Soddy

The Central Role of Energy in Soddy’s Holistic and Critical Approach to Nuclear Science, Economics, and Social Responsibility
Thaddeus J. Trenn

The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 12 / Issue 03 / November 1979, pp 261 -

Source: TW Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0007087400017325

The fact remains that, if the supply of energy failed, modern civilization would come to an end as abruptly as does the music of an organ deprived of wind. [But]… the still unrecognized ’energy problem’… awaits the future…I
F. SODDY, 1912

[The human control of atomic energy could] virtually provide anyone who wanted it with a private sun of his own.2
F. SODDY, 1915

The energy available for each individual man is his income.3
F. SODDY, 1918

[The blame for the future plight of civilization] must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships.4
F. SODDY, 1953

Introduction

FREDERICK SODDY (1877-1956), one of the foremost radiochemists of his day, was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Soddy was also among the first of the scientific leaders of his age, along with Blackett (1897-1974), Bernal (1901-71), and others, to become interested in the social implications of their work. In 1950 his colleague Paneth wrote that currently ’there is widespread discussion on the responsibility towards the community of men of science and particularly experts in radioactivity; but a perusal of Prof. Soddy’s non-chemical writings of no less than thirty years ago [viz., during and after the first world war] shows how strongly he felt the duty to fight for a better order of things’.5

Soddy was a complex iconoclast often derided for dealing with what seemed to be disparate interests. What, it could be asked, could monetary reform possibly have to do with radiochemistry? But to make sense of Soddy, the question must rather be formulated in the other direction: What fundamental concern did Soddy have that enabled him to embrace holistically a variety of seemingly diverse activities?

The answer can be given in a word: energy. And the way in which Soddy dealt with this issue involved him directly with social economics as well as with the social responsibility of scientists.

* Max-Planck-Institut, Riemerschmidstrasse 7, D-8130 Starnberg, W. Germany. THE BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE Vol. is No. 42 (1979) 262 THADDEUS J. TRENN

Soddy construed energy, especially the potentially unlimited supply stored within the atoms of matter, as nature’s special gift to humanity, available only through the mediation of science. It was both our common heritage and a real part of the wealth of nations. The discovery of this new source of energy, the promise of its control, and the frustration of that promise by non-scientific factors form the theme of the present paper. An examination of this theme from Soddy’s complex point of view will hopefully serve to correct the fragmented and superficial received view of Soddy which is still all too prevalent today. The need for, and the discovery of, a new source of energy In his presidential address to the British Association at Bristol in September 1898, Sir William Grookes directed attention to the limitation of world resources. The solution he proposed lay in the artificial production of nitrate in order to stimulate the production of wheat.

‘The fixation of nitrogen is vital to the progress of civilized humanity. Other discoveries’, said Crookes, merely ‘minister to our increased intellectual comfort, . . . [and] hasten the acquisition of wealth . . .’ Crookes warned of the peril for ’the great Caucasian race . . . unless we can class the fixation of nitrogen among certainties to come . . .’[^6]

Although he was referring specifically to the potential food shortage awaiting civilization without new chemical discoveries,

Crookes concluded with more general observations.

Considerations like these must in the end determine the range and avenues of commerce, perhaps the fate of continents. We must develop and guide Nature’s latent energies, we must utilize her inmost workshops . . .[^7]

Thus, by 1898 not only was a potential shortage of world resources becoming recognized, but also the problem was seen as soluble only through international cooperation and scientific research. Soddy had turned twenty-one a few days before this memorable address. He had that year received a first-class honours degree in chemistry at Oxford and remained there for two more years engaged in independent chemical research. While it cannot be confirmed on available evidence that Soddy went to Bristol for the occasion, it is certain that he received the message and made it his own.

In mid-1900 Soddy went to Canada and accepted a junior position in the chemistry department of McGill University, Montreal. Soddy collaborated there with Ernest Rutherford, who had recently been appointed one of the two Macdonald professors of physics. In a brilliant joint effort[^8] Rutherford and Soddy confirmed that the phenomena of radioactivity exhibited a hitherto unknown source of energy in nature. By 1903 they established that the magnitude of this energy was more than a million times that of any previously known terrestrial source, The Central Role of Energy 263 and that it was stored within the atoms of matter. The discovery of this new source of energy was fundamental, but only a first step. Atomic disintegration accompanied by the release of this energy was still nature’s secret. It proceeded at a rate which was independent of any known means of human control and seemed to be associated only with the heaviest elements. Nevertheless, Soddy was quite convinced that the atoms of all elements, not merely those like thorium and uranium, contained such a latent store of energy. There ‘is associated with the internal structure of the atom an enormous store of energy which, in the majority of cases’, Soddy surmised, ‘remains latent and unknowable. For the heaviest elements the property of spontaneous atomic disintegration reveals its existence and enables its amount to be calculated’.9 As understood at the time, this ‘atomic energy’ did not signify the conversion of mass or mass-defect into energy, but it was construed at least by Soddy as a property of atoms in general. With the experimental confirmation by Ramsay and Soddy in mid-1903 of the production of helium by radium emanation, providing a clear case of natural transmutation, the credibility of the disintegration theory of radioactivity and the associated claim of a new source of energy was greatly enhanced. The promise of human control over atomic energy Soddy believed that human control over this new-found source of energy was merely a function of time and scientific ingenuity. Up to the onset of the first world war, in addition to his important scientific contributions concerning isotopes, Soddy embarked upon a public information policy. He preached the promise of artificial transmutation and the benefits that this could—and should—bring to all mankind. If atomic energy could be artifically controlled as Soddy imagined, and as he voiced in the conclusion of his 1906 address on ‘The internal energy of elements’, then by ’the expenditure of about one ton yearly of uranium, costing less than £ 1,000, more energy would be derived than is supplied by all the electric supply stations of London put together. One little step, so easily anticipated in imagination . . .’, said Soddy, ‘divides us from this magnificent inheritance’. Furthermore, he enthused, we ‘are starting the twentieth century with the prize in full view’.10 This prize was the hope of the future. Transmutation no longer meant what it had for the early alchemists, for the transformation of one element into another was no longer of primary interest, even if the end product were gold. The new ‘gold’ was energy. The fundamental problem of transmutation was now that of the controlled release of this atomic store of energy. This new problem, albeit in the first instance of concern mostly to scientists, was one that affected the whole future of civilization. It was in this vein that Soddy in 1912 enlarged upon the 264 THADDEUS J. TRENN theme presented fourteen years earlier by Crookes on the fixation of nitrogen. His paper was appropriately entitled ‘Transmutation, the vital problem of the future’, and it vividly demonstrates the catholicity of his thinking in this matter even before the Great War. According to Soddy, an ’economist might not at once be prepared to accept the doctrine . . . [no doubt he would today] that so far as human affairs go, wealth and available energy are synonyms, and that the poverty or affluence of this planet are primarily measured only by the dearth or abundance of the supply of energy available for its life and work . . .’." But economists aside, even ‘among scientific men the general modern method of treating energy as a fundamental commodity is often obscured by the survival of less direct and more special habits of thought. Sir William Crookes in a remarkable address to the British Association some years ago considered the great question of the world’s future supply of wheat. . .’, Soddy continued. ‘It happens that in this particular case we have an easily understood and specially glaring instance of what is really a universal question. For wheat is only energy’—derived in this case from the sun.[^12]

As for the artificial production of nitrogen compounds needed for agriculture, ’the Chilian deposits of sodium nitrate . . . are certainly not inexhaustible. When they are used up one of the vital assets of agriculture will have disappeared, and thus the “wheat problem”, a phase on a small scale of the still unrecognized “energy problem” that awaits the future, is the first to have attracted attention’.

Modern science is ‘still popularly misunderstood as a creator’ of the store of energy needed for its raw material, whereas it is actually ‘ransacking the globe of stores which have required geological epochs of the past to lay down, and which itself it is powerless to replace.(5) Coal must follow ultimately the threatened fate of the Chilian nitrate beds’, Soddy cautioned (no doubt his admonition should also be taken to apply to gas and oil as well), ‘and considering the rapidly increasing rate at which the available resources of energy are being used up, the end may come sooner than even the most pessimistic anticipate’.J 3

‘As regards energy, and therefore as regards every other commodity, the modern world is undoubtedly living far beyond its income. It has recently come into a legacy from the remote past and it is living on the capital. It cannot now be very long before it wakes up to the appreciation of this fact’.‘4

Yet it still took more than sixty years before the ’energy crisis’ made headlines and before nations began to grasp the full social and economic implications of energy as the basic commodity. Measured against these most recent events, Soddy’s comments of 1912 appear far less abstruse and of much greater portent than they did at the time.

‘These stores may last out a century or two longer’, Soddy continued, ‘but it is obvious that the more glorious the zenith attained the more The Central Role of Energy 265 swift and sure will be the decline’.^

Hope yet remained in the form of the controlled release of this new store of atomic energy. And the responsibility for bringing this about lay squarely on the shoulders of the scientists. As Soddy saw it before the Great War, this was their utmost duty, since the ‘only possible way of escape known to science is by the solution of the problem of transmutation’.16

Nor did he underestimate the difficulties involved. Thirty years of scientific effort lay ahead before Fermi’s group in Chicago could demonstrate what Soddy could only imagine in 1912.

‘The thoughtless may conclude lightly that science which has accomplished so many marvels will surely not fail when this ultimate test comes’.1 ?

What Soddy did not foresee at this time was the possibility that it would not be science that failed humanity in this regard, but that this ultimate achievement of science would be misused for destruction; its natural development stunted and deformed by factors beyond the control of science. To Soddy, before he became aware of the larger issue, it was the solution of the scientific problem that was most urgent, since every year

‘brings appreciably nearer the inevitable coming struggle for the possession and control of the primary sources of natural energy’.[^18]

Without what later became known as nuclear reactors for the controlled release of this atomic energy, our civilization would be forced ‘back into its former physical condition of hand to mouth existence [dependent] upon the daily supply of solar radiation’. Thus, upon the issue of transmutation ‘appears to hang the whole destiny of the race, spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic as well as physical or material’.[^19] In his Matter and energy, also published in 1912, Soddy showed that he had already begun to perceive the problem of transmutation within a larger perspective. The solution of this problem seemed to be the only knowledge that could ‘postpone the day of reckoning’ since it could ‘replenish, rather than further diminish, .. . a dwindling supply of energy . . .‘20

But a mere postponement of the fundamental problem would, in the long run, be no solution.

‘It is perfectly obvious that, with the whole planet in measurable distance of being occupied, and nations being concerned rather to preserve what they have got than to acquire more, a turning-point is being reached in the upward progress which has hitherto kept pace with the advancement of knowledge. Thoughts of economy and conservation will inevitably replace those of development and progress, and the hopes of the race will centre in the future of science.’[^21]

Soddy was thirty-five when he made these observations, and the first world war was not yet visible on the horizon. When it came, the urgent scientific problem became for Soddy of secondary interest. More fundamental problems of social economics and the social responsibility of scientists began to take on greater significance for him, since unless these fundamental questions were solved in advance of a solution to the scientific problem, the achievement of transmutation could prove at best to be a mixed blessing. The promise is tarnished and achieved The traumatic war period of 1914-1919 added a whole new dimension to the scientific problem of transmutation, and during this period Soddy sought to grasp the full meaning of the fundamental conflict and struggled in solitude to find a solution.

As a scientist he recognized that the achievement of controlled atomic energy was both inevitable and a proper goal for science. Indeed it was the duty of science to forestall the otherwise inevitable ’energy problem’ and to provide for the future of civilization. Yet it was becoming increasingly clear that, because of the ignorance and immaturity of society, this could prove to be a curse instead of a blessing. The chemical process recently discovered by Haber had provided at least a temporary solution to the ‘wheat problem’.(5)

But if the fixation of nitrogen could be used for armament as it was during the war, and if other chemical products could be misused for the destruction of human life, then who could guarantee that the release of atomic energy would not also be perverted for warfare ? Both horns of the dilemma presented a peril for civilization.

Soddy therefore turned his attention from the original scientific problem to even more urgent questions of economics and society. He fervently hoped that the control of atomic energy would be postponed until society had become sufficiently mature to take responsibility for this achievement of scientific investigation, yet not postponed indefinitely, for then there would be an inevitable energy crisis. He urged his colleagues to take an interest in the moral and social implications of what they were doing.

The problem was complex but clear. Why were the discoveries which science had achieved for the potential benefit of mankind in every case used for its destruction ? It seemed to Soddy imperative that a solution first be found to this general problem, in order to forestall a similar fate for the achievement of transmutation. Soddy developed this theme in a series of addresses delivered at Aberdeen throughout the war, and published in 1920 under the general title Science and life.

‘Imagine, if you can, what the present war would be like’, he wrote in 1915, ‘if such an explosive had actually been discovered instead of being still in the keeping of the future. Yet it is a discovery that conceivably might be made tomorrow, in time for its development and perfection for the use or destruction, let us say, of the next generation, and which, it is pretty certain, will be made by science sooner or later. Surely it will not need this last actual demonstration to convince the world that it is doomed, if it fools with the achievements of science as it has fooled too long in the past’.22 The Central Role of Energy 267 Two years later—more than sixty years ago—he warned of the dangers of atomic warfare in no uncertain terms. ‘If man ever achieves this further control over Nature . . . War, unless in the meantime man had found a better use for the gifts of science, would not be the lingering agony it is today. Any selected section of the world, or the whole of it if necessary, could be depopulated with a swiftness and dispatch that would leave nothing to be desired’.23 The period from 1919 seemed to Soddy a real race either to death and destruction or to peace and prosperity, for in that year the first successful step towards artificial control of transmutation under laboratory conditions had been announced to the scientific community.24 Judging correctly that full control would quickly come, Soddy dragged his scientific feet and searched rather for a solution to the more fundamental problem, that every potential boon from science had in the past been utilized for the destruction instead of for the benefit of mankind. Unless this problem could be solved and the trend reversed, he forecasted the total ‘wrecking’ of our scientific age.25

Soddy was dismayed that so few of his scientific colleagues were prepared to look beyond the exciting but treacherous boundary of the achievement of full human control over atomic energy. If Soddy seemed misguided to most of his colleagues, they must to him have appeared very shortsighted indeed. Following his identification of the fundamental problem Soddy realized that there would be a tendency first to construct and utilize an atomic bomb for destruction within society, rather than an atomic reactor for the unlimited production of energy for its welfare. He saw clearly that an adequate, reliable, stable, and secure source of energy was a fundamental condition for the welfare of international society. Once atomic energy could be fully controlled and utilized as such a source, the world’s total wealth could be greatly increased. There would thus no longer be any need for repeated cycles of prosperity and peace followed by famine and war.26 To Soddy it was a perversion of science that the achievement of transmutation should be diverted by non-scientific forces from being able to provide just this stabilizing source of energy and, instead, exploited to bolster and perpetuate a system based upon instability and inequality. Soddy considered an antiquated money system lacking a proper scientific standard of value and distribution to be the source of the difficulty. He was particularly incensed at the banking system which he felt could arbitrarily ‘create’ money in order to cover its debts and thereby randomly reduce the value of currency through inflation.2 ? During the next few decades, while science progressed towards the control of atomic energy, Soddy launched a blistering attack upon the evils of the incumbent monetary system. The discovery of nuclear fission in Germany in the 1930s and the rapid progress in America during 268 THADDEUS J. TRENN the second world war is a well known story.28

But Soddy’s struggle during this same period has not yet been fully understood. It has often been said of Soddy that he went ‘off the rails’ about 1919. Although he was appointed to a Chair at Oxford in that year, and received a Nobel Prize two years later, he seems thereafter to have contributed little to orthodox science and turned rather to social economics. His ensuing excommunication from the scientific community was conducted with the same righteous vigour as was his exclusion from the esoteric circle of economists. He was loved by neither and despised by all. To the one he seemed a traitor and to the other a mischievous upstart. But Soddy saw the situation differently, and, as a minority of one, took Mercutio’s position of ‘a plague on both your houses\29 If the scientific community was subservient to a decadent money system which perverted the treasures that science had provided for the benefit of society, then he wanted to be no part of that community. Neither did he endeavour to be recognized by traditional economists, for to him many of them were actually perpetuating the problem. Soddy’s economic views Soddy began to take an active interest in economics and monetary reform during the early 1920s. No doubt one impetus for this was the events following Britain’s formal abandonment of the gold standard in 1919. This was intended as a purely temporary manoeuvre which would permit economic readjustment and the return of Britain to the gold standard at the pre-war parity in 1925.3° The severe recession starting in 1920 was accompanied by a large reduction in the highly inflated wages and prices over the next few years. The attempt to bring this reduction about was one of the main features of economic policy during the first half on the 1920S.31

It was against this background that Soddy lectured and published his Cartesian economics (1922), and The inversion of science (ig24).32 The main principles of the monetary reform which he proposed had been advocated for many years by Silvio Gesell (1862-1930) in Switzerland and Germany, and by the engineer Arthur Kitson (1860-1937) in England.33 Soddy acknowledged his indebtedness to these early reformers as well as to Major Clifford H. Douglas (1879-1952) and his school in the matter of ‘credit reform and on the inefficiency, sabotage and waste that at present are inseparable from our system of distributing wealth’.34 But Soddy stressed that he had ‘been driven independently to advocate this reform after consideration of the physical nature of the defect to be redressed and its interpretation in terms of sociology and polities’.35 No less a reformist than John Maynard Keynes in his General theory of 1936 also acknowledged his indebtedness to the ‘unduly neglected [[269]] prophet Silvio Gesell,[^36] and H. G. Wells pointed out that whenever the complex history of monetary reform comes to be written ‘Gesell will probably be a quite cardinal name in that story’.[^37] Wells like Soddy agreed with Gesell on the ’necessity of increasing the amount of purchasing power in the world with increased production’, but differed in ideology, Wells advocating socialism and Gesell ‘uncontrolled individualism’.38 Soddy took the democratic middle road. Wells thought Soddy’s approach to social economics ’extraordinarily fresh and vigorous’ and Soddy himself ‘a pioneer’.39 They shared a common vision of the future world economy, parting company mainly over the issue of whether this goal was being inhibited intentionally (Soddy) or unintentionally (Wells). Soddy, wrote Wells, thinks ’that the present struggle to arrest the hopeful expansion of human affairs for the sake of the gold standard is due to a conspiracy of powerful, aggressive, able men. We think that it is due to a blind convergence of fear, habit and traditional stupidity’.4» Wells recognized that there was nothing ’to rule the plain accusation of Professor Soddy out of court’,41

but he hoped that Soddy was wrong. ‘If Professor Soddy is right, .. . if it is true that the majority of able spirits among the contemporary rich are, for the sake of power and pre-eminence, deliberately impoverishing a community, which need not be impoverished, then the conception pervading this book of the progressive construction of a universally prosperous economic world community out of the current social order, is unsound’.4* Essential to Soddy’s social economic theory was the link between wealth and energy and the distinction between wealth and money. With an adequate supply of energy there is prosperity, expansion, and development.43 Yet ‘wealth and available energy are synonyms’,44 and furthermore ‘wealth is the power of purchasing’,45 so that if a stable source of energy could be provided by science, the desired goal of increasing the amount of purchasing power in the world could be achieved. The hitch was money, which Soddy regarded as a ‘purely conventional symbol’ of wealth.46 Soddy differed ‘from the reformers [Kitson, Douglas, Cass, and others], while in general agreement with their diagnosis of the industrial and economic situation, in the belief that it is not only possible for a scientific era to devise a stable monetary unit of value, but that it is of far more consequence to its social well-being, even than invariable standards of weights and measures’.47 In contrast to most other monetary reformers such as Douglas, Soddy preferred ’the simpler scheme of basing currency on index number’.48 The idea of index numbers was not new. As Wells pointed out, Professor Irving Fisher (1867-1947) of Yale was already discussing money from this new point of view before the first world war.49 In contrast to the Old Money School, which required that some commodity such as gold or silver be made the standard of value, the New Money 270 THADDEUS J. TRENN School ’turned the matter about from, the point of view of the money manipulated to consider it from the point of view of the worker, and . . . realized that money can be detached altogether from standard commodities’.5° By the early 1930s Keynes, ‘whose commonsense suggestions [were] rapidly spreading into and saturating contemporary monetary thought’, was recognized as an outstanding exponent of the New Money ideas.51

Keynes set forth very clearly the ‘conception of a barometric currency based on an index number’.52 As Soddy observed, [It] is obviously unfair that those who depend for their livelihoods upon fixed wages, salaries, or incomes should have their purchasing power diminished, whether by the find of gold or an issue of counterfeit money. It is almost as obvious that it is unfair that the rentier class, whose income is derived from interest upon past debts, should share equally with the worker when . . . the revenue is scientifically increased, but no new money to correspond is issued. The conclusion is thus extraordinarily simple. Average prices must be fixed by controlling the circulation of money, so that the latter is always increased or decreased proportionately with the increase or decrease of revenue. Fixing the index number by the public issue and withdrawal of currency effects this.53 The ‘constancy of the index number would be the criterion of an honest public currency’.54 Wells expanded upon this point by suggesting that the final settlement to be sought is the world organization of a New Money based on an index number, but a score of expedients may be necessary to avert disaster and gain time for the propaganda and establishment of the scientific method . . . Barometric money, ‘managed currency’ is paper money of which the issue and withdrawal are planned to secure stability of purchasing power in general. An index price of staple commodities has to be maintained. If it falls, issue is increased; if it rises, issue is restricted. So the primary end of a sure value in wages is attained.55 More recently Stewart has commented that ’the monetarists think that monetary policy is very important and has been quite wrongly neglected . . . while the Keynesians (to a greater extent than Keynes himself) have tended to regard monetary policy as relatively unimportant and ineffective’.56

And yet as Lekachman notes, for a variety of reasons ‘monetary policy has been enjoying a revival among economists and public officials’.57 Even though ‘Keynes himself often doubted that it would suffice to resuscitate a depressed economy, . . . [there is] nothing in the Keynesian system [which] contradicts the virtues of monetary policy’.58

The sharpest divergence of view about the importance of monetary policy, as Stewart notes, comes over the measures to be adopted to cope with inflation. ‘To the Keynesians, post-war inflation has The Central Role of Energy 271 basically been a phenomenon springing from the combination of full employment on the one hand and traditional collective-bargaining and price-setting techniques on the other, and needing to be dealt with by some form of incomes policy’.59 But to ’the monetarists inflation is, in the words of Professor Milton Friedman, “a purely monetary phenomenon” ‘.6o

Soddy would not have disagreed. Scientists’ responsibility For Soddy, the issue of the social responsibility of scientists themselves was intimately tied to the scientific question of the availability of a new source of energy and the economic question of its great potential for increasing the wealth of nations (always provided that a solution could be found to the allied problem of money). Merely to provide this new source of energy, as Soddy himself had preached before the first world war, was no longer sufficient. Scientists also had an obligation to participate in the vexed question of the equitable distribution of this new source of wealth. ‘It is an insult to the human intelligence’, wrote Soddy after the second world war, ’that the age which has solved the problem of the production of the physical requisites that enable and empower life should be unable to solve the problems of their equitable distribution, and be compelled to destroy our potential abundance periodically by internal sabotage, world wars and monetary inflation’.61 Soddy believed that the scientific community was particularly responsible for the future of mankind. It was within their power to produce, or not to produce—to operate, or not to operate—sophisticated new products and inventions. To abstain from judgement in these matters, or to plead non-involvement, was to have made a decision by default to support the incumbent system. It was on this fundamental issue that Soddy, over a generation ago, broke ranks with most of his scientific colleagues. But on this ground Soddy was not alone. He was particularly sympathetic to the views of the younger ‘scientific humanists’ such as Bernal and Blackett who were ‘anxious to do good to suffering humanity by all the devices and possibilities of science’.62

According to Barber, however, in the pursuit of the ideal of maximizing the potential power of science, the scientific humanists tended to absolutize science as a value in itself.

63 As socialists, they tended to identify ‘capitalist economic interests’ as the chief cause of ’the frustration of science’.64 Bernal, one of the leaders of this group, wrote that The frustration of science is a very bitter thing. It shows itself as disease, enforced stupidity, misery, thankless toil, and premature death for the great majority, and an anxious, grasping, and futile life for the remainder. Science can change all this, but only science working with those social forces which understand its functions and which march to the same ends.

6S 272 THADDEUS J. TRENN

Once scientists themselves become conscious of this frustration, the scientist is forced to inquire into the factors which control the development of science itself and to ask why it should be hampered and distorted in this way . . . The demand of the scientists that science should be allowed to develop and to be used for the benefit and not for the destruction of mankind is a force .. . to be reckoned with. For, unless it is met, the willing collaboration of the scientist in the present economic system will gradually be replaced by a grudging acquiescence, and finally by a blank refusal to co-operate, or a tacit sabotage.66 In 1935 this group of scientific humanists published a series of essays under the general title, The frustration of science, 67 and although Soddy did not share the view that socialism or communism was the solution, he did share their concern to clarify the basic problem. He therefore accepted their invitation to provide a Foreword to this volume. There is ‘growing sense of social responsibility, among some individual scientific men’, he wrote, but the public expect far more from scientific men in this respect than they have as yet contributed. Individually most of them in this field are still utterly unscientific, and quite as apt as the public themselves to regard original thought on these subjects as socially dangerous and to be suppressed and those who have strayed from the path of ‘pure’ science in these directions as cranks or impostors . . . The pioneer and bearer of a new evangel is always up against an inchoate mass, educable only when miserable and, when prosperous, too proud to learn . . . Referring to the essays themselves, Soddy pointed out that here we ‘read of the wilful destruction of the products and productivity of the soil, the aerial destruction of wealth . . . the development of the art of spreading bacterial infection as a new war technique . . . [all] elegant examples of the sort of ruling mentality now dominating the world’. It was, he thought, to a great extent up to scientists themselves to change the course of these events. ‘Bitter, and justifiably so, as many of the critics of science are, surely nothing bitterer could be said of it than this, that its abundance has but enthroned the wastrel. Nor is the solution . . . that science should look for a new master’. Merely to abandon capitalism for communism was no solution for Soddy.68

As he saw it, the solution is for the public to acknowledge its real master [viz., science], and, for its own safety, insist on being ruled .. . by those who are concerned with the creation of its wealth rather than of its debts.

69 It should require that its universities and learned societies should no longer evade their responsibilities and hide under the guise of false humility as the hired servants of the world their work has made possible, but do that for which they are supported in cultured release from routine occupations, and speak the truth though the heavens fall. 7° The Central Role of Energy 273 This was a patent and insistent invitation to the scientific community to participate in the ‘open conspiracy’ described a few years earlier by Wells, who referred to a ‘world-wide movement conscious of itself. . .’. 71 Its hallmark: ‘Tell the truth though the heavens fall, is the heroic phrasing of it’. 72 Three decades later Bernal could claim that perhaps ’the greatest change in the position of the scientist . . . today lies in the greater self-consciousness of science and its position in society, and a greater awareness of its social function . . . The scientist as citizen is not in the first place a scientist, only in the second’.73 Had Soddy lived to see developments beyond the mid-1950s, he might have been encouraged. As it was, when he died in 1956 during his eightieth year, it was still too early to see just how rapidly the self-consciousness of science would accelerate. It was therefore a reproach as much as an admonition that he sounded shortly before his death: the blame for the future plight of civilization ‘must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships’. 74 Lewis Mumford was among those who commemorated Soddy’s passing in 1956. His tribute is particularly apropos in the present context. I met Soddy at the Sociological Society in 1920, just about the time when he was turning from his work as an experimental chemist to the problem of economics, and particularly to the problem of money, as a medium for making energy available for human life. This preoccupation with economic problems doubtless seemed an aberration to many other people besides his fellow-scientists. Without doubt it involved a sacrifice of Soddy’s special gifts in the field of Chemistry; but it showed an alertness to the social responsibilities of the scientific mind that was exemplary; so that if there had been more Soddys in the world, with the same alertness and the same sensitivity, our age would have been prepared—as even now it is not—to cope with the vast problems . . . which nuclear energy has raised. Soddy demonstrated, by his own too lonely example, the necessary transcendence of the limits of specialization which must become general, if our achievements are not to be undone by the crippled minds who know their isolated field not wisely but too well, and who know life itself, in all its manifold possibilities and challenges, not at all. By his example, yes even by his ‘failure’, he has become one of the heralds of a new age, whose coming awaits a whole generation of Soddys. 75 Conclusion One of the great misconceptions of society, according to Barber, has been to think ’that science is wholly a-moral’. Scientific humanism points out that science ‘rests on a definite set of moral values intimately related to the values of “liberal” society as a whole’.I 6

While not sharing the socialist bent of the scientific humanists, Soddy was clearly disabused of this misconception about value-free science quite early on. ‘Weighty 274 THADDEUS J. TRENN enough influences still prevent any approach to the realization of Utopia, but’, he wrote in 1919, ’they are not now physical but moral’.77 For him it was only a matter of time before the scientific question of transmutation would be solved. Since energy is wealth, the prosperity of the world was assured, at least in principle. He therefore turned his attention from the relatively simple scientific problem to the more complex and urgent moral, economic, and social ones. Soddy was indeed concerned with a variety of interrelated issues. That the integrity and catholicity of his thought eluded most of his contemporaries, and was taken instead to be the aberration of an otherwise astute mind, is perhaps but one indication of just how far he was ahead of his time. That the significance of what he had to say is all too evident today, is perhaps an indication of just how far the ‘open conspiricy’ has now advanced. NOTES 1

Frederick Soddy, Matter and energy, London, 1912, p. 251. F. Soddy, ‘Transmutation, the vital problem of the future’, Scientia, 1912, 11, 199. 2

F. Soddy, ‘Advances in the study of radio-active bodies’, two lectures to the Royal Institution on 15 May and 18 May 1915, as recorded in The Royal Institution Friday evening lectures, igoy-igi8, privately bound at the Royal Institution, London, n.d. The original MS is in the Bodleian Library, Soddy-Howorth Collection, 58 (Alton, m) . The lectures are apparently unpublished but were reviewed in Engineering, 1915, 39, 604. The quotation is from the MS, p. II, 9- 3 F. Soddy, Science and life: Aberdeen addresses, London, 1920, p. 6. The original address entitled ‘Science and life’ was given in December 1918. 4 F. Soddy, concluding statement from Typescript-A of Soddy’s biographical records, in the Bodleian Library, Soddy-Howorth Collection, 4 (Alton, 2). 5 F. A. Paneth, ‘Classical radioactivity and its sequence’, Nature, 1950, 166, 800. 6

Sir William Crookes, ‘Presidential address’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1898, p. 18. 7 Ibid., p. 19. 8

T. J. Trenn, The self-splitting atom: a history of the Rutherford-Soddy collaboration, London, 1977. 9 F. Soddy, ‘Radio-activity’, The electrician, 1904, 52, 646. 10

F. Soddy, ‘The internal energy of elements’, Journal of proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1906, 37, 8. The cost of production is now over ten times greater; cf. M. Hansen, ‘Trends in uranium supply’, International Atomic Energy Agency bulletin, 1976, 18, 16—27. 11

Soddy, ‘Transmutation’, op. cit. (1), p. 187. " Ibid., p. 198. ‘3 Ibid., pp. 199—200. ‘4 Ibid., p. 200. •5 Ibid. •6 Ibid. •7 Ibid. 18

Ibid., p. 201. ‘9 Ibid., p. 202. 20

Soddy, Energy, op. cit. (:), p. 246. 11

Ibid., pp. 246-7. " F. Soddy, op. cit. (3), p. 36. The original address, ‘Physical force—man’s servant or his master?’, was given in November 1915. The quotation is from the section dealing with science and war. See also Bernard Barber, Science and the social order, New York, 1970 (reprint of 1952 edn.), p. 288. ‘J Soddy, op. cit. (3), p. 107. The original address ‘The evolution of matter’ was given in February 1917. »4 T. J. Trenn, ‘The justification of transmutation: speculations of Ramsay and experiments of Rutherford’, Ambix, 1974, 21, 53-77. a 5 F. Soddy, The wrecking of a scientific age, London, 1927. 26 F. Soddy, Dishonest money; or why a larger pay-packet now buys less than it did, London, 1950. ‘7 F. Soddy, Wealth, virtual wealth and debt: the solution of the economic paradox, London, 1926, The arch-enemy of economic freedom: what banking is, what first it was, and again should be, London, 1943. The Central Role of Energy 27518

E. N. Hiebert, The impact of atomic energy, Newton, Kansas, 1961; and Alice K. Smith, A peril and a hope, Chicago, 1965. ‘9 F. Soddy, Money reform as a preliminary to all reform, Birmingham, 1950, p. 2. 3° M. Stewart, Keynes and after, 2nd edn., Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 60. 3- Ibid. 3* F . Soddy , Cartesian economics: the bearing of physical science upon state stewardship, London , 1922 ; The inversion of science: and a scheme of scientific reformation, London , 1924 . 33 Silvio Gesell, Die natiirliche Wirtschaftsordnung durch Freiland undFreigeld, 3rd edn., Arnstadt & Thiiringen, 1919; Die Verwicklichung des Rechtes auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag durch die Geld- und Bodenreform, Hauts-Geneveys, Switzerland, 1906. Arthur Kitson, A scientific solution of the money question, London, 1894; The money problem, London, 1903; A fraudulent standard; an exposure of the fraudulent character of our monetary standard, with suggestions for the establishment of an invariable unit of value, London, 1917. 34 Soddy, Inversion, op. cit. (32), pp. 5—6; Clifford Hugh Douglas, Credit-power and democracy; with a draft-scheme for the mining industry, London, 1920; Economic democracy, London, 1920. 35 Soddy , Inversion, op . cit. (32), p . 5. 36

Stewart, op . cit. (30), p . 76 ; Joh n Maynar d Keynes, The general theory of employment, interest and money, London , 1936. 37 H . G . Wells, The work, wealth and happiness of mankind, London , 1932, p . 365 . 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 487. 4° Ibid., p. 492. 4" Ibid., p. 488. 4* Ibid., p. 492. 43 Soddy, Energy, op. cit. (1), p. 251. 44 Soddy, ‘Transmutation’, op. cit. (1), p. 187. 45 Soddy, op. cit. (3), p. 27. 4’ Ibid.; cf. F. Soddy, Money versus man: a statement of the world problem from the standpoint of the new economics, London, 1931; The role of money, London, 1935. 47 F. Soddy, ‘Unemployment and hope’, Nature, 1930, 125, 346; cf. W. G. Linn Cass, ‘Unemployment and hope’, Nature, 1930, 125, 225. 48

Soddy , Inversion, op . cit. (32), p . 6. 49 Wells, op . cit. (37), pp . 349, 365. Irvin g Fisher, 77 K making of index numbers, Ne w York , 1922; The nature of capital and income, New York, 1906; The purchasing power of money, New York, 1911. Cf. Friedrich A. Hayek, The pure theory of capital, London, 1941, passim. 5" Wells, op. cit. (37), p. 365. 5’ Ibid. 5 J

Ibid.; J. M. Keynes, A tract on monetary reform, London, 1923, ‘constituted an attack on one of the main pillars of the British economic system’, and, according to Stewart, op. cit. (30), p. 22, Keynes found himself ‘virtually alone’ in his rejection of Britain’s return to the pre-war gold standard system; cf. Keynes, A treatise on money, London, 1930. 53 Soddy, Inversion, op. cit. (32), p. 23. 54 Ibid., p. 41. 55 Wells, op. cit. (37), P- 37 •• s 6

Stewart, op. cit. (30), pp . 228-9. 57 Robert Lekachman, The age of Keynes: a biographical study, Harmondsworth, 1966, p . 88. 58 Ibid. 59 Stewart, op. cit. (30), p. 229. «° Ibid. 61

Soddy, op. cit. (26), p. 20. 62

Barber, op. cit. (22), p. 292. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., pp. 292-3. 65john Desmond Bernal, The social function of science, Cambridge, Mass., 1967 (original edn., London, 1939), p. xv. « Ibid., p. 386. 67 Sir Daniel Hall et al., The frustration of science, London, 1935 (reprinted New York, 1975). This contains a Foreword by Soddy on the inversion of science; chapter I by Sir Daniel Hall on science and agriculture; chapter II by J. G. Crowther on aviation; chapter III by J. D. Bernal on science and industry; chapter IV by V. H. Mottram on medicine; chapter V by E. Charles on the invention of sterility with respect to the population explosion; chapter VI by P. A. Gorer on bacterial warfare; and chapter VII by P. M. S. Blackett entitled “The frustration of science’. Blackett insists that science must become involved in social and economic issues: ‘Unless society can use science, it must turn anti-scientific, and that means giving up the hope of the progress that is possible. This is the way that capitalism is now taking, and it leads to Fascism’ (p. 139). The only other alternative envisioned here is socialism, which 276 THADDEUS J. TRENN encourages science, instead of rejecting science like fascism. These claims of Blackett clearly set the tone of the volume. 68

Soddy, op. cit. (67), pp. 7-9. Soddy refused to accept the socialist gambit and followed neither the rank individualism of Gesell nor the creed of Wells. He preferred democracy. ‘The dispute between Socialism and individualism centres on one point, the question of the ownership of revenue-producing enterprise . . . [The alternative], democracy stands for a fair deal between the individual and the community . . . Do not trust labels. Look well to realities. An equally sinister fate is as likely to come from Socialism itself [as from extreme individualism or Fascism]. If it does not understand the origins of social injustice, it is as likely to end in an oligarchy, supported by military power . . .’; Soddy, Inversion, op. cit. (32), p. 47. Cf. F. Soddy, ‘What I think about socialism’, Socialist review, August 1928. A decade later, Soddy expounded further on this point in the light of the political polarity that had hardened in the meantime. ‘There is growing up among the masses, who have no part in or liking for the power-politics of their rulers, a feeling of fatalism that the threatened conflict is inevitable. According to the Marxist doctrine, capitalism carries within itself the seeds of its own collapse, so that they are coming to regard communism as the only alternative. My thesis is that the threatened collapse of our Western civilization has nothing to do with the political issues between capitalism and communism, but is the consequence of its false money system. Not only the impending collapse but its whole development, culminating in this very concentration of power into two opposing world-groups, has been due to the creation and issue of money having passed out of the hands of the several nations, at first into the hands of private bankers and now into the supranational Money Power which has usurped sovereignty over the whole Western World. The alternative is for the West certainly not communism, which . . . would be the substitution of one form of tyranny for another . . . [but] the restoration to the several nations of their traditional sovereign powers over the creation of money, and . . . an honest money system, with money of constant purchasing power, operated, not for profit, but .. . as a public service, like those provided for the maintenance of just weights and measures . . .’; Soddy, op. cit. (29), p. 2. ‘9 Soddy considered science to be the creator of wealth, but under the inversion of science the ’exploiters of the wealth of the world are not its creators’. Under this inversion, from ’the point of view of the community, capital is not wealth but debt, the not owning by the community of the resources of the planet whereon it resides . . .’; Soddy, op. cit. (3), pp. 23-4. The rise of the ‘scientific civilization’ which Soddy advocated would meet with many obstacles, as he acknowledged just after the first world war. “The war being now over, it is not out of place to add that an even greater danger than neglect awaits the scientific investigator, the danger that he along with every other creative element in the community will be remorselessly shackled and exploited to bolster up the present discredited social system. There is abundant evidence since the war that science rules the world, and he who would aspire to rule it must first rule science’; Soddy, op. cit. (3), p. 109; cf. F. Soddy, ‘Social relatons of science’, Mature, 1938, 141, 784-5. i” Soddy, op. cit. (67), p. 9. 71

Wells, op. cit. (37), p. 781. 7 J

Ibid., p. 777. 73 Bernal, op. cit. (65), pp. xxxiv-xxxv. These comments appear in his essay ‘After twenty-five years’ included in this volume and originally published in M. Goldsmith and A. Mackay (eds.), Society and science, London, 1964. 74 Soddy, op. cit. (4). 75 Lewis Mumford , ‘Commemorativ e message’, in Commemoration of Professor Frederick Soddy, London, 1956/8, pp. 11-12. The lack of alertness and sensitivity here described is represented typically by Soddy’s biographer and close colleague in earlier research on isotopes, Sir Alexander Fleck: ‘The basis of his thought for the whole of his life after coming to Oxford was an endeavour to resolve the weaknesses of our modern civilized life . . . [Soddy’s] main conclusion was that “it was entirely due to the fictitious money system which arose contemporaneously with the birth of the scientific civilization and that now was being purposefully and consciously used to frustrate it and to preserve the earlier civilizations founded on slavery” .. . To most of us,’ Fleck admitted, ’these writings have little attraction and the best that can be said of them is that they represented an attempt to base a monetary system on an assessment of energy quantities. . . He continued to write and think on these lines until the 1950s but the impact of these writings tended to diminish’; Alexander Fleck, ‘Frederick Soddy’, Biographical memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1957, 3, 210-11. Twenty years later it can be asked whether Soddy’s views should not have attracted more attention within the scientific community, and whether to have ignored them can be justified. 76

Barber, op. cit. (22), p. 293. 77 Soddy, op. cit. (3), p. 172.