popularity of the concept was at least partly due to the enduring success of Principia ethica, published in 1903 by the philosopher George Moore, one of Charlie Broad’s colleagues in Trinity College. Writing With a refreshing absence of jargon, Moore made the incisive sugges. tion that ‘the beautiful should be defined as that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself’. Soon the talk of intellectuals, Principia ethical was admired by Virginia Woolf and her colleagues in the Bloomsbury Group and declared by Maynard Keynes to be ‘better than Plato’. Over a century before, Immanuel Kant had rendered the subject of beauty too complex and intimidating for most philosophers, but Moore made it accessible again in a way that commanded respect.54 Although Principia ethica did not consider the aesthetics of science, Moore’s common-sense approach to beauty probably influenced his scientific colleagues at Trinity, including Rutherford and the college’s most eminent pure mathematician, G. H. Hardy: both often talked about the beauties of their subject. Kapitza, too, looked on experimental physics not as ‘business’, as it was to several of his colleagues, but as a kind of ‘aesthetic enjoyment’.55 ' 

Although Dirac was not interested in philosophy, this fascination with the nature of beauty had powerful resonances for him. Like many theoreticians, he had been moved by the sheer sensual pleasure of working with Einstein’s theories of relativity and Maxwell’s theory. For him and his colleagues, the theories were just as beautiful as Mozart’s jupiter Symphony, a Rembrandt self-portrait or a Milton sonnet. The beauty of a fundamental theory in physics has several characteristics in common with a great work of art: fundamental simplicity, inevitability, power and grandeur. Like every great work of art, a beautiful theory in physics is always ambitious, never trifling. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, for example, seeks to describe all matter in the universe, throughout all time, past and present. From a few clearly stated principles, Einstein had built a mathematical structure whose explanatory power would be ruined if any of its principles were changed. Abandoning his usual modesty, he .described his theory as ‘incomparably beautiful’.

And

The paper, technical and complex, would not have been easy reading for Dirac, whose training at the Merchant Venturers’ had given him only a modest command of German. He could, however, see that this was not just another run-of-the-mill exercise in the mathematics of quantum theory. Bohr’s theory featured quantities such as the position of the electron and the time it takes to orbit its nucleus, but Heisenberg believed that this was a mistake, as no experimenter would ever be able to measure them. He made this point when he summarised the aim of his theory in the article’s introductory sentence: ‘The present paper seeks to establish a basis for theoretical quantum mechanics founded exclusively upon relationships between quantities which in principle are observable.’32 Heisenberg knew that it would be extremely difhcult to come up with a complete atomic theory built along the lines he envisaged in a single flourish. That would have been too big a task. Instead, he attempted something simpler, by trying to set out a theory of an electron moving not in three dimensions of ordinary space but in just one dimension, that is, in a straight line. Such an electron exists only in the mind of the theoretical physicist, but if this prototype theory worked, then maybe it would be possible to extend it and produce a more realistic version of the theory, one that could be applied to atoms. . Heisenberg considered how classical theory describes his electron, moving back and forth, and how quantum theory might account fOr it, bearing in mind that the two theories must merge smoothly, according to the correspondence principle. The new theory looked completely different from its classical counterpart. For example there is no mention in the quantum theory of single numbers to rep resent the electron’s position; instead, position is replaced by num\ bers in a square array, an example of what mathematicians call a matrix. Each number in this array is a property of a pair of the elec‘ tron’s energy levels and represents the likelihood that the electron will jump between that pair of energy levels. 80, each number can be deduced from observations of the light given out by the electron when it jumps between them. In this way, Heisenberg demonstrated how to build an entirely new atomic theory solely in terms of measurable quantities. 

This picture looks bizarre to anyone coming to it for the first time. With astonishing boldness, Heisenberg had abandoned the assumption that electrons can be visualised in orbit around a nucleus an assumption no one had previously thought to question and replaced it by a purely mathematical description of the electron. Nor was this description easy to accept: for example, if it were to apply to ordinary matter, an object’s precise location would not be measured with a ruler but would be given in terms of an array of numbers that give the chances of its making transitions to other energy states. This was no one’s idea of common sense. In making an imaginative leap like this, Heisenberg was behaving rather like a painter who had switched from Vermeer’s classically descriptive style to one based on the abstractions of Mondrian. But whereas painters can use abstraction simply as a technique for producing an attractive image that may or may not refer to real things, abstraction for physicists is a way of representing things en route to the most accurate possible account of material reality. 

Dirac initially found Heisenberg’s approach too complicated and artificial, so he put the paper aside, dismissing it as being ‘of no interest’.33 About ten days later, however, Dirac returned to it and was struck by a point that Heisenberg made in passing, almost halfway through the paper. Heisenberg wrote that some of the quantities in the theory have a peculiar property: if one quantity is multiplied by another, the result is sometimes different from the one obtained if the sequence of multiplication is reversed. This was exemplified by the quantities he used to represent position and momentum of a piece of matter (its mass multiplied by its velocity): position multiplied by momentum was, strangely, not the same as momentum multiplied by position. The sequence of multiplication appeared to be crucial. Heisenberg later remarked that he mentioned this point as an embarrassing aside, hoping that it would not put off the paper’s reviewers and encourage them to think the theory was too far-fetched to be worth publishing. Far from being disconcerted, Dirac saw that these strange quantities were the key to a new approach to quantum physics. Several years later, his mother told an interviewer that Dirac was so excited that he broke his rule of saying nothing about his work to his parents and did his best to explain non-commutation. He did not try again.

Unlike Heisenberg, who had never come across non-commuting quantities before, Dirac was well acquainted with them from his studies of quaternions, from the Grassmann algebra he had heard about at Baker’s tea parties, and from his extensive studies of projective geometry, which also features such relationships.” 50, Dirac was not only comfortable with the appearance of such quantities in the theory, he was excited by them, although at first he did not understand their significance, nor did he know how to build on Heisenberg’s ideas. What Dirac did notice was that Heisenberg had not constructed his theory to be eonsistent with special relativity so, true to form, Dirac played his favourite game of trying to produce a version of Heisenberg’s theory that was consistent with relativity, but he soon gave up.36 At the end of September, Dirac prepared to return to Cambridge, convinced that the non-commuting quantities in the theory were the key to the mystery. To make progress, he needed to hnd the lock a way of interpretng these quantities, a way of linking them to experimentally observed reality.