The One True Platonic Heaven by John L. Casti, Joseph Henry Press, $22.95/£15.95, ISBN 0309085470 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
THE “Platonic heaven” of John Casti’s title refers to the Institute for Advanced Study that was established at Princeton University in 1930, and his semi-fictionalised account is set in the spring of 1946, just after the end of the Second World War. It is a difficult work to categorise. Casti himself calls it “scientific fiction”, which doesn’t tell us much. Neither does his remark that the Japanese term for it is shosetsu, a kind of history with elements of fiction mixed in. The genre allows a writer to move people around to places they were never in and take part in events they were never at, but it is a tricky method that occasionally proves too awkward to handle with grace.
Members of the institute were simply asked to think, and Casti’s theme is the question of whether there is logically (his italics) a limit to the power of the scientific method in solving the mysteries of the Universe. Among members were famous names such as Einstein, Oppenheimer, Pauli, Neumann and the mathematical genius Gödel. Casti has Gödel buttonholing Einstein in an attempt to persuade him to help his bid for promotion to professor. His lowlier status galls him.
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This is one of the main threads of the narrative in The One True Platonic Heaven. The other is Neumann’s proposal to build a large electronic computer at the institute, an idea that scandalises many of the Princeton scientists, who want nothing to do with engineering and fail to understand the possibilities. Adroit chairmanship by Oppenheimer ensures that, despite their vehement opposition, the computer will be built.
Formal and informal discussions of quantum mechanics and their strange consequences and other rarefied matters are fascinating. Casti gets into the heads of many of the characters, whose thoughts contain the origins of epigrams that have become celebrated, for example, Einstein’s rueful comment that having been a rebel against authority all his life he was paying for it by becoming an authority himself.
Much information has to be carried by the group’s memories or reminiscences, so that at times they resemble actors in a badly constructed play keeping the audience in the know with speeches about what’s been happening off stage. Even this device sometimes fails and, at one point, Casti interrupts Einstein’s thoughts to say that he has totally missed the point of what a computer is for, and then jumps back to Einstein’s musings.
There is a lot of value here, but the plan of the book is far from easy, and might be bewildering. In spite of the people in it having existed, the paradox is that they don’t seem ever to come alive.