Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Bohr had a favorite novel. Its author, Poul Martin Møller, introduced En Dansk Students Eventyr (The Adventures of a Danish Student) as a reading before the University of Copenhagen student union in 1824. It was published posthumously. It was short, witty and deceptively lighthearted. In an important lecture in 1960, “The Unity of Human Knowledge,” Bohr described Møller’s book as “an unfinished novel still read with delight by the older as well as the younger generation in [Denmark].” It gives, he said, “a remarkably vivid and suggestive account of the interplay between the various aspects of our position [as human beings].” 220After the Great War the Danish government helped Bohr establish an institute in Copenhagen. The most promising young physicists in the world pilgrimaged to study there. 221“Every one of those who came into closer contact with Bohr at the Institute,” writes his collaborator Léon Rosenfeld, “as soon as he showed himself sufficiently proficient in the Danish language, was acquainted with the little book: it was part of his initiation.” 222

What magic was contained in the little book? It was the first Danish novel with a contemporary setting: student life, and especially the extended conversations of two student cousins, one a “licentiate”—a degree candidate—the other a “philistine.” The philistine is a familiar type, says Bohr, “very soberly efficient in practical affairs”; the licentiate, more exotic, “is addicted to remote philosophical meditations detrimental to his social activities.” 223Bohr quotes one of the licentiate’s “philosophical meditations”:

[I start] to think about my own thoughts of the situation in which I find myself. I even think that I think of it, and divide myself into an infinite retrogressive sequence of “I’s” who consider each other. I do not know at which “I” to stop as the actual, and in the moment I stop at one, there is indeed again an “I” which stops at it. I become confused and feel a dizziness as if I were looking down into a bottomless abyss. 224

“Bohr kept coming back to the different meanings of the word ‘I,’” Robert Oppenheimer remembered, “the ‘I’ that acts, the ‘I,’ that thinks, the ‘I,’ that studies itself.” 225

Other conditions that trouble the licentiate in Møller’s novel might be taken from a clinical description of the conditions that troubled the young Niels Bohr. This disability, for example:

Certainly I have seen thoughts put on paper before; but since I have come distinctly to perceive the contradiction implied in such an action, I feel completely incapable of forming a single written sentence…. I torture myself to solve the unaccountable puzzle, how one can think, talk, or write. You see, my friend, a movement presupposes a direction. The mind cannot proceed without moving along a certain line; but before following this line, it must already have thought it. Therefore one has already thought every thought before one thinks it. Thus every thought, which seems the work of a minute, presupposes an eternity. This could almost drive me to madness. 226

Or this complaint, on the fragmentation of the self and its multiplying duplicity, which Bohr in later years was wont to quote:

Thus on many occasions man divides himself into two persons, one of whom tries to fool the other, while a third one, who is in fact the same as the other two, is filled with wonder at this confusion. In short, thinking becomes dramatic and quietly acts the most complicated plots with itself and for itself; and the spectator again and again becomes actor. 227

“Bohr would point to those scenes,” Rosenfeld notes, “in which the licentiate describes how he loses the count of his many egos, or [discourses] on the impossibility of formulating a thought, and from these fanciful antinomies he would lead his interlocutor… to the heart of the problem of unambiguous communication of experience, whose earnestness he thus dramatically emphasized.” 228Rosenfeld worshiped Bohr; he failed to see, or chose not to report, that for Bohr the struggles of the licentiate were more than “fanciful antinomies.”

Ratiocination—that is the technical term for what the licentiate does, the term for what the young Bohr did as well—is a defense mechanism against anxiety. Thought spirals, panicky and compulsive. Doubt doubles and redoubles, paralyzing action, emptying out the world. The mechanism is infinitely regressive because once the victim knows the trick, he can doubt anything, even doubt itself. Philosophically the phenomenon could be interesting, but as a practical matter ratiocination is a way of stalling. If work is never finished, its quality cannot be judged. The trouble is that stalling postpones the confrontation and adds that guilt to the burden. Anxiety increases; the mechanism accelerates its spiraling flights; the self feels as if it will fragment; the multiplying “I” dramatizes the feeling of impending breakup. At that point madness reveals its horrors; the image that recurred in Bohr’s conversation and writing throughout his life was the licentiate’s “bottomless abyss.” 229We are “suspended in language,” Bohr liked to say, evoking that abyss; and one of his favorite quotations was two lines from Schiller: 230

But it was not in Møller that Bohr found solid footing. He needed more than a novel, however apposite, for that. He needed what we all need for sanity: he needed love and work.

“I took a great interest in philosophy in the years after my [high school] examination,” Bohr said in his last interview. “I came especially in close connection with Høffding.” 232Harald Høffding was Bohr’s father’s old friend, the other charter member of the Friday-night discussion group. 233Bohr had known him from childhood. Born in 1843, he was twelve years older than Christian Bohr, a profound, sensitive and kindly man. He was a skillful interpreter of the work of Søren Kierkegaard and of William James and a respected philosopher in his own right: an anti-Hegelian, a pragmatist interested in questions of perceptive discontinuity. Bohr became a Høffding student. It seems certain he also turned personally to Høffding for help. He made a good choice. Høffding had struggled through a crisis of his own as a young man, a crisis that brought him, he wrote later, near “despair.” 234

Høffding was twelve years old when Søren Kierkegaard died of a lung infection in chill November 1855, old enough to have heard of the near-riot at the grave a somber walk outside the city walls, old enough for the strange, awkward, fiercely eloquent poet of multiple pseudonyms to have been a living figure. With that familiarity as a point of origin Høffding later turned to Kierkegaard’s writings for solace from despair. He found it especially in Stages on Life’s Way, a black-humorous dramatization of a dialectic of spiritual stages, each independent, disconnected, bridgeable only by an irrational leap of faith. Høffding championed the prolific and difficult Dane in gratitude; his second major book, published in 1892, would help establish Kierkegaard as an important philosopher rather than merely a literary stylist given to outbursts of raving, as Danish critics had first chosen to regard him.

Kierkegaard had much to offer Bohr, especially as Høffding interpreted him. Kierkegaard examined the same states of mind as had Poul Martin Møller. Møller taught Kierkegaard moral philosophy at the university and seems to have been a guide. 235After Møller’s death Kierkegaard dedicated The Concept of Dread to him and referred to him in a draft of the dedication as “my youth’s enthusiasm, my beginning’s confidant, mighty trumpet of my awakening, my departed friend.” 236From Møller to Kierkegaard to Høffding to Bohr: the line of descent was direct.