cc  >> Welcome to Wednesday Nite at  the Lab at the Biotechnology  Center here at UW Madison.  I'm Kevin Niemi with the Center  for Biology Education and your  host tonight.  Our topic for this evening is  from Professor Richard Staley in  the Department of History of  Science and it's on the great  war.  The 90th anniversary of the  armistice, science in the great  war.  So I'm guessing there's not too  many veterans of the World War I  in this room.  That's like 110 years old or  something.  Professor Staley, as I said, is  in the Department of the History  of Science with interests in the  history of physics in Europe and  America during the 19th and 20th  century.  With a particular research focus  on the physics communities  around the 1900s.  So obviously this is a topic  that fits right into that.  And I will just turn it over to  Professor Staley and welcome  Professor Staley. 

 [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you.  It's a pleasure to be here.  As I'm sure all of you know,  armistice day is the 11th day of  November, celebrating the end of  World War I on the 11th hour of  the 11th day of the 11th month  in 1918.  And it was first celebrated as  an event in 1919 dedicated by  King George V of Britain.  In Australia, can you already  tell that's my homeland,  Armistice Day is still marked by  solemn parades and silence at  the appointed hour but it's been  rivaled by Anzac Day on the 25th  of April which commemorates the  first major battle fought by  Australian and New Zealand  forces at Gallipoli.  And in, yes as someone said, a  slaughter.  There's a lot to look back on  when we look back on war, isn't  there?  In the US since World War II,  Armistice Day has been known as  Veteran's Day and it's joined by  Memorial Day that's been  celebrated since the Civil War.  We have far too many wars to  look back on and many, many ways  of returning to the past.  If we think of science and war  then images like this are likely  to come to mind and you'd  immediately pick this as World  War I because of the gas masks,  I imagine.  We think of World War I and  poison gas rather than the more  conventional weapon which  actually did much more killing:  The machine gun there. 

 And, of course, if we see this  image it's clearly World War II.  And the shift in scale from men  and mud to the earth shaken by  the atom is indicative of the  extraordinary impact of  organized science in World War  II.  We already think a lot about the  differences between that image  of a gas mask and this image.  And it tells us a lot about the  increasing engagement of science  and war in the 20th century.  But, in fact, World War I was  particularly important in the  cultural history of Europe and  the world as a mark of the  events that led modernism to  doubt the inevitability of  progress and to see machine war  as a touchstone of reality.  World War I was also important  because the peace won proved to  be so fragile.  The conditions of the Treaty of  Versailles signed on the 28th of  June in 1919 called for Germany  and its allies to bear sole  guilt and pay reparations and  those conditions helped sow the  ground for the extraordinary  social and economic dislocations  that followed.  And while the conditions of the  peace helped ferment a future  war, the experiences that have  been garnered in the trenches of  the front, in the laboratories  of scientists and in the  corridors of power in London,  Berlin and the US, all played a  role in helping those nations  face World War II in a very  different way.  Science and war was something  you could learn and bring ever  closer together.  This talk will focus on two  major tests that were conducted  during or in the shadow of World  War I. 

 And that together illustrates  some of the characteristic  features of scientists'  engagement in war.  Especially we'll focus on  attention between  internationalism on the one  hand, which many had held to be  absolutely essentially to  science itself before World War  I and which was perhaps most  strongly represented in those  few figures who stood up for  pacifism.  That's one poll that we'll be  investigating.  The other, of course, is science  in the service of the nation.  The first test we'll explore is  one we rarely associate with  war.  Tests of the intelligence that  owe the origins to the work of  the French psychologist Alfred  Binet, but I'll show what shaped  most decisively by being  introduced to the US draft in  the course of World War I.  The events we look at in  understanding intelligence will  tell us a great deal about how  intelligence tests came to  assume the form that they have  today.  The second test we'll explore is  much more commonly associated  with the great war.  That's the expedition led by  Arthur Stanley Eddington to test  the bending of star light during  the total eclipse in May 1919.  This was planned during the war  and was conducted as many were  still fighting over the nature  of peace and it became a major  symbol of internationalism. 

 We'll explore just how its  participants managed to make  that so.  And I've chosen to focus on  these two events partly because  they bear upon a common topic:  They both shaped our  understanding of intelligence  through tests and through  Einstein as the image of  intelligence.  And partly because they address  so clearly the question of how  the fruits of war are  transformed and help make a new  peace.  But first of all, of course,  some general issues.  Let's cover the ground.  European engagement.  The war cascaded around  alliances following the  assassination of archduke Franz  Ferdinand on the 28th of June  1914 with the central powers of  Germany and the Austro-Hungarian  empire facing the entente of  France, the UK and Russia.  Their citizens were in many  cases eager to volunteer.  And it's notable that while some  previous, some prewar science  statesman like Norman Lockyer  had long emphasized that science  would be very, very useful to  the military and should be,  therefore, strongly supported by  the state.  In many cases scientists  enrolled in the war effort or  were called up for military  service simply as soldiers. 

 They could best serve, it  seemed, by bearing arms.  That understanding was always  shared with another one.  It was always also recognized  that science, the scientists  could offer the tools of their  discipline to provide the  resources of war.  And I'll consider disciplinary  patriotism in a moment.  But it was only as month after  month the war failed to end and  the press for soldiers became  stronger and stronger and then  obituaries started flooding the  newspapers and journals that  scientists readiness to share  the lot with their fellows as a  soldier was gradually overtaken  by the thought that they had  better ways to engage that might  also keep them out of harm's  way.  And both sides in the conflict  soon had not just martyrs but  scientific martyrs.  The physicist Henry Moseley is  the great British example.  In 1913, by using x-ray spectra  obtained by defractioning  crystals, he'd found a  systematic relationship between  wave length and atomic number.  Moseley's law.  That helped bring new order to  the table of elements. 

 When World War I broke out, he  turned down a job offer and  enlisted in the royal engineers.  He fought at Gallipoli in that  slaughter where he was killed in  action by a sniper in 1915, shot  through the head while he was  telephoning an order.  Similarly, the astronomer Karl  Schwarzchild volunteered for the  German army although he was over  40.  He went to both the western and  the eastern fronts and while  engaged on the eastern front  sent three critical papers on  relativity and quantum theory to  scientific journals in Germany  before he died in May 1916.  Scientists, though, didn't just  bear material arms alone.  They understood their position  to give them a special status  and they regarded themselves as  leaders in the fight for  civilization.  One of the most notorious events  early in the war occurred when  Germany pushed through Belgium  and sacked the University of La  Verne library on August the  25th, 1914.  German university professors  soon afterwards circulated a  manifesto declaring their  solidarity with the German army.  You can see here how strongly  they sought militarism and  civilization to be connected.  And, in fact, that was the case  across all the lines. 

 Have faith in us, they said,  that we shall carry on this war  to the end as a civilized nation  to whom the legacy of a Goethe,  a Beethoven and a Kant is just  as sacred as its own hearths and  homes.  The signatories declared that  the stories about Germans  killing babies, about a ruthless  sack of the library were, in  fact, all lies and that their  nation was, in fact, engaged in  the fight for civilization.  93 people signed this including  amongst them Max Planck, Walther  Nernst, Ludwig --, Fritz Haber,  Philipp Lenard, and Wilhelm  Roentgen and I've only listed  the Nobel Prize winners amongst  the scientists represented.  There was an extremely sharp  reaction to this from scientists  in England and France.  For example, foreign membership  of the Paris Academy of Sciences  was terminated for those German  scientists who had signed the  manifesto and the British royal  society proposed that all German  and Austrian foreign members be  dismissed.  Soon the French attacked their  colleagues across the -- arguing  that although the Germans were  good at organizing science, they  lacked originality and tended to  appropriate theories that  originated elsewhere.  Pierre Duhem, for example, gave  a well attended course of  lectures to students on German  science in which he argued that  German science had a distinctive  character marked by the  deplorable mental  characteristics of the German  race.    German physicists were just  unable to think intuitively and  they lacked the common sense  that was necessary to tie  abstract physical theories to  the real world.  He gave, as an example, the  Theory of Relativity.  With what Duhem described as its  absurd postulate as the velocity  of light as the upper limit of  velocity. 

 He, of course, had things to say  even about science across the  channel in the partner nations.  For Duhem, British science was  reminiscent of a workshop and  far too mechanical for his  taste.  But we can see here how readily  scientists connected nations and  the character of their science.  And Duhem's focus on the Theory  of Relativity actually reflects  something more general that's  worth noticing.  Although Einstein's Theory of  Relativity in its special form  had received a great deal of  attention in Germany, it was  much less well known in both  France and Britain.  In fact, the events that were to  lead Einstein's theory to become  well known were to ensure only  as World War I ended, and we'll  explore them shortly.  So scientists of different  nations fought as cultural  warriors as well as soldiers.  And the boycotts of membership  of societies, the bans on  foreign contributions to  journals, the cessation of  routine contact between  astronomers, things of those  nature were, in fact, to  continue for many years after  World War I.  Apart from their willingness it  show themselves as cultural  warriors, scientists also showed  that the disciplinary gifts of  their long training and their  particular skills could help  provide the resources of war.  And in thinking about the  resources of war, I want to just  address a couple of  misconceptions about science and  the military. 

 One of those is that the  military is always  backward-looking and  conservative and that scientific  technologies come from civilians  and are generally resisted.  The evidence doesn't really bear  that up.  It's much better, for example,  to think of airplanes as being  continually sponsored by the  military and civilian uses to be  maybe not quite a spin off but  subsidiary to military  engagement.  And in thinking about the  weapons of World War I, to the  popular image focuses on the  relatively novel machine gun and  gas as the main weapons.  But of, and new technologies  like the tank.  So we have a great focus on the  tank and gas as the new weapons  of World War I.  But of the 10 million people who  died in the great war in Europe,  5 million of them died from  artillery fire.  It was big guns that did the  killing and it wasn't the novel  weapons that were responsible  for most of the deaths and one  of the reasons is illustrated by  this slide here.  In fact, in part because  belligerence on all sides had  been carrying out research on  gas weapons and on all sides  were exploring ways to use gas  in warfare, it was easy for them  to respond to the threat once it  had issued from Germany.  And as in so many examples in  World War I, a stalemate was  reached with force matched  against force and  countermeasures proving  effective admiring people  further into the blood. 

 So novel weapons didn't do the  trick.  Much more it was refinements of  heavy guns.  The artillery that now had  sophisticated recoil systems  that allowed them to fire  accurately to the same place  time after time and that were  ever more strongly connected in  networks of intelligence that  would provide through aerial  photography and telegraphic  messages the location of the  enemy that you were seeking to  attack.  And I'll just symbolize that  with this slide.  And here we can see both aerial  and earth telegraphy in the  diagonal from the top left down  to the bottom right.  And hydro phones and gas  symbolized in the two other  images.  In the top right image we have  Fritz Haber visiting the front.  In all of these kinds of  networks, it was a combination  of technologies and a gradual  refinement of different elements  of them that was critical.  And scientists played an  important role in that process  and they sought to provide ways  in their laboratories to refine  the tools of war.  One example is the Professor of  Applied Mathematics, Max Mason,  in the University of Wisconsin  who carried out hydrophone and  sonar tests in the waters of  Lake Monona. 

 Scientists found ways that they  could help address the resources  of war.  But it wasn't just the tools and  materials that they could  provide, the mobilization of  science and technology was soon  to lead to new forms of  organization.  In England, that was put in  place by the foundation of a  body that was named the  Department of Scientific and  Industrial Research.  The first time the government  took a long standing active  interest in managing science in  Britain.  That department had the aim of  promoting, funding and  coordinating science and  technical research for  industrial and military  significance.  It was aimed primarily not at  weapons but at the production of  useful goods such as substitute  chemicals for gun powder and  optical glass.  But the department also  recognized a need for  investments in pure science.  Another indication of how war  changed the organization of  science was that the British  equivalent of the National  Bureau of Standards.  The national physical laboratory  had always been previously  organized and run by the royal  society, a self-elected body of  scientists.  At the outbreak of the war it  had 187 employees. 

 By 1918 that number had  increased to 550.  And in that same year the  leadership of the national  physical laboratory was  transferred to the new  Department of Science and  Industrial Research.  So the organization of science  was increasingly being brought  into state hands as a result of  the war.  Like Britain, World War I led  the United States government to  go into science planning with  the formation of the National  Research Council in 1916 in  order to promote and organize  research for national security  and welfare.  And the US was soon able to  dwarf all participants in scale.  And that's best illustrated by  gas.  I'm sure you all think first of  Germany when you think of  involvement in gas warfare and  it was, of course, pioneered by  Fritz Haber and the German army.  But when the US entered the war,  first of all they were in a  position where US chemists had  profited by providing --  materials to Britain and its  allies.  And secondly, they soon  organized their own effort in  gas with the same, in the same  month that the US joined the  war, the National Research  Council formed a subcommittee on  noxious gases with 118 chemists  government at the American  University assisted by John  Hopkins University and the  Mellon Institute.  By war's end there were 4,000  officers and 44,000 men in what  was now called the US chemical  warfare service. 

 And they had the largest  research staff of anybody yet  assembled in the world.  1700 people working on chemical  weapons in the United States.  That was more than half of the  total number of people working  on chemical weapons on all sides  of the conflict.  And it will symbolize that it's  not just in World War II that  the US was able to leapfrog  other nations in the scale of is  scientific efforts.  And it's worth noting that James  Bryant Conan led one group of  that effort on chemical warfare  in the United States and like  many others, the experiences he  gained in World War I were to  provide an important background  for his work in shaping US  policy through World War II.  He was to become one of the two  or three most powerful people in  that effort.  But we shouldn't think only of  weapons, materials and  organization, we should think of  the human resources.  The day that the United States  declared war on Germany, which  was April 6, 1917, 40  psychologists met to discuss the  ways that psychologists as a  discipline might help the war  effort.  One of the most important things  that they decided to do was to  approach the army with a  proposal to help solve what they  regarded as the manpower  problem.  And this case illustrates what  can happen when a particular  scientific community, in this  case psychologists, works to  persuade a different community,  the military, of the value of  their knowledge and practices. 

 This is a story of negotiation  and transformation which changed  both intelligence testing and  the army.  Psychologists recognized that  the army was now dealing with a  situation it was not used to.  There was a large group of  recruits being rushed to the  front without officers gaining  the chance to get to know them  over an extended period of time.  What kind of information did you  have to go on?  This is the registration card of  someone from -- in  Massachusetts.  And that gives height, build,  color of eyes, color of hair.  But, of course, you wanted to  know more about these men.  Psychologists went to the army  to say that they could help weed  out the mentally unfit.  They could tell the army who was  feebleminded.  That reflected the first context  in which intelligence tests had  been developed.  That was turn of the century  France. 

 Where the psychologist Alfred  Binet had been commissioned to  provide a test that would  determine whether children  described as backward in the  French school system were  actually behind their peers or  were just behavioral problems,  just challenged, just behavioral  problems.  Does that unrest reflect real  lack of intelligence or are they  just naughty kids?  French teachers could get them  moved out of their classroom by  describing them as retarded.  Then they would go to another  institution.  The French state thought, well,  we're spending a lot of money on  this we better see whether they  really are, in fact, retarded.  And they commissioned Alfred  Binet to provide a test of the  characteristics of these  children.  Believing that earlier tests  developed by people like Francis  Galton had measured fairly  trivial abilities in either  physical sensation or memory and  the like, Binet proposed instead  that tests of intelligence  should measure skills like  judgment, comprehension and  reasoning.  The same kind of skills that we  measure on intelligence tests  today.  Between 1905 and 1911 he and a  collaborator Theodore Simon  developed highly influential  scales of the measure of  intelligence of children.  Critically, all of their work  involved face to face interviews  with a psychologist and the  child themselves and a detailed  assessment.  It was a very holistic approach,  one might say. 

 Binet's early test was taken to  the United States by a Stanford  University psychologist, Louis  Terman, whose version came to be  called the Stanford Binet test.  And another US psychologist,  Henry Goddard, became familiar  with Binet's approach on a trip  to Europe and translated Binet's  writings into English.  When people like Goddard and  Terman brought the test to the  United States, they interpreted  it in quite different ways.  One of the main things that they  did was apply it to different  groups of people.  First of all, they applied it to  immigrant groups on Ellis Island  from 1913.  And their tests there showed  that approximately 40% of recent  immigrants were feebleminded.  However, the most important  change came when psychologists  went to the army with this tool.  The army took up their offer and  a group of psychologists  including Robert Yerkes, the  president of the American  Psychological Association, and  Henry Goddard himself adapted  the Stanford Binet test to this  new situation.  It was the first time that the  test had been developed for use  primarily by adults rather than  by the mentally ill or by  schoolchildren and for the first  time it was used for large  groups at the same time.  It was also the first time that  the test was developed so that  it could be administered and  then interpreted by relatively  untrained people without the  experts sitting in and observing  the subject. 

 The committee involved designed  an instrument where technology  was substituted for professional  skill and where only quantity --  of the most minimal sort, a  signal number, would be  generated.  Mental testing was being remade  into a new kind of endeavor in  which professional judgment was  subordinated to objective  determination and statistical  manipulation.  It brought psychologists into  the army and here's an image of  the first company of  commissioned psychologists.  And indeed many scientists who  served the war effort went  straight into uniform.  These men are at the School for  Military Psychology in Camp  Greenleaf.  Psychologists undertook field  trials and then the military  assessed whether the results  were useful to them.  This is the kind of negotiation  was going on.  Whether they provided a good  guide to the people who were  being recruited.  In this process the army was  interested in whether or not the  tests were practically useful  while the psychologists were  concerned with whether they  remained intelligence tests,  whether they remained faithful  to the aims of the Stanford  Binet test that they were  adapting.  One of the most significant  requests that the army made was  for a vision which focused on  distinguishing not just the  backward, not just the  feebleminded, but officer  material. 

 And looking for both extremes on  the scale, the test was now  being applied to everyone.  Becoming a tool to characterize  normal intelligence.  You administered it.  You graded it.  And what was it you were  testing?  There were eight different  sections and on the screen you  can see section three on  practical judgment.  There were sections on following  oral directions, rearranging  sentences, solving arithmetical  problems, answering general  information questions, giving  synonyms or antonyms, solving  number series, giving analogies  and these ones.  And I hope this would be big  enough for you to read.  The first question is, it is  wiser to put some money aside  and not spend it all so that you  may A.  prepare for old age or sickness,  B.  collect all the different kinds  of money or C. 

 gamble when you wish.  [LAUGHTER]  You may have an answer for  that fairly quickly, but the  16th and last question was,  why should we have Congressmen?  Because A., the people  must be ruled, B. it ensures  truly representative government,  or C. the people are too many  to meet a make their laws?  And you addressed all these  16 questions in a minute  and a half.  This economy of time, the  security involved, the  measurement across a broad  spectrum and adaptability to  group use had never been --  within civilian testing  previously.  But they changed the nature of  intelligence testing in general.  The pilot test carried out  raised all sorts of queries  about how well the test would  fit specific circumstances but  on the whole officers found it  matched the expectations they'd  formed of their men through  day-to-day contact so it was  agreed to extend the test.  Ultimately 1.  75 million soldiers took the  alpha or the beta intelligence  test.  The latter being designed to  help test illiterate soldiers.  And the test proved massively  influential.  Not just in helping the army in  war time but later when it was  publicized. 

 Two books, in particular, did a  great deal to promote and  popularize the tests: Lothrop  Stoddard's The Revolt Against  Civilization, published in 1922  and this book, Carl C.  Brigham's A Study of American  Intelligence.  The test were powerful both  because they showed that  purportedly objective measures  could be administered  practically and because they  provide an example testing in  all fields increased following  the publicity given the army  tests.  But the results also gave cause  for alarm.  They indicated that nearly half  the white draft, 47.  3%, was described as  feebleminded.  With an age of 12 or less.  And the lowest scores were  recorded by African Americans  and by recent immigrants.  You could disaggregate the army,  disaggregate the normal  community and intelligence was a  tool that became fuel for  eugenics.  Now let's move from psychology  and its transformation to  Einstein's war. 

 We often think of Einstein's  childhood as being marked by a  hatred for schools and that's  reasonably true but it's over  exaggerated.  His last year of school was one  he thoroughly enjoyed and it was  in Switzerland.  And here's a photograph of  Einstein with the graduating  class.  And it was particularly  important because Einstein lived  not with his family, who were  then in northern Italy, but with  the family of one of his school  teachers.  And there he embarked a very  strong diet of socialism that  was strongly critical of  Prussian imperialism.  And in a way he got a political  education at the same time that  he received a normal school  education.  In many ways the attitudes that  Einstein showed in war were to  mark him out from his colleagues  and they stem back to his  secondary schooling in  Switzerland.  At the outbreak of war, Einstein  was in Berlin in the most  prestigious position in German  science.  He'd just been called to become  a member of the Prussian Academy  of Sciences with a professorship  that allowed him to teach  whenever he wanted and that was  all.  Which meant he taught very  rarely. 

 And he had an institute of his  own.  A -- institute for theoretical  physics.  Einstein was already a character  on his on in Germany.  He was a national highflying  academic in Germany.  But his attitude towards the war  would mark him out from his  fellows.  He refused to sign that  manifesto of 93 professors.  And instead joined a colleague  who provided a manifesto to the  Europeans.  And that indicates a very  interesting stance in which  Einstein argued if not for  internationalism, at least for  European solidarity.  He thought that no war had ever  so intensively interrupted the  cultural communalism of  cooperative work as the present  war did.  And while that shouldn't  surprise you, he thought that  those who one might expect to be  able to resist such convictions,  to have a strong regard for  common world civilization, that  was scientists and artists, had  so far fallen into the same kind  of nationalism that everyone  else had exhibited. 

 They had spoken, he thought,  with explainable marshal spirit  but spoken least of all of  peace.  This was signed by four people.  One other person besides of  three people who together  drafted it.  And it was published later in  Switzerland.  Einstein also began attending  members of the organization for  a new fatherland.  Which was promulgating pacifist  aims.  He attended that from 1915 till  the military wound it up early  in 1916.  And for that activity the German  government began their first  surveillance of Albert Einstein.  And, of course, remember that  when he came to the United  States he was also to be under  surveillance from the FBI.  While a convinced pacifist,  Einstein also worked on the  design of wings for airplanes  and he offered supporting expert  evidence for a German firm's  development of a gyro-compass  that helped make submarine  navigation possible. 

 So Einstein wasn't a consistent  or thorough going pacifist.  But before the end of the war  came, he was trying to promote  any sense of internationalism  amongst his colleagues that he  could and wanted to do so  through a proposal for a book  that would include chapters from  scientists in the belligerent  countries and in neutral  nations.  He gave up on that project when  the scientists who he tried to  enroll in it showed that they  didn't, in fact, feel  predominately international.  You had to work very hard for  pacifism and internationalism in  Germany.  Political endeavor marked one  side of Einstein's work during  the war.  The other side, of course, was  his work in physical theory.  In the course of the war, he  sought to create a field theory  of gravitation extending his  earlier special principle of  relatively to deal with  accelerated frames of reference  that would enable it to provide  a theory of gravity.  And, famously, in 1915 he found  a formulation in which the  curvature of space-time around  masses explained Newton's force  of gravity.  He also provided three different  tests of his new theory, the  most important of which the fact  that starlight would be bent  passing in the neighborhood of  the sun.  And Einstein worked very hard to  enable the testing of this  prediction. 

 He began that work even before  he had a final theory.  And that's what led to eclipse  expeditions.  The first of those were in 1914  traveling to Russia.  One expedition was led by Erwin  Freundlich, a colleague of  Einstein's in Berlin who worked  very closely with Einstein on  several different ways of  testing general relativity.  He traveled to southern Russia  in early 1914 in order to take  photographs during an eclipse.  Others traveled there also from  the United States.  But when war was declared  Freundlich was confined as an  enemy alien so he wasn't able to  undertake in the eclipse  expeditions.  The American party set up in  Russia but faced bad weather,  and were unable to take any  photographs.  While Freundlich had to spend  the entirety of the war or a  good part of the war in Russian  prisons before he was exchanged  for prisoners that the Germans  had taken, the Americans had  more freedom.  They sought to provide another  test of an eclipse in 1918 in  Goldendale, Washington. 

 And here's the party gathered  around the cameras that would  take photographs on that  occasion.  Now I'm pretty sure you've never  heard of these events.  War is a major reason why you  didn't hear of Freundlich's  attempt to measure eclipses.  In this case the story is more  complex.  The Americans had to leave much  of their equipment in Russia in  the context of war and so didn't  have the best suited telescopes.  And the person responsible for  taking the measures had trouble  bringing them within a  reasonable range.  His name was H.  Curtis.  And he was an opponent of  relativity.  He wished to publish the results  that he had. 

 And they supported a deflection  considerably less than the one  that Einstein had predicted.  But although he was in charge of  the expedition, he wasn't in  charge of the observatory as a  whole.  And the director of the  observatory, William Campbell,  had control.  Campbell was more interested in  having the most accurate results  possible and in the course of  Curtis' work one saw both  newspaper articles talking about  the test of Einstein's theory in  1918 and the call to stop those  tests.  Campbell telegraphed both Curtis  Einstein results, small weight,  errors large, use cautiously.  He didn't want to let the  reputation of his observatory  rise or fall on figures he  didn't think were good enough.  And he then said, delay  publishing Einstein results.  So here we can see that there's  a real possibility that we might  have learned of Einstein before  1919.  Either through German expedition  work or through American  expedition work in 1918.  But we were ultimately to learn  of Einstein through another man. 

 Through Arthur Stanley Eddington  . Who was a young and highly  promising professor of astronomy  at Cambridge.  Here's a picture of him in 1904  when he graduated senior  wrangler top of the mathematics  class which was an extraordinary  honor.  Eddington received a copy of  Einstein's papers on relativity  from a Dutch astronomer who had  participated in the conversation  as Einstein had developed his  theory.  But as he did so was a rare  event.  Eddington had already found that  the astronomical community  wanted to cease contact across  the enemy lines.  And in 1916  H. H. Turner  who wrote a column called  the Oxford Notebook in the  Observatory called for a  cessation with contact with  Germans.  Eddington replied and that's his  reply there.  What stands in the way of that  continuance of that corporation  which is for the welfare of  astronomy.  Eddington urged his  contemporaries to think not of a  symbolic German but of their  former friends, professor X for  instance.  Call him a hun. 

 Call him a pirate.  Call him a baby killer and try  to work up a little fury.  Eddington thought the attempt  broke down ludicrously.  And he thought that the worship  of love, a forced love of empire  -- and perversion of science had  brought the world to disaster.  But he received a rapid reply.  Turner wrote back, my reply is  that the facts stand in the way.  Hard, horrible facts.  Such as we could not have  believed possible before the  war.  Eddington proposes to shut his  eyes to those facts request to  test the situation by play of  our imagination in connection  with some individual.  Surely professor Eddington is  here using his preconceptions  before the war and his own  shrinking from horrors to help  him in ignoring actual hard  facts. 

 That was how you thought of a  pacifist.  Eddington as a pacifist was  shrinking from horrors.  He wasn't playing a full role in  the British community.  What gave Eddington the strength  to write like this?  Eddington was a Quaker and the  friends had long advocated  pacifism.  And conscientiously objected to  World War I throughout its  course.  And Eddington joined many of his  Quaker colleagues in that  stance.  Early in the war, he was granted  exemption from military service  because as a astronomer his work  was regarded as valuable to the  state.  By the spring of 1918 the  British government desperately  needed manpower and revoked the  exemption.  Determined to refuse  conscription, Eddington was  ready to describe himself as a  conscientious objector.  Cambridge dons sought a less  confrontational pathway. 

 They tried to get him a  deferment on scientific grounds.  But when the relevant letter  arrived granting such a  deferment, Eddington sent it  back with a postscript that he  would not, that if he were not  deferred on -- that he would  claim it on conscientious  objection anyway.  He was an extremely principled  pacifist.  That forced the issue.  And with the stakes for keeping  Eddington from jail now higher,  his colleagues intervened with  the home office to obtain a  deferment for Eddington but only  if he undertook a arduous  scientific task.  Eddington was deferred with the  express stipulation that if the  war should end by 1919 then he  should led one of two  expeditions that were being  planned for the purpose of  verifying Einstein's prediction  with regard to the gravitational  deflection of light.  Einstein was being given a  scientific task.  Eddington was being given a  scientific task to prevent him  from going to jail.  And that task was one that  fitted very well with his  understanding of Quaker duties.  The expedition would be not just  a scientific expedition but also  a Quaker adventure. 

 As Quakers at the war's end  traveled to Berlin with goods to  help those on the enemy side who  were distraught by war, so  Quaker would travel to an island  off the coast of Africa to carry  internationalism into science.  His partner in this endeavor was  Frank Dyson and they aimed to  measure the bending of the sun  around, the bending of starlight  around the sun in a total  eclipse.  But that's very, very hard work.  Their expeditions were to face  clouds.  The mirrors that they used to  change, be affected by the  sunlight.  But they were in the end to  bring newspaper headlines to the  story.  Here is how it was described in  the popular press afterwards.  And again it may be hard to see  this but we can see diagram here  which shows the actual and the  apparent position of a star as  its light is bent in passing  around the neighborhood of the  sun.  Eddington's sight was one of two  sights.  Parties went to Sobral off  Brazil and to Principe off  Africa. 

 And in the first case two  telescopes provided 19  photographs and 8 photographs,  respectively, and showed between  12 and 7 stars in most cases.  And photographs with the second  smaller instrument were  unequivocally the best.  Ultimately, they gave a value  for the deflection of starlight  of 1. 98 seconds  which was in the  neighborhood but above the  Einsteinian value.  Measurement of the stars on the  other telescope gave a value of  . 86 seconds which was close to  the Newtonian value.  The Principe instrument was,  actually these are the Sobral  instruments and here they are.  And what was to prove  problematic in the experiments  were the behavior of these  mirrors driven by clockwork so  that they would track the sun as  it moved.  The Eddington expedition got one  fantastic photograph of a solar  protuberance.  But most of their photographs  were disrupted by cloud and they  got very few star images.  Here's an example of a negative  of the photographs, and if you  can see two lines in this area  the actual stars they're looking  to measure are at the meeting  point of those dashes.  And there are two stars depicted  there. 

 And around here you can see the  light around the edge of the  moon as it eclipses the sun.  The Principe experiment  developed 16 plates but only two  usable plates which showed just  five star images.  And unlike the Sobral observers,  they weren't able to make  comparison plates in the field  and they had to be arranged to  make them at Oxford later.  Their plates showed a value of  1. 61 seconds  of deviation.  And these things explain why it  took so long for the results to  be announced.  The eclipse occurred in May and  results were announced on the  6th of November.  And this is the famous headline  that announced those results:  Revolution in Science, New  Theory of the Universe,  Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.  You might wonder how can you get  a headline from that coming out  of a meeting of the Royal  Astronomical Society and the  Royal Society of London.  You can get a headline like that  because Eddington had worked  extremely hard to make this a  public event.  To stand for internationalism,  he had to convey it to the  public. 

 The 13th of January in 1919 the  Times had already run an article  by reporting that an eclipse  would be coming and tests would  be made.  In April on the 22nd of April  they ran an article that there  would be a solar eclipse the  next month.  On May the 29th there was  another article that there would  be a solar eclipse today.  These articles came from the  scientists themselves.  So the public discussion of  science that was to lurch into  the headlines was something that  had been built and worked for.  It reflected strong concerted  efforts to make a scientific  expedition a public event also  because Eddington wanted it to  stand for internationalism.  He was spectacularly successful  and news of Einstein was to move  around the world.  We've seen two important tests.  And both of them shaped  understandings of science in the  awkward peace that followed  World War I.  Both through the conscious work  of the scientists involved  represented productive  simplifications. 

 In one, intelligence was  rendered in terms of a quotient.  In the second, a crucial  experiment helped establish  science as an international  endeavor and install Albert  Einstein as the figure of the  age representing science as  intelligence.  This second story can remind us  that the very best qualities of  science, internationalism, for  example, are not, in fact,  intrinsic to the endeavor.  They have to be made and remade  by every generation.  Sometimes through contest.  Eddington and Einstein had  achieved a great deal, and this  is Eddington's first letter to  Einstein sent in 1919 on  December the 1st.  He said, Dear professor  Einstein, it was a great  pleasure to receive your letter  from Holland and to be in  personal communication with you.  I was sorry not it be able to  come over to meet you.  Our results were announced on  November 6 and you probably know  that since then all England has  been talking about your theory.  It has made a tremendous  sensation. 

 And although the popular  interest will die down, there is  no mistaking the enthusiasm in  scientific circles and perhaps  more particularly in this  university.  That's a very interesting remark  and I noted before that  relativity had, in fact, not  received much attention in the  scientific communities of France  and Britain.  It was this public event that  was to bring relativity even  into many scientist's  understandings.  Eddington went on.  It is the best possible thing  that could have happened for  scientific relations between  England and Germany.  I do not anticipate rapid  progress towards official  reunion but there is a big  advance toward a more reasonable  frame of mind among scientific  men and that is even more  important than the renewal of  formal associations.  He didn't anticipate rapid  progress.  And, in fact, boycotts were only  to be lifted five to six to  seven years after World War I.  But he had succeeded in creating  a form of rapprochement.  Nevertheless, despite the  enormous achievement that  Eddington and Einstein had  managed, despite the attention  that came to Einstein following  Eddington's work, his path, as  we all know, was to be beset by  controversy and by still more  savage attack. 

 He was to be an example of  intelligence and an example of  conflict at the center of world  events for decades to come.  And that brings me to an end.  Two different images in  intelligence tests and in the  support of Albert Einstein as  the theoretical physicist par  excellence.  Thanks for your attention.  [APPLAUSE]