Science: Death of a Dreamer

As it must to all men, Death came last week to John William Navin Sullivan. Son of a poor Irish sailor, Sullivan was one of the world’s four or five most brilliant interpreters of physics to the world of common men—physics being a prosaic name for that vast branch of science which embraces the giddiest reaches of the universe, the four-dimensional time-space continuum of Relativity, the hidden dance and pulsations of electrons. He was also a novelist, a musician, a philosopher—above all, a dreamer.

In Three Men Discuss Relativity, Aspects of Science, Limitations of Science and other writings, Sullivan disclosed a remarkable flair for simplification, a style distinguished chiefly by lucidity and lack of pretension. Other eminent popularizers have their personal views of the mathematical chart of time and space, usually involving the relation of Science to God. Sullivan also had his personal view, a view wherein science was not entangled with any gods. He did not care for either preaching or carping. Science was a wellspring of beauty, a source of intensely satisfying esthetic experiences. The construction of Relativity was a beautiful piece of architecture.

“As a boy,” Sullivan once wrote, “I lived in a sort of perpetual daydream.” He left school early, went to work for an electrical manufacturer who shortly took such an interest in his mathematical bent that Sullivan was able to complete his education at London University. Beethoven and Dostoyevski were tremendous experiences which dazed him. He visited the U. S., went back for the War which so shattered him that he was forced to rebuild his life. He wrote a book on Beethoven and an autobiographical novel in which he manifested an impressive lack of interest in politics, business, social gatherings, bank holidays, royal processions.

Lately he gave the impression of having said his final say on science, because neither he nor Science knew where they were going. Renewed by the mathematical impredictability of the electron, the old war between Determinism and Free Will was again going full blast, but Sullivan could not bring himself to join those who aligned themselves cocksurely on one side or the other. He devoted himself to writing novels, lived in a small cottage in Surrey, neglected to the last to take regular medical treatment. Suffering from locomotor ataxia, he died in an advanced stage of syphilis.