Godkin Lecture Series at Harvard University; Lecture #1

The following program is presented by radio station WGBH FM in Boston and distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. From sound as they had at Harvard University. The first of the 1960 series of God can lecture us. The British novelist and physicist C.P. Snow will speak on science and government. Thank you. Thank. Here is Mr. PC been almost three years since Sir Charles and Lady snow are with us here in an earlier visit and we are very happy to have them back with us again. This is the first new series of God can lecture. Sir

Charles is extraordinarily well qualified to be this year's God lecturer. He began his career as a professional scientist and was for a considerable period fellow and tutor of Christ's College Cambridge during the Second World War. He was in charge of the selection of scientific personnel for war research in Great Britain. He served for 14 years after the war as a member of the Civil Service Commission and he is still an advisor to that body. And all along as you all know he has continued to write a series of distinguished novels. Under the intriguing general title strangers and brothers. The inclusive inclusive subject of the lectures he used to give here tonight

and tomorrow and Thursday night is science and government. It is my great privilege to welcome sir child Charles back to our community to present him to the audience in Cambridge tonight. Thank you Mr. President. The price. Ladies and gentlemen I'm very pleased that you mentioned that last slide on the road and it's one of the things I really am proud of. And I'm very happy and very honored to be here this evening. I used to spend some time in university. I devoted a bit of thought to them in my time and this year I happen to have

seen a good deal of three of the great universities of the world. One is the English Cambridge where I don't now live but I do go up from time to time. The other is the University of Moscow which is a great university and the third is where my wife and I are spending the winter they are all full. Sitting on the campus but coming down I felt as I felt before that in many ways this is the most splendid university I ever set foot in and I don't feel faintly apologetic that I get it. Some American institution would. I can only admire as a distant spectator. And one for which I feel sometimes happy that I have no responsibility.

From Englishman to feel that. Well my ancestors as well as yours and we feel that we had something to do with it. It'll. Mean some technical difficulty to harm to give these lectures to you you won't be surprised to know that I have in fact written them out. The Harvard University Press would have been put across with me if I'm not the Messiah. On the other hand if I go away for three consecutive lectures it will be extremely punishing for you moderately punishing for me and I'm sorry if you were bored and I'd be even sorrier if I were. With your permission Mr. President I'm going to do exactly what I did with the re-elect.

At my own Cambridge 18 months or so ago I had the lecture written and I tried to give a kind of fairly free and easy gloss on what actually was in the text. I hope that what I say has some vague reference to what I've actually written. I don't get into it but I imagine it probably will. If anyone wants to hold me to account I'm prepared to stand by the text. But I'm not prepared to stand by the written by the spoken word so so that in mind when you have bones to pick with me. There is one further difficulty. The unfortunate Well unfortunately or fortunately a good deal of what I say has to be supported by documentary evidence. So I have to refer to this yellow paper that you see on the table in front of me that is inevitable because I can't memorize the various documents letters we will

not which are contained. So you're going to get a very uneasy compromise between a kind of extempore lecture written like intellect with recourse to documents. I can't do any better I'm sorry. And finally it isn't easy in this particular subject to make a very natural break because I've written this as a continuous narrative and thought of it as such. That is why I don't think it will profit wouldn't be profitable to have like to have questions tonight. I may very well be. When I finished. So you must forgive me if in fact the break tomorrow seems a little artificial. Well that being said here goes. One of the most. Bizarre features of any advanced society is that the cardinal choices are made by a handful of men in secret and at least in

legal fall finally or by men who don't understand the full content of the choices who don't know the background from which they arise nor the consequences which will follow. But I mean of course the advanced industrial society has and I'm thinking specially of the three in which I'm most interested and have most knowledge that is this country. My own and the Soviet Union. But I call no choices. I mean the choices which determine whether we should live or die and how and when we shall live and die. I'm thinking of course first of all of the obvious military choices such as the determination of the reason the decision in England for us and in this country to go ahead with the atomic

bomb with making the atomic bomb the decision to use it when it was in fact made a decision to go ahead with a hydrogen bomb in this country and Russia round 8:56 the various decisions about missiles in this country and in Russia which of take me along rather different paths. The decisions which I saw in fact being made more or less at this moment about nuclear tests and similar things as those all the melodramatic choices that are obvious. Well especially sharp examples of what I have in mind. But effect in far less dramatic areas such as public health. You'll find that in much the same phenomena you'll find it all over government where government is is touching on scientific and technical problems. And this is a really startling

feature of our age. Often I think in the West we tend to laugh it off. We don't recognize it. What a God it is just one of these odd. Phenomena. Of the lack of communication between scientists and non-scientists. The other feature of the difficulty of communication and of the end of the increasing different of the languages of science itself. But there it is. And it seems to me worth examining it seems to me a phenomenon which we must. First of all understand in the West we've not been good at looking at this with fresh and candid eyes. We do seem to me to becoming increasingly good at deluding ourselves particularly with words we use phrases like the free world the freedom of silence. And I want to begin by

saying as hard as I can but these kind of choices are taking place in exactly the same way in any society. But we can think of that which is industrialized to a high level the whatever you think about the legal or administrative formalities there is no difference or no effective difference in the way these cardinal choice is being made. And listen we begin to realize that we should get you know. I know that Rand and the results of this are going to be significant. Probably only too significant. I know that we can draw chops of political responsibility which reconcile these choices and indeed anything else with the forms of parliamentary government. But don't let's fool ourselves with that because the first. Problem in the whole of this tangled and

difficult set up is to realize what the real truth and not what they're supposed to be. In this we do that we should show this complacency this lack of gravity which is beginning to press on us more and more. And so the first thing is to understand what really happens. Dong price has written that we must learn to think and he was writing about exactly this type of problem. We must learn to think without making use of the patterns or models taken for granted by most of the textbooks. It's a good deal harder than it solves. No one has ever thought of this problem a toll of the relations of science and government think that it's easy to produce in a shop. Quick answers the more you've known it that first hand the more difficult it

seems to reach. And if effective solutions or even palliatives that I have to say from the beginning. I know almost no one who's reached the right on this in fact I can say I know of no one who's reached the right answers. I know very few. Who've even begun to ask the right question. The best I can do is to tell a story. It's a story which I won't conceal from you is intended to have some significance as a parable. Some find different parable significances from others but it's intended to have some significance as a parable and try to draw some generalization from this story and perhaps put it more sensibly in modest I shall try to suggest a few working rules. This story is

about two men and two choices. In the first of the two men whom we will never of. The name is spelt Z. D. I'm often puzzled that my medical friends have a curious illusion of the English accent by celebrity names on the second syllable. I'm so talk about my literary colleague as Lawrence Darrelle when of course it's double and show every show every inclination to cool. Well that is not the name rhymes with lizard. He was often known to his friends rather regrettably I think as his. Let's declare my interest straight away as they say in

English boardroom. I think most people who are interested in recent military scientific history in England think that he was the best scientific mind in our time that has devoted itself to the Study of War. And let me go a little further. On the whole my view of history is Tolstoy. I don't really believe in great men having decisive influence on the bench but so far as I believe that at all. And when I think of the English surviving the battles between July and September or October 1948 then of the people who had a part in that survival I'm quite clear that it was at least as great as any. Even if I were talking about him to an English audience I should have to

make go through much of the same explanations as I have to do to you to a certain number. Of Englishman who lived in the US. He was extremely well known but one or two even to a highly intelligent and sophisticated English audience. His name would have been Morton and his part has not been properly recognised because he himself wrote in his diary on May 8 1945 when he was living and what for him was a high level exile. As the president of Malden College Oxford. He said I wonder if the part. That scientists have played meaning of course in the war just ended with faithfully and fully recorded. And he added sadly probably not. Never written or spoken about him before. And I'm particularly glad to do so

to an American audience. And in Cambridge we had especially strong feelings for American science for America and for this part of America. That is we shall see when I get a little further on in the story. It was he who forced through. The step which made a lot of difference to both our countries. But I would teach the English scientists told you I was 16 months before you came in the war. Everything that we knew and everything that we were doing that was entirely his own and it was exactly like him it was a gesture of trust and therefore it's especially appropriate that I should be speaking of him for these nights this week. I know you've liked it because I told you I threatened him with it. Last time I saw him before he died I didn't say that I was going to speak here because I hadn't been

asked to do so. But I did say that I was thinking of writing a piece about him for something like that for Edward Weeks paper The Atlantic Monthly. And he was a better director and who happened to like my book said Well normally I'd say no but let me not be. I'm not that different and I should like it. Then he went on with a. Letter typical rasping kind of smile at least I can trust you to do it with the gloves off. And he meant what he said himself when he was writing about his hero rather than a person who is big enough. Then it's no use being polite. You've got to do what you can with the faults and all and all the errors of that temperament taken into account. I'm happy to say he's with and by his side both who are friends of mine.

In fact when I said that I was thinking of making him and the famous quarrel which I'll come to shortly. But I was thinking making that the bone of my talk. But they were delighted and place the whole of the papers at my I'm qualified to use. This is the most valuable single. Relevant to the English side of the scientific war between 1935 and forty nine hundred fifty. It is a quite sinister it's astonishing extent. He started a great many died as he didn't always keep them up. He wrote a large fragment of an autobiography which mad maddeningly stops just at the interesting point. And he kept very careful minutes Woolies extremely

controversial matters and his own lawyers that I'm told all this documentary material that I've drawn for this series of lectures there a little that I'm saying is my own unsupported impression when I say one that that when I am giving my unsupported impression I shal point it out but it will happen very rarely. Now what was he like. Physically he was English of the English. He was a didn't alter much from the time I first met him which when he was an early middle age and in middle age until he died in 1959. And it was a sort of appearance bearing physique that seems to me You very rarely meet out of England and almost all to the particular professional middle class into which he was born. No one could possibly call him beautiful

times. He often looked like a highly intelligent and sensitive frog on his head. They hadn't much was ready his face. Was redeemed by his eyes or trick streamlet bright. Light blue. Flashing. And even rather absurd which he tended to well didn't conceal this NIS wrote these from these remarkable organs and it was his. His eyes lit up. An aide of the rob a heavy featured heavy featured white bear and face. Like nearly all the successful men of affairs I've known he was physically strong and a muscular sense he had natural thought a sort of confidence of bearing. But you get in people who are used

to getting that and what. But he wasn't all of a piece came into a room when he had a sort of necessary and all thorough tale which made men look at him and again I wish I were a bit of a mimic he had a voice which I can only call something like a warm rasp but I can't do it as a mixture of the quarterdeck and and of academic life. And he had a sort of stylized wit which to my generation seemed a little old fashioned. You know he was a scientist was appointed to look after inventions in the warm up. He is like an inverted McCall waiting for something to turn down. And this famous dispute which I succumbed to before the end of the night the hatchet is buried for the present

but the handle is conveniently near the surface. And there are heaps of these to autism's but to an extent misleading. He knew he was a gifted man. He knew his own capacity but he hadn't got the deep rooted creative confidence the relaxed atoms that you get in Man are we. Have the creation happily behind the Rolex creative confidence that he and his hero rather for instance. Nothing of that. Didn't find himself easy to live with. And he put on concealed a good many in a reference and just the same way and probably not accidentally the same way this powerful. Tough busy letter great again wasn't so impregnable really as it looked. He was always being knocked out by a mysterious high temperatures right through his life

and his temperature had flared up to about 100 for no reason at all you can say and come down again within two days he had the signs of strain which only a man of considerable introspective insight and force would have kept up. And that meant that he was abnormally and so much of a fiction. You had a wife very gifted sons and family life but he needed friends much more than a selves than a self-sufficient man. Would it be expected to need friends. And I sometimes think that he was happiest enough in the afternoon. Now you don't know the ethernet but I do and I can define it I think by saying that I have two clubs in London one of which I go to what I'm getting from them is the one I go to when I'm not. The only man I've ever known who could make the Athenaeum if they

had the sort of energy of temperament which could make friends very easily among all kinds of people young and old. And that was terribly important to me. He was born in 1885 his father was a naval captain who was a naval captain off so first and foremost although incidentally he became assistant hydrographer to the Navy and got and was elected to the Royal Society. But this was very important as a woman throughout his life he had Lee accept and utterly unselfconscious patriotism of a serving officer that came to him as naturally as breathing and he knew intuitively exactly what soldiers and sailors were like which was very important in his career. In fact he would have been a Cylon himself it would have been natural that a family like this if it hadn't been that when he was 13 just before the examination it was found that he was at a blind spot on one eye and writes in his autobiography.

I must of taken this verdict philosophically at the time. I don't remember being disappointed or relieved but it was a bad blow for my father. He went to a friend in the Admiralty and said What would you do with a boy who couldn't get into the Navy. Traditional and scientific he was radical on these he had the radicalness of the side of the scientific and technical temperament but away from that he was all was emotional or conservative he was this beautiful pious intelligent simple honorable lives his father was a very convinced Christian to saw himself was would have called himself a pious agnostic and lose deep loyalties were absolutely part of his temperament. The family were short of money exactly like walling piece of his family was and.

Seemed to. Have the usual disharmony of being contemptuous of manner and always wondered about it and stayed that way until he died. Going to the chances of his life he never made an heir be moved he moved his job too often to have an adequate pension and the only bitter complaint anyone ever remembers him making was that when he was an old man having done this service to his country he hadn't enough to live on. He went through the wealth of Doc's English upper middle upper middle class education he went to Westminster which is one of the best of what we called somewhat humorously public schools. And he went to Oxford he was dazzlingly clever at everything he turned his head and he sometimes used to say I thought he ought to have become a professional mathematician because as he got older it was said that he felt he'd done nothing important creatively

and he did given everything else to have something on the table behind him. But he but anyway he didn't. He did chemistry which at that time was the only serious scientific school in Oxford. And when he finished it's ironic to think now we know that. Oxford has great scientific schools that it was quite impossible for bright young men bursting with academic almost bursting with promise to find anyone to do research on them at Oxford University. That's only 52 years ago and shows you how extremely rapidly these things change. I would guess it might easily have been the same university in the at that period and in fact he went to Germany to work on the next school which was the fashionable Anglo-American thing to do. He didn't get anything out of his on the scientific data but he got something out of it dramatically because it was for the first time he met the second main character in my story.

He met someone who is destined to play a very important. Part in his life. It's difficult to name this character because of the English habit of changing names and styles. There's 30 odd years later the second Kadek I became known to fame as Winston Churchill's grey eminence and right hand man and inseparable friend Lord. But throughout all this story of friendship and enmity with Tis all he was known as FAA Lindemann and that his health has always referred to it. I think for convenience's sake I'll use the name Lindemann rather than as I told these two young men met in Berlin in the winter of nineteen hundred and eight. We don't know the occasion of the meeting. We don't know what they talked about.

It would be most interesting to know because even without the hindsight of what happened they were two of the most remarkable men alive young men alive. And there aren't many such meetings to Lindemann was but. Just. A very remarkable and a very strange man. He was a real heavyweight of personality. I didn't know him as well as I did. I knew him pretty well and had many talks with him. Then he gave me some very tough support when I needed it once or twice but I don't think it's that which interested me so much as he's the sort of character who makes a novelist's fingers age when he really had. That particular density of personality that's the noblest know he always responds to and so on the two issues that I'm going to talk about and I try to enter analytical books as I have no doubt that he was dead wrong and dead right. You have got. A great feeling for him

and I wouldn't be so interested in story if I weren't full of feeling for both these men. I said that English of the English Lindemann was. Quite on English in middle age. He was the kind of central European businessman that when used to meet in the more expensive hotels in Italy. I mean he might have come from Dusseldorf. He was heavy featured padded always very correctly addressed. He spoke German at least as well as he did English and indeed in his under his English there was a sort of overt there was a tone of John. If you get him a tall was his meal was mumbled an extraordinary constricted fresh new one to this day. NURSE What is father's nationality was which is very strange. He may have been a German he may have been an

Alsatian. It's been suggested that the family was Jewish though I doubt it. If so he was an anti-Semitic Jew who made anti-semitic jokes but I think it's I think it's I think it's very unlike. The one thing quite sad about the family as they were very rich and Lindemann always had the attitude to money of a rich man. I'm not as into sobs case of a member of the establishment. And there was a difference about the nature of the patron patriotism he said was patriotic in the simple way of a naval officer. Had the strained fanatical flavor of someone who's chosen our country not his own. And then identified himself with it more passionately than any native Englishman would ever think of doing something slightly mad about Lindemann his patriotism was perfectly genuine. No one ever loving them more in his own way.

But it was a way that made people like to feel strained and not at ease. And a lot of his personality produced exactly the same effect Harner kind of atmosphere of indefinable malaise you felt he didn't understand his own life well and he wasn't very good at coping with a major thing. I mean he was venomous he wish harsh tongue and he had a malicious sadistic sense of humor but nevertheless you felt somehow he was lost. He enjoyed. None of the sensual pleasures. He was the most cranky of all vegetarians he wasn't only a vegetarian but he would only eat very minute fractions of what you might regard as a vegetarian diet. We live mainly on what the whites of a yolks being a parent the two animals.

All have oil and rice. Which in the war presented a minor problem feeding him on this diet and getting the olive oil meant constant had a plane flying from Washington. And underneath US citizens are more of course really linked with it. He was a man of intense emotions until the motions were very deep and difficult to control but he they found out he was a warm outgoing man Lindemann specials had the bitter rage of repression. You could hear that in the nature of the human. I remember being in Oxford one of the first just off to the on his list of been published and I remarked innocently enough that the English on his list must give much more pain than pleasure could all be asked of the people who were left out when much

greater in number than the people who were in him. And Linda man's face lit up. He got a very somber heavy face was very sad brown eyes Willie's brown eyes sparkled with savage glee and he said Of course it is. It wouldn't be any use getting an award if one didn't think of all the people who were miserable because they hadn't managed it. And in that kind of thing he did he was much larger than life so his passions were much bigger than life so anything I can think of inflated monomania of the passions in wonderful character. And I said he is a figure I'm a novelist fingers age. Yet when I say that I sometimes think that isn't quite right I think when I was a young man I would've loved to write about I don't

know I wouldn't have superficially a less mad less feeling that under the surface the structure of his character was more complex. Well one would like to learn what they talked about and Lennon 19:00 night. There's no evidence. Probably they both had a completely unshakable belief in science is the major intellectual manifestation of men in that last of all their lives. I don't think they talked about love for young women. I don't think anybody could have done with Linda. I'm interested in very interesting literature and a strong taste in it but Lindemann had absolutely nothing so they can't talk about that. Let's talk about politics because it had the sort of tolerant easygoing English Establishment conservatism which he kept all his life and Lindemann was a sort of

fanatical reaction. And I may have discussed that but we don't know. There was a romantic story to the people in Whitehall who saw them when they were right at the top of their faith when all the quarrels were on the surface Pecha Kucha completely naive sharpen the knives completely shocked them all the time and there was a romantic story that they'd once been inseparable friends. That I should like to believe that but I think it's overdoing it and the reason I'm pretty sure it's overdoing it is because of this news or an autobiography and he was quite sufficient of a natural storyteller wanted to make the point if it were true because he was obviously leading up to this clash with liniment was the high spot of his life. But what he actually said was this. If I became close but not intimate friend. There was something about him which prevented intimacy. He was one of the cleverest men I've known. He'd

been to school in Germany and German very well as well as he talked English and was fluent in French. He was a very good experiment. He also played as well. He wanted to share rooms with women but I refused I think my chief reasons for doing so time were that he was much better off than I was not going to compete with his standard of living and we should be speaking English. It was lucky we had a minor. I discovered a new gymnasium in Berlin which was run by Nick's lightweight champion boxer of England. So I used to go there for exercise. I persuaded Lindemann to join him books. Now one of his greatest defects was that he hated anyone to be strict Silliman anything. He was a clumsy anemic and inexperienced Boxer and when he who was so much shorter than he was was much quicker with my hands on my feet. He lost his temper completely so much the daughter refused to box them again. I don't think he ever forgave me for that. Still we remained close friends for over 25 years but often

936 he became a bitter enemy. Well that I think is about right. Well the episode liniments played in Germany Lindemann went back to Oxford. They had most distinguished careers in the first war played both happen to be men not only brave but quite abnormally brave in the starkest physical sense. They weren't allowed to fight in the infantry which they wanted to and so both went in for experimentation with aircraft experimenting with aircraft is never much fun but it was less fun in the first world war. And there are wonderful stories of both of them how it was only allowed to learn to fly in weather too rough for the ordinary flying cadet. These are the people who are going to really fight in France for three weeks and had to go up in whether they found unsuitable and Lindemann the famous story as the

airplanes were tending to get into a spinning nose dives. He worked out a theory of how to conquer this and went up and tested it by deliberately putting it on a plane into a spinning nose. So they were a man of normal physical courage. Off the wall they went back to Oxford and went back to Oxford and he succeeded in getting Lindemann appointed to check out of experimental philosophy which means physics. And just for a short time it looked as if these two were going to lead the scientific nations in Oxford the first of them had for three hundred years. But then something happened to them both quite clearly Lindemann who had nothing like the introspective insight. And this was what happened was very simple but both of them came to realize that they weren't going to make a success. This was quite

open about this both in speech he said I knew I should never be any real. And also in right in his own autobiography says I now convinced myself that I'd never be outstanding as a scientist. Younger men were coming on far better than I was in that respect. And that meant that he was a proud man. He set a pretty high standard on himself for himself. He knew he couldn't compete not only with brother who was a very great man but with Brotherhoods number twos number three. And that just wasn't good enough. And all this I'm reminded of. Kazan saying that Englishman weigh themselves up as though they were horse flesh. All I can say is this happened. It was just the same he was even prouder and even more so. No one to be his intellectual superior so he just couldn't bear. The experimenter's on the one side rather Chadwick

obvious in a quite different class from anything he could do. All the young theatre Titian's who were coming on like Heisenberg Dereck and so on he just couldn't take it. And so they both decided that they were going to get out of office and that led them to the Great Commission. They are both became pillars of the Royal Society at an early age. But that was a little easier 40 years ago than it would be now. And our ways of slipping out of those that are typical of the two men. Had made a great reputation in science and applied science in the war. He'd been number two at an aircraft establishment he obviously had a real gift for this and so he was he but was last fall and went off like a shot to become a permanent secretary of the new department of Scientific and Industrial Research

permanent secretaries and in the old explain a much more important plan high grade civil servants in this country. Much respect in their right to the call of what we now call the establishment. They're the people who really are continuously much more influential than almost any minister until good ones fitted into this life which was very important for his future. He wasn't exactly the kind of administrator whom the high grade profession administrator thinks is perfect that would that isn't true he was a bit rough at the edges but they liked him. He liked them. They trusted him. He came from the kind of background he spoke their language. He loved Whitehall. He loved the colored also he loved the Athenaeum and he was good and he liked his colleagues who were tough devoted honest men just like himself. Lindemann his way out was very different. He decided to make his way

through English society and I'm your society I'm using here with a capital S.. In the early 20s it was still bound up with conservative politics it still had a function which it's now more or less lost and Lindemann just set to work to punkah English aside which he did in a very short time. Though this may seem all but it only seems odd if you're approaching English with illusions. It's been extremely easy for rich men to buy their way into English society at any level. It's been done time after time. I mean this this ad is to critics has been wide open for 150 200 yes to anyone who had the wits the will. The determination and the cash. He had all these. And so with an almost inconceivably short time he was eating whites of eggs all of oil

rice and. In most of the great houses of England. And it was became known screamingly unfortunate infantilism as the Prof which was the name he was later became well-known for throughout officially was his name meaning of course Professor. He was an intimate of Lord Birkenhead and it was through Birkenhead that he met Winston Churchill. This was about one thousand twenty four. Their friendship seemed at first sight. This friendship was both sides. Until then the man's death. Lindemann social climbing was his attempt to compensate for in a

defeat. But this was something quite different in CA and it was an absolute true and very deep friendship. And both men paid some price for it. For Linda when Winston was in the wilderness for nine hundred twenty nine to 39 when it seemed he was just another politician with a brilliant future behind him. Churchill was absolutely loyal to Lindemann when he himself came to office and when Linda was very much disliked by other of Churchill's intimate associates. Winston never budged. They tried to get rid of Lindemann but Churchill wouldn't have wouldn't have it. People often speculated on why the French are in an extremely cranky smoking non-drinking vegetarian doesn't sound the obvious soulmate. So when so that the two are to give a nice sensible

suggestion you'd have to know both men not only well but as well as they knew each other it's like speculating about Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. One can make guesses but why any friendship. Well in 1934 they were both 15. They done my two characters they'd done better little. Done rather better than the new ideas he'd been knighted he was a trusted official he was by this time rector of Imperial College London. But he did not. He'd failed. Lindemann had done even less. He was a. Professor whom nobody took seriously he was an amateur among professionals. The real physicist like rather just wrote him off and he was there. His name was not worth anything in science and he was the intimate friend of a politician whose name was worth very little either at that time. Then quite suddenly I was given

the charms for which he was made and I selected a gold just a little time to tell you that even at this time was desperately. Defenseless. England is I'm afraid even more so now because of its tiny size and its exposure to the roots is more vulnerable than any important country in the world. And this was in 1934. And someone had the bright idea that it couldn't do any harm might do some good to see if there were any scientific recourse if there was any method of making them slightly less vulnerable. And so a committee was set up called the Committee for the scientific study of their defense and its terms of reference had the usual flatness they would consider how far advances in scientific and technical knowledge can be used to strengthen the present methods of defense against hostile acts. Well that wasn't very inspiring then. The committee itself didn't grab any interest at all.

It was a minor mental comment and nobody was interested when it was appointed. He wouldn't have a book been appointed if he hadn't been vetted well-liked and trusted by the civil servants but that was all there was to it. And yet within six months he and his colleagues had really got the problem basically solved or at least found some hope of a solution. He insisted on having his own colleagues and they were to one where they were both great scientists quite different from the noumenal one was Hill. Physiologist already a Nobel Prize winner the other was Blackett who became a level Prize winner much later. It was a very good picture of men. Both these were not really acceptable to orthodox English Binion hill was a rather eccentric conservative at least he called himself a conservative but no conservative could understand why because he quarreled with the entire

regime like it was the leader of the young scientific radicals. But I wanted them because they were men of character integrity and great festival decision. And also he wanted them I think they'd both had considerable military experience Hilla been a very successful soldier in the first war and Bleck it before he turned physics had been a professional naval officer wanted this rapid and genuine communication between the scientists and the soldiers. Well they were faced with a problem which was a situation which is not likely to occur again. And it was this that there were a few primitive experiments which had gone about which had gone on in complete secrecy all over the world in this country in England in Japan in Germany. These experiments were

the forerunners of what we would began by calling with your usual genius rechristened radar. No one knew. In 1935 whether this was going to be any good at all but the hill came to an either all either this will work. In which case we ought to throw away all doubts and go straight ahead or begin to teach the officers what this is going to mean. Begin to make preparations for the radar. Long before it's been proved because in fact no decisive experiments have been made or could be made for several months or even or in fact about a year and the law was that there was no defense at all and so they took one of the bravest decisions that any committee has ever they took and they had the complete force of that intellectual and moral conviction.

That was one of the really lucky decisions. Meanwhile lots of things have been happening offstage or rather not exactly off stage but only to prominently on stage because while this secret committee was working getting trusted I was completely in the world of closed English official politics a great deal of open politics was happening. Winston Churchill was constantly inveighing against the government and rightly for the lack of attention to military preparations and so on. We were all anxious that he should prevail and the battle only open politics were completely independent of this closed technical politics which his art and his friends were associated with. But the government got rather tired of Churchill's continual denunciations which had a lot of

truth in them so they set up yet another committee and this was a committee which was a subcommittee of the committee of imperial defense which was a body which in those days looked off had a general oversight in over the whole of English defense on this committee. Mr Churchill was invited to sit. It was the classical maneuver. Which role experienced politicians have done for hundreds of years if a man is too much of a nuisance for God's sake keep him quiet and get him on somewhere where he'll get reasonable information and not be quite so virulent when he gets on his feet. A famine over used by monsters of this kind of maneuver and Churchill bidding has to be in the know. And of course for genuine and decent reasons accepted this with two stipulations. One was that he should reserve the right to criticize in public as before.

Fair enough. The other was that his scientific advisor if a Lindemann should be put on the committee. No one wanted to resist that. And so to appear in the middle of 35 on the committee of his old friend Lindemann appear in July 35 on the committee of his old friend within the hall for no. Lindemann and explained that the committee had done was wrong that this higher priority of a raid was equivalent to treason and was a national disgrace and would lead to national disaster. Whatever thing to have done was doing or would ever do. Well fatal to the national interest

and within that. The i've had this account from all the people present who are now living knew that an old friendship was irretrievably bettered that a new enmity was only label on and that it was going to be a great trouble in producing a sensible radar scheme for England in the war which one could that easily foresee. That I'm going to stop there closely mixed with next part of this. First issue is Israel is rather intricate. And then we come to the second great battle in which Lindemann won I'm not sure. Thank you for thank you.

CHARLES It appears you're leading us into this involvement of science and government through characterization exploration into history. They're most happy to have you with us again we look forward to your lectures tomorrow night Thursday. This has been the first of three lectures in the 1960 series of God can like yes. CBS no British author and scientist is speaking on science and government. The Godkin lectures were produced for broadcast by Charles he does milk for radio station WGBH FM in Boston. These tape recorded programs have been distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the end AB Radio Network.