THE DIALECTIC INVADES PHYSICS
Modern Science. By Hyman Levy. (Hamish Hamilton. ns.) Tins is a formidable book of loo-odd pages, in which Pro- fessor Levy sets out to sketch the landscape of modern physics for the benefit both of layman and student. A brief historical retrospect—not, I think, too well done ; it is apt to be verbose and repetitive—is followed by an account of the struggle to free mathematics from irrelevant concepts, and the emergence as a result of the technique which produced the Newtonian picture of the world. A treatment of the recent revolution in our notions of geometry then leads up to a description of the physical universe as the modern physicist conceives it.
Professor Levy approaches science from a definite and particular point of view. First, as science becomes increas- ingly specialised, each scientist becomes increasingly foreign to his fellows. Scientists or groups of scientists radiate from a common centre, but the farther they travel, the farther their paths diverge. Professor Levy seeks to effect a synthesis by representing the various " outposts " of adyancing science as focal points on the circumference of a common circle.
Secondly, science is one expression of a many-sided stream of social energy. It "draws its nourishment from the society in which it develops. To each historic epoch, its own complex of social and material problems, and therefore also its special group of scientific interests." Society, in short, poses the problems which the scientists set out to solve, and the interests of even the most academic investigator are deter- mined, albeit unconsciously, by the social matrix in which his mind has been formed. When society is unstable, science will be unsettled ; when society is full of contradictions, science too will contradict itself, as, for example, in the war- time activities of the chemist and the doctor.
It is to the consideration of science in its social context that the book is primarily directed. Professor Levy discerns three main stages in the history of science. In the first, the scientist's work is mainly negative ; he frees man from super- stition and dogma and enables him to regard phenomena as the effects of natural forces and not of the arbitrary intrusion into nature of supernatural beings. This stage, which corre- sponds to the liberation of the merchant and the bourgeois from church and feudal lord, came to an end with the seven- teenth century. Secondly, there is the Newtonian era ; the world is pictured as a vast machine which is kept going by mechanical forces. Somebody at some time unknown wound the machine up ; thenceforward it proceeds to function like a gigantic clock through the automatic interaction of its parts. At all levels of inquiry the investigator will find the same types of regularity, while homogeneous atoms whose move- ments take place in accordance with mechanical laws deter- mine the occurrences which the psychologist, no less than the
physicist, investigates. This period • corresponds to the burst of industrial activity which ushered in and resulted from the industrial revolution. In both relations man functioned as a discoverer, not as a participator. He discovered the laws which govern the workings of the cosmic machine without affecting them by his discovery, and he observed the social effects set going by the economic forces that the inventions of machines had engendered, without conceiving himself to be responsible for them or required to modify them, if they were undesirable. Indeed, since they were determined effects —see laissez faire economics—it was clear that he could not mcdify them.
For various reasons the Newtonian scheme of the universe has broken down. There are, for example, the contradictions between Relativity and Quantum theory. Again, it was dis- covered that the same type of regularity did not exist at every level of abstraction, and that regularities in large-scale phenomena co-existed with " an indiscriminate medley of movement in the small," with the resultant conception of macroscopic laws as statistical estimates of very large numbers of microscopic happenings. Hence some physicists have been led to suggest that it is the mind which prescribes its own laws, and that the physicist has projected the processes which he purports to discover.
Professor Levy will have none of these flirtations with idealism ; nevertheless, he uses the conception of interference on the part of the observer to draw one of the most ingenious of his social parallels. Physics, he points out, is today faced by a contradiction. The requirements of objectivity demand that the physicist should observe without interfering with his experiments ; in fact, however, modern technique entails " that the experimenter should so far interfere with the process studied as to render it visible and measurable." The scientist, in other words, must alter what he observes. The antimony is solved dialectically by regarding the experimenter as " an integral part of the process himself." Two important con- clusions are drawn: first, there are no longer any simple repetitions in physics ; we cannot repeat an experiment, since by the very fact of our participation we turn each experiment into a novelty. Secondly, every scientific experiment is a piece of scientific history and, therefore, a piece of social history. Granted that the motives which set the experimenter to work are supplied, that the problems which determine the nature of his experiment are set by his social environment, and the connexion between the state of abstract physics and the needs of a particular phase of capitalist society is estab- lished. This conclusion affords a good illustration of Professor Levy's concept of science as one channel in a stream of social energy flowing outwards from a social group which dictates its direction.
Necessarily I• have had to exclude many matters. Let me then put it on record that the exposition of the last fey.: chapters is no less remarkable for its brilliance than for its originality. Professor Levy shows triumphantly how the new physical conceptions which Relativity and the Quantum theory have sponsored work in practice and, significantly, work for the distinctive technical achievements of our age— electric light and aeronautics—as effectively as the conceptions of mechanical physics worked for the typical products of the nineteenth century, such as spinning looms and rolling mills.
But I would warn the reader against supposing that in Modern Science he will find a textbook. It is altogether too original and personal to be placed in the textbook class. More important, and from the textbook point of view more serious, is the fact that the exposition is written at a number of different levels ; part is devoted to the simple explanation of elementary notions ; part again demands a high degree of mathematical knowledge for its comprehension ; some parts tax the ability of the philosopher, while others challenge the sympathies of the Marxist. I do not doubt that the book is a considerable achievement, but I do doubt whether it is quite the achievement that the author intended.
C. E. M. JoAn.
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