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Part One of "Looking Backwards: A Late Addendum to Milty's Mag" was published in Progress Report Two. It covered Milton's years as a major science fiction fan from 1935 to his "retirement" in 1953. - Ed.
But even then I could not escape the tentacles
of science fiction. Applying for a job in the burgeoning field of atomic
energy (as my scientifictional destiny demanded), I found my path blocked
by my associations with various individuals within science fiction fandom
whose political inclinations leaned far to the left of center (including
one genuine red-diaper baby). To the security clearance apparatus of the
Atomic Energy Commission and the FBI I was persona non grata, even though
in my own mind my heart was pure and sweet.
This predicament caused some bad feeling for a time, but ultimately I triumphed by getting a job much better than the one at Oak Ridge I had originally applied for. In 1958, I found myself a research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. My boss was Lyman Spitzer, originator of the Hubble telescope concept (and, as I write this, recently deceased).
The lab was devoted to the accomplishment of thermonuclear fusion, and was, in real life, more fascinating to me than the fantasies of science fiction.
It was, literally, a science fictional laboratory—it could have been a setting for a science fiction movie, with giant magnet coils, capacitors, generators, insulators—everything except crackling sparks and cackling hunchbacks. The stellarator I worked with (precursor of the tokamak) could have been a drawing by Wesso in Amazing Stories.
Unfortunately, economics eventually took precedence over science. When contracts for projects start running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, with different groups vying for the same money, then scientific research becomes piranha city. It appears the Plasma Physics Lab is now doomed, and the goal of commercial thermonuclear fusion may turn into a fantasy. It is a story that will resonate in history: an idea that was believed in for decades by some of the best physicists in the world turned out to be physically possible but economically unfeasible.
In the decades after my tenure at the Plasma Physics Lab I did ten years of teaching and also got into the skepticism business.
This activity led me into writing a few books: Discovering the Natural Laws (Doubleday 1972, Dover 1989), A Physicist's Guide to Skepticism (Prometheus Books 1988), The Science Gap: Dispelling the Myths and Understanding the Reality of Science (Prometheus Books, 1992).
The first book describes the various experiments that verify the natural laws such as conservation of energy and momentum, the laws of relativity, etc. These laws enable us to say with an extremely high degree of confidence that perpetual motion machines are impossible, faster-than-light travel is impossible, and antigravity is impossible.
The precision of the experiments is unbelievable to anyone who is not familiar with the methods used. The average citizen knows nothing about them and therefore feels smug in repeating inanities such as "anything is possible." The second and third books say more about these popular myths and delusions.
These are terrific books and have a lot of good stuff in them. All are in print. Now, with the coming of the Internet I find that the world is inundated with amateur scientists inventing their own theories of the universe and proposing newer and more idiotic perpetual motion machines. My books are tiny bricks in the dike protecting us against the forces of irrationality.
During the past few years I have written a regular column for Skeptical Briefs, a newsletter published by CSICOP—the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Thus the skepticism business has bloomed into a full-scale post-retirement activity. It's a good thing I have a pension, because skepticism pays very little money. (Although the other week I received $100 as a consultation fee for reading a new theory of the universe.)
With the approach of important 50th anniversaries, I have tended to think more and more of dates, places, and events of World War II.
Where was I when the Germans invaded Russia? Where was I when our army was invading Normandy? Where was I when the atomic bomb was dropped? How many times did I chide myself for not having kept a diary?
These thoughts inspired me to look over my old photographs and fanzines. Suddenly the truth became clear. I already had a diary in Milty's Mag. Look at where I was. In March, 1940 (the first issue of Milty's Mag) I was living at 2020 F St., N. W., in Washington, D.C. (The National Science Foundation now occupies those premises.) Those were the days when I walked to work (at 9th & F) right through the front yard of the White House.
In two months, the Germans would invade the Netherlands and Belgium. In another year, they would invade Russia and my mother would receive her last letter from her people in that country.
There appears to be a gap in my collection. The next issue of Milty's Mag in my possession is dated 16 Apr. 1944. In the intervening time I had enlisted, gone to Ordnance School at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, run around the race track at Santa Anita, then on to a year at Oregon State College, had a couple of weeks in the hospital, then sat in Fort Lewis, Washington, waiting for who knows what. Reading my blatherings about the effects of spinal meningitis and the mathematics of space travel make me realize how young I was.
By this time Italy was out of the war. The one event I wish I had known about was the incredible performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony on 9 August 1942 in the middle of the Siege of Leningrad—a battle in which half the population of Leningrad lost their lives. This symphony had a special emotional and social significance and still stirs up the blood.
The next issue of Milty's Mag is quite mysterious. No date; the only address is Postmaster, New York. Now I can confess all, due to a clever code message hidden in the text, wherein I describe seeing Wagner's Das Rheingold at the Metropolitan Opera House, down near Times Square. I am the only one who knows that I saw Das Rheingold while I was stationed at Fort Hamilton, in Brooklyn, preparing to embark on an overseas voyage.
Nowadays you would pay a fortune for a comparable cruise. Four days on the Queen Mary, and even with 12,000 troops it didn't seem overcrowded. I must be the only GI in the army who spent the time on board working on homework problems for a correspondence course in differential equations. Then there was a trip across the English Channel with the water smooth as glass and our convoy gliding silently across under the moonlight to France, with me sacked out on deck overnight, too nervous to sleep down in the hold.
The next issue of Milty's Mag was written in stages, starting with March 1945, the last day of the overseas journey. I still didn't know where I was headed. For all I knew, I could have been aiming straight into the Battle of the Bulge; I hadn't heard enough to know that battle was already finished.
Tonight as I write this I am going to have dinner with a friend who was right in the middle of that battle. You young things don't know what you missed. The next paragraph is dated April, 1945. The world is now filled with flowers and sunshine. The war is still going on a couple of hundred miles to the east, but somehow I have landed in Paris. You hear about Paris in the spring? Well, I had it, all of it.
I felt terribly guilty about not defeating the Germans myself, but I could only do what I was told to do. And what I did was make the most of Paris. Went to the Opera seven times, sitting not far from the box inhabited by the Phantom. To a youngster raised on the original Lon Chaney version of Phantom of the Opera the first sight of that incredible opera house was a vision beyond belief. In the same opera house I attended the first performance in France of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the same symphony that was performed during the battle of Leningrad three years previously.
In Paris you are never far from music. Accordingly I ended up taking piano lessons from a real pianist named Gilles Gilbert whose studio was a block away from Pigalle and who turned out to be an American. Mind you, this was between doing my real job, which took place in a Signal Corps warehouse by the Seine.
But typing reports did not seem to be particularly productive. On the other hand, perhaps I look at it from the wrong perspective. If we agree that one twenty-page inventory report is equal to one German private, then I feel somewhat better.
Actually, the one really useful thing I did while in Paris was a result of my encounter with a group of refugees ("displaced persons" was the term used; we had not yet invented the word "survivor") just out of the concentration camps. I walked in the front door of this place I had heard about and the first person I met was a young man who stuck out his hand and said: "Guten tag. Mein namen ist Maurice Rothman." The ground opened up beneath me. Four years in the army and this is the only fellow Rothman I have met. Naturally, we became good friends. I made believe he was my cousin, although I didn't know of any relatives in Germany. I started the ball rolling to find his brother in Brooklyn. Finally I walked with him into the American Embassy where he got his papers to come to America. He ended up as a successful house painter in Vallejo, California. A "color engineer," he called himself. Upon retiring from the business he bought himself a nice house with a three-car garage, drove a Cadillac, played golf at the country club. A total American success story.
When I got back to the States in the spring of 1946, I was already signed up for graduate school at Penn State. My fan writing had to become more serious. The sentimental meanderings of Milty's Mag had to give way to the hard-edged intellectual thought of Plenum. My writing in Plenum ranged from discourses on modern literature as seen in Transition, a magazine published in Paris, to lectures on modern mathematics-showing off what I was currently learning.
Most revealing is an January 1948 article, titled "The Crackpot and the Scientist," in which I analyze the characteristics of sundry cranks who invent perpetual motion machines, orgone boxes, devise idiosyncratic theories of the atom, etc. Among these characters was one who claimed to extract energy out of air itself—never mind the second law of thermodynamics.
What's funny is the fact that within the past few weeks (as I write this) somebody has mounted an entire seminar on this very same subject in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, with the aim of selling rights to his inventions to the gullible public. Nothing has changed in 50 years, except that everything has gotten slicker and more commercial.
What is clear is the fact that all of my recent books stem directly from this particular article in Plenum. Plenum was practice for all my skeptical writing. But now the style is better and the subject matter more comprehensive. In fact, while I was writing The Science Gap a few years ago, there was one paragraph that I thought was incredibly original. It was a philosophical idea that I could not remember seeing anywhere else. I was delighted to have achieved such an original thought. The old brain wasn't completely dead. However, when I recently started going through my copies of Plenum, the same paragraph jumped out of the page at me, almost word for word. The wise words I had written in 1948 remained stored in my unconscious mind for over 40 years, to be regurgitated in a creative frenzy while writing The Science Gap.
Producing a fanzine in the 1940s was the best on-the-job-training for future pursuits in both teaching and writing. My interest in jousting with cranks and crackpots originated in those years, and now is put to use as I write books and articles for the skeptical movement.
I'm proud of the fact that Philadelphia and its environs now boasts of an active skeptics group: The Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (Phact). And on its first anniversary (November 9, 1996) they awarded me a plaque celebrating my induction as their first Hall of Fame member. I've come full circle, and with my elevation to Guest of Honor at Bucconeer, the circle is made larger.
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