rudolf steiner library newsletter: reviews new economics curriculum and a far reaching and possible new society. Dr. Christopher Schaefer is a lecturer, writer, researcher, and organizational development consultant, and co-director of the Center for Social Research at Hawthorne Valley (thecenterforsocialresearch.org)
Rudolf Steiner and the Atom By Keith Francis. Adonis Press, Hillsdale, New York, 2012, 267 pgs. Review by Frederick J. Dennehy My disappointment after finishing Rudolf Steiner and the Atom was this: that I had not had the experience of having Keith Francis as a science teacher in school. Readers who, like me, have only a peripheral scientific background will be grateful for Mr. Francis’s ability to anticipate a reader’s questions and weave his responses into the book. The writing is so clear that even a reader without interest in anthroposophy will be excited by the history of the atom presented here, from the high days of ancient Greece; through the pioneer work of the 19th century leading to the development of the familiar Rutherford atomic model; to the imaginative daring of scientists such as Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Dirac, and Schrödinger, who shaped and colored the quantum era. 9 What was Rudolf Steiner’s opinion of atomic theory? And what would that opinion have likely been following the anni mirabiles 1925–1930, immediately following his death? Although Mr. Francis pursues these questions throughout the book, he does not come to final judgment, because to produce a definitive answer would be to satisfy a need other than that for the truth. But the hunt itself is altogether worthwhile. In his books and public lectures, Rudolf Steiner was emphatic in his opposition to atomic theories. He said that the atom was a mental construct, and accordingly Formation of a Science of World Economics, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1949. 9 I found myself wishing that Mr. Francis had also dealt with David Bohm’s approach. But then, as he observes, this is not a “book about everything.” 14 •
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extended beyond the domain of the perceived world. For Steiner, as for Goethe, scientific theory must be limited to the perceptible, and must seek its connections within the perceptible. But in the lectures he gave for members of the Theosophical Society, and later, the Anthroposophical Society, Steiner referred to atoms as physical realities, and cautioned his listeners about the demonic (ahrimanic) consequences of endowing the atom with the characteristics of “coagulated electricity”—the “same substance of which thought itself is composed.” Someday, said Steiner, “a man standing here, let us say, will be able by pressing a button concealed in his pocket, to explode some object at a great distance—say in Hamburg!… What I have just indicated will be within man’s power when the occult truth that thought and atom consist of the same substance is put into practical application.”10 This raises two distinct questions. First, how does one reconcile Steiner’s public and private pronouncements? Second, what would Steiner say now about atomic theory, which today is less a “theory” than it is the standard vocabulary of science, accepted by virtually every physicist in the world? Mr. Francis approaches the apparent contradiction between Steiner’s public position that the atom is a mere mental construct and his private reference to atoms as constituents of the physical world by reminding us that Steiner himself said more than once that anthroposophy was “difficult” and also “strange.” It may be helpful to understand it this way. The image of the electronic atom that Bohr worked with is in fact an intellectual artifact that does not correspond to anything in the physical world. Yet it may be “real” because the worlds of soul and spirit have reality just as does the physical world. Steiner said repeatedly that a wrong thought can do real damage. Thus, while the physicist’s mental representation of the atom in Steiner’s time may never have existed in the physical world, it may nonetheless be real if it has penetrated the general thought environment and become a vehicle for conceptions “for the future of a humanity bound to the physical world and unconscious of the spirit.” While unfortunately Steiner did not address the apparent contradiction for us, his latterday readers, he surely was not engaging in “double think.” We should not treat categorically Steiner’s 1904 state10 “The Work of Secret Societies in the World: The Atom as Coagulated Electricity.” Berlin, December 23, 1904.