X
Preface
scientist's business is to provide his students or readers, without commentary,
the knowledge they will later use, for better or for worse, as suits them. It
will be up to them to discover by themselves, possibly years after graduating,
that which "has no place" (why, please?) in scientific books or lectures and
which was not told them by older scientists well aware of it, or who should
have been. Let me give you a few French examples.
As a dozen of people who mostly work in particle physics assured me,
you can spend five or eight years learning physics without ever having heard
anything about nuclear weapons. I once checked the chemistry library of my
Paris university for books by Louis Fieser, a most eminent Harvard chemist
who, during WW II, was in charge of improving incendiary weapons and
developed napalm; all of his chemistry books are there, but not his account
of war workS.
I found another, particularly caricatural, example in a textbook of physics
for high-school finishing students; as required by the French official instructions in 1995, the concluding chapter, on the laser (never mind that an eighteen year old boy or girl can understand practically nothing to it), mentioned
a number of civilian applications - ophthalmology, measure of atmospheric
pollution, compact discs, energy production by laser-induced thermonuclear
fusion 9 , etc. - but not a single military use of lasers, a domain in which
French industry was always very strong. This is not only dishonest; it is a
foolish way to hide the truth since students read newspapers, look at TV,
and if they type "laser military history" on www.google.com. they will get
about 164,000 documents!
Thirty years ago, in part under the influence of what I had seen on American campuses and read in American newspapers and such reviews as Science
8 Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method. A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in
War and in Peace (Reinhold, 1964). In the Biographical Memoirs, v. 65, 1994,
of the (American) National Academy of Science, Fieser's biographer has this to
say (p. 165) about his work during WW II: "With the approach of World War II,
Fieser was drown increasingly into war-related projects. A brief excursion into the
area of mixed aliphatic-aromatic polynitro compounds for possible use as exotic
explosives was followed by studies of alkali salts of long chain fatty acids as
incendiaries, but by far the most important of his war-related work was his long
and intensive study of the quinone antimalarials", to which the author devotes
one full page. The word "napalm" is nowhere to be found in this fourteen-page
biography, a beautiful example of the art of fooling the reader with opaque
technical jargon. All the more remarkable since Fieser was strongly criticised
during the Vietnam War for his development of napalm. In his long biography
of von Neumann in the Dictionary of Scientific Biogrophy, J. Dieudonne devotes
two lines to what he calls his "government" work without telling us whether
it had to do with, say, the H-bomb or cancer research, two strongly supported
domains of "government" work.
9 This is a very long term project, but the French and American military have
justified this very expensive enterprise by pointing out that the new knowledge
of fusion processes it will provide will be used to improve nuclear weapons, a fact
that is of course not mentioned in the textbook.
Preface
scientist's business is to provide his students or readers, without commentary,
the knowledge they will later use, for better or for worse, as suits them. It
will be up to them to discover by themselves, possibly years after graduating,
that which "has no place" (why, please?) in scientific books or lectures and
which was not told them by older scientists well aware of it, or who should
have been. Let me give you a few French examples.
As a dozen of people who mostly work in particle physics assured me,
you can spend five or eight years learning physics without ever having heard
anything about nuclear weapons. I once checked the chemistry library of my
Paris university for books by Louis Fieser, a most eminent Harvard chemist
who, during WW II, was in charge of improving incendiary weapons and
developed napalm; all of his chemistry books are there, but not his account
of war workS.
I found another, particularly caricatural, example in a textbook of physics
for high-school finishing students; as required by the French official instructions in 1995, the concluding chapter, on the laser (never mind that an eighteen year old boy or girl can understand practically nothing to it), mentioned
a number of civilian applications - ophthalmology, measure of atmospheric
pollution, compact discs, energy production by laser-induced thermonuclear
fusion 9 , etc. - but not a single military use of lasers, a domain in which
French industry was always very strong. This is not only dishonest; it is a
foolish way to hide the truth since students read newspapers, look at TV,
and if they type "laser military history" on www.google.com. they will get
about 164,000 documents!
Thirty years ago, in part under the influence of what I had seen on American campuses and read in American newspapers and such reviews as Science
8 Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method. A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in
War and in Peace (Reinhold, 1964). In the Biographical Memoirs, v. 65, 1994,
of the (American) National Academy of Science, Fieser's biographer has this to
say (p. 165) about his work during WW II: "With the approach of World War II,
Fieser was drown increasingly into war-related projects. A brief excursion into the
area of mixed aliphatic-aromatic polynitro compounds for possible use as exotic
explosives was followed by studies of alkali salts of long chain fatty acids as
incendiaries, but by far the most important of his war-related work was his long
and intensive study of the quinone antimalarials", to which the author devotes
one full page. The word "napalm" is nowhere to be found in this fourteen-page
biography, a beautiful example of the art of fooling the reader with opaque
technical jargon. All the more remarkable since Fieser was strongly criticised
during the Vietnam War for his development of napalm. In his long biography
of von Neumann in the Dictionary of Scientific Biogrophy, J. Dieudonne devotes
two lines to what he calls his "government" work without telling us whether
it had to do with, say, the H-bomb or cancer research, two strongly supported
domains of "government" work.
9 This is a very long term project, but the French and American military have
justified this very expensive enterprise by pointing out that the new knowledge
of fusion processes it will provide will be used to improve nuclear weapons, a fact
that is of course not mentioned in the textbook.