Lamentations

By Peter Staler

NIGHT THOUGHTS OF A CLASSICAL PHYSICIST by Russell McCormmach Harvard University; 219pages; $15

The year is 1918, the place a small university town in a Germany whose people are slowly and unhappily awakening to the fact that they are losing the Great War. The protagonist is Victor Jakob, a professor of physics who, like his country, comes to realize that he too is being defeated. Younger, more imaginative men have challenged Jakob's beloved structure of classical physics, undermining the foundations of his intellectual world. Advancing age has confronted him with a more direct challenge, making him doubt his own usefulness and weakening his will to live. Seated in his study and spreading jam made from turnips on bread made from substances whose origins he dares not guess, Jakob watches night descend and reminisces about a life spent in the struggle to discern the laws underlying the physical world.

Jakob is a character invented by Russell McCormmach, 48, a professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University. "After years of work on rather standard books of history for the specialist," says McCormmach, "I decided to try a kind of spin-off from scholarly material. Enter Victor." But if the physicist is made of whole cloth, the other personae of this remarkable exercise in fiction and historiography are not, and they rise from the pages as Jakob remembers them and their contributions to physics. There is the fascinating Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell, who forged the theory of electromagnetism, and Jakob's fellow Germans, Heinrich Hertz, Hermann von Helmholtz, Max Planck and that disturbing chap, Albert Einstein, who, to Jakob's everlasting distress, fused physics with mathematics and introduced a radically new way of seeing and thinking. It is a way that will provide humanity with a method of destroying that most complex and fragile construction, humanity. Finally, there is Paul Drude, Jakob's mentor and advocate of harmony in both life and physics, whose suicide unsettles his disciple and turns his mind toward ever enlarging thoughts of personal and global extinction.

Part history, part science lesson, part philosophical treatise, Night Thoughts is a brilliant piece of scholarship and a profoundly moving portrait of a man and his time. Jakob may not have existed. But the place he inhabited did, and by the final chapters of this ruminative, disturbing book, the reader is likely to grieve for the professor and for the world. --By Peter Staler

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