Abstract
In 1903 Soddy contributed to the discovery of a new source of energy within atoms. He initially lobbied for the importance of scientific research to achieve artificial transmutation in order to permit society to benefit from atomic energy. But appalled by the abuse during World War I of such scientific achievements as the nitrogen fixation process, he tried to draw attention to the potential misuse of nature’s gifts and refrained from such further research that might accelerate the achievement of controlled atomic energy. Rather he sought the reason for such perversion of science and focussed his attention on an obsolete economic system requiring periodic convulsions to stimulate production and involving a method of redistribution that was far from scientific. Energy — not money — was considered to be the real wealth of nations. Between the two world wars Soddy stressed the need to supplement our limited resources of coal and oil to insure an adequate supply of future energy so as to forestall the economic disorder which would accompany the otherwise inevitable energy crisis. Atomic energy could fulfill this social and economic need but only if it were used peacefully, making this the last viable option according to Soddy for the survival of Mankind.
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 …1
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 responsibiity for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships. 4
F. SODDY, 1953
Reprinted from The British Journal for the History of Science 12: 42 (November 1979): 261–76.
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Notes
Frederick Soddy, Matter and Energy, London, 1912, p. 251. F. Soddy, ‘Transmutation, the Vital problem of the Future’, Scientia, 1912, 11, 199.
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, 1907-1918, privately bound at the Royal Institution, London, n.d. The original MS is in the Bodleian Library, Soddy-Howorth Colection, 58 (Alton, 111). The lectures are apparently unpublished but were reviewed in Engineering, 1915, 99, 604. The quotation is from the MS, p. II, 9.
F. Soddy, Science and Life: Aberdeen Addresses, London, 1920, p. 6. The original address entitled ‘Science and Life’ was given in December 1918.
F. A. Paneth, ‘Classical Radioactivity and its Sequence’, Nature, 1950, 166, 800.
Sir William Crookes, ‘Presidential Address’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1898, p. 18.
T. J. Trenn, The Self-Splitting Atom: A History of the Rutherford-Soddy Collaboration, London, 1977.
F. Soddy, ‘Radio-Activity’, The Electrician, 1904, 52, 646.
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.
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.
Soddy, op. cit. (3), p. 107. The original address ‘The Evolution of Matter’ was given in February 1917.
T. J. Trenn, ‘The Justification of Transmutation: Speculations of Ramsay and Experiments of Rutherford’, Ambix, 1974, 21, 53–77.
F. Soddy, The Wrecking of a Scientific Age, London, 1927.
F. Soddy, Dishonest Money; or Why a Larger Pay-Packet Now Buys Less Than It Did, London, 1950.
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.
E. N. Hiebert, The Impact of Atomic Energy, Newton, Kansas, 1961; and Alice K. Smith, A Peril and a Hope, Chicago, 1965.
F. Soddy, Money Reform as a Preliminary to All Reform, Birmingham, 1950, p. 2.
M. Stewart, Keynes and After, 2nd edn., Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 60.
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.
Silvio Gesell, Die naturliche Wirtschaftsordnung durch Freiland und Freigeld, 3rd edn., Arnstadt & Thiiringen, 1919; Die Verwirklichung des Rechtes aufden 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.
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.
Stewart, op. cit. (30), p. 76; John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London, 1936.
H. G. Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, London, 1932, p. 365.
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.
F. Soddy, ‘Unemployment and Hope’, Nature, 1930, 125, 346; cf. W. G. Linn Cass, ‘Unemployment and Hope’, Nature, 1930, 125, 225.
Wells, op. cit. (37), pp. 349, 365. Irving Fisher, The Making of Index Numbers, New 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.
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.
Robert Lekachman, The Age of Keynes: A Biographical Study, Harmondsworth, 1966, p. 88.
John Desmond Bernal, The Social Function of Science, Cambridge, Mass., 1967 (original edn., London, 1939), p. xv.
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 encourages science, instead of rejecting science like fascism. These claims of Blackett clearly set the tone of the volume.
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 Relations of Science’, Nature, 1928, 141, 784–5.
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.
Lewis Mumford, ‘Commemorative 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 civilization 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.
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Trenn, T.J. (1986). The Central Role of Energy in Soddy’s Holistic and Critical Approach to Nuclear Science, Economics, And Social Responsibility. In: Kauffman, G.B. (eds) Frederick Soddy (1877–1956). Chemists and Chemistry, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5297-3_13
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