Address to the American Physical Society

"Address to the American Physical Society" was a speech given to that organization in New York City on February 5, 1969. It was subsequently published is the Chicago Tribune Magazine on June 22, 1969 (entitled "Physicist, Purge Thyself"), the collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons in 1974, and the second volume of Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2011.

Summary

Vonnegut recounts an incident about his brother Bernard, who worked at the General Electric Company in Schenectady and was notorious for his messy laboratory. A safety officer chided him once and Bernard replied, taping his own head, "you should see what it's like up here". Although his brother is a physicist, the night's program described Vonnegut as a humanist. Admitting that studies in the arts don't afford the opportunities of the sciences, he advances his "canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts": because artists are supersensitive, they will be a warning sign to "more robust types" that danger is coming. That said, artists die every day and little attention is paid. Vonnegut admits that he can't give an "outside opinion" to a group of scientists since his own education was in chemistry. He thinks it was good that he didn't major in English so no professor could tell him what to read or note how horrible he was at writing, thus both became purely acts of pleasure. When he studied chemistry at Cornell, he thought that in the future scientists would rightfully have all the power and his fraternity brothers studying sociology and government and history were wasting their time. They all became rich, powerful lawyers. He notes that scientists also tend to live longer than writers.

H. G. Wells, 1920

Defining a humanist as someone interested in human beings, Vonnegut says that makes his sheepdog Sandy a humanist. Most humans are primarily interested in humans. Before arriving for this speech, he received a letter from Prof. George F. Norwood of the University of Miami who described himself as a "humanistic physicist", which Vonnegut defines as a "virtuous physicist" who thinks about people and would not knowingly help governments or other powerful entities hurt them. His novel Cat's Cradle featured a scientist who doesn't think about people at all and develops a substance called ice-nine that can freeze all the water on the planet. Vonnegut took this idea from an incident in the early 1930s when H. G. Wells visited G.E. Irving Langmuir, at that time the only Nobel Prize winner in private industry, was assigned to entertain him. He made up a science fiction story that he thought might interest Wells about a form of ice stable at room temperature. It didn't and since both are now dead, Vonnegut took it. While writing the book he explained the premise to a crystallographer who, after a half hour of silent thought, determined it to be impossible. Perhaps so, but scientific developments just as morally horrible are now well-known. Younger scientists are more likely to be concerned with the repercussions of their discoveries and inventions, while older ones didn't think of moral matters, perhaps as a result of the Great Depression and the subsequent "Can do!" attitude of the Second World War when fighting "a war against pure evil."

Louis Fieser, 1965

While stating he doesn't particularly wish to moralize, Vonnegut says many listeners now, especially among "university people", expect moralizing. He recounts his "greatest public-speaking failure" in the summer of 1968 at Valparaiso University in Indiana in which he said "many screamingly funny things" only to later learn he was expected to moralize. So now he tells students to not be greedy or kill or pollute or raid the public treasury or work for those who do so. These messages work well since the students are already telling themselves the same thing anyway. Fewer young people enter the sciences due to fear that their knowledge may be used for horrible ends. During a recent talk at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Vonnegut noted the student protests against the university's secret government work and against Dow recruiters on campus. He found this a pointless exercise, like "an attack on the doorman or theater usher". He recounted a protest against Dow at Harvard several years ago in which Louis Fieser, the inventor of napalm, was able to move about freely, which Vonnegut found curious. The day after this talk in Ann Arbor, Vonnegut received a letter from an audience member who also questioned why students don't protests the scientists who invent weapons. However, he also believes Fieser would simply be confused by such a protest, which makes him less potent as a symbol. Vonnegut realizes that this older generation of scientists may be that last who were "innocent" in terms of not thinking of the ramifications of their discoveries. Younger scientists, however, are developing a moral conscience.

Quotes

"I am charmed that you should call me in your program notes here a humanist. I have always thought of myself as a paranoid, as an overreactor, and a person who makes a questionable living with his mental diseases. Fiction writers are not customarily persons in the best of mental health."

"My father said he would help to pay for my college education only if I studied something serious. This was in the late Thirties. Reader's Digest magazine was in those days celebrating the wonderful things Germans were doing with chemicals. Chemistry was obviously the coming thing. So was German. So I went to Cornell University, and I studied chemistry and German."

"[T]here was no professor with the power to order me what to read... I only read Madame Bovary last year. It's a very good book. I had heard that it was."

"My dog is a humanist. His name is Sandy. He is a sheep dog. I know that Sandy is a dud name for a sheep dog, but there it is."

"[M]ost scientists now realize... that their bosses are not necessarily sensitive or moral or imaginative men. Ask Wernher von Braun. His boss had him firing rockets at London."

"They become physicists who are so virtuous that they don't go into physics at all."

See Also

• "The Scientific Goblins Are Gonna Git Us", review of Unless Peace Comes, a book of essays on weapons development
• "Lecture on Science and Technology", given at M.I.T. about the moral responsibility of scientists