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the atom—from wells to szilard 9 chaPter 1 The Atom—From H. G. Wells to Leo Szilard The discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s would qualify as beginning what Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm shift in scientific knowledge. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he uses the term “paradigm” to signify the set of beliefs shared by scientific communities and asks the question, Does the world itself change with paradigms? His answer: “Outside the laboratory everyday affairs usually continue as before.”1 Supposing, however, a writer wanted to incorporate such a discovery into a novel. Kuhn himself recognizes that paradigms exist with slightly different meanings in linguistics and the law and even began speculating on its applicability to the arts. If we take the term to indicate a characteristic or exemplary narrative pattern, then a shift in the scientific sense might carry implications of related shifts in narrative. This is what happens in fiction dealing with the extraordinary forces unleashed by nuclear fission in a context of war. From H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free on, atomic war does not only kill thousands and cause massive destruction, but it also causes a rupture in the narratives themselves , introducing discontinuities that become important for the narratives to bridge over. Again and again in the postwar period novels dealing with nuclear war are set in a future where the past has to be painstakingly reconstructed by regaining access to history. Typically these novels set up a future retrospect, a future vantage point from which to examine how events have developed from the reader’s present to the postwar era of the narrative present. Spencer Weart points out that nuclear energy tales typically tend to focus on some “tremendous forbidden secret” and, because they deal with one of the most hidden aspects of nature, an “attack upon the secret things in search of mastery.”2 Robert Cromie’s The Crack of Doom, the first novel to describe an atomic weapon, 10 under the shadow describes the attempts by Herbert Brande (probably named after Ibsen’s obsessed idealist), a scientific genius whose talents include telepathy, to destroy the world with a new device. The novel is narrated by a young medic, Arthur Marcel, whose interest in Brande is stimulated when he tells him roundly, “The Universe is a mistake !”3 For the rest of the novel, Marcel tries to discover Brande’s plan and prevent him from putting it into practice. In other words, the action is an investigation of Brande’s mentality rather than the technology of the weapon he has devised, and his logic runs: The atom is the smallest unit in nature but it can be destroyed; therefore, nature is destructible. In fact, strife is a principle of nature, since it is the way life itself emerges, and Brande’s fantastic dream is of merging humanity back into the matrix of protoplasm. This “nirvana,” as he calls it, therefore represents a kind of atomic mysticism where he doesn’t see himself as killing, only returning humanity to the life pool in the universe. Comparing himself with earlier seekers of the principle of life, he uses a characteristic Victorian image of achievement, of attaining the heights: “But we know more than they. We have climbed no doubt in the footholds they have carved, and we have gained the summit they only saw in the mirage of hope.” Although he describes himself as a scientist, Brande actually leads a cult of devoted followers very like the physicist in J. B. Priestley’s 1938 novel The Doomsday Men. Priestley describes an enormous secret installation in the Mojave Desert; Cromie’s hero has chosen a deserted Pacific island. Priestley’s scientist’s motivation is less clear, but he declares that he wants to perform “one last triumphant stroke, one supreme act of defiance” in deciding the moment of humanity’s exit.4 Shortly before Brande detonates his device, he declares his intention in ringing tones: “I stand . . . I may say with one foot on sea and one on land, for I hold the elemental secret of them both. And I swear by the living god—Science incarnate —that the suffering of the centuries is over, that for this earth and all that it contains, from this night and for ever, Time will be no more!”5 In both novels the discovery of atomic fission licenses the scientist to play destiny with the whole race and forms part of a Promethean dream of...

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