In His Own Words: Epilogue and Reflexions

Abstract

You may ask me whether, when looking back, I consider my long life of 100 years to be a happy one, and am I satisfied with the outcome? Despite many up and downs, and a very difficult period during and after the Second World War, the answer is yes. I have been privileged to have had a joyful youth, a long and happy marriage, and a wonderful family (Chap. 1). Through a mixture of good fortune and good health, I have frequently found myself in a position to make decisions regarding areas of science and other fields that I have always felt passionately about. Science, of course, has always been at the centre of my life. In this final chapter, I would like to reflect on the essential points, and share some conclusions drawn from my long experience of a changing world.

You may ask me whether, when looking back, I consider my long life of 100 years to be a happy one, and am I satisfied with the outcome? Despite many up and downs, and a very difficult period during and after the Second World War, the answer is yes. I have been privileged to have had a joyful youth, a long and happy marriage, and a wonderful family (Chap. 1). Through a mixture of good fortune and good health, I have frequently found myself in a position to make decisions regarding areas of science and other fields that I have always felt passionately about. Science, of course, has always been at the centre of my life. In this final chapter, I would like to reflect on the essential points, and share some conclusions drawn from my long experience of a changing world.

Science at the Centre of My Life

The main focus of my career has been research in physics, which brought me the greatest satisfaction. The joy of realisation that, as the result of painstaking work, you are the first to know something that was not known before is indescribable. Perhaps it can only be compared to the feeling felt by an explorer who voyages for the first time into unknown territory. Of course, moments like this are rare, but they nevertheless make all the effort worthwhile.

The Importance of Fundamental Science and Technology in a Changing World

Since the beginning of human consciousness, our species has always asked questions: what is the structure of the heavens, how do we account for the motion of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon? More recently, we have pondered the galaxies and their creation, how the cosmos started—will it have an end, and what role do Black Holes play? Today, similar fundamental questions are also being asked about the microcosm. Are there ultimate eternal building blocks of matter? Can they be subdivided into ever smaller particles? What keeps them together and guarantees the existence of matter? There are permanent changes in nature: what causes them? The attitude, and human spirit, that lead us to pursue such questions was best expressed in my opinion by Johan Wolfgang Goethe, who called it Faustischer Drang, Faust’s urge, to understand what keeps the world together. Faust’s urge came upon me early and has stayed with me my whole life.

In my lifetime, and to my great fascination, the exploration of the cosmos and of the microcosm have become closely linked together. One cannot understand the infinitely large without understanding the infinitesimally small and vice versa. Today, the natural sciences have evolved into numerous highly specialised disciplines, but physics and mathematics remain at their core, providing a unifying foundation. This is what makes them so interesting.

It may seem that pursuing such questions of fundamental science is the province of an intellectual elite, but it has always been an essential part of human culture. What would we teach our children if there were no progress in acquiring additional and new fundamental knowledge? Would we still tell them that the universe is about 4000 years old? Or that the stability of matter and its eternal changes in nature are due to some supernatural entities rather than elementary forces in nature? Spiritual concepts, not only material achievements, are important for human identity, but they must exist alongside the learnings of science.

A second argument for the importance of fundamental science is the fact that all modern technologies are the offspring of fundamental scientific discoveries. All present-day electrical applications owe their existence to the work of scientists like Alessandro Volta, Georg Ohm, André-Marie Ampère, Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz, James Clerk Maxwell and many others. Modern TV, telecommunications, computing and many forms of medical diagnostics rely on quantum mechanics, which was developed about 100 years ago and is one of the most abstract of theories.

Modern technologies have thus benefitted from fundamental research but the inverse is also true: many of these technologies have also led to the development of essential tools for fundamental research. Take, for example, electron microscopes, particle accelerators in their many different forms, and telescopes. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that I took an interest in both fundamental and applied science, and my own research work was carried out in both fields. Indeed, I was never fully satisfied with abstract ideas alone; I wanted to create something of tangible value as well.

Scientific Careers in Changing Times

The way a scientific career evolves has changed dramatically over recent decades. My most important publications carry only my name. This is almost unthinkable in most fields of science today where most of the research must be carried out in collaboration with others, often involving teams from several universities. In extreme cases, such as some of the experiments performed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the number of authors can reach several thousand. This is a practice that I tried to resist when I was Director-General of CERN in the 1980s and the experimental collaborations preparing for the LHC’s predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP), were coming together. I failed completely. Before LEP, large collaborations consisted of a few tens of scientists, and often took their names from the initials of the collaborating institutes—CDHS, for example: CERN–Dortmund–Heidelberg–Saclay—which was led by the Nobel Prize winner, Jack Steinberger. LEP experiments reached several hundred collaborators, and their names had evolved into sometimes-contrived acronyms describing their detectors—DEtector with Lepton, Photon and Hadron Identification, DELPHI, for example.

Fig. 12.1

Herwig receives the Albert Einstein Gold Medal from UNESCO Director-General Kōichirō Matsuura in April 2004. The Albert Einstein Gold Medal is a high distinction that UNESCO confers on outstanding people who have made a major contribution to science and international cooperation (©UNESCO, UNESCO Photobank, CC SA 3.0 IGO)

Other practices have vividly changed also. Today everyone from a budding scientist to someone aiming for the top jobs has to apply for any position by filling out forms, writing CVs and quoting their publication statistics. All these measures are introduced to make the selection procedure more objective and transparent, but I doubt it’s the best way. Anyway, I have never applied for a job in my life, so I don’t believe I would be able to make a reasonable career today!.

Fig. 12.2

Herwig was later awarded UNESCO’s Niels Bohr Gold Medal, which was presented to him by Danish Minister, Helge Sander, at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters on 15 November 2006. The medal is awarded to “researchers who have made outstanding contributions to physics—research which, furthermore, has or could have a significant influence on the world” (©Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, All rights reserved)

My passion for science has helped me to overcome many difficult moments in my life and has contributed essentially to shaping my personality. I have often recalled the words of my father who told me that: “in moments of distress, work and the engagement in it can always be the harbour of refuge.” Certainly, my work has given me the satisfaction of having made at least some minor contribution to human history. Of course, reputation and even glory are very ephemeral. With very few exceptions, people and their achievements disappear into archives or even oblivion. I sometimes wonder what future archaeologists would make of CERN. Maybe the LEP tunnel will be the part of my legacy that will last longest. Nevertheless, I suspect that anyone excavating CERN hundreds of years from now and finding a circular tunnel with a precisely defined geometrical shape, completely useless for any kind of traffic, would be a little bit baffled. They would probably conclude that it was a kind of place of worship, like a medieval cathedral or Stonehenge!.

Fig. 12.3

In a slide from Herwig’s talk at the LEP closing ceremony, he speculates on what future historians might make of the LEP/LHC tunnel were they to find it without accompanying documentation. Would they look at it as we look at Stonehenge? (Herwig Schopper’s personal collection. ©Herwig Schopper, All rights reserved).

Public Understanding of Science

Based on my own experience, certainly limited but gathered over many years, I have developed some general thoughts that I would like to share. At the same time, however, I am very much aware how difficult it is to pass on one’s own experience to later generations. Young people consider the words of their elders largely as quaint stories with little relevance to them. I certainly did, and it is only later in life that we learn to listen to our predecessors. I hope that some of my thoughts and reflections might induce at least some readers to develop further their own ideas.

It seems to me that it is relatively easy for journalists to explain to the public the beauty of the arts, the basic principles of economics, or the rules of sport. To my regret, a real understanding of fundamental physics such as quantum mechanics, and in particular of elementary particle physics and astrophysics, requires a long and challenging apprenticeship. A book containing a single mathematical equation will lose about half of its readers. This is not to say that an appreciation of the beauty of science is not possible without a grasp of mathematics. It is, and there are some wonderful communicators of science. Nevertheless, to me it is a pity that so many people miss out on the pleasure and the beauty that natural sciences can provide.

In all the subjects that humans communicate with each other, science is unique. In no other walk of life is public understanding a recognised academic discipline. However, we meet a serious problem when we ask what we really mean by the word ‘understanding.’ In classical physics it is possible to connect abstract theories to familiar experiences in everyday life. For example, the electromagnetic waves that bring television into our homes and connect our mobile phones can be described by analogy to water waves. The analogy is not perfect—analogies never are—as we no longer believe in the ether of the nineteenth century to be the carrier of these waves. Nevertheless, as a tool to understanding, it’s good enough. Even Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which requires the abstract theory of Riemann space, can be made tangible—begreifbar in German—by analogy to a ball rolling on an elastic sheet.

In quantum mechanics such analogies must be abandoned completely for a deep understanding. Abstract mathematical structures are the only way to describe the completely counterintuitive results of experiments. Any attempt to understand fully these phenomena through a simple concrete or descriptive picture fails. How can we understand the spin of particles, which has something to do with rotation, when point-like particles such as electrons and quarks with no internal structure cannot rotate? How can we accept the superposition of quantum–mechanical states, which, together with their statistical interpretation, lead to phenomena that are completely unimaginable in classical terms. Human logic and experience cannot do it—it is only mathematics that can make sense of what we observe, and mathematics is largely immune to analogy.

This total counterintuitiveness was one of the reasons why Einstein, and many other physicists, never accepted quantum mechanics as an ultimate theory. If it challenged Einstein, then it’s no surprise that quantum mechanics is so impenetrable to most people. Are fundamental scientists, theoretical and experimental, becoming modern-day monks, respected by the outside world but isolated in our spiritual monasteries? I was once struck by the comments of a member of the audience for a public lecture I gave about the Higgs particle, CERN’s most recent great discovery. After I’d finished, she said to me: “Professor, your talk was excellent although I did not understand much. However, my non-understanding was at a much higher level than ever before.” So, on the one hand, these abstract ideas can be considered as the pinnacle of human thought, imagination and intellectual achievement. On the other hand, what is that worth if it is inaccessible to most of humanity? The problem is that these developments are based on abstract concepts and most people abhor abstract thinking. Nevertheless, sometimes the most abstruse ideas can prompt imagination in cultural works. Recently a film based on the concept of parallel worlds in quantum mechanics was an Oscar-winning box office hit.

Of course, I’m playing devil’s advocate here. As I’ve already said, much of the technology we take for granted in modern life relies on abstract physics such as this. I could equally well argue that it doesn’t matter whether people fully understand it or not. But I think it does matter. We scientists must never give up on our efforts to explain and to engage with the public, and to share with them the importance of science as part of our culture.

Another, equally important, aspect of public understanding of science is how science works. Natural sciences like physics, chemistry and biology play a steadily increasing role in society, underpinning many modern technologies that have changed our daily lives. As a society, we take this for granted, yet unfortunately, the general public does not understand how science works. People turn to science for accurate predictions of what will happen in the future, but science cannot do that. Science can make firm statements based on accumulated evidence from experiments that must have been shown to be reproducible, but it cannot make predictions with the same degree of certainty.

Fig. 12.4

World-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma (left) with CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti and Herwig Schopper at an event exploring common aspects of music and physics at CERN in December 2023 (Courtesy Fabiola Gianotti, ©Fabiola Gianotti, All rights reserved)

Sensationalism and Scientific Revolutions

Research is a never-ending endeavour, with each new result raising new questions. Scientific revolutions, as media like to call them, do not really exist in the sense that everything previously known becomes obsolete. Rather, these so-called revolutions usually imply that the laws which are valid in a certain domain are limited to this domain, while different laws are valid in another. For example, quantum mechanics has revolutionised science, but it has not invalidated the classical physics that went before. When we are dealing with the kind of scales or dimensions of objects that we are familiar with from daily life, metres and centimetres, classical physics works just fine. If we deal with single atoms or molecules that are more than a million times smaller, then we must apply quantum mechanics. This is the nature of a scientific revolution: it just tells us that different laws have to be applied in different domains. They do not contradict themselves, but one set of rules is the special case of more general laws. We say that quantum mechanics yields asymptotically classical physics when we go from atomic dimensions to everyday life. It would be a disaster if classical physics would be devaluated completely by quantum mechanics. Radio, television and mobile phones would not work, and aircraft would not take off anymore. So when the media announce scientific revolutions, there’s no need to be shocked!

To give another example, classical physics is valid when dealing with velocities that are much smaller than that of light. If we look at objects moving with velocities close to the velocity of light, then we must use the special theory of relativity. That is the case at CERN, where the accelerated particles travel with velocities very close to that of light. This leads to many misunderstandings.

For example, it would be impossible to accelerate a spaceship to the speed of light. According to the laws of special relativity, the mass of the spaceship would increase with its velocity and become infinite at light speed. To bring an object with any mass to such a velocity would require infinite energy. Only light, which is massless, or other massless objects, can reach that velocity. Special relativity states that the velocity of light is the limiting speed at which signals can be transmitted, using light or any other means. Nothing can travel faster.

This has implications for the question of whether intelligent life exists beyond our local cosmic neighbourhood. It’s a question that does not interest me very much, because even if intelligent life does exist in other galaxies, it would take hundreds or thousands of years to get an answer. Who has that much patience? Certainly not me! Does this kind of misrepresentation of science matter? Possibly not, but isn’t the science of events on our planet more interesting?

People seem to like sensation, and the media we consume pander to that, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. One revealing example is the first picture of a Black Hole, which made the front pages of many newspapers around the world. People were fascinated by it, without really knowing why. When young people were asked for their thoughts about it, some said that it looks like a hot doughnut, which I suppose the picture does. What most people didn’t realise was the image they were looking at has little to do with any normal photograph but is based on a complicated phenomenon that is hard to explain. It is already difficult enough to explain a Black Hole, because it is a special mathematical solution of general relativity. Indeed, there are different types of Black Hole, all with the common property that they accumulate a sufficiently large mass that their gravitational attraction prevents even light or any other radiation from escaping. This means that they cannot be seen in the conventional sense of the word, and their existence can only be detected indirectly. It is a great triumph of astrophysics that their properties and their role in the universe can be deciphered at all, and this so-called photograph is just one more way of getting indirect information. As we can’t see Black Holes, we can’t photograph them, so this famous image is not a photograph in the classical sense, but rather a visualised representation of the data. In this case, the media succeeded in generating excitement about science, although they hardly explained the nature and roles of Black Holes, even though an extremely heavy one sits at the centre of our galaxy.

It’s not always like that, however. When CERN first circulated beams in the LHC in 2008, there was enormous media interest. Over 350 media outlets were at CERN that day. Why? Some were there to cover the start of a new era of research in particle physics, but most were there for another reason. A somewhat crazy and completely unfounded speculation was doing the rounds that the LHC would produce a certain type of mini-Black Hole that would devour the world. Needless to say, this did not happen—sophisticated though it is, the LHC does nothing more than recreate naturally occurring phenomena in the laboratory where they can be studied. There was never any risk, but the sensationalism succeeded in scaring many people around the world. Without wishing to detract from the many good journalists reporting on science in a balanced and ethical way, if this is indicative of the quality of science coverage we can expect, we face the danger that science will become a kind of modern superstition—mysterious, somewhat attractive, but at the same time creating fear. Schools have a great responsibility in ensuring that this does not happen.

We are in daily contact with technologies such as television, mobile telephony, computing and networking. Like most people I am no longer able to repair them. But in principle I understand how the technology works, and I do not have to believe in ghosts or any other form of supernatural phenomena. It would be a good thing in my opinion if everyone could have a similar level of understanding of the things they take for granted, especially young people.

There’s also a more important reason why it’s important to understand science, and the way it works. Today, more than ever, an ability to make decisions based on the evidence available, and to change those decisions as the evidence evolves, is increasingly important for everyone. You need look no further than the recent COVID-19 pandemic for evidence of that, or the kind of decisions that society as a whole is taking when confronted with overwhelming evidence that we are having a devastating impact on the Earth’s climate.

Science, Politics and the Role of Forecasts

The fact that society, and above all politicians, expect science to make definite forecasts is a problem that can have very serious consequences. Of course, science can make solid predictions based on past experience, but forecasts have their limits. This is what politics either fails to understand, or wilfully ignores: science is often used as a shield to cover political intentions. Why does this happen? I can only scratch the surface here—each of the points I’m about to raise would merit a book to itself.

To make forecasts, we have to develop models that require a number of assumptions on processes that are not yet known, or that are known with some degree of uncertainty. The obvious, and most pressing, example is climate change. Most of the processes that determine the atmospheric and oceanic climate are well known, but not all. For example, clouds influence how much sunlight is reflected back into space, while mechanisms governing the formation of clouds are extremely complex, and not fully understood. A unique experiment at CERN, which probably could not be done anywhere else, painstakingly simulates atmospheric processes to provide input to climate models and thereby refine their predictions. The CLOUD experiment—an acronym derived from the phrase cosmics leaving outdoor droplets—can simulate the atmosphere to extraordinarily high precision, even going so far as to include cosmic radiation, which is simulated by a particle beam from a CERN accelerator. This allows the experiment to investigate the mechanisms by which clouds form, and the extent to which anthropogenic activity influences those mechanisms. CLOUD has been running since 2009, and its work is far from done.

Another major source of uncertainty in climate modelling is the interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean, which absorbs a large fraction of the CO₂ in the atmosphere. These and other poorly understood processes influence the precision of any forecast, which is why forecasts for future temperature rises are quoted with an element of uncertainty. General trends can be predicted, but as to the quantitative statements beloved of politicians, we should be very sceptical. Unfortunately, politicians all too often misinterpret scientific uncertainty as evidence that scientists do not really know what they are doing, and say that what science puts forward as evidence is just an opinion, equivalent to that of those who would deny climate change. This is irresponsible, unacceptable and dangerous.

There is another inevitable uncertainty in scientific statements. Physics students learn in their first semester that a quantitative statement in science has always to be accompanied by a statement of its errors, otherwise it has little significance. One ubiquitous source of uncertainty is the so-called statistical error. In any probabilistic process, statistical error is important. Consider throwing a die. If the die is perfectly fabricated, the probability that it will land on any of its six numbers will be the same, namely one sixth, but it will take many throws to verify this. Every gambler knows, and dreams of, the same number coming up several times in a row. That does happen, but only very rarely. The laws of statistics tell us how likely the average result of any measurements is, and how likely it is that we will see deviations from this average. The precision of a measurement increases as one over the square root of the number of times it is repeated. Hence, with 100 measurements the statistical error would be 10% and for 1000 trials it is about 3%. A clarification of the terminology may be useful here. What we call ‘error’ in measurements is not associated with any wrongdoing as in daily life, rather, it signifies a level of uncertainty.

The Gaussian distribution is one of the most used formulae in statistics, and it even appeared on a 10 Deutschmark banknote in the 1990s. The Gaussian gives us information on how probable deviations from the most likely average value are. Extremely rare events in the so-called tails of the probability distribution are nevertheless possible. These are the events that some decision makers, and certain elements of the media, like. As no scientist can say that they are impossible, such extremely unlikely events allow agendas to be pushed and sensations to be made.

Statistics is not the only source of error. In addition, there may be other external influences. A die might be imperfectly manufactured, for example, with a tendency to favour one number more than the others. To account for factors such as this, a systematic error must be added, and its size must be estimated, which is sometimes rather difficult. Bear this in mind the next time you read a newspaper article or listen to a politician quoting a scientific number to support an opinion or justify a political decision. Ask yourself, was the number they hold up as evidence accompanied by two errors, statistical and the systematic? I suspect that the answer will be no.

This is normally true in the reporting of public opinion polls. By the time the results are reported, few of us get to see the details of the analysis, or even the margin of error on the numbers quoted. For those of us versed in statistics, we can get a feel for what the statistical error might be from the number of people polled, and of the systematic error from the demographic spread of the interviewees. But most people are not trained in statistics, so are ill equipped to interpret the numbers they are given. Because of limitations in time and resources, even a large public opinion poll probably will not interview more than a few thousand people. If the poll is about voting intentions and the results for two parties differ by under a few per cent, then no conclusion can be drawn about voting intentions, even before taking systematic errors into account. Of course, the experts who conduct the surveys know this, but by the time the results make it onto the TV news, they are simplistically reported as party X leads party Y by a few per cent in the polls. In other words, differences that have absolutely no significance are discussed in the public sphere at length, and this can influence the outcome of the real election.

Turning back to climate change, the neglect of errors has very serious consequences. Anyone who follows the news at all is familiar with the debate around whether the permissible rise in global temperature to avoid catastrophe is 2° or 1.5°. It’s the wrong question. In the public debate, I have never heard about the scientific uncertainty on these figures, but if you read the original publications of course, you find that the errors are several degrees [1]. In the light of this, it makes no sense to argue about a difference of 0.5°, but that’s what the world is doing.

What we should be focusing on is the overwhelmingly strong scientific evidence that the climate is warming rapidly, and that we have a lot to do with that. Whether it is by 1.5° or 2° is irrelevant given that the uncertainty on individual forecasts is of the order of several degrees.

The difficulty in making detailed predictions, and the potential pitfalls in trying to do so, became painfully evident when the Club of Rome rightly made the forecast that there are limits to growth. They predicted that it would not be possible for the agricultural production of the planet to feed 10 billion people, and that at a time when there were no climatic problems in general sight. This shows how difficult it is to make long term forecasts with reliability. Today it seems clear that food is not the crucial limit, but rather that other restrictions are more important, such as the rapid growth of populations. This was explained clearly by Ernst Ullrich von Weizsäcker, a scientist, politician and honorary president of the Club of Rome in his remarkable keynote address at the 50th anniversary of the European Physical Society in Geneva on 28 September 2018. In a paper entitled ‘Come on [2]’, he explains that one has to give up the belief that current trends are sustainable and adopt new and exciting journey with long term visions. For that purpose, a kind of new enlightenment might be necessary. The first enlightenment helped to liberate our spirits and prepare them for the technical revolutions, leading to a materialistic philosophy and in the end to selfishness and brutal competition. Enlightenment 2.0 should instead concentrate on a balance between contradicting elements like human versus nature, public versus state, fast change versus stability, feminine and masculine, religion and state and others. It seems that Asian civilisation can more easily accept such balances whereas the tendency of the West is to polarise.

The Club of Rome was absolutely right to draw attention to the limits to growth, but society’s reaction was to debate the details of the premise rather than address the problem. With climate change, we’re seeing the same thing happening: we should be concentrating on mitigation instead of arguing about tenths of degrees. This could allow us to develop the necessary technologies instead of taking precipitous decisions with little impact. We could then set the most favourable speed to fight climate change without damaging social life worldwide. Recently it seems that it is becoming more and more evident that the 1.5° target cannot be met and more importance should be given to mitigating measures, in particular concerning rising sea levels.

In many walks of modern life, those who should be taking a lead frequently take refuge behind what they refer to as objective scientific facts. In doing so, they are shifting the responsibility they should assume on to others: the scientists who have supposedly provided those objective facts. Even worse, they establish so-called expert committees with scientific-sounding names that often appear impartial but are frequently far from it. When something goes wrong nobody is to blame but the science, which has been misrepresented by design.

In some cases, ethical or truly political issues with a scientific dimension are transferred to legal courts or parliamentary bodies that again turn to science for certainty. This kind of practice is based on the same misconception of science that I’ve already discussed. Science itself cannot give firm advice on decisions for the application of technologies. It can perhaps offer different scenarios for future developments. Unfortunately, some individual scientists also overestimate their own work, and play into the hands of a system looking to avoid responsibility. The solution? There is probably no simple answer, but when looking for impartial scientific evidence, perhaps the best way is to turn to national scientific academies such as the UK’s Royal Society or Germany’s Leopoldina, but there may be other possibilities.

Is There a Universal Truth?

Another issue that has intrigued me all my life is the notion of universal values. In science we agree on ways to establish whether a result is true or false: the final verdict on whether a theory is right or wrong is provided by reproducible experiments. Could it be possible to find a similar procedure for ethical values that would be true everywhere, for everyone and at all times?

I touched on this question in a previous chapter (see Chap. 11) when discussing the relationship between natural science, religion and art. It may suffice here to repeat that what science and religion consider to be true is based on completely different concepts. In science a true statement can always be verified by experiments at any time and in any place. Only if we explore nature under these conditions can we find rules independent of tradition, political systems and ethical considerations. Religion, on the other hand, relies on revelation. The aesthetic in the arts is yet another completely different realm of human life that involves subjective personal taste. They are all different experiences of reality, completely independent and complementary, and our lives would be incomplete and poorer without them.

Could it be possible to agree on conditions, as we have done for science, to establish universal ethical principles? I doubt it. The testing experiment would be history, which cannot simply be repeated. Hence, I believe there is no absolute truth in this sense. As far as ethical principles are concerned, everybody has the right to choose the basic elements according to their tradition, education and power of judgement. Time changes what any given society considers to be ethically acceptable. Of course, human rights are recognised today as guiding principles. But the historical development of these principles was achieved mainly in the western world, starting with the French revolution, and evolving through the social improvements during the more recent technical revolutions. We should be proud of these achievements, but we should also recognise that western cultures represent only a minority of humanity, and we should be wary of arrogance when trying to impose western value systems wholesale on other cultures.

In the west, we believe that democracy is the best way to organise society. However, in discussion with colleagues from other cultures, I have often been challenged to say what I mean by democracy. Is an elected parliament alone a guarantee of democracy? Probably not. And does democracy have to be practised as it is in the UK, France, the USA or indeed in any other western democratic country? There are essential differences in political practice, which lead to a spectrum of differences in the behaviour of societies. Finding the right balance between the rights of the individual and the interests of society is not so easy. Too much liberalism favours extreme egotism, whereas a too strong state risks stifling private initiatives and freedoms, with government rules overseeing what goes on even in our bedrooms. More tolerance is needed in all kinds of discussions between nations and cultures, where mutual respect and understanding are paramount. Could these be principles one might be able to accept globally? I doubt it. Perhaps different solutions for different areas of the globe are what we should seek: good relations with mutual respect and tolerance would be a better solution. Nation states, a result of the French revolution and adapted to benefit from the emerging new technologies may indeed be a bad option for coping with the advantages and dangers of present-day technologies.

Is Technical and Social Progress Too Quick for the Human Mind?

I once had the chance to discuss politics with Werner Heisenberg. He pointed out that in classical physics we learn that a sudden transition, a step function as we call it, imposed on a system in equilibrium leads to violent oscillations that die away only after some time, which is determined by internal parameters of the system. If you want to move a system smoothly from one steady state to another you have to do it slowly, adiabatically as we call it in physics, in order to avoid turbulence. The same may also be true for social systems: if we talk about the evolution of events in time, it’s important to be aware that developments need a certain natural time to happen smoothly.

I think that turbulence can happen in social systems if traditions and mentalities are changed too rapidly. Revolutions lead to turbulence and violence, and as the old adage tells us, they devour their own children. Humans, it seems, as well as natural phenomena, need time to adapt to new conditions. For that reason, it is rarely productive to impose a new ethical value system on a society with a particular mentality and traditions, even if convinced that doing so will be beneficial for that society. Each system has its own natural inertia, which should not be neglected.

In my travels over many decades, I have been able to observe this for myself. When I visited Turkey 50 years ago, for example, the large towns all had western features. The radical reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had swept away centuries of Ottoman tradition and replaced it with westernisation. Men were no longer obliged to wear long beards, writing switched to the western alphabet, and the political system was democratic. Every time I have visited Turkey since, I have found that it has taken some steps back towards the old value system. Atatürk introduced turbulence, and it will still take time for the new Turkey, or Türkiye as the country is now known at the UN, to settle into a new equilibrium. I have observed similar developments in some countries in the Middle East. In Russia, Communism did not extinguish the old orthodox religion. And in Afghanistan, decades of intervention failed to supplant the tribal mindset that prevails again today.

Even if elements of a system are distasteful to our value system they cannot be changed by force. I remember a dispute with a Chinese minister at a Forum Engelberg meeting, where someone criticised the corruption in his country, He replied: what is corruption? What you call corruption is part of our tradition for 2000 years. He warned us that too much pressure on changing their system could be considered as neo-imperialism. One should not lightly condemn other social systems, before fully understanding their history, and arrogance should be avoided.

The influence on society of the rapid advance of technology may be less obvious than that of revolutions, but it is nevertheless there. It has rapidly changed the mentality of large parts of humanity, like mobile phones in developing countries to cite one example.

What Are the Priorities in Politics?

I have never been a member of a political party or carried out a political job. I have, however, been involved with politicians throughout my career, and this has allowed me a glimpse into their mentality. It has often surprised me how fast they sometimes have to change their priorities, and I’d like to recount two particularly striking examples.

When I was at DESY, I got to know the publisher of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Marion Gräfin von Dönhoff, who was one of the most influential journalists in Germany, and Helmut Schmidt, who had visited DESY when he was Federal Chancellor of Germany and joined Die Zeit as co-publisher later. Dönhoff had the intention of starting some supporting activities for large projects, and I became involved in her circles. As a result, I was invited to a private meeting at of about a dozen people at a hotel in Berlin on the occasion of her 75th birthday in 1984. The star guests were none other than Helmut Schmidt and Henry Kissinger. They had both retired from politics and they gave talks about what should have been done to improve the global political situation. When we asked why they did not follow their own advice when in office, the answer was that when one takes up an executive position the priorities change: the main objective is to stay in power and win the next election.

This struck me very deeply, but it means that I was not too surprised when I got a similar answer a few years ago when I was invited to a meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan. The president had invited about two dozen former presidents or prime ministers from east or south European countries to a meeting where only they were allowed to speak. A few scientists were also invited but we could only listen during the official sessions. I had a sense of déjà vu listening to them explaining with great conviction what should be done to improve the global political situation. When I asked them during the coffee breaks why they did not do these things when in power, I got the same answer as before: priorities change drastically when one is appointed to an executive job. As a party leader in opposition, one can propose many ideas without being compelled to prove immediately that they would work in practice. Promises during an election campaign are something different from establishing concrete laws with immediate consequences. From these discussions I learned that one cannot expect the same objectivity and sustainability that one is accustomed to in science.

A World in Transition

A visiting alien looking at the situation of the world today and listening to some self-appointed prophet of doom would be forgiven for concluding that the end is nigh. I tend to disagree. Having lived through, and experienced at first hand, the horrors of global conflict, I’m actually more optimistic about the future than you might expect.

It is true that society faces multiple challenges that appear existential, and the majority of humanity has living conditions far below those that the industrialised countries enjoy. Modern information technologies make this strikingly clear to anyone who cares to look, and it’s not unreasonable for those in poverty to aspire to western standards of living. Added to this, climate change is having a drastic impact on the planet, leading to extreme weather events happening with increasing frequency, and even changing the regions of the planet that are hospitable to human habitation. If no satisfactory solution can be found, the migration that we see today will soon seem like a trickle. Turning migrants around at our borders is not the solution. We need to think more rationally and inclusively about dealing with such challenges.

Claims that the end is nigh are nothing new. They are as old as human civilization itself, enshrined in religious texts the world over. The Mayan calendar, for example, famously ended around 2012. Today, it is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that keeps us on our toes, updating their famous doomsday clock regularly to show how close we are to midnight—the moment it all ends. Over the three-quarters of a century of its existence, the clock’s time has moved closer or further away, but it has always been very close to midnight. At the time of writing, we are just 90 seconds away. I don’t suppose that the scientists behind the clock truly believe that the world will end at their symbolic midnight. Rather, they are keeping the issues that we need to be dealing with in the public eye, exploiting our love for the sensational that I’ve already discussed. In a certain way, this is a good thing: it helps us to focus on the need for solutions, but in heeding their warnings, we must also remember that rushed decisions will not solve our problems. We need well thought-out solutions.

History teaches us that there are two ways to change existing systems. There is the abrupt cataclysmic approach exemplified by revolutions, or there is peaceful evolution that takes time. In the latter we can adapt in small steps, taking sufficient time for society and nature to evolve in parallel. This implies giving sufficient time to develop new technologies and learn how to live with them. Such advances cannot simply be ordered, as the Soviets tried to do with their 5-year plans, for example.

Time is short, but we are an innovative species. I for one am inspired by the energy, ideas and creativity of generations much younger than my own, and that makes me optimistic. We are living through a time of transition and those younger generations give me cause for hope.

Whichever way the world changes, peacefully or not, no country or region can go it alone. Natural systems have always been interconnected, and modern technology means that so are we. No one is immune from the actions of others, and it is in everyone’s interest to work together. One thing is certain, an element of competition between countries and regions will always be present, and major players on the world stage, such as the USA, China, India, Africa and South America—and I hope also Europe, will have major parts to play. They will need to work together to ensure sustainable peaceful coexistence, not only relying on formal rights, but also on balance based on mutual understanding and tolerance. This requires a positive narrative and optimism instead of belligerent competition set against a background of doomsday scenarios.

I have the impression that today’s pessimism is mainly present in the developed countries. In particular, the younger generations are frustrated, seeing little perspective for a better future. The only long-term prospect they see is climate change and its attendant problems. In countries where social improvements are still possible, the mind-set is completely different. I have seen this in my travels to developing countries, and to countries with large populations such as India and China. In such places, the younger generations are motivated to work hard and develop plans for a brighter future for themselves, or at least for their children. Such optimistic narratives are missing for the developed world.

What can be done? Some people claim that scientific and technological developments will not be crucial for social progress. The history of the past few hundred years suggests otherwise. I do not say that such progress alone will suffice, but without it, it will be very difficult to avoid a major human disaster.

Our leaders would do well to look at global science for inspiration. As anyone working in science knows, scientific fields thrive through a blend of collaboration and competition, hard work and great effort. Science is international, and without discrimination of traditions, religions or races. Even if political solutions will be delimited by region, the whole world will benefit from the results of global science and technology.

In my life and career, I’ve been lucky to count as friends people from many cultures. Whatever their religious, cultural or political background, a shared vision of progress for humanity has united us. These are lofty words, and whatever happens, the Earth will survive. Future generations will find themselves confronted by their own challenges, and as all generations have done, they will find their own solutions.