While the Brains Trust was wildly popular, George Orwell (1944) mocked its “phony pretense” in his Tribune column, holding it “a very dismal thing.” Nevertheless, he concedes that it was originally a step forward in radio programming, and that it continued to goad the reactionary, blustering “Blimps” with its agnostic, academic approach.
Each live airing of the Brains Trust was recorded automatically on a wax cylinder by a telediphone machine, a portable recording device that the BBC also used for war correspondence. The Brains Trust program on which Polanyi and Russell appeared was, according to the transcript from those wax cylinders, “Telediphoned – Monday, 8th January, 1945.”
The Question Master opened the show by doubting “whether the Brains Trust ever had quite such a constellation of scientific talent as we have round the table this week.” He introduced Russell and then Polanyi “who, like Bertrand Russell, has received to the great accolade of the scientific world the Fellowship of the Royal Society.” He introduced a medical practitioner who was also a Member of Parliament, an anonymous psychoanalyst, and a “scientific story teller.”
Toward the end of the show, after the sort of dreary questioning Orwell despised, the Question Master offered “[t]he next question…from Doctor Austin H. Birch of Newport. Does it make any practical difference whether relativity is true or not? Does it make any practical difference whether Einstein’s right or not?”
Page two of telediphone cylinder six conveys Polanyi’s recorded response:
“I’m very much convinced that in the long run the difference may be profound. It has been suggested already, recently, that with the theory of relativity, and particularly with its more general forms, which have been elaborated since Einstein’s work, we get to a conception of the world which is much closer to the medieval conception of the world than the Newtonian idea of the world was. As it were everything, all the elements of the world, arise and were derived from its structure. It’s all built in, so to speak, into the walls, or into space….”
The question posed by Dr. Birch to the “constellation of scientific talent” that January day about “any practical difference” of relativity is ambiguous on two counts: It is not clear that “practical difference” meant technological application, as Polanyi took it to mean in “The republic of science,” as opposed to, say, common meaning or importance. Neither is it clear whether relativity referred to Einstein’s special relativity or his later general relativity. What is clear, however, is that Polanyi’s response in the radio booth addresses general relativity, while his anecdote in the essay a decade and a half later addresses special relativity.
The difference is not an esoteric distinction between two theories too abstruse for ordinary minds. It is, rather, the distinction between an accurate recounting of evidence for his argument that science is unpredictable and hence ungovernable, and his inaccurate reporting of evidence that suits his argument – by a man for whom “the discovery and possession of truth [is] one of the first obligations of a good society.”
Polanyi’s reading of Wells, his scientific and political jousting with Soddy, and his encouragement of Szilard all suggest that he could not have been oblivious to the connection between special relativity and the atomic bomb. We cannot know if perhaps Polanyi had the bomb in mind on live radio in January 1945, but patriotically steered his answer away from it and toward general relativity. Yet, by 1962, there was no secret weapon to protect. He could neither be covering for the war effort, which was over, nor even for his own ignorance, which he overstates.
He was covering for the autonomy of science.