The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion - Hardcover

Wouk, Herman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031607845X ISBN 13: 9780316078450

Verlag: Little, Brown Spark, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

"More years ago than I care to reckon up, I met Richard Feynman." So begins The Language God Talks, Herman Wouk's gem on navigating the divide between science and religion. In one rich, compact volume, Wouk draws on stories from his life as well as on key events from the 20th century to address the eternal questions of why we are here, what purpose faith serves, and how scientific fact fits into the picture. He relates wonderful conversations he's had with scientists such as Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Freeman Dyson, and Steven Weinberg, and brings to life such pivotal moments as the 1969 moon landing and the Challenger disaster.

Brilliantly written, The Language God Talks is a scintillating and lively investigation and a worthy addition to the literature.

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Herman Wouk's acclaimed novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Caine Mutiny; Marjorie Morningstar; Don't Stop the Carnival; Youngblood Hawke; The Winds of War; War and Remembrance; Inside, Outside; The Hope; The Glory; and A Hole in Texas.

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The Language God Talks

On Science and ReligionBy Wouk, Herman

Little, Brown and Company

Copyright © 2010 Wouk, Herman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316078450

CHAPTER ONE

The Language God Talks

More years ago than I care to reckon up, I met Richard Feynman. I was then out to write a sort of War and Peace of World War II, and early on in the moonstruck enterprise I realized that if I were at all serious about it, I had to learn something right away about the atomic bomb. Tolstoy could not consult Kutuzov, the general who drove Napoleon out of Russia, because the canny old one-eyed field marshal was long since dead; but when I started to work on my unlikely notion nearly all the men who had created the bomb were alive, and several of them were at the California Institute of Technology, including Feynman. President Truman, who had been an artilleryman in World War I, said of the bomb, “It was a bigger piece of artillery, so I used it,” a striking remark which shows up in my War and Remembrance but surely something less than the whole story. So I went to Caltech to talk to those who knew the whole story.

This may seem monstrously pushy, and no doubt it was. Like many novelists I have spun my books out of my own experiences when I could, but in attempting work far outside my own relatively jog-trot existence I have had to pick other men’s brains. My World War II service, three years on destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific, gave me the substance of The Caine Mutiny, but taught me nothing at all about the world storm that had swept me from Manhattan to the South Pacific like a driven leaf. When the bomb fell on Hiroshima my ship was a bobbing speck on picket duty in the rough waters off Okinawa, and we had just survived a kamikaze attack unscathed; so I joined heartily in the merriment aboard ship, very glad that I had survived the war and would soon go back to my free civilian life and marry my sweetheart. As to the larger issues of dropping a whacking new bomb made of uranium on a Japanese city, I was innocent and indifferent. The radio said that our scientists had “harnessed the power of the Sun,” and that was quite enough for me and for all of us aboard that old four-piper, halfway around the world from home.

The Caltech scientists received me cordially, and talked freely about their adventures in working on the bomb. I remember one physicist telling me, for instance, how he drove to the Trinity test site in New Mexico with the dread plutonium core in the back seat of his car. But to a man, one after another, they warned me so earnestly not to try to see Richard Feynman, that I began to think of him as a human plutonium core. However, I had nothing to lose so I did try, and somehow I found myself in his office, talking to a lean guy in white shirtsleeves, with long hair and a sharply humorous countenance calling to mind a bust of Voltaire. It didn’t go well at first. “You know,” he said, as I groped to explain my purpose, “while you’re talking, you’re not learning anything.” So I blurted out baldly, any old way, my vision of a fiction work throwing a rope around the whole global war. As I spoke an enigmatic look came over that strong face, something like remote tolerant amusement. “Well, that’s the sort of thing genius reaches out for,” he said, and he took over the conversation.

In swift strokes Feynman brought the entire Manhattan Project to life, the excitement and the perils alike, mentioning that once in a laboratory corridor he passed uranium materials stacked so carelessly that a chain reaction was within a whisker of going off. His main point was that the whole enterprise was gigantically messy, and that the atomic bomb was by no means at a frontier of science. He put it so: “It wasn’t a lion hunt, it was a rabbit shoot.” There was no Nobel Prize, that is to say, in the concept or the calculations; it was just a challenge, if a huge one, to audacious innovative technology and brute industrial effort. This formidable fellow walked out of the building with me, and said as we were parting, “Do you know calculus?”

I admitted that I didn’t.

“You had better learn it,” he said. “It’s the language God talks.”

Calculus

I never forgot Feynman’s admonition, promising myself that I would get at calculus once I had written my big war novel, which I thought might take four or five years. It became two novels, each about a thousand pages long, and the task engulfed my life from my late forties well into my sixties, the better part of two decades. Toward the end I had a strong sense of racing the calendar to finish it before I died. All that while, the language God talks had to wait.

After that I did make several separate attempts to learn calculus, all recorded in a loose-leaf notebook which I still have. I tried self-teaching out of books with titles like Calculus Made Easy. I picked up and skimmed freshman texts in college bookstores, hoping to come across one that might help a mathematical ignoramus like me, who had spent his college years in the humanities—i.e., literature and philosophy—in an adolescent quest for the meaning of existence, little knowing that calculus, which I had heard of as a difficult bore leading nowhere, was the language God talks; or as one noted Jewish microbiologist, also a Torah scholar, commented to me with a grin, “His other language.” I even engaged a tutor, an Israeli, figuring to improve my spoken Hebrew while learning calculus. A dumb idea, and I advanced in neither. Lastly, desperately, I got permission to audit a high-school course in calculus. I actually hung on with the teenagers for a couple of months, but I fell too far behind and had to withdraw, with a few farewell words to them about the preciousness of knowing calculus. As I was walking out of the classroom, a patter of applause surprised me; a sympathy hand, in showbiz parlance, for the defeated departing old codger.

In short, calculus remains a thick glass wall between me and most truths in Feynman’s world where he hears God talk.

Gell-Mann

The Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman’s colleague and rival at Caltech, was no man to mince words, and he once observed that the gap between a person who understood quantum mechanics and one who did not was arguably wider than the difference between a human being and a great ape. On the other hand, Feynman is on the record as having said, “Nobody understands quantum mechanics.” We have here what is called in Talmudic discourse, which I know pretty well, a sort of Plugta d’tanoi, that is, a standoff of the sages. Obviously I have to hope that the weight is with Feynman. As it happens, I know Murray Gell-Mann, and we have chatted some in a social vein. I did try once or twice to raise serious matters with him, but gave up. His responses, while not impolite, hinted that an orangutan was getting a bit too familiar.

Feynman was kinder. We met one summer years later at the Aspen Institute, a think tank high in the Colorado Rockies, and we took to lunching together and going on long walks. He did most of the talking: about his own work in physics, about quantum mechanics (making it seem momentarily almost understandable), and about philosophy, of which he was acidly scornful. His father, a dealer in uniforms, evidently a man with a restless inquiring mind, had...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Little, Brown Spark
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 031607845X
• ISBN 13: 9780316078450
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Giunti Editore; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; 40057; Italien