Revisiting an Intellectual Crossroads

8p.m. Only two hours late. Not like arriving at 5 a.m. by car from Udine or Venice or somewhere, after winter fog in Milan. The Italian government had hoped that the center would help revive Trieste, once the great port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but in the summer of 1987 it is still off the main air routes. I’m glad to get a lift along the spectacular coast road to the tiny resort of Grignano—but not, this time, to the homely Hotel Mi- gnon. Surprisingly, the luxurious Adriatico has been taken over as a palace hostel for the center. A discursive dinner with old physics cronies in the fish restaurant by the harbor rounds off the day. Heavy rain (in August!) prevents my usual morning walk up to the center through the park. The trees planted by the hapless Maximilian around his hideous new castle of Miramare have matured gracefully in 150 years. The center itself; stylishly sculpted in gray concrete, stretches across a scrubby hollow at the far edge of the park, looking out over the trees to the sea. It also has matured gracefully in its 20 years. The International Center for Theoretical Physics that Abdus Salam magically coaxed out of the International Atomic Energy Agency caine into being in a cramped building in the city For a long time after the move out to Miramare, the new building created through Italy’s munificence seemed too grand, too roomy. Few of the Northern physicists who would cheerfully scrum in for a summer semi-vacation cared to stay and face the notorious “Bora,” Trieste’s icy winter wind. For long winter months the place was half-empty. Physicists from the tropical South, desperately seeking intellectual sustenance, were not deterred by material discomfort. Money was their problem. We had support from various sources—mainly United Nations agencies—to bring about 50 Third World physicists to the center for an advanced course in condensed matter physics. The funds had to be spread thinly over the globe. Paolo Budini, the shrewd Triestino professor who had originally spoken up so boldly to have the center situated in Italy, doesn’t seem to be around today. He was deputy director, and we used to go through the applications together. How few there were from the less developed countries, especially in Africa! Were the applicants’ formal qualifications—often no more than an M.Sc. from a provincial university and a couple of experimental notes—outweighed by intelligence and dedication? Did they have enough English? How to balance their needs against those of all the enthusiastic Indian Ph.D.s, each with a score of publications brimming with theoretical formulae? Salam’s original plan was for a center where promising young physicists could coome in out of the cold for intense periods of very advanced, very theoretical research. He had not reckoned on his own uniqueness. Most of the applicants would need to learn a great deal more about their subject before they could hope to start on research. But their interests and experience were obviously too diverse for the conventionally short and sophisticated “summer school.” We invented three-month “winter colleges,” authoritative and broad in scope but comprehensible rather than comprehensive. Salam grumbled a bit at the liberties we took in interpreting “Theoretical Physics as “any good talk about physics.” We taught him eventually that even in Indonesia or Nigeria there might be some value in getting to know about the useful properties of matter in the condensed state. Anyway, the explanation of the plasticity of polyethylene or the opto-electronic behavior of amorphous silicon is beautiful, even if it can’t be calculated algebraically. I miss the lively planning sessions with Stig Lundquist, Federico Garcia Moliner, Norman March and the others. Our lecturers had to be world authorities, but we chose them for their humanity as well as for their science. They would have to express themselves clearly in the two languages of theoretical physics—mathematics and broken English—and give themselves sympathetically to the strivings of the participants. The best moment was at the beginning of a course, when a newcomer shyly would enter my little office. What is it he or she is trying to say so haltingly? “I working on electron-phonon interaction in some the AlKali metal.” But here is a colleague! It’s the very person with the clever idea in last year’s Physics Letters! At once we share the language, the world, of theoretical physics. In due time we talk about being a physicist “in my country.” Once again I hear of the struggle to stay alive as a scientist in an anti-scientific culture, in a lethargic, poverty-stricken university, amid economic chaos and political corruption. They are too grateful for the little we are able to do for them, through the center and beyond. The privilege is ours, to know such noble and upright spirits. Now they all seem to be coming to Trieste in the hundreds. The old building is crowded. Soon it will be twinned into the empty concrete shell that stands beside it. The Italian government is heavily hacking the scientific and technological development of the region. Other new buildings up the hill already house a companion institution. The Adriatico contains satellite lecture rooms and a library. Grand occasions, such as the tercentenary of Newton’s Principia, fill the great amphitheater that Salam demanded. Salam and I exchange the hopes and fears of 30 years of friendship. The center is flourishing, but still what a terrible world! How desperate, still, are the prospects of so many peoples! How little, still, is science understood by the politicos! But, as always, he has plans. The only thing that is changed about him is that he can’t find time for physics any more. As always, I am moved by his self-dedication. Should I join him here in Trieste? And, as always, I resist his appeal, saying that the center is for theoretical physics, not for social and political analysis. On the plane home (three hours delayed, of course) I am chastened by the thought that I am too attached to my country, my family and my garden. “Science is social,” Ziman once asserted bluntly during a talk broadcast by NBC radio. It was an epigrammatic way of high-lighting the communal dimension of science that has long fascinated him and about which he has written in a succession of influential books. For 10 years professor of theoretical physics at Bristol University, he abandoned solid-state physics in 1982 to develop his wider interests concerning the social relations of science. He is now chairman of two London-based organizations, the Council for Science and Society and the Science Policy Support Group. From 1970 to 1979 he served on the scientific council of the International Center for Theoretical Physics. Born in New Zealand, he was educated at Victoria University College, Wellington, before studying at Oxford University in England and teaching at Cambridge University.

Revisiting an Intellectual Crossroads

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John Ziman

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March 1988

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