Scientists Under Surveillance - JPat Brown et al (Eds) ***

This is a weird one, in some ways reminiscent of one of those 'fun' books that tries to put a story across by mocking up fake documents - except the documents here are real - specifically, extracts from the FBI's files on leading scientists.

Sometimes these are fairly mundane - security checks, for example, when a scientist has been put forward for some senior government post, such as the astronomer Vera Rubin, about which nothing whatsoever of interest is found. At other times, something unexpected turns up. In the case, for example, of Neil Armstrong, the background check pulled up a reference to a bizarre incident when two tourists arrived near Armstrong's home, asking questions that were considered too personal. In other cases, such as the flamboyant Richard Feynman, there were suspicions of communist or other disruptive tendencies, though Feynman comes out triumphant. Feynman is also an interesting example of something those who report scientists as suspicious ought to bear in mind - the people making the accusations are routinely investigated themselves. For Feynman, there are page after page of supportive comments before he was given a government post, but one multi-page rant accusing him of being 'a master of deception'. The identity of the accuser is redacted, though the notes give a strong suspicion of who it was (something anyone who knows Feynman's biography can probably guess.)

Although one or two snippets stand out, a lot of it can be quite samey, or involves people of interest only to the most dedicated history of science fans, such as John P. Craven. Given both the pedestrian nature of much of the FBI reporting and the dull bureaucracy of it all, it's hard not to flip through the pages, picking out bits that jump out at you. (I think this even happened to the editors, as pages 2 and 3 on Neil Armstrong are actually the same document.) To make matters worse, more could have been done to enhance the contrast of some of the copies - several pages were totally impossible to read.

Despite all this, there's a certain frisson of seeing what amounts to spy work on big names, plus the fun of trying to guess what's behind the redacted bits (mostly done by cutting and pasting bits of paper over them documents, rather than black marker). If you happen to be someone writing about one of the subjects, there would be great material in here to add in an anecdote or two. And it can demonstrate well some of the worrying paranoia of government agencies. But overall it's more a 'Hmm, that's interesting,' than a 'Wow! Must tell everyone!'

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied), the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Search This Blog