Solid Cues by Gerald Feinberg (review)

others they are incidental to the story, an extreme example being the essay “Uranium” in which the actual element plays nopart except in the imagination of one character. In many they also serve as metaphor. Whether he is relating an incident fromhisprofessional orpersonal life or his own imaginings, Levi engages in a profound meditation on human thought and action. Just as he is able to use the chemical elements to serve as metaphors for purposes of literary expression, he brings the analytic intent of the chemist to human affairs. His unflinchingexpositionof hisowncharacter and insightful speculation on those of other people is parallel to the chemist’s investigation of the fundamental constituents of materials. In his previous writings Levi has dealt not with science but rather with his experience in the crucible of Auschwitz. As he states in “Chromium”. “. .. It seemed to me that I would be purified if I told its story, and I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicting on them the story of his misfortune.” His writing career, which began as catharsis, here has continued inspired by his profession which moved him to dabble in writing even in his student days. Two of these stories are fictions recovered from his youth. Levi refers to this collection as “tales of militant chemistry”. Levi’s descriptions of the methods and attitudes of chemists are accurate and poetic. The metaphoric uses of chemical properties are always appropriate, such as “Argon”, in which the Piedmontese Jewish community in which he grew up is likened to this inert, ubiquitous gas. Some of these tales are as engrossing as any detective story, such as “Silver”, in which a classmate at a reunion relates how he tracked down the cause of spoilage in X-ray film. Silver appears both assubstance, used in thefilm, and as metaphor, since this story is told at their twenty-fifth reunion. Another detective story appears in “Chromium”, in which Levi is assigned to determine why a batch of chromate paint has spoiled. The cause turns out to be an error intranscription of an analytic technique, which has led to the acceptance of a shipment of bad chromate. Levi works out a simple remedy which is incorporated in the formula for the paint. The upshot is that years later, after he has moved on to another job, when this unacceptable chromate is no longer on the market, his simple remedy, now unnecessary, is still added to the paint out of the same organizational rote that produced the erroneous analyses in the first place. What could have been merely another interestingstory of industrial detection is, additionally, a comment on human institutions. Levihasachievedsomethingremarkable and seeminglywithout intent. He has not merely closed the gap between C.P. Snow’s two cultures, he has done better: he has created a work in which no hint of the gap exists. From the biographical material in this book, Levi seemsnever to have made any distinction. Science and the humanities have been inseparably interwoven in his life and in this book. SOLID CUES by Gerald Feinberg.Heinemann, London, 1985.287 pp. $12.95. ISBN:0 67145608 3. Reviewed by Leo Narodny, Martin’s Bay, St. John, Barbados, West Indies. Feinberg, from his chair at Columbia University, looks into the black hole of the future of science with SolidCues and findsastronomy and chemistry collapsing into biology and physics. As he says, “Even gravity waves cannot be used to learn about the inaccessible interiors of such objects.” Where is science going, with the powerful techniques now available? Feinberg’s observations on quantum fields can be postulated for the arts as well as for scientists. As Einstein asserted, the properties of any ‘empty’ region of space depend on the presence and form of matter nearby. It can be said that quantumfieldsarethecoreof reality. It can also be said that every ‘friendly’ artist has a quantum field of influence. Feinberg proceeds fromthe stateof the art and what can be understood from particle physics to forecast the next 40 years of discoveries, particularly as they relate to biology and the scienceof life as it can be measured and formulated, thereby focusing...