Volume 50, Number 5 · March 27, 2003
The Gentleman Scientist
By Timothy Ferris
Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
by Jennet Conant
Simon and Schuster, 330 pp., $26.00
Amateurs used to make significant contributions to scientific research—as they still do, in astronomy at least—but generally speaking, their roles got small once the sciences got big. This is particularly true for physics, the hardest- core of all the 'hard' sciences. Physics had become almost exclusively professional by the dawn of the twenti-eth century, when Max Planck first glimpsed the quantum principle and Albert Einstein was starting to grope his way to relativity theory. (Part of the charm of Einstein's life story is that he was working as a patent office clerk in 1905, when he published the special theory of relativity, and so could be taken for an amateur scientist. In reality, though, he was a formally trained physicist who was simply having trouble finding a job, and he assumed academic posts once they were offered him.)
Review, 3855 words
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