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Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist
It is the end of an historical epoch, but to an old professor of physics, Victor Jakob, sitting in his unlighted study, eating dubious bread with jam made from turnips, it is the end of a way of thinking in his own subject. Younger men have challenged the classical world picture of physics and are looking forward to observational tests of Einstein’s new theory of relativity as well as the creation of a quantum mechanics of the atom. It is a time of both apprehension and hope.
In this remarkable book, the reader literally inhabits the mind of a scientist while Professor Jakob meditates on the discoveries of the past fifty years and reviews his own life and career―his scientific ambitions and his record of small successes. He recalls the great men who taught or inspired Helmholtz, Hertz, Maxwell, Planck, and above all Paul Drude, whose life and mind exemplified the classical virtues of proportion, harmony, and grace that Jakob reveres. In Drude’s shocking and unexpected suicide, we see reflected Jakob’s own bewilderment and loss of bearings as his once secure world comes to an end in the horrors of the war and in the cultural fragmentation wrought by twentieth-century modernism. His attempt to come to terms with himself, with his life in science, and with his spiritual legacy will affect deeply everyone who cares about the fragile structures of civilization that must fall before the onrush of progress.
In this remarkable book, the reader literally inhabits the mind of a scientist while Professor Jakob meditates on the discoveries of the past fifty years and reviews his own life and career―his scientific ambitions and his record of small successes. He recalls the great men who taught or inspired Helmholtz, Hertz, Maxwell, Planck, and above all Paul Drude, whose life and mind exemplified the classical virtues of proportion, harmony, and grace that Jakob reveres. In Drude’s shocking and unexpected suicide, we see reflected Jakob’s own bewilderment and loss of bearings as his once secure world comes to an end in the horrors of the war and in the cultural fragmentation wrought by twentieth-century modernism. His attempt to come to terms with himself, with his life in science, and with his spiritual legacy will affect deeply everyone who cares about the fragile structures of civilization that must fall before the onrush of progress.
229 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 1, 2024
An evocative sketch of a bygone era! Through the format of a fictionalized composite figure in Professor Victor Jakob, a classical physicist nearing retirement age as of 1919, the distinguished historian of science Russell McCormmach paints a picture of intellectual life in an era of revolutionary change, from the perspective not of the protagonists themselves but of one whose dearly held principles were being overturned. The text, about equal in length to a novella, contains a series of pericopes on scenes in the professor’s life over a few months towards the close of World War I. Two appendices offer explanatory notes and contain useful references to contemporary sources such as lectures, correspondence and diaries.
McCormmach has multiple themes to pursue, precisely in their interrelationship. First is the prevailing attitude towards an academic career as a vocation. In those days, the term vocation carried many more connotations than the word suggests for us, who tend to see in it little more than a specialization one acquires in order to hold a job and make a career; for people of the period in question, it signifies a combination of personal inclination, coupled with a sense of duty and professional responsibility to make the best of oneself as an act of service to the nation (and to God, if one was religious). Therefore, intellectual integrity demanded a more intimate connection between one’s professional activity and one’s overall philosophical approach to life as a whole than is generally the case these days. The reader seeking a deeper appreciation of this major aspect of German culture will want to turn to Max Weber’s celebrated vocation lectures of 1917-1919, which are exemplary about how Germans thought about such things in that period and which this recensionist hopes to review before long. Connected with this theme in the present work is a circumstantial inspection of academic politics in the German university system. Unlike the decentralized system with which most American or English readers will be familiar, the German universities were highly centralized under the direction of the Prussian ministry of culture.
Here, McCormmach’s exposition can comment on the nature of anti-Semitism as reflected in professional conduct at the university. This issue happens to be a little more involved than one might suppose since Jews could not simply be excluded from academic life – they were too intellectually capable for that, but prejudice certainly did exist and played itself out in subtler ways. As a rule, the prized positions as full professor of experimental physics were reserved for non-Jews while the upcoming discipline of theoretical physics tended to be viewed as a field where Jews could display their talent (and whose reputation suffered thereby through its association with Jewishness).
Another closely related topic is the whole subject of institutional life in the department of physics of the contemporary university. This recensionist once had the good fortune to spend a year as a DAAD Sonderstipendiat studying mathematical physics at the University of Heidelberg. As a master’s-level student, he was given a desk on the ground floor of the physics department, which was then housed in a neoclassical villa on the Philosophenweg overlooking the town center from the north bank of the Neckar river; every day he would commute on the tram, walk across the bridge over the Neckar and climb the hill up to the institute. McCormmach’s depiction of several aspects of life at his fictional institute of physics rings true (centering on personal interactions between the professor and his superior, the head of the institute or Geheimrath, and among others around such as the lower-ranked Privatdozent, the wartime students, the custodian and so forth).
Finally, the setting of this fictional account in the year 1919 permits the author to comment on World War I from the German point of view and its effects on daily life by 1918 onwards. This theme is not merely incidental, since academics took it upon themselves to contribute to the war effort as much as possible, not just through their moral support but also, for physicists and engineers, by redirecting their research to practical ends that might help the German army in its fighting (for instance, through a better understanding of acoustics so as to instruct gunners on how to locate the position of enemy cannons by timing the reports with stopwatches).
McCormmach’s central theme as indicated in the title, however, concerns the relationship between the established classical physics versus the old quantum mechanics then getting underway. Far more than as presented by the dry discipline one encounters today in freshman physics lectures, for educated men around the turn of the twentieth century, classical physics was accorded a standing as an ideal worldview and methodology. Classical indicates approbation! Therefore, the quantum revolution threatened deep-seated principles and must have been perceived as profoundly disruptive. Through his fictional character of Victor Jakob, McCormmach succeeds admirably in portraying just why the arrival of the radical quantum mechanics was so disturbing to one trained in the classical tradition (which represents not just a certain formal school of thought and its technical premises but implicates the entire Hellenic spirit of rational inquiry going back to the pre-Socratics). For the empirical successes flowing from the new quantum principles were undeniable. Thus, the very world itself seems to be telling the classical physicist that he has been fundamentally mistaken all his life about what he believes in most dearly!
Four stars: engaging, harbor no great expectations for the work as a purely literary exercise (it remains too slight for that, the characters are not fully developed and there is no plot-line) but look on it rather as a vehicle for the author to reconstruct a synthetic portrait of the atmosphere surrounding German academic life during the latter part of the nineteenth century through to its crisis during World War I. Recommendation: the book is best read after one has gained some knowledge of the research programs of the time (Maxwellian electrodynamics, Lorentz’ ion theory, Einstein’s special relativity, Ostwald’s energeticism and Wien’s electromagnetic world-picture, Mie’s work on a unified theory of fields and matter, the old quantum mechanics of Planck, Bohr, Sommerfeld et al.). Then one can pick up on the signals McCormmach sends, while if one hadn’t the background they would pass by like only so much jargon; but in McCormmach’s text itself there is neither space nor opportunity to go into the details one ought to know in order fully to appreciate what he wants to say.
McCormmach has multiple themes to pursue, precisely in their interrelationship. First is the prevailing attitude towards an academic career as a vocation. In those days, the term vocation carried many more connotations than the word suggests for us, who tend to see in it little more than a specialization one acquires in order to hold a job and make a career; for people of the period in question, it signifies a combination of personal inclination, coupled with a sense of duty and professional responsibility to make the best of oneself as an act of service to the nation (and to God, if one was religious). Therefore, intellectual integrity demanded a more intimate connection between one’s professional activity and one’s overall philosophical approach to life as a whole than is generally the case these days. The reader seeking a deeper appreciation of this major aspect of German culture will want to turn to Max Weber’s celebrated vocation lectures of 1917-1919, which are exemplary about how Germans thought about such things in that period and which this recensionist hopes to review before long. Connected with this theme in the present work is a circumstantial inspection of academic politics in the German university system. Unlike the decentralized system with which most American or English readers will be familiar, the German universities were highly centralized under the direction of the Prussian ministry of culture.
Here, McCormmach’s exposition can comment on the nature of anti-Semitism as reflected in professional conduct at the university. This issue happens to be a little more involved than one might suppose since Jews could not simply be excluded from academic life – they were too intellectually capable for that, but prejudice certainly did exist and played itself out in subtler ways. As a rule, the prized positions as full professor of experimental physics were reserved for non-Jews while the upcoming discipline of theoretical physics tended to be viewed as a field where Jews could display their talent (and whose reputation suffered thereby through its association with Jewishness).
Another closely related topic is the whole subject of institutional life in the department of physics of the contemporary university. This recensionist once had the good fortune to spend a year as a DAAD Sonderstipendiat studying mathematical physics at the University of Heidelberg. As a master’s-level student, he was given a desk on the ground floor of the physics department, which was then housed in a neoclassical villa on the Philosophenweg overlooking the town center from the north bank of the Neckar river; every day he would commute on the tram, walk across the bridge over the Neckar and climb the hill up to the institute. McCormmach’s depiction of several aspects of life at his fictional institute of physics rings true (centering on personal interactions between the professor and his superior, the head of the institute or Geheimrath, and among others around such as the lower-ranked Privatdozent, the wartime students, the custodian and so forth).
Finally, the setting of this fictional account in the year 1919 permits the author to comment on World War I from the German point of view and its effects on daily life by 1918 onwards. This theme is not merely incidental, since academics took it upon themselves to contribute to the war effort as much as possible, not just through their moral support but also, for physicists and engineers, by redirecting their research to practical ends that might help the German army in its fighting (for instance, through a better understanding of acoustics so as to instruct gunners on how to locate the position of enemy cannons by timing the reports with stopwatches).
McCormmach’s central theme as indicated in the title, however, concerns the relationship between the established classical physics versus the old quantum mechanics then getting underway. Far more than as presented by the dry discipline one encounters today in freshman physics lectures, for educated men around the turn of the twentieth century, classical physics was accorded a standing as an ideal worldview and methodology. Classical indicates approbation! Therefore, the quantum revolution threatened deep-seated principles and must have been perceived as profoundly disruptive. Through his fictional character of Victor Jakob, McCormmach succeeds admirably in portraying just why the arrival of the radical quantum mechanics was so disturbing to one trained in the classical tradition (which represents not just a certain formal school of thought and its technical premises but implicates the entire Hellenic spirit of rational inquiry going back to the pre-Socratics). For the empirical successes flowing from the new quantum principles were undeniable. Thus, the very world itself seems to be telling the classical physicist that he has been fundamentally mistaken all his life about what he believes in most dearly!
Four stars: engaging, harbor no great expectations for the work as a purely literary exercise (it remains too slight for that, the characters are not fully developed and there is no plot-line) but look on it rather as a vehicle for the author to reconstruct a synthetic portrait of the atmosphere surrounding German academic life during the latter part of the nineteenth century through to its crisis during World War I. Recommendation: the book is best read after one has gained some knowledge of the research programs of the time (Maxwellian electrodynamics, Lorentz’ ion theory, Einstein’s special relativity, Ostwald’s energeticism and Wien’s electromagnetic world-picture, Mie’s work on a unified theory of fields and matter, the old quantum mechanics of Planck, Bohr, Sommerfeld et al.). Then one can pick up on the signals McCormmach sends, while if one hadn’t the background they would pass by like only so much jargon; but in McCormmach’s text itself there is neither space nor opportunity to go into the details one ought to know in order fully to appreciate what he wants to say.
October 4, 2019
Night Thoughts is an exceptionally well-researched and thoroughly admirable work of historical fiction. 4 stars for the immensity of the author's effort in constructing the interior life of the novel's protagonist: a German physicist who came of professional age during the last great phase of his discipline's 'classical' era and is, as an older man, experiencing the dislocations wrought by the 'new physics'; an intellectual in the 'classic' mode whose entire world is being remade by various disruptions (war, technological change, social change, etc.) in fin-de-siecle Europe. The book is an exceptionally thoughtful probing of the mind of such a man. Less 1 star though, since it is -- alas, as well -- a rather dull read.
The author himself notes (in an epilogue on sources) that the novel's protagonist isn't as fully developed -- as a character -- as would have been the case had the book in review been a biography or a more traditional work of fiction. It's an honest and astute observation. And it cuts to the heart of what I, myself, found wanting in this novel. Night Thoughts is a short book that felt long to read. It's a very adroit exercise, but a tepid piece of fiction. Not because the author lacks writing skill, simply because he pays scant attention (by design) to character development.
Fascinated as I am with the history of science in general, the history of physics in particular, and the history of ideas more broadly -- I'm glad I read Night Thoughts. As a gloss on non-fiction reading I've done on fin-de-siecle European intellectual history and the history of physics, it provided thoughtful added perspective. I recommend it to readers with similar interests. But I can't recommend it highly as work of literature.
The author himself notes (in an epilogue on sources) that the novel's protagonist isn't as fully developed -- as a character -- as would have been the case had the book in review been a biography or a more traditional work of fiction. It's an honest and astute observation. And it cuts to the heart of what I, myself, found wanting in this novel. Night Thoughts is a short book that felt long to read. It's a very adroit exercise, but a tepid piece of fiction. Not because the author lacks writing skill, simply because he pays scant attention (by design) to character development.
Fascinated as I am with the history of science in general, the history of physics in particular, and the history of ideas more broadly -- I'm glad I read Night Thoughts. As a gloss on non-fiction reading I've done on fin-de-siecle European intellectual history and the history of physics, it provided thoughtful added perspective. I recommend it to readers with similar interests. But I can't recommend it highly as work of literature.
December 11, 2017
Fascinating discussion of classical and quantum physics in the context of the cultural developements in the era of WWI (expressionism, moral philosophy, abstraction, music, existentialism, nationalism, antisemitism) especially from the perspective of an early skeptic. Read it in a day!
August 9, 2011
I'm not sure what I was expecting with this book. The title and blurbs couldn't help but intrigue me with their combination of physics, the WW1 era and the promise (fulfilled less richly than I'd hoped) of what it felt like to live in a world of emerging uncertainties. To some extent the science was over my head and because of that I no doubt missed many nuances, but the portrayal of the fictional main character was finely done - it was all too easy to picture myself in his shoes. This is a book I might well come back to.
June 21, 2017
I did enjoy this, and I have to say that it is a truly original idea. The author's character is a fictional amalgamation of real physicists whose twilight years coincide with the onset of World War I and the rise of Einstein's theory of general relativity. I don't remember enough physics these days to completely appreciate that aspect of the novel, but the character study is fascinating and it was well researched. I'm glad I discovered this one.
February 2, 2023
This was the first book I read for my 2nd philosophy class, junior year: Modern Physics and Moral Responsibility. The book was published by McCormmach in 1982, and it is based on extensive research of German physicists in the early 20th century. The story takes place in Germany in 1918, at the end of World War I. The main character is a fictional German classical physicist named
Viktor Jakob, who is an amalgam of real German classical physicists of this time period.
One of the main issues in the novel is the transition from classical physics to relativistic physics in the early 1900s. Jakob finds himself stuck in his ways as a classical physicist, despite Einstein's new theories in relativity, and Plank's quantum theory taking control of the physics world. Jakob stays up late at his desk thinking about how classical physics can retain its significance, hence the name of the novel, "Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist." Jakob is a very old man who is clearly depressed and heading down a dark pathway, like his deceased colleague, Paul Drude. Jakob's inner struggles are central to the novel, and McCormmach brings the reader deep into the physicists' mind.
This book also covers themes like German nationalism, the role of physics in war, and international harmony. There is also plenty of historical background contained within the book, as the footnotes mostly reference the actions of real German physicists in the early 20th century. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I'm excited to see what else this class has to offer.
Viktor Jakob, who is an amalgam of real German classical physicists of this time period.
One of the main issues in the novel is the transition from classical physics to relativistic physics in the early 1900s. Jakob finds himself stuck in his ways as a classical physicist, despite Einstein's new theories in relativity, and Plank's quantum theory taking control of the physics world. Jakob stays up late at his desk thinking about how classical physics can retain its significance, hence the name of the novel, "Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist." Jakob is a very old man who is clearly depressed and heading down a dark pathway, like his deceased colleague, Paul Drude. Jakob's inner struggles are central to the novel, and McCormmach brings the reader deep into the physicists' mind.
This book also covers themes like German nationalism, the role of physics in war, and international harmony. There is also plenty of historical background contained within the book, as the footnotes mostly reference the actions of real German physicists in the early 20th century. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I'm excited to see what else this class has to offer.
February 20, 2023
Historical fiction; less about physics and more about the socio-cultural setting of a German physicist near the time of WWI, including the relationship of physics to patriotism and war. Includes the difficulty of a classical physicist dealing with relativity (which relies more on mathematics and abstractions than actual experimentation).
Writes about the principles of quantum theory and relativity and the relation to classical theory almost as an aside in the personal thoughts of this fictional amalgam of a physicist and the angst of the transition to the new theory.
Not much of a plot. More a bunch of reminiscing. But provides interesting material for a sociologist and can give you an idea of some of the basics of quantum theory.
Writes about the principles of quantum theory and relativity and the relation to classical theory almost as an aside in the personal thoughts of this fictional amalgam of a physicist and the angst of the transition to the new theory.
Not much of a plot. More a bunch of reminiscing. But provides interesting material for a sociologist and can give you an idea of some of the basics of quantum theory.
January 6, 2023
It's an interesting story of how it felt to be a "regular" physicist around the turn of the twentieth century, when physics became "modern." Beyond the actual science, I enjoyed the themes of feeling irrelevant and being left behind by progress, though these are understandably upsetting. Overall it's not a bad book, but it can be fairly boring. Lots of soliloquies, lots of thinking, lots of ruminating.
September 8, 2021
I disagree with some of the reviews and even the author himself about the character depth here. I found Jakob to be very well-developed, emotionally complex, and sympathetic. I actually found the book to be quite poignant. As much as it was about a changing scientific order, it was also about war and nationalism. I very much enjoyed it.
December 10, 2024
Lots of potential, short enough, but poor writing.
March 7, 2017
It was fine. Not that great? Interesting that it was about a German guy and it reminded me of Hesse at times in style.
Basically, it attempts to capture, through fiction, the feelings of an average physicist at the onset of the world war. A creative idea, but I kept falling asleep while reading it. Though that might be confounding factors like forcing myself to do required reading.
Basically, it attempts to capture, through fiction, the feelings of an average physicist at the onset of the world war. A creative idea, but I kept falling asleep while reading it. Though that might be confounding factors like forcing myself to do required reading.
September 16, 2013
I read this book nearly 20 years ago, as part of my college "first year seminar." I took up the book again, looking to find something dealing with the sociology of science to use in my own first year seminars. This book will not work, but it was enjoyable to read it again. What WILL work are a few of the essays in Stephan Shapin's recent "Never Pure."
January 1, 2015
Despite my limited knowledge of physics I found the book engaging. I appreciated the unique style.
July 17, 2016
A book with a nicely bleak atmosphere.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews