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Thursday, Nov 17, 2005

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"Even in the Nazi period, some scientists did not compromise"

Ranjit Hoskote

In a recent interview, mathematician and physicistJoel L. Lebowitzspeaks on a range of subjects including the social responsibility of scientists. Excerpts:

— PHOTO: VIVEK BENDRE

Joel Lebowitz: "Intuitively, from an everyday point of view, we are moving into the future."

Professor Joel L. Lebowitz, who was in Mumbai as a speaker under the Sarojini Damodaran International Fellowship Programme of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, is a distinguished mathematician and physicist at Rutgers University, U.S. Celebrated in the scientific world as "the creator of a remarkable worldwide intellectual community in mathematical physics and statistical mechanics," Prof. Lebowitz organises two statistical mechanics meetings every year at Rutgers, which attract hundreds of students and researchers.

He also belongs to a large global network of intellectuals that has been working to turn public opinion against the violence in the Levant. He is one of the signatories to a statement that calls for "Mutual Recognition and Moderation in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," intended as an effort in the direction of a negotiated peaceful solution of the conflict, and made in the hope that a lasting peace may be realised between Israel and a Palestinian state

This is especially pertinent, considering that Prof. Lebowitz is the only survivor of a Carpathian Jewish family that perished in the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1944-1945. The future scientist emigrated to the U.S. in 1946, as a 16-year-old.

As a scientist, you approach the world in a spirit of objective inquiry. But as a survivor of the Shoah, the Holocaust, how do you view the persistence of a historical memory of injustice? And how would you resist the attempts, often made by fascist establishments, to distort science and present it as the product of a specific culture or race?

There was clearly a strong attempt to develop a genuine `Aryan' science and a need to denigrate even Einstein's work as `Hebrew' science in Nazi Germany. I talked about this at the World Congress of Mathematicians in 1998, which was held in Berlin that year. Later, I gave a lecture on Max von Laue, who won the 1914 Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of X-ray crystallography. Among all the top German scientists, he was the most pronounced anti-Nazi. So even in the Nazi period, some scientists did not compromise on their values. Science has its own memory, which builds on the past, operates in an incremental way, and is equipped with an internal self-correction mechanism.

But doesn't that self-correction mechanism sometimes become a sign of dissidence?

I must go back to my experiences in the former Soviet Union. One of my scientific heroes was Andrei Sakharov, a leading refusenik or dissident Soviet scientist, an activist for peace and freedom who opposed the official scientific establishment of the Soviet Union. I met him when I went to Moscow for the first time in 1979. This was at an unofficial seminar held in a private home. The refuseniks could not have a conference openly, nor could we meet them openly. I went with another colleague as part of a tourist group, which was our camouflage.

Does the scientist have a social role as a truth-teller?

At the conference that I hold twice a year on statistical mechanics at Rutgers, I always include a session on the social responsibility of scientists.

You have spoken, often, of how we cannot remember the future because time's arrow is unidirectional. Yet physicists are at home with a conception of time in which past, present, and future seem to be subjective locations rather than fixed determinations.

Intuitively, from an everyday point of view, we are moving into the future. But many physicists treat past, present, and future as a single entity. `Now' is as subjectively defined, in this view, as `here' is. We must consider the paradox that the physical laws that govern life are time-symmetric, but happenings in the world are time-asymmetric, unidirectional. It's the Humpty Dumpty syndrome. An egg breaks, you can't put it back together. Milk spills, you can't unspill it. The question is, how do we reconcile the irreversible behaviour of physical objects with the reversible dynamics of the atoms and molecules that make up those objects?

Are we speaking of varying degrees of order in a system?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics governs our lives — the degree of entropy is always increasing in any system. The 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann's explanation, to which I subscribe also, was that the starting condition of the universe is very far from equilibrium. We are moving from low-entropy states to high-entropy states. A glass of milk is a macroscopic system composed of many, many microscopic particles. There are very few orderly states for all those particles, compared to very many possible disorderly states. Once an orderly system loses its equilibrium, as when the milk is spilled, it is very, very difficult to return it to the earlier state of order. Boltzmann's explanation is probabilistic, the probability of recreating a lost orderly state is extremely low.

Physicists delight in moving from the micro-level to the macro-level, and the rules of behaviour change drastically as we transit from one to the other. Is there really a world out there that exists autonomously of our observations, or does the observing consciousness make the world?

What seems like a paradox at one level can be a paradigm at another level. It depends on which level of the system you find yourself in. At the same time, I do not believe that the observer produces the world. I believe that there is an objective world, independent of observers. The universe existed before us. We are part of the natural world.

We are also part of a political world in which memory is often the basis of antagonisms, feuds, projects based on the righting of perceived historical wrongs. Would you consider the proposal, made by various thinkers including Ricoeur and J. Krishnamurti, for a remedial amnesia, a necessary forgetting that liberates us from the cycle of violence enacted in the name of justice?

That would be a good idea. A lot of the trouble-makers in the world pose as custodians of historical justice. I know there is a point in bringing war criminals to trial, but this is not a solution in itself. I would willingly trade that in, if we could be certain that there would not be more people committing new crimes in the name of historical justice. It is a human habit to remember all that is negative. When the Soviet Union ended, the question of how the different nationalities within the former super-state would deal with one another came up. And some people were saying things like, `How can we trust the other side when they betrayed us 860 years ago?'

Is science in the grip of over-specialisation? Should it re-connect with its roots in Renaissance humanism, achieving a more amplified sense of what it means to be human and share a common human condition?

Surely. When I look at how people across the world are engaged in the same pursuits, I find we have much more in common — across sexes, races, nationalities, religions — than we think. Many of us are asking the same questions about the universe, important questions. When we recognise this, our differences become trivial by comparison.

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