Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (review)

Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett (1897–1974) earned the 1948 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on cosmic radiation and the bubble chamber, served as president of Britain's Royal Society (1965–70), and lived at the center of political controversy for his leftist convictions and activism in matters of military policy and postcolonial economic development. Until now his life has not been the focus of a proper biography, and so Mary Jo Nye has provided the remedy long overdue. Blackett's surviving family and colleagues have cooperated, allowing Nye to reach far beyond the scope of official documents and piece together a fascinating life story. Her chief interest lies in reconciling Blackett's scientific and political careers, a subject of interest to anyone pondering our culture's allergic reaction to combining professional authority and political activity.

Readers of this journal will note that technology is a recurring theme in Blackett's development as scientist and activist. For instance, his professional identity was as an experimental, not theoretical, physicist, and his skill in designing experiments aroused envy even among theorists. (In 1926, J. Robert Oppenheimer joked to friends that he planned to poison Blackett for showing him up during his stint in the Cavendish Laboratory.) Nye tells how Blackett's career began in the workshop at the Royal Naval College at Osborne and Dartmouth, where he first developed his talent with experimental apparatus. After serving in World War I, he left the navy to pursue an undergraduate physics degree at Cambridge and then began work in Ernest Rutherford's Cavendish Lab. It gave Blackett a lifelong subversive thrill that he never completed a doctorate.

Nye explains that Blackett's sophisticated and thorough empiricism, which he called "phenomenology," was executed in the confidence that experiments make unique contributions to physics. His perfectionism with experimentation had its costs, however. Although Nye makes a convincing case that Blackett and colleague Giuseppe Occhialini deserve credit for discovering the positron, Blackett held up publishing until he had completed exhaustive experiments and the credit (and 1936 Nobel Prize) went to Carl Anderson of the California Institute of Technology. Blackett's own Nobel Prize, in 1948, recognized his contributions to bubble chamber technique. His dogged thoroughness marked his entire career. In the 1950s, he frequently frustrated colleagues by delaying publication of his geophysical work, work that breathed life into the then-dormant theory of plate tectonics.

Technology and its uses also formed the center of Blackett's political activities. Nye makes clear that Blackett based his Fabian (non-Marxian socialist) politics on the same rigorous empiricism as his science. Never a pacifist like many among the British scientific Left, in 1934 Blackett joined the Tizard Committee, which green-lighted the British radar program. Optimizing radar's use drove Blackett to develop and apply the new field of operations research during the war, thereby turning the airplane into an effective antisubmarine weapon. His empiricism led him to side with Henry Tizard against Churchill's science advisor, Frederick Lindemann, in condemning the Allied strategic bombing campaign on the grounds that it was ineffective and a waste of lives and resources. This made him enemies, even though the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey later proved most of his major indictments to be correct.

Blackett continued thus into the cold war and the 1950s, condemning nuclear weapons generally and American war planning in particular, all the while refusing to join the bandwagon in criticizing the Soviets. Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and MI5 kept files on him. Despite all this, Blackett was elected president of the Royal Society, during which time he also served as the science advisor for the Ministry of Technology in Harold Wilson's Labour government—the latter post yielding him a peerage in the House of Lords. He spent these years trying to reinvigorate British industry and encouraging economic development in the decolonizing world.

Blackett's integrity and intellectual honesty, along...