Harmony and Unity: The Life of Niels Bohr by Niels BlaedelReview by: Finn AaserudIsis, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 130-131Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/234132 .

Accessed: 08/05/2014 20:03

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 20:03:58 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

130 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 81: 1: 306 (1990)

"atomic shield" available to all NATO allies. Consequently Canada's atomic re- search laboratory at Chalk River had no identifiable weapons research facility, a fact that Bothwell underscores as signifi- cant in shaping Canadian nuclear research and development.

Not only was Canada's nuclear technol- ogy imported, but, as Bothwell also notes, so were many of the nuclear scientists and technicians who built the Canadian pro- gram. The first three heads of the Chalk River Laboratory-Hans von Halban, John Cockcroft, and W. B. Lewis-were for- eigners. The very success of atomic energy development in Canada, according to Both- well, was dependent on the importation of skilled technicians and laborers.

Nonetheless, its foreign dependence and cosmopolitan influences did not keep the Canadians from becoming isolated and in- ward looking. The National Research Council built the Chalk River Laboratory and its bedroom community, Deep River, in the northern forests a hundred miles northwest of Ottawa. Bothwell believes that Chalk River's setting, perhaps more remote than Los Alamos or Oak Ridge, bred not only a sense of isolation but also a debilitating elitism among Canada's nuclear scientists and technicians. Bothwell's char- acterization of Canada's nuclear elite as proud, aloof, self-righteous, and overconfi- dent, however, might apply to the Ameri- can and British nuclear scientists as well.

Perhaps the problem was not entirely the fact that the Canadians were stuck in the northern woods. As Bothwell notes, by 1970 enthusiasm for nuclear science had dramatically waned as public suspicion of science and technology grew. Nuclear sci- entists, however, were unprepared to cope with such profound shifts in public opinion and political support. Initially, the energy crisis and Middle East turmoil of the early 1970s seemed to offer great promise for the future of nuclear power. But these develop- ments only masked a deeply pervasive anti- nuclear sentiment nurtured by antiwar and environmental activism. The China Syn- drome and Three Mile Island had as much impact on the Canadian nuclear power in- dustry as on the United States'.

Ironically, the Canadian nuclear power industry is in little better shape than that of the United States. Bothwell concludes, "AECL, founded on faith in science and sustained by a national commitment to re- search and development, was ill-prepared

to meet the changing climate of opinion. It was, of course, surprised; unfortunately, it was also disarmed" (p. 424).

JACK M. HOLL

Niels Blaedel. Harmony and Unity: The Life of Niels Bohr. xi + 323 pp., illus., figs., bibls., index. Madison, Wis.: Science Tech Publishers; Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1988. $35.

Along with Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr is generally regarded as a giant of twentieth- century physics. Yet historians and other writers have devoted vastly less attention to Bohr. In addition to the book under re- view, full-scale biographies have been at- tempted only by Ruth Moore (New York, 1966), Daniil S. Danin (in Russian; Mos- cow, 1978), and Ulrich Roseberg (in Ger- man; Stuttgart, 1985). The reasons for this relative lack of attention are complex; one is certainly that Bohr was securely en- trenched in a Danish culture that is difficult for many historians to penetrate.

It is important, then, that at last a biogra- phy has been written by a Dane with wide knowledge of the society in which Bohr lived and moved. Thus Niels Blaedel begins with a picturesque exposition of Bohr's relationship with the artistic milieu in the area of his summer house in northern Zealand. Other sections pinpoint the im- portance of Bohr's artistic interests and connections; the role of the eighteenth- century Danish author Poul Martin M0ller in the formation of his philosophy of phys- ics constitutes but one particularly interest- ing example. However, Blaedel too often presupposes a Danish audience; for an in- ternational audience the book would have profited greatly from more background. Moreover, other aspects of Danish society -such as technical education, the electri- cal industry, and private foundations-and their impact on Bohr and his work receive substantially scanter treatment. This is a pity, since Bohr's firm connections with virtually all facets of Danish society con- tributed to the formation and success of his career.

The author had unprecedented access to Bohr's family correspondence, primarily with his wife Margrethe, who, before she died at ninety-four in 1984, read Blaedel many letters from her husband. Although Blaedel quotes extensively from only a few letters, the material demonstrates that a definitive biography of Bohr cannot be

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 20:03:58 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 81: 1: 306 (1990) 131

written without full access to the family correspondence. The letters confirm the impression that Bohr was truly a family person who discriminated clearly between those feelings and ideas he could relate to colleagues and those that had to remain within the family. The quotations are too few, however, to add much new insight into Bohr's life and career as a whole.

Any biography of Bohr has to deal with his scientific work, which after all was the centerpiece of his career. Blaedel's treat- ment of Bohr's science contributes little that is new and even ignores major work by historians of science such as Helge Kragh, Roger Stuewer, and John Heilbron. Instead he bases his account on the reminiscences of Bohr's colleagues, which are necessarily anecdotal. The treatment of Bohr's science is also quite uneven. Thus the introduction of the compound nucleus model in 1936, which constituted Bohr's entry into the field of theoretical nuclear physics and was arguably his main contribution to it, is not dealt with at all.

Blaedel's attention to sources is inade- quate. Instead of footnotes, he provides comments on individual paragraphs at the end of the book. These comments are se- verely limited; even long quotations often carry no reference to the source. More- over, Blaedel often distorts information in these sources. On page 206 alone, where he treats facts with which I am particularly fa- miliar, I counted four simple errors. For example, he claims wrongly that the Co- penhagen "cyclotron was the first one in Europe." Most of the misrepresentations are trivial, but taken together they detract significantly from the reader's confidence in the work as a whole.

Only in one section does Blaedel provide his source for virtually every paragraph of text: that devoted to the ill-fated meeting between Bohr and Winston Churchill in May 1944, when Bohr failed to convince Churchill of the value of sharing the secret of the atomic bomb with the rest of the world and particularly with the Soviet Union. Blaedel's references here are mostly to the diaries of Charles Moran (Churchill's personal physician during the war), published in 1966. Blaedel seeks to use these and a few other published sources to argue that Churchill did not ac- cept Bohr's view of the situation because he was too mentally and physically ex- hausted toward the end of the war. Had Churchill been fully alert, Blaedel implies,

he would clearly have accepted the ines- capable logic of the great physicist.

To me this is the worst instance of what I consider the major weakness of the book- its tendency toward hagiography, evident already in the treatment of Bohr as a youth. Blaedel implies that nothing Bohr said or did could ever be wrong, whether it con- cerned his involvement in "high politics" or his work in physics. In presenting Bohr's debates with Erwin Schrodinger and Albert Einstein on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, for example, Blaedel intimates that Bohr was correct by definition. Bohr was clearly unique as both a physicist and a man. Treating him as infallible is entirely unnecessary and only detracts from the un- derstanding of a great human being.

Most of the exquisite, and for the most part previously unpublished, photographs have been retained in the English-language edition. The few but effective color repro- ductions, however, have been removed. So have two appendixes, one listing Danish artists' portrayals of Bohr, the other Dan- ish radio programs with and about him. Furthermore, the appendix listing Bohr's publications has been trimmed to contain only his scientific publications. Finally, the translation leaves much to be desired; it is overly faithful to the Danish wording and sentence structure, does not flow well, and in a few instances also misrepresents the intended meaning.

Blaedel's book, written on commission for the Bohr centennial and published in Danish in 1985, contains valuable insights on Bohr, particularly as they relate to his previously unavailable family correspon- dence and his place in Danish culture. As a full-scale biography, however, it is too short and incomplete. A definitive account of Bohr's life and career remains to be written.

FINN AASERUD

Thomas F. Glick (Editor). The Comparative Reception of Relativity. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 103.) vii + 412 pp., illus., index. Dordrecht/Boston/Lan- caster: D. Reidel, 1987. (Distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, Mass.) Dfl 198, $79, ?54.50.

Although there have been a substantial number of historical studies on the origins of the special theory of relativity, both an

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 20:03:58 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions