Einstein in Spain

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 179 Discovering is sprinkled with errors and debatable assertations. Examples of the former are: Bell Telephone Laboratory scientists before the AT&T breakup did not have almost complete research freedom (p. 12); it is Donald, not William, Beaver (p. 40); to denigrate U.S. education, Root-Bernstein asserts (p. 43) that most U.S. Nobel prize winners were trained overseas, but a count for physics discloses only nine such out of fifty-three. R. W. Wood was an American, not a British, scientist (p. 94); Davy did not make the 1840 statement on page 155, as he had been dead for many years. To gently knock T. S. Kuhn, the author reports that “someone” discovered he used para­ digm in 150 different ways; Masterman merely found 21 different usages. In 1939 there was no universal dogma on “the inviolability of atomic structure” (p. 402). Not only had scientists worked out a number of natural radioactivity decay series, but in 1932 Cockcroft and Walton at the Cavendish accomplished the first successful artifi­ cial transmutation. At the time of this writing Barbara McClintock is alive, contrary to page 403. It is to Root-Bernstein’s credit that the text does not end with some simplistic prescription for successful discovering. Instead, there is a full menu, perhaps contradictory in part, certainly somewhat unclear as to what program is being recommended. I like to think that the author, despite his vast self-assurance even when outside the areas of his own research, is intuitively reacting to what is the only lesson of good history: that the past is at least as complicated and as murky as the present. Nathan Reingold Dr. Reingold is senior historian at the National Museum of American History. Einstein in Spain: Relativity and the Recovery of Science. By Thomas F. Glick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 391; illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $42.00. The comparative study of the acceptance of scientific theory and its influence on culture and society was not a new subdiscipline even in the days of J. T. Merz. But during the past few decades it has been cultivated with increasing energy, and some nice results have ap­ peared. Even with respect to the relatively narrow case of the national reception of (or objections to) Einstein’s theories of relativity, there now exists a substantial corpus from the pens of many scholars, including Stanley Goldberg (starting with his pioneering dissertation comparing cases of Germany, France, Britain, and the United States), Michel Biezunski (France), Loren Graham (Britain and the USSR), Barbara Reeves (Italy), and J. M. Sanchez Ron (Britain), among many others. 180 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Thomas F. Glick’s book, Einstein in Spain: Relativity and the Recovery ofScience, is a fine addition to this shelf. On one level, it is a thorough account of the events, personalities, and publications attending Ein­ stein’s triumphant two-week trip to Spain in February—March 1923—a trip not without its share of grotesque and hilarious mo­ ments, as was also the case for his other voyages. But the main achievement of this book is to show how, both during Einstein’s visit and in its aftermath, the person and his scientific message became, as it were, a prism that refracted, and separated out for detailed study, the complex set of strains in the cultural and political life of Spain. From one moment to the next, one could not have predicted which group or faction, coming from which part of the whole spectrum, would attempt to attach itself to Einstein or reveal itself in hostility. Einstein and his science become tools for analyzing the agents and trends of his time. Anyone who has had the chance to work in the Einstein Archives knows this to have been true wherever Einstein went: the voluminous set of correspondence and other records of interactions have become the veritable eyepiece of an optical instru­ ment through which one glimpses a large part of our century in a new way. This surely accounts for some of the continuing fascination of scholars with this figure. Einstein arrived in Spain at an opportune point in history, just about

Art history · Einstein · Epistemology · Physics · Statement (logic) · Classics · Historical Studies in Science · History · Mathematical Physics · Philosophy