In search of the Philosopher’s Stone
A few weeks ago I was in Stockholm where I attended a welcoming reception at the city hall, famous for hosting the ceremony each December at which the Nobel prizes are presented. Since then, a visit to the University of Adelaide reminded me that one of its most distinguished alumni, Lawrence Bragg, achieved a double-first in Nobel prizes: he and his father, William, are the only father-and-son prize winning partnership and, at the age of 25, Lawrence remains the youngest ever Nobel laureate.
The Nobel prize for physics came in 1915, in recognition of their pioneering work in the development of the analytical technique of X-ray diffraction and with it the birth of solid state physics, and Lawrence received the news in France, in the trenches. He finally collected the prize in 1922 but his father did not turn up at the ceremony in Stockholm; all pleasure and pride had been destroyed by the death of his other son, Bob, at Gallipoli just a few weeks before the prize had been announced.
I heard Sir Lawrence Bragg lecture at the Royal Institution in London in the late 1950s when I was in the sixth form at school. By now he was a grand old man of science and he had left behind an unhappy period at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where he had been sucked into the unseemly squabbling between Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin over the controversial discovery of the double helix of DNA (the first three, but not Franklin who died, would win their Nobel prizes in 1962).
Bragg’s lecture was brilliant and I can still remember much of its structure, many of its experiments and its sheer panache. The subject was radioactivity, which was too dangerous to explore in any practical way in a school laboratory, but here we could see it all happening on the floor of the Royal Institution in a series of experiments we had read about but never expected to see. It remains one of the most memorable presentations I have ever witnessed and, looking back, I recognize its profound impact because it was one of the factors that contributed to my decision to study chemistry rather than music at university.
In fact it was not a difficult decision. In the 1950s science seemed to have all the answers: astronomy was explaining the past; the present offered a huge choice of well-paid scientific jobs and the future would be taken care of by nuclear energy. Fifty years later it all looks rather different and we are seeing a worrying flight from science in schools and universities. The sciences (Group 4) are no longer the most popular subjects in the IB Diploma Programme, having been overtaken by the humanities (Group 3) in 2001. Although the quality of high-performing science students is being maintained, the ‘tail’ is growing longer and longer with nearly a third of all students obtaining a failing grade in their chosen science subject.
A reason for the malaise might be the disappearance of the magic and mystery that attracted me to the subject and was so powerfully present in Bragg’s description of radioactivity. I still keep on my desk a beautifully shaped glass retort or alembic. It reminds me how my chemistry teacher at school promised that one day we would use one in our experiments. We never did but the idea was enough to make me want to study a subject that was evidently still largely concerned with turning base metals into gold. It is many years since I taught a science lesson but I suspect much of the mystery has gone, replaced by a fatal dose of social responsibility. Every science teacher should be presented with Oliver Sacks’ wonderful biography Uncle Tungsten, Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (published by Picador) to be reminded of the sometimes irresponsible excitement of doing science and of the essential part it plays in the world’s narrative of growing human potential.
George Walker
Postscript
An interesting article related to the above has recently been published by The Guardian. Readers can find this at:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1642253,00.html
George.
