The Virgin and the Mousetrap/The Joy of Insight
Haegel, Nancy M.
BOOKS Scientific annunciations THE VIRGIN AND THE MOUSETRAP Essays in Search of the Soul of Science Chet Raymo Viking Penguin, $18.95, 199 pp. THE JOY OF INSIGHT Passions of a...
...There's little poetry, and little polemic--just wonderful stories from a man who has led a most interesting life...
...Something similar is afoot in the computer images of the molecules of life...
...He generalized the idea of complementarity to fields of human experience outside of physics, such as ethics, music, art, and religion...
...Nowadays your position on Jesus...
...And his friends have been many...
...It made me envy his friends...
...Chet Raymo and Victor Weisskopf are both scientists, professors, and authors who are eager to share new insights about their science, their lives, their passions...
...The limitations of essay length are felt most clearly when Raymo attempts to tackle "the big ones"----environmental concerns, the strategic defense initiative (more popularly known as Star Wars), animal rights...
...We can no longer look upon ourselves as the favored children of gods...
...In the face of the temptation to escape from this paradox into either fundamentalism or nihilism, Raymo cautions that "the often anthropomorphic forms of the older faiths are insufficiently capacious to encompass what we have learned about the world, and science is too tentative an instrument to be deified...
...In the final chapter of the book, Weisskopf takes readers on a delightful tour of his collection of classical music, a setting for some of his best reflections on the balance in life that is the theme of The Joy of Insight as well as The Virgin and the Mousetrap...
...A man who lectures on the scientific origin of the universe concludes by playing part of Hayden's Creation "to demonstrate another way of describing the same event...
...A surprising number of people are still confused by the claims of "creation science," while Hans Kiing's latest book reminds us that "modernity," with its enshrinement of science, has left us lonely and unfulfilled...
...During the years that followed the war, he returned to academic research, taught physics at MIT, and spent four years as director general of CERN, the European international high energy physics laboratory...
...Students find themselves finishing an experiment on Friday night, rummaging in dusty library stacks, or arguing politics until dawn...
...A determined few become passionate about science, about physics...
...THE JOY OF INSIGHT Passions of a Physicist Victor Weisskopf Basic Books, $24.95,328 pp...
...He helped found the Federation of American Scientists and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to educate scientists and the public about nuclear policies and arms control...
...Weisskopf refers to the Danish physicist Neils Bohr as his "intellectual father...
...He was also widely active in the political opposition to the growing arms race...
...By the time the Nazis were defeated, Weisskopf was fully engaged by the challenge of the work...
...Alan Wolfe, The New Republic "Admirably concise and marvelously fair...
...The analogy is striking and illuminating...
...This theme follows Weisskopf throughout his life...
...q'he unexamined quest for knowledge is hemmed with peril," he observes, while concluding that we have no choice but to proceed with caution...
...Of course, we thoroughly disagreed on many subjects...
...Recent annunciations from the scientific world--new forms of life and new styles of weapons, too much ozone in our cities and not enough in the upper atmosphere-have left society reeling...
...Andrew M. Greeley, N.Y...
...They become scientists, physicists, maybe even professors...
...Raymo's goal is to discover "the soul of science," to connect his own life in all its dimensions to the seemingly impersonal, and often inconceivably small, large, or dangerous phenomena that engage scientists...
...These essays do not attempt to explain science, but to experience it, to discover ways in which science enriches our personal lives, not materialistically but spiritually...
...Regarding Pope John Paul II he writes, "Altogether, he is a friendly, outgoing person who does not use his authoritative position to intimidate his partners in a discussion...
...Joseph is at work, a clever mousetrap on his bench...
...A nonobservant Jew, he serves in the Pontifical Academy of Science...
...Weisskopf has lived with delight, and his autobiography is a delight to share...
...Here, too, is an almost mystical vision of a hidden harmony established throughout the cosmos, the unsuppressible capacity of substance to generate self...
...Music and science, along with his wife Ellen, with whom he shared his life for fifty-seven years, and his family, are the loves of Weisskopf's life and the focus of his story...
...Secret hopes that the scientific difficulties would be insurmountable slowly evolve into a strong desire simply to achieve the goal...
...Victor Weisskopf would probably agree...
...Gould and Raymo share an intellectual pleasure in science, a realization of its limitations, and an awareness of how modem science has changed our visions of ourselves...
...As examples of complementarity, he often mentioned the scientific versus the poetic approach to an experience or justice versus compassion or psychology versus neurophysiology...
...Complementarity took a new turn in Weisskopf's life when he, like many other gifted scientific refugees from Europe, joined the Manhattan Project...
...Times Book Review $25.00 at bookstores or from --'~ BasicBooks Toll-free with credit card 1-800-331-3761 A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 20 December 1991:755...
...Weisskopfhas made major contributions to basic science...
...Despite the brevity, most of the highly exciting and controversial topics in modem science make an appearance...
...Raymo's The Virgin and the Mousetrap: Essays in Search of the Soul of Science has the more intriguing title, inspired by a fifteenth-century Flemish altarpiece depicting the Annunciation...
...Weisskopf had the good fortune to come of age during the "golden years" of modem physics and had the ability to take advantage of it...
...These subjects don't lend themselves to quick survey or brief reflection...
...The Joy of lnsight begins with memories from a Vienna childhood and concludes with the reflections of an MIT emeritus professor...
...There is a great wisdom here in seeking a balance in our search for meaning, offered by someone who has attempted to walk with balance through dangerous territory...
...An extraordinary intellectual achievement...
...Raymo's writing is gentler, more spiritual...
...Certainly a most exciting topic today is the ability of scientists to unlock "the code of fife" in the molecules of human DNA...
...In his autobiography, this talented physicist and teacher recounts the path that took him 754: Commonweal through an education with some of the greatest physicists of our time, to Los Alamos and a front-row seat for the first test of the atomic bomb, to leadership roles in working for nuclear arms control...
...In retrospect, I have often been disappointed that, at the time, the thought of quitting did not even cross my mind...
...In addition to physics, he learned from Bohr to widely apply the concept of complementarity, a term coined by Bohr to explain the apparent contradiction in physics between the wave-like and particle-like properties of the electron...
...The road has at times been perilous, but Weisskopf has walked it with grace, honesty, and joy...
...Nancy M. Haegel ne of the joys of university fife is watching young people discover something about which they become passionate...
...One is reminded of the noted essayist Stephen Jay Gould as Raymo writes, "the age of petty miracles is past...
...Nonreligious, he still reports a "brush with the irrational" as his yarmulke mysteriously disappears in a gust of wind in an Israeli cemetery...
...matters less than your posmon on Rousseau...
...Gould delights those who wish to be challenged, perhaps even discomforted...
...The universe, we now understand, is vast beyond our reckoning, and we are ordinary perhaps even typical fragments of that universe...
...engaging and challenging...
...As this event unfolds, Mary is reading...
...What Raymo, professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, sees in this picture, and what he attempts to explore in his essays, is the harmony between the material and the spiritual, between Joseph's new creation and the new creation implied in the message of the angel...
...Here, too, there is an attempt to represent unseen realities with visible images...
...He offers a more comforting, though perhaps less challenging welcome to modem science...
...Neils Bohr taught me to appreciate the importance of different, even seemingly contradictory avenues to human experience...
...For two centuries, religious conflict divided America...
...Here is a riveting account of how Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have I'~ forces against their p ro g ressive counterparts--secularists, reform Jews, liberal Catholics and Protestants, all heirs to the Enlightenment--as both sides struggle for control over the meaning of America...
...These molecules can now be visualized through computer-generated images that appear in popular science magazines...
...The Gothic architects achieved a unity of form and function that has seldom been surpassed...
...Raymo makes an admirable attempt to shine light on topics that need it, but the intensity is too low to penetrate much darkness...
...He worked, at various times, with Heisenberg, Bloch, Schroedinger, Pauli, and Bohr, men who made seminal contributions to physics...
...In reflecting back, he is neither defensive nor preachy, just honest...
...Robert Coles "Hunter's evenhandedness is a rare treat in a book dealing with such contentious topics...
...The material and the spiritual meet in a number of reflections on physics and biology, astronomy and evolution...
...Today the battles are fought along new and unfamiliar lines...
...When the bomb exploded at Trinity, Weisskopf was at an open observation pit ten miles from the site...
...The book consists of twenty-one essays, each seemingly predestined to be a short ten pages in length...
...In contrast to Raymo's poetic style, Weisskopf writes simply and candidly...
...All of this is recounted in the same engaging and transparent style...
...Raymo looks at these images and sees Gothic cathedrals: "When we enter a Gothic cathedral we have the sense that every visible component of the structure has a job to do...
...An initial eagerness to participate in the project gives way to a more complicated psychology...
...Raymo does describe well the alienation from modem science that is reflected today in tendencies to either deny or deify it...
...He describes his thoughts during the Los Alamos years without the protective editing in hindsight that one might expect...
...He provides wonderfully clear descriptions of the significant advances in nuclear and atomic physics in which he played a role...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 22
