ESSAY: Focusing on one of Barbara Lovett Cline's scientists, write an essay both defending and criticizing her approach to correlating a scientist's research "style" and achievement with his biography and personality.

In Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Javert is presented as a man who is obsessed with absolutes and with justice. He believes that Jean Valjean is a criminal who stole a loaf of bread, escaped from prison, and, therefore, should be punished. When Javert must come to terms with the fact that Jean Valjean is essentially a better man than he is, Javert sees his world crumble. He cannot bear to believe that the hard facts of the law are not necessarily the most moral way of life, so he faces death instead.

The life of Max Planck is not so dramatic as Javert's tragedy, but the similarity is unmistakable as presented in Barbara Lovett Cline's Men Who Made a New Physics. Planck, too, is a man who believes in order, law, and most importantly absolute truth. Planck's inclination towards this truth was rooted in his upbringing. The men in his family were disciplined to set high goals and to reach them. With his father being a very well respected professor, Planck had a certain devotion to academics. Additionally, he felt comfortable with the orderliness and absolute rules of school (37). The routine of school was applied to his later life and everyday habits. Each day of his life he woke up at the same time, took a walk for the same amount of time, and played the piano at a certain assigned time (51).

Cline attempts to relate Planck's love of organization to his ambitions as a scientist. She succeeds in explaining why Planck chose to study thermodynamics even though it was basically considered by his contemporaries to be a dead topic. He was fascinated by its simplicity. Even though the laws focus on the fact that everything is being driven towards randomness, Planck was attracted to the fact that it can be applied to seemingly unrelated items as an absolute truth. He wanted to continue to demonstrate the wide applicability of the laws, not through experiment, but through reason (41). His devotion to order led him to such an ambition.

One portion of Planck's life that Cline is unable to explain is his working relationships with other scientists. She describes him as having a reserved manner, yet energetic (36). He works on a topic that no one else is interested in but has a desire to have an effect on science (43). He wants to discuss his ideas with others (44) but chooses to study in a solitary environment (41). Cline is unable to reconcile these differences in personality and life goals; she claims he is an orderly and logical man, yet these contradictions do not support that theory.

What is more contradictory between his personality and his research style, however, is his greatest achievement: E = hf. Cline sets up the stage with the main character being so intent in making the laws of thermodynamics absolute. However, at the climax, not only does he abandon his beloved laws, but he contradicts the all-mighty laws of nature. Furthermore, he does this not through reason and logic but by guessing! By giving up his idea that everything is moving towards disorder and by admitting that the problem is statistical, he adopted Boltzman's idea that an increase of entropy was not absolute. Additionally, he derived his formula without fully understanding what it meant. This method of basically putting parts of an equation together without considering what the implications were or whether it was even mathematically reasonable does not seem to coincide with his orderly manner.
Even though Planck undermines her theory that there is a deep connection between a scientist's personality and his achievements, she does not hide this fact. She states quite clearly, "Planck, a most conservative person, introduces what has been called ëthe most revolutionary idea which ever has shaken physics'- the quantum theory" (50). Later, she weakly attempts to save her thesis by explaining that Planck did not realize the full implications of his discovery (61). She states within her book that once he realized that his work suggested that classical physics could not be applied to the microscopic world, he worked towards trying to disprove the very thing that made him famous (ibid.). However, in a footnote, she admits, "it is not possible to know for certain what Planck did or did not recognize at that time." It seems that she includes in the body of the book that which is more helpful to her thesis, not what may be true.

Cline's main goal in writing this book was to bring the scientists behind the theories to life. In this, she succeeds. However, her attempt to explain how the scientists arrived at their goals through studying their private life and personality was not a total success. Perhaps she paints the scientists too much as caricatures. She presents Planck as a Javert- a man willing to die for justice and order. Yet, when it comes down to it, Planck got lucky playing around with some numbers. When he realized what he had done, he did not kill himself. He was even able to eventually come to terms with the fact that the theory that entropy must increase is not an absolute but a statistical truth. In her attempt to make the scientists real, she has created characters that lose the humanity that she is attempting to show. By making Planck so absolute, she makes him unbelievable and thus undermining her true goal.
 

Back to Rise of Modern Science	Learning
Main Page	Evaluation
Teaching	Reflection