Everything about John Desmond Bernal totally explained
John Desmond Bernal FRS (
10 May 1901—
15 September 1971) was an Irish-born scientist known for pioneering
X-ray crystallography.
Career
He was born in
Nenagh,
County Tipperary, Ireland. He was educated at
Bedford School near London, and then at
Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. At Cambridge he studied both mathematics and science for a B. A. degree in 1922, which he followed by another year of natural sciences. He taught himself the theory of
space groups, including the
quaternion method; this became the mathematical basis of later work on
crystal structure. After graduating he started research under
Sir William Bragg at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of
graphite.
It was in his research group in
Cambridge that
Dorothy Hodgkin started her research. Together, in 1934, they took the first X-ray photographs of hydrated
protein crystals. Other prominent scientists who studied with him include
Rosalind Franklin,
Aaron Klug and
Max Perutz.
He was later Professor of
Physics at
Birkbeck College, University of London (where he became Master) and a
Fellow of the Royal Society.
Political activism
Bernal was a public intellectual, very prominent in political life, particularly in the
1930s after having left the
Communist Party of Great Britain in
1933. According to biographer
Maurice Goldsmith, he didn't so much withdraw from the CPGB, but lost his card and didn't renew it. He had joined in 1923.
He attended the famous
1931 meeting on
History of Science, where he met the Soviets
Nikolai Bukharin and
Boris Hessen, who gave an influential
Marxist account of the work of
Isaac Newton. This meeting fundamentally changed his world-view.
In
1939, he published
The Social Function of Science, probably the earliest text on the
sociology of science. He was chairman of the
World Peace Council from 1959 until 1965.
In 1948/9 he endorsed the "proletarian science" of
Trofim Lysenko.
He was awarded the
Lenin Peace Prize in 1953.
War work
He is known also as joint inventor of the
Mulberry Harbour.
After helping orchestrate
D-Day, Bernal landed on
Normandy on D-Day + 1. It was said that a letter of his went astray in early 1944, and this nearly led to the postponement of D-Day. (Source: film account by
Alan Mackay, who quoted Bernal on this fact). His extensive knowledge of the area stemmed from a combination of research in English libraries and personal experience having visited the area on previous holidays. The Navy had temporarily assigned him the rank of commander such that he wouldn't stand out as a civilian amongst the invasion forces. However, the members of his unit were less than convinced as he directed a vehicle using the terms "left" and "right" instead of "
port" and "
starboard."
He is also famous for having firstly proposed in
1929 the so-called
Bernal sphere, a type of
space habitat intended as a long-term home for permanent residents.
Family
His family was
Sephardic Jewish on his father's side, though his father Samuel was a
Catholic; his mother, nee Elizabeth Miller, was an American Catholic convert, a graduate of
Stanford University and a journalist.
Martin Bernal, author of
Black Athena, is his son with Margaret Gardiner. He had three other children, two with Agnes Eileen Sprague whom he married in 1921, and one with
Margot Heinemann.
He also had a long term professional and, intermittently, intimate relationship with
Dorothy Hodgkin whose scientific research work he mentored.
Trivia: A fictional portrait of him appears in the novel
The Search, an early work of his friend
C. P. Snow, and another ("Tengal") in
The Holiday by
Stevie Smith.
Works
- The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929) (External Link
)
- Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (1934) with E. F. Carritt, Ralph Fox, Hyman Levy, John Macmurray, R. Page Arnot
- The Social Function of Science (1939)
- Science and the Humanities (1946) pamphlet
- The Freedom of Necessity (1949)
- The Physical Basis of Life (1951)
- Marx and Science (1952) Marxism Today Series No. 9
- Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (1953)
- Science in History (1954) four volumes in later editions, The Emergence of Science; The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions; The Natural Sciences in Our Time; The Social Sciences: Conclusions
- World without War (1958)
- A Prospect of Peace (1960)
- Need There Be Need? (1960) pamphlet
- The Origin of Life (1967)
- Emergence of Science (1971)
- The Extension of Man. A History of Physics before 1900 (1972) also as A History of Classical Physics from Antiquity to the Quantum
- On History (1980) with Fernand Braudel
- Engels and Science, Labour Monthly pamphlet
- After Twenty-five Years
- Peace to the World, British Peace Committee pamphlet
Quotation
"Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states." (Quote from Bernal on MSN Encarta)
Footnotes
Further Information
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