physicswor ld.com

Physics Wor ld Ju ly 201646

Reviews

On the evening of 6 June 1989, two days after the massacre at Tianan-men Square, an official from the US embassy invited the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and his wife, Li Shuxian, to take refuge at the US embassy in Beijing. For the next 13 months, under the precarious protection of the US ambassador, they remained inside the embassy, until delicate negotiations yielded an arrange-ment by which they were permitted to depart China for the UK. Dur-ing this period of exile, Fang and Li were not allowed to communicate with the outside world. With time on his hands, Fang began to write this memoir, which is one of the most insightful accounts we have of the chaotic period of Chinese history that began with the founding of the People’s Republic of China and cul-minated with the Tiananmen massa-cre. It is also a revealing portrait of a courageous scholar whose role in history has been compared to that of Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union or Galileo in 16th-century Florence.

Born in Beijing in 1936, Fang had a childhood that was remarkably tran-quil, given the Japanese occupation,

the Second World War and the civil war that followed. Then, toward the end of 1948, Nationalist troops occu-pied his high school and Fang joined the Federation of Democratic Youth, an underground organization with links to the Communist Party. The following year, after the Nationalist defeat, Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China. At about the same time, Fang’s aptitude for science began to shine, and he entered Peking Uni-versity three years later, flush with excitement about physics and patri-otic fervour.

While still an undergraduate, Fang was invited to join an elite group whose core task was to calcu-late a model for neutron diffusion in a breeder reactor. Nowadays, this calculation could be done with an iPhone in less than a second; then, it took 300 of the brightest young physicists in China several months to work it out with abaci. But phys-ics was not his only passion, and his memoir becomes a love story as he describes meeting a brilliant and spirited classmate, Li Shuxian. Their shared passions for physics and Com-munism fed a growing romance, and when they (first Li, then Fang) were invited to join the Communist Party, their future looked golden.

Upon graduation, Fang was assigned to a “work unit” of the Chi-nese Academy of Sciences, while Li was given a post as an interpreter for visiting Soviet physicists. Mean-while, though, a string of incidents was leading Fang and Li first to question Communist orthodoxy, and ultimately to become completely disaffected with the party. In 1957 Mao Zedong announced his “Let a hundred flowers bloom” policy. This supposed attempt at liberalization quickly revealed itself as a cynical plot to ferret out and persecute any-one with the temerity to question the party line. Fang and Li walked right into the trap: together with a friend, Ni Wansun, they began drafting a letter to the Party Central Commit-tee calling attention to some of the harm the “Anti-Rightist” crackdown was doing to the party. Warned by friends not to send the letter, they abandoned their plans, but copies of Ni’s outline were distributed. That

was enough. Fang summarizes the events that followed with charac-teristic irony, calling it “a splendid success: in a single blow an entire gang that had planned one whole let-ter that had never been mailed was completely annihilated”. All three were expelled from the party, and although Li was permitted to remain at Peking University under a cloud, Ni was fired from his academic post and sent to do labour reform. Fang, meanwhile, was banished to an impoverished village, where he did manual labour for eight months.

For the next 15 years, Fang’s career oscillated between extremes. After he returned to Beijing in 1958, he was appointed to the newly founded University of Science and Technol-ogy (USTC), where he embarked on a picaresque odyssey in physics, beginning with nuclear and elemen-tary particle physics, then solid-state physics, then laser physics and finally cosmology. In 1961 he and Li married, and they later had two sons. However, both Fang’s research and his family life were regularly interrupted, as he was repeatedly sent away to labour as a farmer, a coal miner, railway builder and brick maker. His descrip-tions of these assignments – particu-larly the bizarre attempts to increase farm productivity during the Great Leap Forward – are both comical and horrifying, as they resulted in the death by starvation of more than 20 million people. Fang also gives a first-hand report of the persecutions during the Cultural Revolution, which caused many gifted intellectu-als to commit suicide.

The death of Mao in September 1976 precipitated a dramatic change in Fang’s fortunes. In February 1979 he was reinstated as a member of the Communist Party. He was allowed to travel abroad, which he did fre-quently and with relish, becoming something of an international celeb-rity for his outspoken views on sci-ence and intellectual freedom. In 1981 he became a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 1984 he was appointed vice-presi-dent of the USTC.

This might have been Fang’s happy ending but for, as he puts it, his “addiction to trouble”. The reform movement that followed

Fang Lizhi, physicist and dissidentRichard McCray

Great educator Fang Lizhi converses with his students in Beijing, 1987.

The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the StateFang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link2016 Henry Holt £21.99/$32.00hb 352pp

AIP

Emili

o S

egrè

Vis

ual A

rchi

ves/

Ge

Ge

physicswor ld.com

Physics Wor ld Ju ly 2016 47

Reviews

Mao’s death gained momentum rap-idly, becoming especially popular among students, who regarded Fang as a hero and often invited him to speak at their gatherings. Initially, party leaders had encouraged these reforms, but by early 1987 Deng Xiaoping had had enough. Fang was expelled from the party for a second time and sacked from his position at the USTC. He obtained another job, teaching cosmology at the Beijing Observatory, but by this time, the democracy movement had caught fire with students throughout China, and attempts to suppress it only fanned the flames. The movement culminated in May 1989 with the occupation of Tiananmen Square and its brutal suppression on 4 June, when some 300 000 troops opened fire on the crowd, killing thousands of demonstrators and sending Fang and Li into their 13-month exile at the US embassy.

Fang does not cover the post-

embassy period in his memoir, but Perry Link, a noted scholar of East Asian languages and culture, has enriched his beautiful translation with an insightful foreword and afterword. In the latter, we learn that, after their release, Fang and Li spent several months at the Uni-versity of Cambridge before moving to the Institute for Advanced Study in the US. In 1992 Fang accepted an appointment at the University of Arizona, where he remained until his untimely death in 2012.

What will be the legacy of Fang? He has been called a brilliant scien-tist, and he was certainly a prolific researcher, but I cannot identify any singular contributions with a lasting impact on astrophysics or cosmol-ogy. It is instructive, though, to com-pare his circumstances with those of Sakharov. Like Fang, the Soviet dissident and nuclear scientist was persecuted by his government for defending intellectual freedom.

However, Sakharov also enjoyed a privileged life in the company of some of the greatest physicists of the time, including Lev Landau, Vitaly Ginzburg and Yakov Zel’dovich. Fang had no such peers. Yet with virtually no contact with the inter-national research community – and with the almost constant distractions of the Maoist chaos – he succeeded in educating himself and his col-leagues in modern astrophysics.

As I write this review, I have just returned from a visit to some of the leading centres for astrophysics in China. Several of the leaders at these institutions are former students of Fang. Many younger scientists have been inspired by the example of his life, so eloquently documented in this memoir. That, surely, is his true legacy.

Richard McCray is an astrophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley, US, e-mail mccrayr@me.com

iSto

ck/L

inda

Ste

war

d

Roughly speaking One method of dealing with misinformation provided in David Helfand’s new book is learning to make back-of-envelope estimates.

Fighting misinformationAs an astronomer, educator and science advocate at Columbia University in the US, David Helfand has spent his career knocking down faulty arguments and misleading “facts” that cling on despite the huge amount of information available to modern audiences. In his book A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age, Helfand explains how the same “habits of mind” that make someone a good scientist can also give non-scientists “an antidote to the misinformation glut”. These habits include making back-of-the-envelope estimates, and distinguishing between correlation and causation. Without such tools, Helfand writes, “you are a dependent creature, doomed to accept what the world of charlatans and hucksters, politicians and professors provides, with no way out of the miasma of misinformation”. At this point, many of Helfand’s readers will be punching the air with shouts of “Yes! I’ve been saying this for years!” And therein lies the challenge. In theory, Helfand’s book aims to convert non-experts to the scientific “cause” and teach them how to debunk misinformation. In practice, the book will probably appeal most to people who already agree with him and are perfectly capable of doing

their own debunking. That does not make book worthless. Far from it: there is a long and noble tradition of using popular-science writing to encourage fellow-combatants in the fight against pseudoscience (Carl Sagan’s 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World is another example). The deeper problem is one that Helfand hints at near the end of the book, where he describes a study showing that people who reject (say) theories of evolution or climate change are not, in the main, either ignorant or lacking in scientific skills. Instead, they simply refuse to accept ideas that conflict with their pre-existing religious or political beliefs. Helfand rightly calls this conclusion “disturbing”, but he does not really engage with it. That’s unfortunate, because if this study is valid, then the premise of Helfand’s book is flawed, and he and many other defenders of science are fighting with precisely the wrong weapons. Disturbing indeed.

● 2016 Columbia University Press $29.95hb

Scientist or writer?Stephen Heard writes about 75 000 words per year, more than many novels. But Heard is not a novelist. Instead, he’s an evolutionary ecologist at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and he reckons his annual written

output – spread across journal papers, grant proposals, peer reviews, technical reports and administrative documents – is fairly typical for a senior scientist. Since writing is such a significant part of a scientist’s working life, it’s important to do it well, and Heard’s book The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career promises to help you do just that. The book is not a step-by-step guide to producing particular scientific documents. Instead, it focuses on topics such as building good writing behaviour; understanding the content and structure of scientific papers; developing a clear and appropriate writing style; and making the most of the revision process. Some of Heard’s tips for good scientific writing are straightforward (“an abstract is not a movie trailer and does not need to avoid plot spoilers”), while others are a bit off-the-wall (to combat procrastination, he suggests you “hang a small stuffed animal or the like near your writing station, and think of it as your writing conscience”). The most important tip, though, is one that recurs throughout the book, and can be summed up in three words: remember your reader.

● 2016 Princeton University Press £16.95/$21.95pb 320pp

Between the lines