Louis de Broglie: Un itinéraire scientifique by Louis de Broglie; Georges LochakReview by: Dominique PestreIsis, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 740-741Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/234813 .

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740 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 79: 4: 299 (1988)

E. G. Bowen

ship detection in naval exercises in late 1938. Plans to begin production of airborne interceptor radar were made the following year; with the outbreak of the war, how- ever, Bowen's group began a series of moves from one facility to another, making the task of installing both airborne inter- ceptor and coastal surveillance radar espe- cially difficult. In the fall of 1940 Bowen joined the Tizard Mission to Canada and the United States, which introduced the newly developed cavity magnetron to American radar researchers and served as a catalyst for organizing and directing the National Defense Research Committee's nascent radar effort. His account of the Ti- zard Mission's travels and their reception by American scientists and authorities is the most interesting and well-written part of the book. Bowen remained in the United States as an adviser at MIT's Radiation Laboratory-the nation's center for radar research-until 1944, when he joined the Radiophysics Laboratory at the University of Sydney.

Radar Days joins a number of already- published memoirs of English and Ameri- can radar researchers-from A. P. Rowe's One Story of Radar (Cambridge, 1948) to Ernest Pollard's Radiation (Woodburn

Press, 1982) and John Rigden's Rabi: Sci- entist and Citizen (Basic Books, 1987)-as well as broader histories of radar by David Allison, Willem Hackmann, and the late Henry Guerlac. Bowen provides consider- able technical detail about his early sys- tems and occasional moments of humor: his mixture of amusement and fear over Air Ministry security precautions, for example, provokes both anxiety and self-effacing humor over attempts to safeguard classified documents and equipment. His stories of building prototypes from old equipment and scrap nicely illustrate the difficult con- ditions under which even high-priority mili- tary research was conducted before the war. The book has small shortcomings- occasional superfluous detail, virtually no discussion of the moral and ethical aspects of either military research or air warfare, and no mention of how the author's war- time research experiences affected his post- war career-but they are balanced by Bowen's keen memory and dry humor, and may reflect the author's perceptions of his work in his younger years. That perception is neatly summed up in a photograph (on p. 36) showing a young E. G. Bowen in the rear cockpit of a small test aircraft. Straps cut into his overcoat and scarf; the young man is both smiling and apprehensive. Mili- tary research before World War II, the picture says, was serious business, and occasionally hair-raising; but from the perspective of the rear cockpit, it was mainly an innocent good time to be looked back upon with a touch of nostalgia.

ALEX SOOJUNG-KIM PANG

Louis de Broglie. Louis de Broglie: Un itin- eraire scientifique. Edited by Georges Lo- chak (Histoire des Sciences.) 215 pp., bibl. Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 1987. Fr 79.

This book is intended as an introduction to the life and work of Louis de Broglie, the French Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1929. It comprises thirteen texts by de Broglie, all of them previously published, most from the years 1952-1955, when he returned to his initial skepticism toward the standard interpretation of quantum me- chanics. Chosen by Georges Lochak, an old friend and pupil of de Broglie, these texts are published to commemorate the death of the physicist at ninety-four in March 1987.

Lochak's preface will help give readers a

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 79: 4: 299 (1988) 741

feeling for the kind of man de Broglie was and for his pupils' and friends' dedication and devotion to him. He appears as a decid- edly original personality, one whom many in the last forty years considered margi- nal, "a kind of fossil that years have made deaf and blind," to paraphrase Einstein speaking of his own image in Princeton.

The articles are grouped under three headings: "Autobiographical Notes" (the one dated 1952 is the most detailed and complete), "Evolution of Louis de Brog- lie's Ideas in Theoretical Physics," and "Philosophy of Science." In fact these headings are largely misleading, since two thirds of the volume deals with one main concern: the scientific works and the re- search de Broglie followed from 1923 to 1928, the intellectual reasons that led him on a different path from that of his well- known contemporaries, and the factors that led him back to it in the early 1950s.

In 1911 Louis de Broglie was nineteen. Interested by Jules Henri Poincare's philo- sophical writings, he read the galley proofs of the proceedings of the first Solvay Con- ference, which his brother, Maurice, was then editing. That converted him: he would become a physicist. In 1913 he was called up by the army and set to serve in radio transmission-which he did until 1919. Early that year he came back to his brother's private laboratory, where he worked on X-ray physics. This confirmed him in his prewar conviction that "a syn- thetic theory of radiation," linking the "wave" and the "particle" organically, was urgent and necessary. At the end of 1923 he proposed a way of fulfilling part of that pro- gram, a solution that made him known. From 1924 to the Solvay Conference of 1927 (where he was asked to report) he fol- lowed his own ideas on how to integrate the "particle" into the wave. He did not suc- ceed technically, however. Feeling iso- lated, he admitted defeat in 1928 and rallied to Niels Bohr and Max Born's approach- "keeping anyway a certain nostalgia for [his] initial conceptions." The reason he gave for this conversion was that, apart from the fact that he felt isolated with a technically complex research program that Bohr and his followers considered uninter- esting, he was nominated associate profes- sor at the Sorbonne. He thought that "teaching forces one to present things within a totally coherent form," and the only available form was that of the "Co-

penhagen group." He thus taught, and re- mained more or less within, this framework for twenty years.

These various autobiographical stories are useful since no serious biography of de Broglie is available. Their main interest is that they allow the reader to get an idea of de Broglie's fundamental project, to grasp his perception of what a "true physical de- scription" had to be, of what could count as an explanation in the world of microphy- sics, of what he counted as proof in a theory-and how those implicit but ines- capable conceptions totally shaped his physics and his career.

From the historian's point of view, a lot remains to be done. Three main studies re- lated to de Broglie could be envisaged. The first would go into the topics listed above more seriously, starting from original sources, and try to refine the characteris- tics, origins, and effects of de Broglie's cul- tural or intellectual background. It would continue the work started by Bruce Whea- ton on the specific roles of the de Broglie brothers (The Tiger and the Shark, Cam- bridge, 1983); centered on the 1910s and 1920s, it would try to describe the growth and decline of a way of doing micro- physics.

A second study would center on members of Louis de Broglie's school from the 1930s to the 1970s. In a comparison of their work with efforts in other countries, their lines of research, their favorite models and methods, and their results could be identified and assessed. The heart of the problem would be understanding what led to marginalization.

A third study, finally, would consider the ways-institutional as well as intellectual- through which another kind of theoretical physics entered France in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

For the time being, however, this book will be useful to those who are not particu- larly familiar with this aspect of the history of quantum and theoretical physics.

DOMINIQUE PESTRE

Martin S. Kenzer. (Editor). Carl 0. Sauer: A Tribute. xvii + 229 pp., illus., index. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1987. $13.95 (paper).

The first half of this tribute to Carl Sauer, arguably the leading figure in American ge-

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