Word: lindemann
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Once close friends (and now both dead), Tizard and Lindemann turned to public power after failing to reach the first rank in pure science. They had little else in common. Chemist Tizard, who at times "looked like a highly intelligent and sensitive frog," was the outgoing, very English son of a regular navy officer. The "very odd and very gifted" Physicist Lindemann was "repressed, suspicious, malevolent." A fanatic Englishman-by-adoption, he was a fierce ascetic who shunned sensual pleasures. Snow recalls him as "an extreme and cranky vegetarian who lived largely on the whites of eggs,† Port Salut...
...ambitious and "distinctly rich" Lindemann, said Snow, began "eating his singular vegetarian meals at a good many of the great English houses." He met Churchill, formed a lifelong friendship, even though Churchill soon was out of political favor. Tizard took a different road. After teaching at Oxford, he turned to science-advising at Whitehall, and with his bluff, soldierly manner "fitted into that world from the start." Lindemann was jealous...
...Ministry gave Tizard charge of a four-man committee to study British air defense. The group soon made a far-reaching recommendation: put every ounce of British brainpower into developing radar. Then Lindemann landed on the committee as Churchill's delegate. For a solid year, he argued so savagely for his own gadgety notions (infrared detection of enemy planes, aerial parachute mines) that at one point the committee broke up. Costly Victory. Tizard pressed on, and radar was ready in time to help win the Battle of Britain. But the feud had just begun. When Churchill became Prime Minister...
Snow sees clear lessons: "It is dangerous to have a solitary scientific overlord" such as Lindemann was during the war. "It is especially dangerous to have him sitting in power, with no scientist near him, surrounded by politicians who think of him as all-wise and all-knowing." It is even more dangerous to give any power of choice to the scientist who deceives himself through an excessive devotion to gadgetry and secrecy...
...published next spring as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection by Harvard University Press. f Lindemann found yolks to be "too exciting...