The Republic of Science and the Atomic Bomb

Abstract

Science is an enterprise that deplores boundaries. There is not much point, for instance, in trying to do nuclear physics without chemistry, and it would be foolish for scientists to pretend that they can work in isolation according to state borders, as if (say) mathematicians of different nationalities are somehow engaged in studying separate, national strains of their subject. Ecosystems are not confined by human-imposed lines of demarcation; seas lap on many shores. The Hungarian Jew Michael Polanyi, a polymath educated in Germany and with a long teaching career in Britain, wrote at mid-twentieth century of “a republic of science,” in which scientists worked together across and despite nation-states, trying to solve common problems. “The Republic of Science,” he wrote, “is a Society of Explorers.” Science presented a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which could be most efficiently assembled through group effort, each scientist working from his perspective or with her expertise. “The authority of scientific opinion remains essentially mutual,” Polanyi wrote. “Any authority which would undertake to direct the work of the scientist centrally would bring the progress of science virtually to a standstill.”1 The republic required sharing knowledge. It spurned hierarchy. It did not supplant but transcended the state.