Consultant Dan
11 October 2011
On Nobel Prizes, humanist science and climate change
Its Nobel Prize season and the Swedish Academy is doing an excellent job again this year of promoting the online conversation about the winners.
Today Sunanda Creagh has an interesting article on The Conversation about Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954 for his work on quantum mechanics.
Archives show that Born, who was from a Jewish family, was expelled from his University post by Adolf Hitler.
I’m glad that Sunny also chose to mention Born’s role in Pugwash, a little known organisation, mostly comprised of physicists, which won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1995.
I went to a Pugwash conference in the old city of Leningrad, as it was called at the time, where I met its founder Joseph Rotblat. Rotblat shared in the Nobel Prize for Peace for his role in the Pugwash movement. He was a true peacemaker: dignified, intelligent and compassionate.
Rotblat was the first conscientious objector of the nuclear age and expanded on his refusal to build nuclear weapons, into an organization which helped avert nuclear conflagration during the Cold War.
When you read the words of Joseph Rotblat, Albert Einstein, Francesco Calogero and the other Pugwashniks, you hear a wiser view of science that we get now, in these shrill culture wars waged over global warming.
Those European humanists argued that we can choose where to direct scientific knowledge and choose to leave some things undiscovered, like nuclear weaponry physics.
This was nothing like the philistine PR of the climate denialists. This was the greatest minds in physics looking into the soul of knowledge and human potential and choosing life instead of death.
It will come as no surprise to know that Pugwash has expanded its watchful eye from the nuclear threat to the climate crisis. The 59th Pugwash Conference was held in Germany in July and described the transition from fossil fuels to new energy sources as ‘mandatory’.
Pugwash is one of the most successful examples of scientists demonstrating social responsibility and intellectual leadership. We need that wisdom now, to drive the renewable energy revolution and safeguard our climate.
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