What Mad Pursuit Read online

  I have little recollection of my very early years. I do not even remember being taught to read by my aunt Ethel, who was a schoolteacher. Photographs make me appear to be a very normal child. My mother was fond of saying that I looked like an archbishop. I’m not sure she had ever seen an archbishop—she was not a Catholic or a member of the Church of England—but she may well have seen a photograph of one in the newspaper. It is hardly likely that at the age of four or five I resembled such a venerable person. What I suspect she meant, but was too restrained to say, was that she thought I looked like an angel—very fair hair, blue eyes, an “angelic” expression of benevolent curiosity—but with perhaps something extra. Odile (my current wife) has a locket, a gift from my mother, from that period. It contains two small round tinted photographs, one of my younger brother, Tony, and one of me. I once commented to her that, from the look of it, I seemed to have been a rather angelic child. “Not really,” she said. “Look at those piercing eyes.” And she spoke with feeling, having often, in our many years together, been subjected to that same critical inquiring gaze.

  My only other clue as to my early nature comes from Michael, my son by my first wife, Doreen. When he was about the same age, he lived for a time with my mother. I noticed that, more than once, in reply to an explanation by her, he would answer, “But that can’t be right.” My mother, puzzled, would ask, “Why not?” to which Michael would give a simple, logical explanation that was transparently correct. I suspect that I too made such remarks to my mother—which was not difficult because she was not a precise thinker—and she found these both disconcerting and fascinating. In any event, it is clear to me now that my mother thought (as many mothers do) that her elder son had exceptional talents, and coming from a solid, middle-class background, she did everything possible to see that these talents were nurtured.

  It must have been to parry my constant questions about the world—for neither of my parents had any scientific background—that they bought for me Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. This was published serially, so that in any one number art, science, history, mythology, and literature were all jumbled together. As far as I can remember, I read it all avidly, but it was the science that appealed to me most. What was the universe like? What were atoms? How did things grow? I absorbed great chunks of explanation, reveling in the unexpectedness of it all, judged by the everyday world I saw around me. How marvelous to have discovered such things! It must have been at such an early age that I decided I would be a scientist. But I foresaw one snag. By the time I grew up—and how far away that seemed!—everything would have been discovered. I confided my fears to my mother, who reassured me. “Don’t worry, Ducky,” she said. “There will be plenty left for you to find out.”

  By the time I was ten or twelve, I had graduated to experiments at home—my parents must have bought me a student’s textbook on chemistry. I tried to make artificial silk—a failure. I put an explosive mixture into bottles and blew them up electrically—a spectacular success that, not unnaturally, worried my parents. A compromise was reached. A bottle could be blown up only while it was immersed in a pail of water. I got a prize at school—my first prize ever—for collecting wildflowers. I had gathered far more species than anyone else, but then we lived on the edge of the country whereas all my fellow schoolboys lived in the town. I felt a little guilty about this but accepted the prize—a small book on insect-eating plants—without demur. I wrote and mimeographed a small magazine to entertain my parents and my friends. But in spite of all this, I do not recall being exceptionally precocious or doing anything really outstanding. I was fairly good at mathematics, but I never discovered for myself some important theorem. In short, I was curious about the world, logical, enterprising, and willing to work hard if my enthusiasm was aroused. If I had a fault, it was that if I could grasp something easily, I believed I had already understood it thoroughly.

  My family were all tennis players. My father played for many years for Northamptonshire, an English county, and once played at Wimbledon. My mother also played, but with much less skill and only moderate enthusiasm. My younger brother, Tony, was a much keener player, doing well in the Junior County Championship and also playing for his school. I can hardly believe it now, but as a boy I was mad about tennis. I can still remember the day when my mother woke me early and told me (what bliss!) that I could miss school that day as we were going to Wimbledon. My brother and I would sit, sometimes for hours, beside the courts at the local tennis club, waiting for the drizzle to stop and hoping at least one of the courts would become dry enough for us to play on it. I did play other games (soccer, rugby, cricket, etc.) but without any distinction.

  My parents were religious in a rather quiet way. We had nothing like family prayers, but they attended church every Sunday morning and when we were old enough my brother and I went with them. The church was a nonconformist Protestant one, a Congregational Church, as it is called in England, with a substantial building on Abington Avenue. As we did not own an automobile we often walked to church, though sometimes we made part of the journey by bus. My mother greatly admired the clergyman because of his upright character. For a time my father was secretary of the church (that is, he did the church’s financial paperwork), but I did not get the feeling that either of them was especially devout. Certainly they were not overly narrow in their outlook on life. My father sometimes played tennis on Sunday afternoons, but my mother warned me not to mention this to other members of the congregation since some almost certainly would not have approved of such sinful conduct.

  I accepted all this, as children do, as part of our way of life. At exactly which point I lost my early religious faith I am not clear, but I suspect I was then about twelve years old. It was almost certainly before the actual onset of puberty. Nor can I recall exactly what led me to this radical change of viewpoint. I remember telling my mother that I no longer wished to go to church, and she was visibly upset by this. I imagine that my growing interest in science and the rather lowly intellectual level of the preacher and his congregation motivated me, though I doubt if it would have made much difference if I had known of other more sophisticated Christian beliefs. Whatever the reason, from then on I was a skeptic, an agnostic with a strong inclination toward atheism.

  This did not save me from attending Christian services at school, especially at the boarding school I went to later, where a compulsory service was held every morning and two on Sundays. For the first year there, until my voice broke, I even sang in the choir. I would listen to the sermons but with detachment and even with some amusement if they were not too boring. Fortunately, as they were addressed to schoolboys, they were often short, though all too frequently based on moral exhortation.

  I have no doubt, as will emerge later, that this loss of faith in Christian religion and my growing attachment to science have played a dominant part in my scientific career, not so much on a day-to-day basis but in the choice of what I have considered interesting and important. I realized early on that it is detailed scientific knowledge which makes certain religious beliefs untenable. A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically? A belief, at the time it was formulated, may not only have appealed to the imagination but also fit well with all that was then known. It can nevertheless be made to appear ridiculous because of facts uncovered later by science. What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs? Yet it is clear that some mysteries have still to be explained scientifically. While these remain unexplained, they can serve as an easy refuge for religious superstition. It seemed t
o me of the first importance to identify these unexplained areas of knowledge and to work toward their scientific understanding, whether such explanations would turn out to confirm existing religious beliefs or to refute them.

  Although I found many religious beliefs absurd (the story of the animals in Noah’s ark is a good example), I often excused them to myself on the assumption that they originally had some rational basis. This sometimes led me to quite unwarranted assumptions. I was familiar with the account in Genesis in which God makes Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. How could such a belief arise? Of course I knew that, at least in certain respects, men were anatomically different from women. What more natural for me to assume that men had one less rib than women? A primitive people, knowing this, could easily believe that this missing rib was used to construct Eve. It never entered my head to check whether this tacit hypothesis of mine corresponded to the facts. It was only some years later, probably when I was an undergraduate, that I let slip to a friend of mine, a medical student, that I understood that women had one more rib than men. To my surprise, instead of agreeing he reacted strongly to this idea and asked me why I thought so. When I explained my reasons he almost fell off his chair with laughter. I learned the hard way that in dealing with myths one should not try to be too rational.

  My formal education had few special features. For a number of years I attended the Northampton Grammar School. At the age of fourteen I obtained a scholarship to Mill Hill School in North London, a boys’ “public” school (in the English sense, meaning private), consisting mainly of boarders. My father and his three brothers had been at school there. Fortunately the school was good at teaching science and I obtained a thorough grounding in physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

  I had a rather vulgar attitude toward pure mathematics, being mainly interested in mathematical results. The exact discipline of rigorous proof held no attraction for me, though I enjoyed the elegance of simple proofs. Nor could I feel much enthusiasm for chemistry, which, as then taught to schoolboys, was more like a set of recipes than a science. Much later, when I read Linus Pauling’s General Chemistry, I found it enthralling. Even so I have never tried to master inorganic chemistry, and my knowledge of organic chemistry is still very patchy. I did enjoy the physics I was taught at school. There was a course in medical biology (the school had a Medical Sixth Form, which prepared pupils for the first Bachelor of Medicine exam), but it never occurred to me to learn about the standard animals of the course: the earthworm, the frog, and the rabbit. I think I must have picked up the elements of Mendelian genetics but I don’t think I was ever taught it at school.

  I played, or was compelled to play, numerous sports but was rather feeble at all of them except tennis. I managed to be on the school tennis team for my last two years there. When I left school I found I could no longer play it for amusement, so I gave it up and have hardly played it since.

  At the age of eighteen I went to University College, London. By that time my parents had moved from Northampton to Mill Hill, so that my younger brother could attend the school as a day boy. I lived at home, going to University College by bus and underground, the journey one way taking the better part of an hour. When I was twenty-one I obtained a second-class Honours degree in physics, with subsidiary mathematics. The teaching in physics had been competent but a shade old-fashioned. We were taught the Bohr theory of the atom, by then (the mid-1930s) quite out of date. Quantum mechanics was hardly mentioned until a very short course of six lectures at the end of the final year. In the same way, the mathematics I learned was what a previous generation of physicists had found useful. I was taught nothing of eigenvalues or group theory, for example.

  Physics has in any case changed beyond recognition since then. At that time there was not even a hint of quantum electrodynamics, let alone quarks or superstrings. Thus, although I was trained in what would now be regarded as historical physics, my current knowledge of modern physics is only at the Scientific American level.

  After the war I did teach myself the elements of quantum mechanics, but I have never had occasion to use it. Books on this subject were in those days often entitled Wave Mechanics. At that time they could be found at the Cambridge University library classified under “Hydrodynamics.” No doubt things are different now.

  Having obtained my Bachelor of Science degree, I started research at University College, under Professor Edward Neville da Costa Andrade, helped financially by my uncle, Arthur Crick. Andrade put me onto the dullest problem imaginable, the determination of the viscosity of water, under pressure, between 100° and 150° C. I lived in a rented apartment near the British Museum that I shared with an ex-school friend, Raoul Colinvaux, who was studying law.

  My main task was to construct a sealable, spherical copper vessel (to hold the water), with a neck that would allow for the expansion of the water. It had to be kept at a constant temperature and its decaying oscillations captured on film. I am no good at precise mechanical construction but I had the help of Leonard Walden, Andrade’s senior lab assistant, and an excellent staff in the laboratory workshop. I actually enjoyed making the apparatus, boring though it was scientifically, because it was a relief to be doing something after years of merely learning.

  These experiences may have helped me during the war, when I had to devise weapons, but otherwise they were a complete waste of time. What I had acquired, however indirectly, was the hubris of the physicist, the feeling that physics as a discipline was highly successful, so why should not other sciences do likewise? I believe this did help me when, after the war, I eventually switched to biophysics. It was a healthy corrective to the rather plodding, somewhat cautious attitude I often encountered when I began to mix with biologists.

  When the Second World War started in September 1939, the department was evacuated to Wales. I stayed at home, occupying my time by learning to play squash. My brother (who was then a medical student) taught me on the squash courts at Mill Hill School. The students had been evacuated to Wales, while the school buildings had become an emergency hospital. Tony and I played on a sliding handicap. Every time I lost a game I started the next game with an extra point. If I won a game my advantage was reduced by one point. By the end of the year we were about equal. I played squash occasionally, on and off, for many years, both in London and Cambridge. I always enjoyed it because I never tried to play it seriously. As it is no longer a sensible game for one of my age, I now take my exercise by walking or by swimming in a heated swimming pool in the Southern Californian sunshine.

  Eventually, early in 1940, I was given a civilian job at the Admiralty. This enabled me to marry my first wife, Doreen Dodd. Our son Michael was born in London, during an air raid, on November 25, 1940.1 worked first in the Admiralty Research Laboratory, next to the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, a South London suburb. Then I was transferred to the Mine Design Department near Havant, not far from Portsmouth on the south coast of England. After the war ended I was given a job in scientific intelligence at the Admiralty in London. By good fortune a land mine had blown up the apparatus I had so laboriously constructed at University College, so after the war I was not obliged to go back to measuring the viscosity of water.

  2

  The Gossip Test

  DURING MOST of the war I had worked on the design of magnetic and acoustic mines—the noncontact mines—initially under the direction of a well-known theoretical physicist, H. S. W. Massey. Such mines were dropped by our aircraft into shipping channels in the relatively shallow water of the Baltic and the North Sea. There they sat, silently and secretly, on the seabed until they were exploded by an enemy sweep or they blew up one of the enemy ships. The trick in designing their circuits was to make them distinguish in some way between the magnetic fields and sounds of a sweep and those of a ship. In this I had been relatively successful. These special mines were about five times as effective as the standard noncontact mines. After the war it was estimated that mines sank or seriously damaged as many as a t
housand enemy merchant vessels.

  When the war finally came to an end I was at a loss as to what to do. By that time I was working at the Admiralty Headquarters in Whitehall, in the windowless extension known as The Citadel. I did the obvious thing and applied to become a permanent scientific civil servant. At first they were not sure they wanted me, but eventually, after pressure from the Admiralty and a second interview—the committee was chaired by novelist C. P. Snow—I was offered a permanent job. By this time I was reasonably sure that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life designing weapons, but what did I want to do? I took stock of my qualifications. A not-very-good degree, redeemed somewhat by my achievements at the Admiralty. A knowledge of certain restricted parts of magnetism and hydrodynamics, neither of them subjects for which I felt the least bit of enthusiasm. No published papers at all. The few short Admiralty reports I had written at Teddington would count for very little. Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualification could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things. I was sure in my mind that I wanted to do fundamental research rather than going into applied research, even though my Admiralty experience would have fit me for developmental work. But did I have the necessary ability?