Science and Religion

Edwin Salpeter, Owen Gingerich and John Polkinghorne

Alan Macfarlane, Mark Turin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032119731
• eBook ISBN: 9781000467901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Science and Religion: Edwin Salpeter, Owen Gingerich and John Polkinghorne is a collection of interviews being published as a book. These interviews have been conducted by one of England's leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of 40 years, the five conversations in this volume, are part of Social Science Press's series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions also form a part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences, the sciences and to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three foremost physicists and historians of science.

Edwin Salpeter recounts rather dispassionately his departure from Austria to Australia to escape Nazi persecution. And in doing so broaches, not only, on the prevailing anti-Semitic sentiment of the time, but takes the debate forward into the one between science and religion. Though he only touches upon it, this debate finds resonance in the words of Owen Gingerich who belonged to the Mennonite dispensation and who has been rather vocal about the pro-Christian anti-creationist ideology. However, it is John Polkinghorne who provides a deep insight into the ongoing debate on science and religion.

Immensely riveting as conversations, this collection reveals how intrinsically related science and religion are, how pertinent it is to understand the workings of science in the context of religion. The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in Astronomy and Cosmology as well as the History of Science, but also to those with an inquisitive mind.

Please note: This title is co-published with Social Science Press, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

PART
one

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222446-1

Edwin Salpeter. Photograph courtesy Alan Macfarlane.

Edwin Ernest Salpeter

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222446-2

Edwin Ernest Salpeter (1924–2008) was an Austrian–Australian– American astrophysicist. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Salpeter emigrated from Austria to Australia while in his teens to escape the Nazis. He attended Sydney Boys High School (1939–40) and Sydney University, where he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in 1944 and his Master’s degree in 1945. In the same year, he was awarded an overseas scholarship and attended the University of Birmingham, England. He earned his doctorate in 1948 under the supervision of Sir Rudolf Peierls. He spent the remainder of his career at Cornell University, where he was the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences. Salpeter died of leukemia at his home in Ithaca, New York, on 26 November 2008.

In 1951, Salpeter suggested that stars could burn helium-4 into carbon-12 with the Triple-alpha process not directly, but through an intermediate metastable state of beryllium-8. This helped to explain the carbon production in stars. He later derived the initial mass function for the formation rates of stars of different mass in the Galaxy.

Salpeter, with Hans Bethe, wrote two articles in 1951 which introduced the equation bearing their names — the Bethe–Salpeter equation, which describes the interactions between a pair of fundamental particles under a quantum field theory.

In 1955, he found the Salpeter function or the initial mass function (IMF). It shows that the number of stars in each mass range decreases rapidly with increasing mass.

In 1964, Salpeter and independently Yakov B. Zel’dovich, were the first to suggest that accretion discs around massive black holes are responsible for the huge amounts of energy radiated by quasars (which are the brightest active galactic nuclei). This is currently the most accepted explanation for the physical origin of active galactic nuclei and the associated extragalactic relativistic jets.

Along with Hans Bethe, Salpeter published Quantum Mechanics of One- and Two-Electron Atoms (1957) and Atoms I (1957).¹

Mark Turin (MT): It gives me great pleasure to sit here with you, Professor Emeritus Edwin Salpeter from Cornell University. Today is 12 November 2008. We are here on a cold Ithaca winter afternoon, but inside a warm house with a fire on. Could I ask you Ed, first, where and when you were born?

Edwin Salpeter (ES): I was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1924 and I spent much of my first five years in Budapest. That was a time when there was a lot of back and forth between Austria and Hungary. It wasn’t then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but my dad went to a job in Budapest for five years.

MT: Do you have any memories of those early years back and forth?

ES: No. Not at all. A few years later, when I was a pre-teenager, we went back to Hungary and in a week, I managed to pick up Hungarian words more quickly than other people. But no, I don’t really have any memory from back then. But maybe, the one thing I accomplished is learning how to swim in a pool that went with my dad’s firm.

MT: What work was he doing that took him to Budapest?

ES: Immediately after his PhD, he was very university-inclined and even wrote a textbook called Mathematical Methods for Physicists and Medical Doctors, but it became fairly clear that there was too much anti-Semitism for that. Especially, he had a close friend from his own university’s days when Schrödinger2, who of course got a Nobel Prize soon after. I had relatives in Europe and they advised my dad that you are just not going to make it in universities, but industries were much more open-minded and much less anti-Semitic.

MT: I wonder why that was. Do you have any thoughts about that in retrospect?

This interview was conducted by Mark Turin on 12 November 2008 in Ithaca, New York. It was made fourteen days before Edwin Salpeter died when he was seriously ill in bed. The transcription for this interview has been provided by Radha Béteille, for this volume.

These interviews are available for viewing on:
http://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1130197
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEnG6lyWoOM

ES: No, not at all except that industry in a War is most about making a good living and the sociology was not so important.

MT: You have already said that you were born in the inter-War period in Austria to a Jewish family with a professional father who had an academic background as well, a PhD, what about your mother?

ES: She got a PhD in physics, but gave up working as soon as I was born which was just a year and a half after they got married. After I was born, she would give lessons occasionally, but she didn’t really work fully.

MT: What was the physics of the early 1920s in Austria? What research did your parents do for their doctorates?

ES: Really, quite a lot. My dad did something on the early days of radioactivity, or at least, how radioactivity affected currents in what would otherwise be insulators, assuming that I would do something on highly isolated insulators. So, my dad’s radioactivity almost ran into some trouble with Schrödinger’s experiments, but he managed to work it out.

MT: What was Vienna like as far as you can recall in the inter-War years? Was it a dynamic and lively place or was there already a build-up of fear of what was coming from Germany?

ES: There was a lot of build-up of fear of everything, not just of Germany. We happened to live in a house which was opposite, a big apartment house of workers’ flats, across the road from a local gendarmerie. When I was 12 years old, they had an actual civil war right across our corner, with my mum trying to keep me away from the window, but that’s not easy to do with an 11- or 12-year-old’s room because there was a war going on. Now I would say, at least for a Jew, it was not a pleasant place.

MT: The Jewish community of which you are a part, was it like one thinks of it in many parts of Germany where intellectual, educated Jews are very assimilated? Called themselves first Germans and secondarily Jews?

ES: Yes. Certainly, certainly.

MT: Can you tell me a bit about your memories the Jewish community when you were young and what it meant for you and your family?

ES: In Austria, very little. I had a few boyfriends and because of its great anti-Semitism, even at that stage, you had more friends of your own persuasion. So, it was more that my friends were mostly Jewish.

MT: But already, by the late 1920s and early 1930s there were anti-Jewish measures in place to make your father’s professional life difficult and your schooling was also impacted, I think.

ES: The schooling, there’s some controversy between my mother and me. Namely, when I was about 10 years old, when you’ve finished elementary school, you had to take an exam to get into the gymnasium — a gymnasium is a sort of high school of all kinds and you absolutely needed that to do anything else. And lo and behold, I flunked the entrance exam. My mother said, ‘Well it’s just that the authorities are all anti-Semitic and you should’ve passed easily’. My theory was that, sure, there was a lot of anti-Semitism, but I mainly flunked because I kept reading a Wild West story writer called Karl May3 who wrote for some reason about the US Wild West, but in German for German boys. And of course, one will never know which was the main story, presumably it was a little bit of both.

MT: What were your parents’ names?

ES: My dad’s name was Jacob Leib. It was a custom that even if you were not a very religious Jew that you would take on a Jewish middle name. And I think Leib is lion. My mum, on the other hand, had a long first name Friederika that she didn’t bother having a second name.

MT: Do you at all remember your mother’s maiden name?

ES: Horn.

MT: And, do you have any memories or stories about your grandparents on either side?

ES: My grandparents, my dad’s parents and relatives, I absolutely never met even. My dad had come from Galicia, which kept changing from Romania to Poland to God knows what. He left for study in Indiana, but his Galician relatives did not come together.

MT: Do you know what happened to them? Out of interest?

ES: Yes. We had a relative who died in the meantime, a bit older than me or you —— somehow cooped up and of course they were all murdered, in fact, many of them by just the local Poles who at that time were in charge of Galicia. And then of course the remainder by the Nazis. But as I say, I absolutely never had any knowledge of them.

MT: And what about your mother’s parents? And her relatives, brothers and sisters?

ES: That was much easier because I lived in an apartment house which was owned jointly by my mother and her mother. My grandfather on that side, I never knew. He died either before I was born or before I could have remembered. So, him I don’t remember, but of course, I remember stories about him. We even had a photograph of him proudly driving a car when my mother was eight years old or so.

MT: What stories do you recall? Was he a stern man or a warm and loving father to your mother?

ES: I don’t know those stories but he was very proud. He was an electrical engineer and he was very proud of being assimilated. He once even, there was tiger that had escaped from a travelling show and he shot the tiger. That was one of the big stories. My mother as a girl travelled a lot. Especially in summer times, he would go to build mostly electric railroads, that was his passion, but his main thing was converting funiculars and other things into being run on electricity.

MT: That’s a great lineage, from a maternal grandfather as electrical engineer, a mother a physicist, yourself an astrophysicist, but I’m thinking back now to the early 1900s when your mother was probably born. To have a young Jewish woman have a chance to do a PhD in physics, it has to be quite an enlightened and an intellectually experimental family to want that for their daughter, any way at the time.

ES: My mother had really wanted to study medicine but the authorities at the university decided that there was money in medicine. Medicine is a useful and important area, so they absolutely would not let her study medicine. But physics seemed such a completely useless topic, they did not mind her doing that.

MT: Can you tell me a little bit about your memories, any anecdotes about that period in Vienna, up until, I think, your departure to Australia before the outbreak of War.

ES: For me personally, the most interesting thing was my attitude towards areas of endeavour and school. We had lived in a very nonintellectual suburb and I was in a school that wasn’t in any way selective, so I was top of my class in all subjects I did. But I was not, in any way, interested in the future so to speak, what I would want to do when I grew up and how I should make decisions of that kind, not at all.

MT: Aside from yourself, were there other children, do you have brothers and sisters?

ES: I have a half-sister. My dad, before he had married my mother, had married a Catholic woman with the intention of getting divorced immediately after. He got her pregnant before they got married. But he went to a lot of trouble, which in a way is slightly surprising, he became a Catholic just for the marriage so that he could be able to say that father and mother were both Catholics. My sister was given a very Christian and Catholic first name, Maria Christina and that was partly because her mother already felt that they might have to pretend that she was fully non-Jewish. When the War happened, they emigrated, my sister and her mother, from Vienna to Waldkirch, which is a little town at the border between Austria, Lichtenstein and Switzerland just to be away from any people who might have known somebody in Vienna —— might have known the mother and my father and remembered that my father was Jewish.

MT: They survived the War?

ES: They survived the War. My sister’s mother survived to quite a high age and although they coul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Transcriber's Note
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Appendix 1: Biographical Information - Compiled
• Appendix 2: Scientific Terms and Equipment - Compiled