"Ever since I began studying science,” Jeremy Bernstein writes, “I have been struck by its human characteristics. Yet in his autobiography, Einstein said that he took up science precisely as an alternative to the ‘merely personal.’ In fact there is no alternative to the ‘merely personal,’ as Einstein’s own life demonstrates.” Thus the title of Mr. Bernstein’s sparkling new collection of essays, which represent much of his work over the past ten years. When he first began writing about science for the New Yorker years ago, its editor, William Shawn, suggested that Mr. Bernstein write about science as a form of human experience. This he has been doing with great aplomb and success since 1960—his book Einstein, for example, was nominated for a National Book Award. In The Merely Personal, his essays range from an attempt to explain the quantum theory through the use of Tom Stoppard’s play Hapgood, to a critical review of recent books on Einstein. They describe Mr. Bernstein’s encounters with such people as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Bobby Fischer, and W. H. Auden. Readers will find an explanation of the origin of Newton’s contention that he stood on the shoulders of giants; a description of a surreal encounter with the logician Kurt Gödel; a discussion of computer chess; and an analysis of the attempts of the Germans to build an atomic bomb during World War II. Most of all they will find a relentlessly curious mind at work, its product conveyed in a compulsively readable style.
Although he was trained and once worked in theoretical physics, Jeremy Bernstein is best known as a longtime science writer for
The New Yorker magazine, in whose pages he wrote sprawling essays on such matters as quantum mechanics, probability, and the birth of the nuclear age.
The Merely Personal gathers several of his magazine pieces, many written in the last 10 years. They address the origin and history of scientific concepts, probe into the deepest workings of game theory and chess machines, and raise big questions: If German scientists had succeeded in making a nuclear weapon, would they have turned it over to the Nazi government? Is reality knowable? Does God, in fact, play dice with the universe?
The best parts of Bernstein's book, however, are those that look into the often strange lives of individual scientists, such as the mathematician Kurt Gödel, "a full-blown paranoiac" who used his isolation from the world to afford a new way of looking into logical systems, and the scientist Richard Feynman, whose "Mozartean genius in physics seemed to be combined with an almost equally Mozartean urge to play the clown." Bernstein's portraits of Einstein, Kepler, Oppenheimer, and other major scientific theoreticians and practitioners offer a bird's-eye view of how research is conducted and breakthroughs are made, all delivered in highly readable prose. --Gregory McNamee
