Physics and Anthropology: A Personal Account by the New President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation

Abstract

' The Editor has asked me to explain why I a physical scientist was chosen to be President of an Anthropological institute and why I accepted the appointment. The Board of Directors will have to be asked why they selected me for this position. On the other hand, I may be able to explain why I accepted this offer despite my present joint appointment as Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Biophysics at the University of Illinois two disciplines which are by no means linked to anthropology in any obvious way. Permit me to go back a bit more than half a century to show that this apparent mesalliance is in fact a legitimate affair. I was born into a delightful, typical family of mixed Germanic, Slavonic and Jewish extraction, with artists, craftsmen, engineers, peasants, architects, and lawyers as ancestors. As a boy I wanted to become a Naturforscher, which in my mind was a romantic mixture of Fridtjof Nansen and Maria Curie. Despite this dream of glory, I was always a miserable student who never did his homework: in the natural sciences I felt it was trivial, and I just did not have time for the humanities. There were too many other things to do skiing, mountain climbing, at night in a jazz combo, and developing reat new illusions with a cousin of mine in an unsurpassed magic act. College broke up the act, and I went into physics, because if I ever wanted to know anything about nature, I had better study her laws. I was soon captivated by a new kind of magic, that of the Viennese Circle, a small but vigorous group of philosophers of science. Wittgenstein, Schlick, Menger, and Carnap influenced me deeply, and I began to grasp the fundamental difference between the world as it is, and its symbolic representation i language or equations. I wanted to learn more about the peculiar relation between the observer and the observed, by learning more about the The war put an end to such highfaluting thoughts. But magic again saved me to emerge unscathed in mind and body. After working during these years in various research laboratories in Germany on plasma physics and microwave electronics, I arrived in Vienna in 1945, with a wife, three children, and borrowed shirts, pants, and shoes, just in time to help set up the first post-war radio station, whose science and art program I directed until 1949. At the same time I tried to help one of Austria's telephone companies produce dearly needed equipment. These fascinating times of exhaustion, turmoil, and spiritual rejuvenation stimulated me to return to my old riddle of the nature of the observer. With the encouragement of two wonderful men, the psychiatrists Victor Franki and Otto Potzl, I published an outline of a quantum mechanical theory of physiological memory.