Book Review (1) Light is a Messenger: The Life and Science of William Lawrence Bragg

Title   'Light is a Messenger; The Life and Science of William Lawrence Bragg'
Author  Graeme K Hunter
Publisher   Oxford University Press, 2004 £35.00
ISBN 019852921X, 322 pages hardback

The thought has never crossed my mind that it would have been interesting to have had the chance to meet Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. In the case of Sir Lawrence Bragg, who died in 1971, my entry into crystallography in 1974, just 3 years later, makes it somehow galling to have been so close, and yet so far, in time to have seen him in action. Obviously my point here, in mentioning Newton and Einstein in the same breath, is that he is such an iconic figure in the whole development of X-ray crystal structure analysis, and the many discoveries with which Bragg was closely involved in, that I feel one must rank him in the Newton or Einstein league in the history of science.

The author of this biography immediately explains his reason though for writing on Sir Lawrence Bragg ('Bragg'), which is that Bragg is still the youngest ever Nobel Prize-winner and that fact alone makes Bragg an icon. There is a 'however' though, which is that Bragg was Nobel Prize-winner in 1915 jointly with his father, Sir William Henry Bragg. His father specialised more on crystallographic instrumentation and apparatus, and was also preoccupied for several years in the early 20th century with the idea that X-rays were corpuscles rather than waves. But, and skipping on a few years, and to press the point about the strength of this father and son team, they agreed to split the world of crystal structure analysis into organics for the father and inorganics for the son. Sir William Henry Bragg died in 1942 and Bragg broke away into the biological (organic!) world when he moved to Cambridge from Manchester to succeed Rutherford in 1938. Unexpectedly, Bragg teamed up there with J D Bernal's former student Max Perutz. Together they pioneered the development of protein crystallography until, with Kendrew, the protein structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin were eventually determined in the late 1950s. On the way, also under Bragg's patronage, Watson and Crick determined the DNA double helix structure in 1953, based on the fibre diffraction data from Kings College (Franklin and Wilkins).

This is a very quick sketch of the story, but leaving out the major precocious moment in 1913 of a very young Bragg, i.e. as a Cambridge postgraduate, firstly deriving what became known as Bragg's law and then also deducing the first crystal structure, that of sodium chloride. Bragg's father meanwhile, converted to X-rays being waves by the crystal diffraction grating results of Laue in 1912, built the first X-ray diffractometer. Bragg is quoted by the author as referring to "the superior nature of data from your diffractometer, Dad,". This and many others are amongst the jewels of quotations that the author sets before the reader.

Indeed, the author has clearly worked extremely hard on this book. The title itself, a very good one, is a quote of Bragg from what seems to me a rather obscure lecture he gave in 1928; the full quotation being "Light is a messenger, carrying a story about the form of the object....". A proper measure of the author's labours though, rather than saying he had read even the obscure lectures, are in the 1008 historical references at the back of the book, and numerous further footnotes throughout the book. These not only list numerous archived letters of Bragg and others but also interviews with a variety of key players. One has a growing feel of privilege at reading this carefully prepared biography.

There were also tricky details for the author to get right, specifically the tensions between father and son, in spite of the obvious filial devotion that I have touched on already. Obviously, as someone who did not see this all unfolding I was left feeling that the author had given a credible, evidence-based treatment of this important aspect of Bragg's life story. But the author pushed this too far, I felt, in extrapolating to Jim Watson being seen by Bragg as equivalent to himself as the young overlooked genius behind the DNA double helix (with Bragg viewing Crick as playing the equivalent role of his father, in danger of getting all the credit).

I was surprised to learn that Bragg was subjected to bouts of depression and angry outbursts. This was brought out in several places in the book, with footnote evidence back up. I suppose I didn't want to believe this, spoiling as it did my rosy view of one of my science heroes. However I did already know that Bragg had had a nervous breakdown. Anyway, the genial smiling character on the front cover of this book doesn't reflect this aspect. Also, my prior readings of Bragg anecdotes, admittedly only two, from A Random Walk in Science (published by IOP) showed that Bragg had a keen sense of humour.

There were some aspects of the book that I didn't like. The exposition of the crystallography was overly long in the early chapters, I felt. Like Bragg's aunt, of a later chapter, who hadn't a clue when Bragg tried to explain his latest crystal structure, I could imagine that non-scientists reading this book would be equally baffled by these details of the science. I am also still mulling over the tactic of not gathering the family life details of Bragg, as a father, into one chapter; it seemed on several occasions that the author had to mix this into many chapters to ease the science details along. The family details deserved a better focus. [The advantage for the author was of course to keep a strict chronology of the story.]

In retrospect, Bragg had three distinct career phases. These came after the precocious beginning and the First World War when he was a Major leading a team doing sound ranging to pinpoint the enemy guns. There were his Manchester period (1919 to 1937), his Cambridge period (1938 to 1954) and then the Royal Institution period (1954 to 1965). Manchester itself was thoroughly slated. The most memorable anecdote was that the fog was so thick it even prevented seeing the stage from the back of the theatre! Altogether, Manchester was apparently a dirty, grimy, indeed uncivilised place. Bragg's wife was glad to leave Manchester behind when moving south. [What a difference a few decades makes - Manchester today has no fog, has stone-cleaned buildings, and is a cultural scene of thriving orchestras, theatres and national sports facilities!]

For anyone interested in the history of how our subject has come to where it is today, this book offers a feast of interesting details. In addition to the above history one must highlight the fascinating ins and outs of Bragg's rivalry with Linus Pauling. As one example, I mention their battle over their respective Nobel Prize nominations, leading up to the 1962 Nobel Prize awards for Perutz, Kendrew, Watson, Crick and Wilkins. This is revealed by the letters Bragg and Pauling wrote to each other, and into the Nobel Foundation, at the time. [Bragg won that tussle......]. There are also Bragg's major achievements in enthusing schoolchildren in science and discovery through his lectures, especially but not exclusively, in his period as Director of The Royal Institution.

As I arrived at the end of the book I admired the way in which the author left the last words on Bragg to David Phillips, who had worked with Bragg at the RI, by quoting from Phillips' Biographical Memoir of Bragg for The Royal Society. Indeed those last pages of this biography brought a crescendo of feeling about this great scientist and person, Sir Lawrence Bragg, whom I would never be able to meet; so close in time to the start of my career and yet so far. I was grateful for this book because I felt I had really got to see the person who had driven the science.

John Helliwell