book+reviewed

Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist By Russell McCormmach

Victor Jakob is an aged professor living in the early 20th century. As a theoretical physicist, not in the best health, he views the world critically and gloomily. To the world, he is past his time, old school, and not well regarded. To himself, the professor knows his time is almost up. He is troubled by the changing times and often regresses to his disillusioned thoughts. Jakob finds himself lost in a rapidly changing world as it ushers in the new ideas of modern physics. Growing up in a time period before World War I, his world, built on values, discipline and tradition, contained structure. Now after the war, the professor returns to a world that is drastically different. Even coming to lecture, he notices the university has become unfamiliar—the physical building has aged, some of the staff have changed, and the dynamics of the student body are different. “As he listened to a lonely pair of footsteps in the corridor, he recalled the institute as it was before the world war when it was filled with dedicated researchers. The new director had been determined to make the institute a credit to himself, to physics, and to the university. The director’s own research from the institute soon became a steady—if, as Jakob judged, at times a shallow—flow of publications.” Clearly, the professor has become very cynical of the institute. What he once came to know as a place of pure intellect and cultivating ideas has now perverted to a void building lacking any real academic substance. Needless to say, Jakob, himself, has grown old too and the years have taken a toll. “As in a mirror, he saw the untrimmed mustache, the bony nose, the furrowed skin receding over the top of the skull, the wisps of gray hair around the collar. There were times when he found physical deterioration in old age objectively interesting, but this was not one of those times. In any case, what was important about a man like himself was not physical but mental.”

I think Russell McCormmach does an excellent job in painting Jakob’s character. Even though I cannot identify with his situation of finding classical physics becoming overtaken by modern quantum mechanics, I can empathize with his trouble of adjusting and longing to hold on to something familiar. Jakob, although very brilliant, has grown slow to keep up with the ever changing world. Through the descriptions of his inner thoughts, McCormmach reveals that Jakob wants to hold on to tradition and old friends because he finds comfort in them. This parallels his constantly loosening grip on classical physics as the world around him seeks to update knowledge and truth. Reading about his situation, almost makes me feel uncomfortable. As I write this review on break, I find it uneasy coming back home to a slightly altered town; everything seems distant. I had mistakenly thought I would be returning home to a place where I had left everything exactly where it was and I could come back and pick up where I had left off. Like Jakob, there is something very unsettling about not being able to recognize certain places or seeing people change. Of course it is silly to expect or even hope to stop time and halt change. It is for the better; it is a process of renewal so the world can move on. However, we all find comfort in the familiarity and are happy to find routine in the things we do. Jakob is seemingly stuck inbetween two worlds—the past, a home he knew well and treasured, but cannot hold on to and the present future, which has moved too rapidly for him to catch up. With this dilemma, we see the external tumultuous world of physics mirrored by Jakob’s internal dissonance.

At the heart of the generational gap in this story is the evolution of scientific thought—a shift from a classical view of the natural world to a now atomic and quantum interpretation. The classical perspective was an all encompassing scope of seeing all the pieces of the world fit together. Jakob embodied this philosophy. He was looking for the explanation and proof of a world-ether. His idea was that all facets of life worked together and were deeply entangled. This old physics was theoretical. It was science that was concrete and rigid and the underpinnings were certain in explaining phenomena in the mechanical world. However, modern physics and everything it came with, in the professor’s eye, deviated from this virtuous endeavor. It allowed for uncertainty and that in itself struck at the core of what was classical and what was physics. “Physics was becoming increasingly abstract. Physicists used to seek picturable mechanisms for understanding the world, but now many of them had pretty well given it up. Their immaterial world-ether was not a mechanism so much as a set of mathematical relations, and if they substituted empty space and energy for the world-ether they were left with an even greater abstraction.” Jakob could not bear to imagine his life’s work would be so easily replaced; all seemed lost. His purpose became obsolete, and so Jakob himself must cease with the passage of time and the passing of classical physics.

The setting of this novel, during the great wars of the 20th century, I believe is significant as it is accurate in the historical timeframe. Yes, physics and atomic theory were blossoming at the time but more importantly there was a shift in political and social attitudes in the backdrop. Especially through efforts of the war, there existed a strong sense of nationalism and a movement away from the individual. Each solider lost his personal story to tell and every scientist’s work, too, grew to be less of a sense of personal satisfaction. Everything was done in the shadow of a nation and scientific pursuit was researched under the reputation of a university. Indeed, Jakob saw this departure from self actualization. Classical physics was becoming tainted with impure and unoriginal thoughts. “Jakob believed that physics in its present state couldn’t sacrifice the world-ether without sacrificing its goal of intelligibility.” Trapped in a fixated mindset, Jakob could not accept the novel concepts of modern physics. His inability to align his thoughts around this impending future shows his own rigidity. Jakob personifies the classical point of view. He values simplicity and appreciates an otherwise observable universe. His world is weaved into the past and as the present world turns, Jakob is left behind.