Science: Golden Age Interpreter

When little Jimmy Jeans was born in 1877, science was smug and dull. It considered the universe a mere machine governed by well-known laws. When Sir James Hopwood Jeans (O.M.; M.A.; D.Sc.; LL.D.; D.L.; F.R.S.) died in England last week at 69, the universe had once again become a mystery, and— thanks to war-conscripted science—a dangerous mystery.

But between the publication of Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity (1905) and the explosion of the first atomic bomb (1945), science had a glorious period never equaled before. On dozens of fronts it swept ahead. From laboratories and observatories, from scholars' quiet studies in rapid succession came startling discoveries, most of them wrapped in an opaque web of higher mathematics.

Sir James Jeans was a leading interpreter of this Golden Age. Jeans started as a lecturer at Cambridge, England, then was summoned to Princeton in 1905 by the University's president, Woodrow Wilson. There Jeans taught applied mathematics, married Charlotte Tiffany Mitchell of the jeweled Tiffanys. In 1910 he went back to Cambridge, turned to astronomy. Always a theoretician rather than an observer, he published formidable papers which won him a reputation among brother scientists. Typical title: The Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism; Atomicity and Quanta.

About the only Jeans theory which can be explained to laymen presents a possible origin of the solar system. If another star, Jeans argued mathematically, ever passed near the sun, it may have pulled out a streamer of gas. This, cooling, may have formed the planets.

If Jeans had stuck to his astronomical knitting, only scientists would ever have heard of him. But he was that great rarity, a first-rate scientist with a command of lucid English. Starting in the late 1920s, he wrote a series of best-selling books* which brought the new discoveries of science, unblemished by errors or indignity, down to the popular level.

The service was desperately needed, for science had far outrun popular understanding. Relativity was nearly a generation old, but it had not yet penetrated the thin outer layers of the public mind. The Quantum Theory, perhaps even more important, was even less understood. People needed to know that stars were no longer points in space, but convenient physical laboratories, observed through fantastic instruments. People needed to be told that the atom had fallen apart, had dissolved into lesser particles.

With limpid, vivid clarity, Jeans explained the mysteries. He did not stop work as a scientist, but gradually his scientific work took second place. He lectured, played the lion, his comings & goings across the Atlantic became almost public events.

As Jeans grew older, he gradually became preoccupied with abstract philosophy. Sample problem: Is the material world an illusion, and thought the only reality? Such abstractions hold small interest for most of the modern public, and Jeans's last book, Physics and Philosophy, was little read.

Sir Arthur Eddington, Jeans's closest rival, died in 1 B.B. (Before the Bomb). Jeans himself died in 2 A.B. The two Englishmen left no one to take their place. So far, the terrifying discoveries of the nuclear physicists have found no comparable interpreters.