Jewell’s sensitive and thoughtful account is a stimulating contribution to the history and philosophy of modern science and culture in Norway, Europe and North America, and not least in Bergen. I enthusiastically recommend his work to both specialists and non-specialists.
William H. Hubbard, professor emeritus of modern European history, Concordia University (Montreal) and University of Bergen
The Weather’s Face
In all these aspects Vilhelm Bjerknes embodied special qualities and abilities that enabled him (and his co-workers) to achieve remarkable scientific successes, most especially a method of viewing and understanding weather behaviour, which laid the groundwork for scientific prediction of that intractable natural phenomenon.
R alph Jewell
In The Weather’s Face the philosopher Ralph Jewell creates a fascinating and compelling portrait of Vilhelm Bjerknes, an internationally prominent Norwegian physicist, who today is largely remembered for developing the Bergen School of Meteorology. Drawing copiously on Bjerknes’s letters and writings – most of them translated into English for the first time – Jewell’s telling of the Bjerknes story has a poetic immediacy that enthrals the reader. Through Bjerknes’s experiences and thoughts, as well as Jewell’s own reflections derived from a profound understanding of the history and philosophy of science, the reader learns about the making and living of science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, crucial aspects that are now often neglected or underestimated: the role of the individual, of personality and creative inspiration, of communicative style spoken and written, of community and team-building, and of mediating intellectual leadership.
The Weather’s Face Features of science in the story of Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Bergen school of meteorology
Following extensive studies in the natural sciences as well as in philosophy, the history of science and psychology at the universities of London and Leicester, he embarked in 1964 on a long and distinguished career in teaching and research at the University of Bergen, Norway. His fascination with and research into Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Bergen School of Meteorology led him to locate and preserve from oblivion numerous primary sources pertaining to their groundbreaking work.
R alph Jewell
ISBN 978-82-450-1441-9
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Ralph Jewell was born in Falmouth, UK, in 1940.
Ralph Jewell was also the main driving force behind the Introductory Programme for international students that was initiated in the mid-1970s at the University of Bergen. His wide literary and philosophical interests, together with his deep understanding of the place of storytelling in the human experience, transformed his seminars into spaces where students from all over the world discovered that a university is truly a place to find one’s intellectual fortune.
THE WEATHER’S FACE
Ralph Jewell
THE WEATHER’S FACE Features of science in the story of Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Bergen school of meteorology
Copyright © 2017 by Vigmostad & Bjørke AS All Rights Reserved Graphic production: John Grieg, Bergen ISBN: 978-82-450-1441-9 Cover design by Fagbokforlaget Cover photo: Erik Werenskiold, Portrait of professor of mechanics and mathematical physics Vilhelm Bjerknes, 1932. Photographer: Arthur Sand/UiO. Reproduced with permission from the University of Oslo. The author of this book has received financial support from Norges forskningsråd (The Research Council of Norway). The project is supported by the University of Bergen.
Inquiries about this text can be directed to: Fagbokforlaget Kanalveien 51 5068 Bergen Tel.: 55 38 88 00 Fax: 55 38 88 01 e-mail: fagbokforlaget@fagbokforlaget.no www.fagbokforlaget.no
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Vilhelm Bjerknes 1946.
VILHELM BJERKNES AND THE UNIVERSITY OF BERGEN When this book is published it will be 100 years since the Bergen school of meteorology was founded by Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes (1862–1951). The development of this school of meteorology took place within the Department of Geophysics, which was established by Bergen Museum in 1917. That same year Bjerknes was invited to the museum as a professor and leading scientist at the new department. Vilhelm Bjerknes was already an internationally renowned physicist, who had been a professor in Stockholm, Oslo and Leipzig. The Bergen school of meteorology became the foundation of modern weather forecasting. The theories and methods developed by Vilhelm Bjerknes and his colleagues are still important for describing, understanding and predicting the weather all over the world. The contributions of the Bergen school of meteorology had a great significance and impact for science as well as for society. However, as it has been said, it is only natural that modern weather forecasting was invented and developed just in Bergen, where there is a lot of weather! In 1926 Bjerknes returned to the University of Oslo, where once again he became a professor of physics there. However, his pioneering work during his years at Bergen Museum had lasting effects. From the basis of the contributions of Bjerknes, the Bergen school of meteorology and the Department of Geophysics were further developed and later integrated into the University of Bergen, which was established in 1946. Thus, Bjerknes’s scientific work and his institution building became important parts of the academic and scientific tradition which had been developed at Bergen Museum since the nineteenth century. This tradition was the basis for the founding and development of the new university. Vilhelm Bjerknes and his research is still a great source of inspiration at the University of Bergen. Currently, his work is further developed in climate research, which is one of the university’s most important research priorities. In the year 2000 the University of Bergen established the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research as a center of excellence and as one of the largest climate research units in Europe. In addition to his scientific contributions and institutional leadership, Vilhelm Bjerknes was also active in public debate on the importance of research in society. Pointing out that research was a necessary force in nation building and social development, he argued that the resources spent on research should be increased, and that the conditions for research should be improved.
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Given these contributions by Vilhelm Bjerknes as an internationally renowned scientist, as an advocate for the importance and improvement of conditions of research in society, and as a very important leading scientist and institution builder in the history of Bergen Museum and University of Bergen, it was an easy decision for the university to support the initiative and efforts to publish this book. The decision was made in 2012, when I was the Rector of the university. The university is very grateful to Bjerknes’s grandson, Vilhelm Bjerknes and his wife, Liv Bjerknes, for their convincing initiative concerning the book, and to the executive director of Fagbokforlaget, Arno Vigmostad, for his enthusiastic decision to publish it. Above all, we are grateful to the author of the book, Ralph Jewell, Associate Professor Emeritus at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, who for many years has been studying the life and work of Vilhelm Bjerknes. Sigmund Grønmo Rector of the University of Bergen 2005–2013
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DEDICATION To you all, who have given that most precious of things, your goodwill, as perhaps over the years, or for some shorter times, we have had our conversations to explore together what a story about Vilhelm Bjerknes may show us about science and life and philosophy and the arts, and how they are not really to be separated, each one of you showing goodwill in the colour you have given it, I dedicate this book.
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EPIGRAPHS The trunk and the branches of the tree are the abiding works of the frail and transient leaf. All the wood of the tree is formed solely by the leaf; and the size and peculiarities of that wood, are owing entirely to the amount and vital activity of the foliage. Slowly and silently – year after year – generation after generation – the leaf is elaborating from air and rain and sunshine – those solid structures which are destined to outlive it – and to remain behind – when it has fallen and crumbled into dust, as its enduring monuments. And is it not so with man? He is occupied all his life with works that are to survive him. Rev. Hugh Macmillan
There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature, if it be theory to infer more than we see. William Whewell
I hoped, as I expressed it, that the observations should be able to show us the weather’s face, alluding to the portraits found in newspapers which are made just from dots of ink: ten dots yield no physiognomy, but ten thousand can give the characteristic wrinkles and lines by which a face is known. But I was extremely excited to see if this tenfold increase in the number of [meteorological observation] stations would be enough to let us see the weather’s face. Vilhelm Bjerknes
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.
William Wordsworth
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STAGES, STEPS AND POINTS This account of Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Bergen school of meteorology is considered and arranged as an extended journey. Its main divisions are the stages of this journey. The stages are composed of various steps running in an unbroken sequence throughout the journey. Thirdly, each step brings into view clusters of fugitive points which, by being so fleeting, may easily escape notice or attention, so becoming quite lost for later moments of reflection. A journey may be planned beforehand in regard to its main stages as well as perhaps some of the steps expected to be taken on the way. But the many points of interest that attract attention, and perhaps excite thoughtful reflection, that are likely to be seen while travelling in an intriguing unfamiliar landscape, will be mostly unexpected and surpass any forethought. They might even offer surprising experiences and new visions, and as a result lead to a freshened attunement of vision, so bringing ever more points to be noticed that, in turn, become ever more rewarding than previously could be imagined. So here, the points are the delicate and often transient themes, features and issues that this story of a journey into a life in science calls into view. On a journey through enjoyable natural surroundings that are not yet familiar, we might regard the pleasures of seeing unexpected points of interest – and any likely gradual heightening of the readiness to see new things and so adjust our vision to them – as the essential pleasure and reward of such travelling. In this account the points arise within the natural flow of the incidents and events on the whole path of the story. A large part of the value of the dramatic story of Vilhelm Bjerknes and how, with a characteristic sense of duty, he took care of his life work to make sure that above all it was always worthy of his high purpose, is that it provides the very kind of fine, delicate, life-given and natural occasion and opportunity that may so readily prompt forth such fresh seeing and fresh noticing – and attunement and re-attunement of vision – to do with a life lived in the personally felt force of invitations, challenges and obligations that are welcomed as stemming from a source recognised as science.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During March 2012 the 150-year anniversary of the birth of Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862–1951) was celebrated widely in Norway. Meetings were held to honour the memory of him, of what he became as an inspiring presence for so many, and of what, through his whole bearing and stance in his life and life work as a great scientist, he brought about in Norway and the world over. At the University of Bergen a high point of those celebrations was a public lecture given on Monday 19 March by Sir Brian Hoskins, Professor of Meteorology at Reading University, and Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, who had chosen as his theme: “Vilhelm Bjerknes’s fingerprints on modern climate research.” The lecture was a masterly treatment of that theme. After listening to Sir Brian’s lecture, Vilhelm Bjerknes, grandson of the Vilhelm Bjerknes being celebrated, and his wife, Liv Bjerknes, walked with me through Nygård park on the path that runs partly alongside what had been the lovely garden of the villa where for some years from 1919, during the heyday of the Bergen school of meteorology, the Bjerknes family had made their home and the centre of their meteorological activity. We made our way to my university room, which happened to be in the very same house in which, after being uprooted from Leipzig, Vilhelm Bjerknes and his two Carnegie assistants made a new start on their work after arriving in Bergen in the autumn of 1917. The short distance of the three or four hundred metres or so, that on that fine day in March 2012 the three of us walked from Sir Brian’s lecture to my study, seemed, especially just then, to be across hallowed ground. I had promised to read for Vilhelm and Liv Bjerknes from the large manuscript that in draft form I had written during the first half of 1988 about Vilhelm Bjerknes in whose honour many of us had gathered together on that Monday. I made a large pot of tea. We talked about Sir Brian’s manner of handling the theme of his lecture, and why we had found it so fine. I took down a copy of the manuscript from the shelf where it had lain for several years, and started to read aloud from it, beginning with the opening pages. We talked a little about that beginning. I read more, from different parts of the story. They were evidently thrilled by what I read to them. Shortly afterwards we met once more to continue our conversation and to consider more of what I had written. I read aloud for them passages from the manuscript to show some of its leading ideas and themes, and what had led me to them. After a short time our conversation suddenly took a fresh turn. They expressed their view that the best
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way for me to honour Vilhelm Bjerknes would be to get my manuscript published. “Many of us,” they said, “have been looking forward to reading it!” I reflected for just a moment, and then responded with the firm promise: “Then I will do so.” I would do so in order more widely to show just what it was about Vilhelm Bjerknes that had brought me to regard him as a truly exemplary figure of science for showing so well some of its most honoured features. Along with that, and more generally, within the scope of my powers, I would try to show how the figure of Vilhelm Bjerknes and what he achieved in science seemed, nearly at once, to be so beautifully apt for my philosophical purposes when, in 1968, I first became aware of the richness of the experience that his presence – whether in person, in his talk or in his writing – gave to so many in Norway and the world over. Vilhelm Bjerknes and his life work in science seemed in 1968 to me as nothing less than a godsend for giving rise to and for guiding reflections that take one always further and with clarifying special focus, when intent as I was then and am still, upon philosophically considering the conditions and the varieties of possible knowledge. A short telephone call to the office of the Rector of the University of Bergen, there and then, was enough for the three of us to be invited to a meeting with Rector Grønmo set for some days later. He listened keenly first to what Vilhelm and Liv Bjerknes said to him, and then to me, as I spoke about my essential purpose in writing about Vilhelm Bjerknes in the manner in which I had done so, as a story with its moments of moving drama in the life of a most eminent scientist. I read aloud several short passages from the manuscript to show for him that purpose of mine at work in it. It was a good meeting. Much had been understood, quickly, and with abundant goodwill. Later that same day Rector Grønmo took the first steps that within the week led to a meeting with the publisher at which it was agreed to proceed towards publication. For Rector Grønmo’s decisive action in 2012 in setting in motion the arrangements with the publisher, and for the connected assurance of support from the University of Bergen continued by Rector Dag Rune Olsen, that eased forward the publication of The Weather’s Face, I am deeply grateful. To Shari Nilsen who rectified mistakes and infelicities of language in an earlier version of the manuscript, and for doing so with fine sensitivity in the hope that her work would help the book on its way towards other readers, I am most grateful. At short notice, William H. Hubbard undertook the work of copy-editing. That he became willing wholeheartedly to give himself to this work made him not only the copy editor but also a valued conversation partner with a shared sense of the importance of Vilhelm Bjerknes as a figure of science. My greatest debt of gratitude is to Christian Erbacher who has been a partner in philosophical conversations for a good number of years and gave crucial help when he became my editor at the time when the work was being brought into the final state in which I could gladly let it be published.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I
II
Preparing for the Journey Ahead
A Son’s Father – Carl Anton Bjerknes (1825–1903)
15
55
III
Finding One’s Own Way And Place In Science
161
IV
Bringing a Life Work in Science to Final Composition
215
V
VI
Reshaping a Science
Bergen: Reinvigorating Meteorology
333
453
Bjerknes’s Farewell Speech, Fløien, 24 June 1926
501
Epilogue
509
Archive
510
Sources
511
Index of Names
514
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page 5: Photograph courtesy of The Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. Page 60: Vilhelm Bjerknes, C.A. Bjerknes: hans liv og arbeide: træk av norsk kulturhistorie i det nittende aarhundre (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1925), 12. Page 72: Portrait by Jakob Emanuel Handmann (1753). Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain. Page 80: Vilhelm Bjerknes, C.A. Bjerknes: hans liv og arbeide: træk av norsk kulturhistorie i det nittende aarhundre (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1925), 49. Page 85: Photographer unknown/Universitetshistorisk fotobase (UFO). Page 95: Photograph courtesy of the Bjerknes Family. Page 108: Photograph courtesy of the Bjerknes Family Page 109: Sketched by Ernst Bjerknes. In Ernst Bjerknes, Barndom og ungdom i bygd og by: minner fra åtti-årenes Norge (Oslo: Dybwad, 1945). Page 120: Vilhelm Bjerknes, C.A. Bjerknes: hans liv og arbeide: træk av norsk kulturhistorie i det nittende aarhundre (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1925), 167. Page 121: Vilhelm Bjerknes, C.A. Bjerknes: hans liv og arbeide: træk av norsk kulturhistorie i det nittende aarhundre (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1925), 169. Page 124: Vilhelm Bjerknes, C.A. Bjerknes: hans liv og arbeide: træk av norsk kulturhistorie i det nittende aarhundre (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1925), 173. Page 146: Portrait by Johan Görbitz 1826. Photograph courtesy of The University of Oslo. Page 158: Portrait by August Eiebakke. Photographer: Arthur Sand/UiO. Photograph courtesy of The University of Oslo. Page 162: Photographer: Christoffer Gade. Rude/Nasjonalbiblioteket/Wikipedia. Page 205: Photograph courtesy of the Bjerknes family. Page 379: Vilhelm Bjerknes et al., Dynamische Meteorologie und Hydrologie: Atlas (Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1912). Page 380: Vilhelm Bjerknes et al., Dynamische Meteorologie und Hydrologie: Atlas (Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1912). Page 384: Vilhelm Bjerknes et al., Dynamische Meteorologie und Hydrologie: Atlas (Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1912). Page 385: Vilhelm Bjerknes et al., Dynamische Meteorologie und Hydrologie: Atlas (Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1912). Page 464: Photograph courtesy of The Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. Page 466: Source: Bjerknes værkart, Statsarkivet, Bergen. Page 474: J. Bjerknes, “On the Structure of Moving Cyclones,” Geofysiske Publikasjoner 1, no.2 (1919): 1–8. Page 476: J. Bjerknes, “On the Structure of Moving Cyclones,” Geofysiske Publikasjoner 1, no.2 (1919): 4. Page 477: Source: Billedsamlingen, MARCUS, University of Bergen Library. Page 480: Bergens Tidende, Wednesday 7 May 1919. Page 483: Photograph courtesy of The Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. Page 484: Photograph courtesy of The Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. Page 485: Photograph courtesy of The Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. Page 486: Photograph courtesy of The Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. Page 492: J. Bjerknes and H. Solberg, “Life Cycle of Cyclones and the Polar Front Theory of Atmospheric Circulation,” Geofysiske Publikasjoner 3, no. 1 (1922): 1–18. Page 500: Bergens Tidende, Saturday 24 June 1926.
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I
PREPARING FOR THE JOURNEY AHEAD
Facts, Theories and Lives
The expression of lives in science
Lives have been spent in the search for new facts. And when these new facts have been found, lives have been dedicated to the work of producing their theory. Is it not most unfortunate, then, that so often facts and theories are learned, are used and are taught without being brought into any connection with the lives of those who have been the most responsible for bringing them forth? The Weather’s Face proceeds from the belief that losing view of the human lives behind facts and theories in science is to lose far too much. It is an attempt to make clear just how great a loss this may be, and to show one result of taking facts and theories in science and trying to make their connection with lives visible again. This attempt draws on, and is sustained by, an outstanding example of the winning of new facts in science and the subsequent striving to produce a suitable theory for them, namely the meteorological innovations of the Norwegian physicist Vilhelm Bjerknes and his Bergen school of meteorology. This example is not as widely known as perhaps it deserves to be, but the natural phenomena investigated by Bjerknes and the school of meteorology, that grew around him in Bergen, are familiar to everyone through the apparently capricious sequence of winds, rain, clouds and fog, and their absence, and everything else that we call “the weather.” To Bjerknes and the Bergen school of meteorology we owe the achievement of discerning and bringing forth for scientific scrutiny and discussion those features of special meteorological interest called “atmospheric fronts” together with all that new order they carried into meteorology – an order which has lasted from the 1920s to the present day. How did the lives of Vilhelm Bjerknes and the other members of the Bergen school lead them to search and research the atmosphere in their own very special way? How did their lives make them aware of particular points of interest in the atmosphere that at first only they found interesting? How did their lives bring them to see features, events and actions in the skies and 15
The Weather's Face
in the clouds that until they saw them had never been seen at all? And how did their lives make them notice and take heed of particular goings on and patterns of arrangements within the atmosphere as being quite new, but yet most dependable signs of the weather to come? These are the very kind of questions that may let us become more alive to the course of human lives in the understanding of how new facts enter a science, for what Vilhelm Bjerknes and his Bergen school noticed and heeded in the course of their lives, became with the passage of time the leading facts and the leading theory of meteorological science. Although Bjerknes and his young collaborators in Bergen started what now can be regarded as the most dramatic surge of new methods and ideas in the history of meteorology, it is noteworthy that when they started their pioneering work in Bergen just before the end of the 1914–1918 war, they were not meteorologists in the proper sense of the word as then understood. It took several years for the new sorts of features, things and actions in the atmosphere that the Bergen school had brought into view, to become widely acknowledged as something more than the collective views and opinions of a few individuals located in a middle-sized seaport on the western Norwegian coast, about what was, after all, one of nature’s most puzzling, and for science most unruly, domains. Early reactions to the Bergen school’s findings were most varied. Some of the established figures in meteorology tried to minimise the significance of the new ideas as being merely the sketches and suggestions of a small group of fringe scientists who lacked proper footing in meteorology. Some leading meteorologists were directly and openly hostile to what they regarded as tendencies arising from the Bergen approach, that seemed threatening to their own influence and authority. But nevertheless small islands of acceptance of the Bergen school views quickly formed. These islands grew larger and larger until the new findings were no longer regarded as the curious opinions of a marginal fringe group, but as fact. Hence a most engaging question: What is involved in such a transformation?
Expressing lives in the expressions of science Their lives guided the way the members of the Bergen school looked upon, viewed carefully and, in a variety of different ways, visualised the behaviour of the atmosphere, but their lives guided also the way they severally and collectively expressed in fresh terms, and in fresh turns of phrase, what they saw and tried to show. Once these lives are brought back into clearer view, then all the characteristic wordings and visual imagery belonging to 16
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Preparing for the Journey Ahead
the meteorology of the Bergen school, may appear to fit in with those lives in ways that otherwise would remain largely unseen. To notice how the fresh forms of expression arising within the Bergen school actually carry the personal impress of its recognisable personalities, and to see how this impress shaped their science at its living core, is to be awakened to fresh and really vital sources of meanings – meanings which in this case belong to family life, local loyalties, personal aims, farming and cultivating, broad but perhaps also short-lived public concerns, and to so much else that at first sight might appear to have no connection at all with the science of meteorology. It is among these fresh and vital, and often quite surprising, sources of meanings that we can expect to form an awareness of how those people, who were primarily responsible for bringing forth the facts and theory of Bergen school meteorology, actually were responsible for them. Words such as family, life, vitality, birth, death, conflict and struggle all entered the language of the Bergen school’s meteorology as words that put them on the alert for catching what, through their research, this team of mainly young scientists came to see as essential features and aspects of the atmosphere and its patterns of behaviour. Their inspiring leader, Vilhelm Bjerknes, had such an unusually strong sense of the bonds of family linking together its generations that he regarded his life work in science as a family obligation. His own writing and talk was vital, vivid and fully alive, and so the more readily enlivening for others whenever they read or listened to him speak, as he tried to catch and discuss the dynamic character of nature. For it was the motion of nature, and its changes, that he strongly believed was the primary condition for our being interested in exploring it. And wording the new ideas, as the Bergen school did, right at the end of the Great War of 1914–1918 and from then on, the time’s most public imagery of conflict, battle, struggle and tense drama at the crucially important military front, gave the very name and image, and it gave, too, the charge of alerting tension in the meaning of front. This formed a parallel that is plain for all to see and feel between the military conflicts of that war and their new vision. Vilhelm Bjerknes shone in the art of using apt metaphor, and his naturalness of expression richly evokes the man and his life. The freshness of the innovations of Vilhelm Bjerknes and his Bergen school of meteorology was matched and connected with a similar freshness in how those innovations were first expressed, and with an engaging vitality that was one of the leading features of the quickly rising meteorology that came under intense and most purposeful cultivation in Bergen, all under the guidance and watchful attention of Vilhelm Bjerknes. 17
The Weather's Face
Expressions of science undergo change over time
But as the reports of the new findings in Bergen spread far from the first locality in which they had taken form, and as they came to be spread not only by reports at first hand, but also by reports at second and third hand, and through paraphrases and through paraphrases of paraphrases, reaching ever further away from Bergen, the rather individual styles of expression at first used only in Bergen, gave way to forms that carried less and less of the original impress of their origins in personalities and place. The original characteristic modes of expression in all their freshness, and so with their fuller life-expressing effect, came to be left behind. Through this process the early accounts held to give the new meteorology, more and more came to be stripped of their original bloom, or the poetics, of their freshly made figurative expression and imagery. This allowed the Bergen school’s accounts to travel more easily and to circulate in the channels made by and for scientific reporting, criticism and discussion, beyond any particular locality, and far beyond the limits naturally given by the reach of the personal and local allusions of the original metaphors and turns of words that were a feature of the first Bergen accounts. In this way the statements representing what the Bergen school had brought into view, came to take on a conceptual tidiness and degree of mutual fit of the kind that theories are meant to ensure. At this stage their status of being facts was more readily acknowledged, and their mutual fit into a coherent and consistent ensemble, or complex, was at the same time a mutual strengthening of their status as findings of fact. Insofar as this tendency was a tendency to pass from an originally richly metaphoric, and in other ways creatively imaginative wording, to wording in which this poetical bloom had been stripped away, it was a tendency that perhaps clarifies one way in which individual lives and their styles of expression may come to be lost to view in science. It points to possible ways of trying to undo the loss. Clearly, if the life sources for meanings of words and expressions are better seen in the freshest accounts still bearing that bloom of their original poetics, then, if we are to restore our sense of these life sources, it is to the freshest accounts that we should return. To do that is a leading purpose of this account. What remained as a result of this process of transformation, was a form of knowledge that science has made familiar to us – a form shaped mainly by argument and by teaching purposes – a form of knowledge that is theorylike in character and capable of being presented more or less anywhere, more or less tidily and in standardised form, more or less coherently, and more or less consistent in its freedom from contradictions. The demand for a wellstructured exposition of Bergen school meteorology, perhaps of sufficient 18
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Preparing for the Journey Ahead
merit to serve as a standard for other expositions of it to follow, was linked with the demands for coherence and consistency. As these demands increasingly came to be fulfilled, the logic of the findings became more apparent and important, while the human story revealed in the way the findings were first expressed, began to fade out of sight and dwindle away. Most of the metaphors and images which earlier had been so evidently metaphors, so characteristic of the fresh Bergen school accounts and so expressive of their authors’ lives, were left out or made less evident in favour of terser, more manageable, more standard and in other ways changed forms of expression, ultimately with the drive towards the thoroughly abstract forms that could ease their mathematical treatment. Through changes like these, the human lives that have entered into the making of scientific knowledge may all too easily become lost to awareness and view. The processes accompanying the transformations which concede the status of fact on opinions and views, and which promote the rise of secured theory, are processes that seem to depend for their efficiency on achieving a loss of the very kind that The Weather’s Face is meant to remedy.
The forms of writing resulting from widespread dispersion in science
From such transformations the outcome is a form of knowledge possessing a structural feature that is strongly associated with theory and science – a form which eases the making of secure and surveyable connections within and between scientific texts. But as these kinds of connections within texts and in their logic with other texts grow stronger through such a process, other kinds of connections become obscured or hidden. Connections holding within and between human lives, which could be shown in a human story of new growth in knowledge gained through life and work in science, become less looked for and less noticed. An example taken from the life of Vilhelm Bjerknes shows the kind of connections that may be seen through a human story of new growth in knowledge, but which, without the story, would remain out of sight even with the keenest logical insight.
A First Glimpse of Bjerknes’s Science
Vilhelm Bjerknes was deeply affected by the thought that his father, the mathematician-physicist Carl Anton Bjerknes, did not make the headway in his work that he deserved to make, and that he did not get from his fellow 19
The Weather's Face
Norwegian scientists a fitting appreciation of the qualities and strengths of what he brought to his work in science, work to which he was thoroughly devoted. Vilhelm believed and maintained that unfavourable circumstances of his father’s life were largely to blame. From the despair and the sense of injustice that his father’s fate engendered, Vilhelm Bjerknes shaped his plans for his own life work in science, plans which he occasionally discussed with his fellow countryman and friend, the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen.
Explaining Dead Water In 1896 Nansen returned from an arctic voyage of exploration that had gripped the public imagination both at home in Norway and abroad. He came home after having experienced a mysterious problem at sea that severely challenged him. He asked his friend Vilhelm Bjerknes for help. The problem was an old mystery among seafarers in northerly coastal regions and went under the name “dead water” [dødvandet]. Nansen had found that at one point in the voyage his vessel Fram was unable to make any proper headway, even with full engine power. He had encountered the dreaded dead water – water that seemed to tease unfortunate skippers by gripping them fast and hindering their vessels from getting ahead. In Farthest North, his account of that expedition, Nansen wrote of that encounter with this baffling phenomenon. It was on 30 August 1893: After passing a great number of new islands, we got into open water off Taimur Island, and steamed in still weather through the sound to the north-east. At five in the afternoon I saw from the crow’s nest thick ice ahead, which blocked further progress. It stretched from Taimur Island right across to the islands south of it. On the ice bearded seals (Phoca barbata) were to be seen in all directions, and we saw one walrus. We approached the ice to make fast to it, but the Fram had got into a deadwater, and made hardly any way, in spite of the engine going full pressure. It was such slow work that I thought I would row ahead to shoot seal. In the meantime the Fram advanced slowly to the edge of the ice with her machinery still going at full speed.1 [2 September] We steamed south in the evening, but still followed by the deadwater. According to Nordenskiöld’s map, it was only about 20 miles to Taimur Strait, but we were the whole night doing this distance. Our speed was reduced to 1 Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship “Fram” 1893–96, and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johansen, vol. 1 (London: George Newnes, 1898), 131.
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about a fifth part of what it would otherwise have been. At 6 a.m. (3 September) we got in among some thin ice that scraped the dead-water off us. The change was noticeable at once. As the Fram cut into the ice crust she gave a sort of spring forward, and, after this, went on at her ordinary speed; and henceforth we had very little more trouble with dead-water.2
A scientific solution may show more than its result Within days of being given the problem, Bjerknes and one of his research assistants, Walfrid Ekman, could give Nansen the broad lines of its solution. The impeding effect of dead water was a physical phenomenon found where one layer of water overlays another layer such that at the boundary between the two layers, completely invisible to the observer at the surface, waves, in some conditions relatively hefty, were easily formed by even a small forward movement of a vessel. The spring thaw may result in just such an overlay when fresh water overlays the denser seawater of a narrow fjord. Bjerknes’s first public presentation of what he and his assistant had discovered about the phenomenon, opened with lines which reveal just the kind of connection between a life and science that I am concerned with here, in this particular example the connection between a sea phenomenon and the apparent fate of his father in not making expected progress in his research: The word “dead water” belongs to the language of sailors in all the three Scandinavian countries. In Norwegian it has entered also into ordinary educated speech, where especially the expression “to be in dead water” is common, and it is used about any person or any matter not making the progress that ought to be expected. But while everyone knows the derived meaning of the term, there are only a few, even in Norway, who have seen the phenomenon that the term originally signifies.3
Earlier, in his first letter on the subject to Nansen, Bjerknes had expressed himself in a way which even more directly gives the clue to his parallel interest in the question: The boundary between two layers of water of different density is very susceptible to the formation of waves. Even small causes can produce waves of great dimensions. 2 Ibid., 135. 3 Vilhelm Bjerknes, “Om dødvandsforeteelsen [On the phenomenon of dead water]” (Lecture manuscript, 1901), Ms. fol. 3861: 15:9, Nasjonalbiblioteket (hereinafter NB).
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These waves have a very slow rate of propagation compared with the ordinary waves at the surface. Such a wave activity below can be very pronounced without there being any sign of it noticed at the surface. An observer who sees only the surface will therefore have little or no idea about what takes place below.4
Allegory connecting physics and human life The connection between Vilhelm Bjerknes’s concern about his father’s lack of progress in his research work at certain times, and this investigation into dead water now becomes plainer to see. The one account, of either dead water or his father’s difficulties, becomes an allegory, or parallel tale, of the other. His father’s headway had been hindered by circumstances that were not immediately obvious to an observer, just as in the case of a ship being caught in dead water and held back by quite pronounced, yet unseen conditions in the form of hefty retarding waves below. In the case of dead water, Bjerknes and Ekman developed, through their scientific investigations, the means of revealing what before had been hidden. In the other case – his father’s apparent difficulties in making expected headway in his mathematical-physical research – Bjerknes wrote a full-scale biographical study in which he had a corresponding intention, namely, to reveal the previously hidden, but definitely hindering circumstances which at times had held back his father from advancing in his work. In the Foreword to that biographical study, Bjerknes used words that directly show this intention: It will be seen that the book deals less with scientific results that have been won than with what it has cost to win them. It sheds light on the enormous waste of powers that our social order operates under. Social conditions interacting with the twists and turns of fate make such a waste of powers unavoidable. It is the task of cultural politics to reduce this waste, and an essential condition that this may be done will always be that those who govern are not wholly unfamiliar with the actual nature of scientific work, and the conditions which lead to victory or defeat.5
There is human drama, then, in Bjerknes’s capacity for bringing into view previously hidden causes at work, when expected headway is not made on account of powers going to waste. That human drama connects his life 4 V. Bjerknes to Nansen, 31 October 1898, Ms. fol. 1924, NB. 5 Vilhelm Bjerknes, C.A. Bjerknes: hans liv og arbeide: træk av norsk kulturhistorie i det nittende aarhundrede (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1925), Foreword.
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with his investigation of physical nature in a most engaging way. That is the drama of the life story that lies ahead.
Attending to the full value of the words of scientists It is when we appeal to the full value of words that the bonds between life and the work of a life in science reveal themselves. When those bonds are seen, a life being lived may the more readily be seen in the work and the words of a scientist. But that requires a particular way of listening and reading, and a stance that is more likely to be prompted by poetry and literary art more generally than by science. Fortunately for our exploration here, Vilhelm Bjerknes had a capacity for writing with an extraordinary mastery of the expressive possibilities within language, revealing how full was his sense of the value that he wished to give to his words, both for the kinds of effects which belong to the poetic, or the more obviously creative opportunities within the use of language, and to those which belong to rhetoric, so involving a tact and sensitivity towards those whom he wished successfully to address and perhaps persuade. A clear sign of this mastery is in the way he succeeded so often in showing with his words while at the same time saying what he had in mind to express. The invitations are many in the case of Bjerknes’s writings and spoken addresses for seeing them under the aspect of literary art, as well as being finely tuned for his purpose of making persuasive appeals. His father, Carl Anton, also believed that “the sense of beauty, art, must be at work not less in science, and not least in mathematics, than in poetry”.6 In exploring intently what father and son richly meant by their words in their manner of using them, we shall be exploring matters likely to run deep.
Science as a leading cultural feature of modern life Vilhelm Bjerknes campaigned vigorously his entire life for the idea that we had entered the Age of Research, the age in which science had become the leading part of culture. He viewed his own work in science in the light of his strongly felt sense of responsibility to make sure that through his work others, especially his fellow Norwegians, might be guided to see the validity of this large, cultural claim for science. I hope to show in this story of 6 Olaf Devik, “Tale ved festmøtet i Universitetets aula 14. mars 1962 i anledning av 100-årsdagen for professor Vilhelm Bjerknes’ fødsel,” Samtiden, 1962, 260.
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Bjerknes that science has its touchstones in the way that the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold spoke of art having them, and that the creative language and example of scientific exploration, that eventually amounted to the polar front meteorology of Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Bergen school, is one of them. In this meteorology we find life expressed with great meaning, and with most evident great integrity. Our encounter with it may be an encouragement to look for validity in lives as well as formal validity in arguments. Being without any close acquaintance with the technical and theoretical aspects of meteorological science, should be no hindrance to following the story that I tell here in The Weather’s Face. In the Foreword to his biography of his father, Bjerknes gave this assurance: “There is a certain difficulty in portraying for the general public a scientist’s work. This tends to be true most of all when it concerns a mathematician. On this point, however, I hope that it will be found that we have an exception here. The ideas which sustained C.A. Bjerknes’s life work were of the kind that may be understood by anyone, without specialist knowledge.” It is likewise here, for the ideas and goals which sustained the meteorological investigations of Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Bergen school of meteorology, were of the kind that may be understood by anyone, without first having to possess specialist meteorological knowledge. To whom is The Weather’s Face addressed then? Bjerknes once declared that the daily forecasts and warnings that he and his folk issued from their forecasting service in Bergen, were meant only to be a means of help to selfhelp for those who had a real and serious interest in the weather. Bjerknes and his Bergen school worked with all their abilities at full stretch so as to catch and track the subtleties of the behaviour of the atmosphere. They were pledged to do so. They hoped, in turn, that others would find something of value in their carefully wrought expressions of what they had seen, and of what, in the imminent weather developments, they could expect to see develop from it. The Weather’s Face is a response to the many subtleties of science, with its leading features and its play of human forces, as the human story of Vilhelm Bjerknes and his Bergen school of meteorology lets them appear, or rather brings them into view. It is offered here as a means of help to self-help, and above all as a story to give encouragement and pleasure, as well as some engaging sense or experience of Bjerknes’s inspiring presence, to all those who wish to look for and see more closely into the subtle ways by which human lives and liveliness enter into the achieving of the facts and the theories that are expected from science. 24
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Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862–1951) – A Preliminary Sketch The effectiveness of nuance
Vilhelm Bjerknes combined a rare sensitivity of perception with rare powers of expression. Among people and with words he delighted in the remarkable expressive power of slight or delicate shadings, nuances and features when they are of the right promising kind. That helps to explain the attraction the atmosphere held for him. It helps to explain his sensitive, yet strong way with words. And it must also go a long way towards clarifying the great appeal it obviously had for him when he said that he and his little research group in Bergen tried to see the weather’s face. One of his most precious memories of childhood was of the evenings at home when the custom was that his father read aloud to the rest of the family: If I shall express my judgement, I have never heard anyone better at reading aloud. There was no trace of theatre or declamation. Everything was expressed in a straightforward manner and naturally, but with an almost imperceptible nuancing which made everything come to life … Without doubt his talent for reading aloud depended first and foremost on that intensity with which he lived into what he read. … We waited excitedly to see what the evening would bring. It was our substitute for evenings at the theatre, a luxury that never arose in our family.7
It was just this sense of the promising power of delicate and even almost imperceptible nuancing, coming from and giving vitality, that so firmly marked all of Bjerknes’s life work. It shows how scarcity of available means may encourage thrifty use of the means that do become available, so as then to be all the readier to appreciate the significance of certain telling features and their changes, even when of the slightest kind. Bjerknes knew this well. It gives the story of his life.
Scientific research as the cultivation of well-selected nuances Bjerknes looked upon science as that part of culture that had to nurture and enhance a sense for those very fine distinctions and slight changes in nature that at first might seem of only small interest, but with the right understanding then appear to be of vital importance. Carefully dropping two wooden croquet balls into a tub of water to see if they bobbed towards or away from 7
Bjerknes, C.A. Bjerknes: hans liv og arbeide, 225.
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each other, was part of his boyhood apprenticeship to science, as he helped his father use methods as simple as this to test new ideas about the fundamental nature of physical reality. Science, as it took shape first through the work he shared with his father and afterwards through his own, was the deliberate, guided cultivation of an alert readiness to sense significance in subtle natural happenings, either naturally occurring or contrived in experiment, then to be followed by the apt and economical revealing to others of what, with this sense, it had become possible for him to see.
Continuity in nature and its representations But for all his personal ways that amounted to a distinct style in his work, as in his life, there was a great philosophical question about nature that brought Bjerknes’s work into connection with one of the most general, and historically one of the most deeply set, controversies of science: Is nature fundamentally one continuous whole, or not? Bjerknes’s answer was firm, and it was an answer that both he and his father gave with complete conviction: nature is fundamentally continuous, and if it seems to us that it is not so, then we would be well advised to think again and look again. Throughout the whole of his life he developed practices and skills that could be called “continuity-revealing” methods. Whether in the form of diagrams, pictures, or charts, whether of electrical or magnetic fields, or of motion in the sea or the atmosphere, in arguments and above all in the form of sensitively wrought stories, for him they were all pre-eminently devices for showing revealed continuities in nature, often as surprising alternatives to methods that were incapable of showing continuity even where it obviously existed. By attending to the continuities of nature, and by responding with his skills as a scientist fully deployed to investigate apparent breaks in nature, Bjerknes believed that eventually he would be the more likely to penetrate deep enough to apprehend what is ultimately its beautifully simple harmony.
Written works of science as “continuity revealers” Among all the continuity-revealing devices he valued, one kind had a special place for Bjerknes – the kind that seems present in the making of all sciences – and that was the fully developed systematic treatise. To produce one was to produce a piece of writing of a certain character and possessing certain features that, when successfully accomplished, may drive thoughts together and minds together into harmonious agreement – a condition 26
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promising accord and harmony in the kind of shared activities that call for being inspired by compatible, even if various, thoughts. Using the device of the systematic treatise, Bjerknes set himself to bring meteorologists more fully into this condition of accord and harmony, so that the effort and work of individual meteorologists, then, would be more capable of being integrated with the work of others in meteorological science.
Handicraft skills: a crucial part of Bjerknes’s aptitude for science Bjerknes approached his studies of nature not only with the images, thoughts and attitudes commonly associated with science, but also with those of the arts and the crafts. As a Norwegian who had a strong sense of what it meant to be one, he took pleasure and pride in the traditional forms of craftsmanship and practical ingenuity that belonged to rural life in Norway. And he approached his task with a strong sense of the inheritance of the special qualities and talents that close-knit families nurture and pass on, then to be further nurtured and passed on again, always to be improved by one generation after the other. He recounted that on the farms of his forefathers before the time of factories, winter had been the time for getting on with practical handicrafts of various kinds. That was the time for making things, such as furniture and household utensils and implements needed for the farm home, traditionally made out of leather, metal and wood. Life in the Norwegian countryside, often in small and rather isolated communities, or on farms quite distant from others, had encouraged self-sufficiency. Building and keeping in good repair one’s own house and making one’s own furniture, utensils and tools were part of the regular pattern of this way of living. Referring to those former times, Bjerknes made a point of mentioning that according to tradition, practical dexterity and skilfulness quite generally had been quite the common thing in the line of the Bjerknes family. But he did this partly to point out that his father’s talents were of a different kind: “Carl Anton did not have quite such a powerful memory and easy dexterity as his brother. But he had a rich imagination and an ability for seeing surprising or unexpected combinations between matters usually considered apart. Assimilation, in his case, came through work. What he understood and retained was above all the interconnectedness and the nuances of thought belonging to strictly built logical systems.” 8 8
Ibid., 15.
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Logically well-arranged systems
Through being closely bonded with his father since childhood, Vilhelm Bjerknes came to be inspired by what such logically well-constructed systems could offer and show. What they could offer and show was something crucial to the purpose that he later set himself to do for meteorology. He described the striking effect when his father, responding to a nuance of thought, made what at first seemed only a small change of procedure within his mathematical treatment of a previously most awkward and unyielding system of theorems, concerning the mechanics of fluids: “All that these formulas had contained in the way of twisted and misleading results then, by that means, ordered themselves into the most beautiful harmony. It was a whole new world that had opened itself up.” 9 The promise held in the logic of tight or strictly formal systems, then, contained the possibility of a new world appearing to open up. Put in this way, it seemed that if his father’s aptitude was an alternative to the practical aptitude for “making things,” then it was an attractive alternative. But besides catching the force of the promise of theorems and theory, Vilhelm Bjerknes, even as a schoolboy, also designed and constructed experimental apparatus willingly and skilfully, conscious of being glad to continue also the practical side of the family traditions. A sheath knife was one of his proudest possessions when he was a boy. Significantly for us here, it was not just the skills that later served him so very well in his own scientific work – it was also the imagery associated with constructing practical devices, and the attitude of being ready, when necessary, to be self-sufficient with ingenious improvisations that helped him to make headway in his work. If one may speak of one aptitude as the theoretical and the other the practical, Vilhelm Bjerknes combined the two in full measure and with a natural balance. This was a combination that the developments leading to the formation of the Bergen school of meteorology, as well as the characteristic work that was done in it, could hardly have been without.
The distinctive human qualities of Vilhelm Bjerknes However, the really essential contribution that Bjerknes made to the development of the Bergen school of meteorology came from his quite distinctive human qualities. To an exceptional degree he was responsive to the presence of those around him. Whether working together with them, addressing 9
28
Ibid., 148.
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fellow scientists or wider audiences, or in listening to others, he was as abundantly present for them, as they were to him. This was felt by them, and it was gratifying for them to notice it. Like his father whose exceptional talent for reading aloud for others came from “that intensity with which he lived into what he read,” Vilhelm brought that same intensity for living into the very lives, it seemed, of those he addressed, through sympathetic attunement with them and their interests and concerns. With this he possessed a quite remarkable dexterity of address. What he said in his talk and what he wrote, seem to have been pitched with an uncanny accuracy in exactly the most fitting way for the occasion. It is as if through his own personal and exquisite use of words, his words became actually freshened up to become just right for the immediate occasion. Using words in that way so that they could take the effect of the force of his thought and awareness of his particular purpose, among and for others, his words took on new powers as he chose them and formed them together into phrases and larger patterns of his own making for the immediate occasion. To a most unusual degree the words he used, in this way, became his words. This is what made him a strong maker with words – verily a poet – in his prose. What might at first seem surprising or even paradoxical, is that in making them to such an unusual degree his own words, others found them natural and easy to follow. His way with words was closely bound up with his attentive way with people, for his subtle feeling for words and their variable powers was heightened by that alert awareness of his concerning whom he addressed and why he did so. He spoke of newly coined words as resembling orphans without the benefit of family relations to support them. For any new words that he coined in his poetic freedoms in writing and speaking, especially when it was about his latest work, he was at the ready to provide them with a home and new family relations among other words, already made safe by him or by others, to support them in their infancy. This kind of tie-up between words and the people he meant them for, gave vitality – to be attended to in a trusting mood of safety or security – to what he said or wrote, just as he had observed that his father could bring to life to what he used to read aloud to the family because of how intensely he lived into what he read. This disposition of Vilhelm Bjerknes, and his capacity for showing it so evidently in his arts of expression, is at the very heart of how he was able to become such an inspiring presence for those who, during his lectures for them, as well among them in their shared work of scientific research, looked to him for leadership. Through this capacity and this disposition, he gained their gratitude, trust and loyalty. They all could be confident that Bjerknes 29
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would be naturally at the ready always to reach out to them with a sensitive awareness of the individuality and special strengths and limitations of each one of them, always at the ready to adjust what he said and did for them and among them in the light of all this awareness. In Vilhelm Bjerknes’s whole manner of being there is a characteristic combination of two tendencies, the one towards humbleness that seemed quite natural for him, the other towards self-assurance and having a proud bearing, which to those who knew him seemed equally natural for him. How this same combination marked the character of another great scientist, Michael Faraday, has been portrayed by his friend, colleague and biographer John Tyndall. Telling of how in a conversation with him Faraday had balanced together those two apparently contrary tendencies, Tyndall recalled: I once took the liberty of censuring the conclusion of a letter of his to the Dean of St. Paul’s. He subscribed himself “humbly yours,” and I objected to the adverb. “Well, but, Tyndall,” he said, “I am humble; and still it would be a great mistake to think that I am not also proud.” This duality ran through his character. A democrat in his defiance of all authority which unfairly limited his freedom of thought, and still ready to stoop in reverence to all that was really worthy of reverence, in the customs of the world or the characters of men.10
Here perfectly expressed is precisely that duality which ran through the whole character of Vilhelm Bjerknes.
Combining Literary Art and Science
The demanding art of composing scientific writings When Bjerknes approached the task of preparing the instrument by which he hoped to reform meteorology, a great treatise, he brought to bear on his designs for it an unusual and personal range of interests and forms of judgement. It had to reveal continuity, in his view the fundamental property of physical reality. It had to show clearly, and certainly not hide, the practical steps, solutions and methods of procedure of the research that had led up to it. It had to display a harmony and form of composition that, with surveyable connections between all its parts, could helpfully show its over-all coherence. It had to speak out so as to reach and be willingly heard by those he wished 10
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John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1868), 39.
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to be moved or changed by it. It had to be well-constructed according to the stringent demands of firmly built logical systems, so as to be serviceable when the forces of logical pressure in strict argumentation were called for. And at one and the same time it had to be compendious enough to deal with the large problem he had chosen, yet manageable in the form of the mainly linear exposition that a treatise, being given in the form of a written work, is expected to follow. These were many demands to be satisfied all at once, and Bjerknes was most conscious of them all. When reading Bjerknes, it becomes a pleasure to become aware of just how evidently he managed simultaneously to satisfy these demands, so fully and without apparent strain. Part of the unusual pleasure when reading Bjerknes is this: one may become more aware of desiderata of the kind of effective writing that enters into the making of science, because his writing so manifestly displays their fulfilment. Fortunately for us he expressed some of the leading considerations that he believed had to enter into that literary art of composing well a written scientific work. The occasion that prompted him to express himself so directly on this theme, was in 1926 when one of his scientific assistants submitted to him a draft of a dissertation that in some respects Bjerknes had found disappointing. Bjerknes despaired of the difficulty of stating explicitly what good, effective writing of that kind depended upon. But he felt that he had to make the attempt and replied with this advice concerning that literary art of writing a work such as a dissertation: It is always an ungratifying work, the first time. No one is born with the ability to write a work such that it is well-suited to be read by others. And what it all depends on is often so indefinable that it is hopeless to get anywhere with it by means of written discussion. But troublesome as it will be, I shall at least have a try. As a start, even I, who ought to know the subject quite well beforehand, find it difficult to get my bearings in the paper. Hesselberg, who has read it, says the same. To what can that be due? It is difficult to say. But an external device that in any case would be a great help, is to introduce clear sections with headings. Then one is always able to turn back the pages and try to see: what am I reading about now? A true master of the art of writing, who always has the reader in his power, and is always able to make his words suit so that he makes the reader’s thoughts go to where he wishes them to go, is always much less dependent on formal divisions and headings. But the way to acquire this kind of mastery in presentation is by going through hard work in making divisions and systematising, and through experience of where he should give the reader pointers through the text, and what he may leave to the reader to find out for himself.
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In the present case I therefore believe that it would not be of much use to discuss details before the dissertation appears in this new form, clear and easily surveyed in its sections, and with the necessary informative headings. Then one sees if the dissertation as a whole is well “composed,” to take an expression from the world of art, and one can see if every section in itself is what it should be, where everything that has to be said is said in the simplest and clearest way – use the time while you are in Paris to study the art of composition that the French have.11
These observations, in this expression of them by a true master of the very art which here he was attempting to impart, do give pause for thought. Here we see at once that Bjerknes, for whom the depiction of fluid motion by drawing streamlines to show lines of flow was so essential in the portrayal of the atmosphere’s movements that he tried with his assistants to make, saw success in the art of writing as the creation of aptly connected apt words in composition in which currents of meaning – what their writer drives at – could flow unimpeded by hindrance that the writer could have prevented. Many issues of great importance are involved here in this extract from Bjerknes’s letter to his assistant – more than can be treated fairly and quickly, and all at once. But they shall enter often and naturally into the whole story as it develops ahead, as some of its essential and alerting themes. But there is one point that calls out to be made straightaway, and it concerns the strong similarity between Bjerknes’s views on the character of scientific writing when well composed, and his views on the composition of nature. Both of them show continuity. Both do without separate divisions. When the writing about nature is right, the one or the other of them – the well-composed writing or nature – reflects the continuity shown by form of composition of the other. As Bjerknes put it, the true master of the art of literary composition has once used divisions as steps on the way to his mastery of that art. But in the degree to which he has actually achieved this mastery, he no longer has to use them. In science, Bjerknes believed, it is likewise: the steps towards apprehending the continuity, the unity, the harmony of nature, are through first dividing it into manageable parts, thereafter progressively to win release from the necessity of the kind of initial aid that such temporary division into parts provides. The master scientist, like the master of literary art, manages progressively to overcome such division and discontinuity.
11
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V. Bjerknes to H. Rebbestad, 13 May 1926, Brevsamling 469B, NB.
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But was not the driving innovation of the Bergen school of meteorology the discernment of atmospheric fronts? Are not fronts to be understood as atmospheric discontinuities, say as between air masses that are cold and dry and those that are warmer and moister? On the one hand Bjerknes highly prized the discovery of the harmony and continuity of nature as the highest kind of discovery in science, yet the new meteorology involving warm fronts, cold fronts and other kinds of fronts that first took form under his leadership in the research work of the members of the Bergen school, was directed towards atmospheric discontinuities. Do we not have a mismatch in all this that amounts to paradox?
The use of discontinuities for a seeker of continuity The resolution of this apparent paradox is here: Bjerknes believed that the greatest scientific significance of fronts was that they gave pause for thought, specifically inviting a strategic redirecting of perceptive vigilance and thoughtful scrutiny of the atmosphere, so that in due course an even more fundamental understanding of the atmosphere – without necessarily focusing on fronts – might the better be reached. If the primary goal was to discover continuity in nature, then what better way could there be to show it than by showing it with the revised forms of understanding that were so prompted, as prevailing through even the most apparent discontinuities? If the fronts of the atmosphere seemed to be the regions of weakest continuity – indeed they were regions of greatest discontinuity – then discovering through research how to make them fathomable as strongly continuous in essential features after all, would give the greatest result. Bjerknes aimed to show the power of physics to make clear the essential continuity persisting right through even fronts, by bringing into service for that task the branch of physics on which he relied most, namely mechanics. This is exactly the same as in the case where it would be wise to concentrate one’s attention on strengthening the weakest links of a chain if one sets out to strengthen the chain. Part of his scientific work, then, was to produce calls for special attention which could direct effort strategically to just those features or aspects of nature that could offer the investigator the most handsome, and the most promising, yield of new and ever more deeply founded forms of understanding. The atmospheric fronts of the Bergen school were just such things. They were calls for special attention and intense scrutiny with the most exacting application of all the resources available within mechanics. The assistant, H. Rebbestad, to whom Bjerknes addressed his remarks about the 33
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composition of a scientific treatise, was engaged in exactly that work under Bjerknes’s leadership, that was towards finding the solutions of the mathematical problems to which the fronts, in posing problems for the mechanics of fluid motion, helpfully pointed the direction and gave the spur. The young scientists who together with Bjerknes formed the Bergen school may have used their fronts as welcome new guides to trust as they looked for a more fundamental harmony in a domain – the atmosphere – that hitherto had given the very image of chaos. But they also used their fronts with earnestly maintained purposes as humans among humans, and as Norwegians and Scandinavians in the world of international affairs, to invigorate the science of meteorology – a science which previously they and others had thought had become lifeless, despondent and dull. By seeing the Bergen school’s fronts as spurs to heightened vigilance we see them not so much as things discovered, but as things that had very important uses, as things or features that gave promise of exciting and greater things to come in science. The Bergen school, always with Bjerknes at the forefront both as figurehead and vigorous campaigner, used the fronts to very great effect, and in ways more varied than could easily be imagined without knowing more of the story.
Two telling episodes Two scenes drawn from the story ahead – one from 1890, when he was 28 years old and aspiring to high achievement in science, the other from 1918, which was his first full year in Bergen – will bring forth what was utterly characteristic of Vilhelm Bjerknes in the full colour of his personality. In 1890 he was in Paris with a travel grant from his university, the University of Christiania, to widen his experience of science through directly experiencing the ways of scientists in their lectures and laboratories, and to absorb what he could from being in the living presence of some of the leading physicists and mathematicians of the day. His father, Carl Anton, had urged him to pay a visit to a paternal friend, the eminent French mathematician Charles Hermite. All three – father, son and Charles Hermite – shared a reverential interest in the personality and the work of the great Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, who had died so tragically and so very young. After arriving in Paris Vilhelm at first hesitated about making this visit, not wishing, or perhaps really not daring, to risk disturbing the great mathematician Hermite in his work. But overcoming his reservations, he decided that the only proper thing to do was to pay him a visit and relay his father’s greetings as promised. That he did. 34
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Vilhelm wrote to his father to tell him about the kindly way in which Hermite had welcomed him. In his letter he reviewed more generally his experience of attending lectures in Paris, acknowledging in definitely positive terms those he thought were brilliant, and saying a few discrete words about those he found disappointing. Of Hermite, who had a congenital deformity of his legs and was now no longer young nor in full vigour, he said this, after first telling his father of the kindness and consideration with which the great mathematician had welcomed him: Also Hermite, surely, has his faults as a lecturer. For the first thing he can hardly talk, and for the next thing he can hardly write either. It is with the greatest difficulty that he stands up to go to write on the blackboard; he writes his formulas vertically downwards. Very often he avoids the problem by speaking them out into the air. All that makes it somewhat disjointed. But then he has other qualities that place him above most other lecturers I have heard. It is not just a spiritless [aandeløs] going through of details. Everywhere in all he does, he carefully draws attention to interconnections, to what is important and what is not, showing how the one idea leads to the other. And there is something else that is appealing about Hermite, and that is the warm and acknowledging words he uses every time he mentions another mathematician. Contorted and deformed as he is … he is beautiful when he sits there in front of us. An intelligence and a warmth comes over his face such that one does not forget it.12
Bjerknes was a young scientist of 28 years when he wrote this letter. Yet it shows so well the springs and bonds of human sympathy that were already so characteristic of him, especially when attentive, as he surely was then, to what enters into the formation of those features of a personality marked by such great devotion to science as Hermite so evidently was. The very qualities he observed in Hermite’s manner of communicating his ideas, were qualities that in due course Vilhelm Bjerknes’s own students experienced in his lectures for them. Olaf Devik, who later became one of Bjerknes’s most valuable co-workers, has described what it was that had inspired him and his fellow students of physics when Bjerknes returned from Stockholm to Kristiania [Oslo] in 1906. From Bjerknes they experienced lectures of a kind they had never experienced before: For us who at that time were students of the Natural Sciences, his lectures were wholly extraordinary and inspiring. Those who heard them were stimulated, they 12
V. Bjerknes to C.A. Bjerknes, 4 February 1891, Brevsamling 469C, NB.
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put their abilities at full stretch, and the problems he posed continued to occupy us when the lecturing was over. Vilhelm Bjerknes did not remove the difficulties, he let the material keep its relief, in an odd way. It was not a flowing stream; it was rather a chiselling out from a material. We who listened experienced the intense work his mind managed to do while he was forming his material, and we had the feeling that it was all being shaped there and then, but all the same, of course, it had been most painstakingly worked through beforehand.13
In this recognition and portrayal of an inspirited presentation which shows the interconnection of ideas, and the contours it gave of what is of high importance and what is of lower significance, just as when a physical relief map contours the high and the low ground of a geographical terrain, we are given several hints about logical connection in interplay with liveliness. Together they may succeed in dividing a whole terrain, domain or field of scientific understanding or investigation into areas or themes of high and low significance. Science taught in this way structures perceptiveness and critical vigilance of attention and observation, creating a texture of felt significance that shows in a dynamic way what might be left only coarsely treated and what, by contrast, calls for the most finely detailed treatment. Moreover, how the speaker or teacher is perceived and experienced is part of the perception of the significance of the interconnections between what is said and how the ideas enter into a flow. An example of this phenomenon is given by Jerome Bruner, philosopher of language and child psychologist. Bruner recalled his lessons with one of his schoolteachers in particular, a Miss Orcutt. His other teachers, he never forgot, were so off-puttingly and barrenly informative in their stance of being simply transmitters of facts – but not Miss Orcutt. She had, and showed well, a different stance. He told of what made her unique among his teachers: She made the statement in class: “It is a very puzzling thing, not that water turns to ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but that it should change from a liquid into a solid.” She then went on to give us an intuitive account of Brownian movement and of molecules, expressing a sense of wonder that matched, indeed bettered, the sense of wonder that I felt at that age (around ten) about everything I turned my mind to, including at the far reach such matters as light from extinguished stars still traveling toward us, though their sources had been snuffed out. In effect, she was inviting me to extend my world of wonder to encompass hers. It was not just that she was informing me. 13
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Olaf Devik, “Vilhelm Bjerknes,” Volund (1962): 21–29.
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She was, rather, negotiating the world of wonder and possibility. Molecules, solids, liquids, movement were not facts; they were to be used in pondering and imagining. Miss Orcutt was the rarity. … She was a human event, not a transmission device.14
Like Bruner’s Miss Orcutt, Vilhelm Bjerknes was no mere transmission device for delivering barrenly informative and inert facts. With his gift for attracting promising young recruits into his research teams, tactfully leading them so as to bring out their talents, and so to let them feel for themselves the full thrill of experiencing how their talents could come to fuller expression, then to usher them into the world of research and learning as fully-fledged, yet still young creative scientists – many or most of whom went on to become leading international figures in their chosen fields – he too, in all this and most decidedly, was “a human event.”
An experience of youthful exuberance in Bergen A fitting way to round off this preliminary sketch of Bjerknes is to read how one of his young recruits into his Bergen school of meteorology recalled the experience of meeting Bjerknes for the first time. What this young recruit related gives a full and vivid picture of what it was like to be there at that time of excitement and shared exuberance among the young scientists who made the Bergen school into what it became. Erik Björkdal was this young recruit, and here is how he recalled the day he arrived by train from Sweden to begin his scientific adventure in Bergen: In the beginning it was not an easy matter to recruit the necessary staff, and therefore, through his Swedish contacts, Prof. Bjerknes had invited some students from Uppsala and Stockholm to come to Bergen and take part in a course. Together with a fellow student I arrived there one summer day in 1919. It was our first trip abroad, and we were full of youthful expectation. The journey itself was a great experience. The Bergensbanen made an overwhelming impression on us, but when we arrived in Bergen there was a surprise of a different kind in store for us.15 At the station we were met by the Professor himself, who personally saw to our luggage and escorted us to the lodgings that he had rented for us. It was something quite new for us that a famous professor could pay such great attention to unknown students, but it was 14 Jerome Bruner, “The Language of Education,” Social Research 49, no. 4 (1982), 844. 15 “Bergensbanen” refers to the impressively engineered railway line that crosses the mountains between the west and the east of Norway and so connects Bergen with the capital.
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not enough even with that. Just a couple of days after our arrival, he took us on an inspection trip along the coast aboard the Armauer Hansen, so that from the start we got a living impression not only of Norwegian nature, but also of the work of forecasting out in the field. At the Forecasting Service in Allégaten 33 we soon began to thrive in the international circle of young and enthusiastic meteorology students. In the course there were Norwegian, Danish and Swedish participants. It was not long before we were set to do practical work on the weather charts. Every chart was a new problem that had to be solved, and according to ability, everyone contributed to the analysis. Every time it was possible to trick a new secret out of fronts and cyclones, there was jubilation. There was no talk of fixed office hours. Whenever there was an especially interesting occurrence, we could be sitting long into the night, discussing, yes, it happened once that an eager soul did not leave the house for a whole week. While the young ones took care of gathering the empirical material, Professor Bjerknes worked on his side with the theoretical foundations. At the tea-table in the mornings, everyone gathered together and exchanged the latest news, and plans were made both for forecasting’s theoretical and practical development. One day there could be a discussion of the dynamics of the frontal surfaces, the next day one became aware that Jan Mayen lay in splendid isolation up in the Norwegian Sea and awaited a meteorological station. Whenever it was necessary to sound the trumpet for our cause, to the public or to get funding from the authorities, the professor himself had to go into the line of fire. The youngsters forwarded their far more than modest wishes and demands: he had to make sure of arguing in a convincing manner. The foreign specialists took a rather sceptical line in the beginning. So that they might have the opportunity to form an opinion from a proper basis through seeing for themselves, some of the more prominent ones were invited to Bergen. It was a great experience for us youngsters to get together with capacities such as Shaw and Exner and discuss the problems with them. In youthful presumption we considered ourselves their equals, and should they not at once accept our statements, we thought it was only the worse for them. But Shaw met us with his whimsical and indulgent good humour and was extremely popular. Bergen was an ideal frame around this intellectual unfolding. It was not distracting with the temptations of a large city, but it provided us with trips up in the hills and mountains as well as visits to the theatre and concerts. Moreover, the town’s citizens looked with agreeable sympathy on the onward-rushing weather forecasting, and they opened their homes to the young scientists.16 16 Erik Björkdal, “Trekk av meteorologiens historie i Norge,” Norsk geografisk tidsskrift 9 (1943): 308–10.
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Vilhelm Bjerknes must have been gratified to read this on its publication in 1943, just when he wrote his own beautifully told story of how the Bergen school came into existence. To get young people like Erik Björkdal, who possessed a suitable combination of abilities together with a good sense of purpose and lively imagination, and get them to direct their abilities towards scientific work, was what mattered to Bjerknes perhaps more than anything else. In their presence he became for them an inspiring presence, a rich carrier of what science, in their hopes, might be. In that way Bjerknes brought science to life in unforgettable experiences. There was no secret about Bjerknes’s lifelong capacity to inspire, to get others to attend to what he had at heart, and to create the striking impression he made upon audiences – whether they be of leading scientists, of politicians, fishermen, townspeople of Bergen – and on people quite generally. His writing seemed to make him personally there for readers, just as his spoken words did for those who listened to him as he spoke. The English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman tried in 1852 to say what it is that lets some authors write surprisingly well. He set forth what he believed was an ailment that affected the work of the authors of the day, and suggested a remedy for it: Our writers write so well that there is little to choose between them. What they lack is that individuality, that earnestness, most personal yet most unconscious of self, which is the greatest charm of an author. The very form of the compositions of the day suggests to us their main deficiency. They are anonymous. So was it not in the literature of those nations which we consider the special standard of classical writing; so is it not with our own Classics. The Epic was sung by the voice of the living, present poet. The drama, in its very idea, is poetry in persons. Historians begin, “Herodotus, of Halicarnassus, publishes his researches”; or, “Thucydides, the Athenian, has composed an account of the war.” Pindar is all through his odes a speaker. Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero, throw their philosophical dissertations into the form of a dialogue. Orators and preachers are by their very profession known persons, and the personal is laid down by the Philosopher of antiquity17 as the source of their greatest persuasiveness.18
17 Aristotle. 18 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), 329.
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It was because Bjerknes had the freedom and courage to allow his individuality of expression full scope for the purpose at hand that his expression could find its personal form, colour and persuasiveness. His writings and utterances were not anonymous; they were Bjerknes personified. In 1924, when addressing physicists at California Institute of Technology, Bjerknes must have shown this very quality of individuality, that earnestness, that charm of personality, even in his series of lectures in theoretical physics. After the last of the lectures, the Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, who had invited Bjerknes to hold them, thanked Bjerknes in a fine, little speech. Millikan emphasised the point that never before in that institute had there been given lectures that so strongly bore the stamp of one man’s work. The wider story of Vilhelm Bjerknes, and the experiences that entered into the formation of his own distinctive manner of conducting research, may be known and told in many ways, and so it should be, rich as it is in those clear signs of the human lives that we are looking for, so as more purposefully to see those lives in activity in vigorous, fresh growing in science. But let now Vilhelm Bjerknes himself take us further for a time, in his authentic telling of his story, with its drama so tersely rendered as it is in: How the Bergen School Came into Existence.
The Story of the Bergen School as Told by Vilhelm Bjerknes How the Bergen school came into existence
When on the occasion of its 25-year Jubilee I write on the theme of how “the Bergen school” came into existence, I must ask to be pardoned for the fact that in the circumstances as they concern me, the result turns out to be something of a scientific autobiography.19 In the summer of 1918 I took the boldest step of my life by assuming the responsibility for starting the venture which the founders called the Western Forecasting Service [Vestlandske Værvarsling]. The step was connected with a scientific thread of thought which, under various turns of fate, had been spun for about a hundred years.
19 Vilhelm Bjerknes, “Hvordan Bergensskolen Ble Til,” in Vervarslinga på Vestlandet 25 År. Festskrift Utgitt i Anledning av 25-Årsjubileet 1. Juli 1943 (Bergen: John Griegs Boktrykkeri, 1944). It is translated here by the present author, as all translations in this work have been unless otherwise made clear.
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The thread started very far away from the thought of meteorology. My father, apparently while still a schoolboy, was once rummaging in a chest of books left by his deceased father. He held in his hands a book which in its time had been very widely read, Euler’s Letters to a German Princess in the Danish edition of 1792. He read it and became especially struck by the great mathematician’s forceful polemic against the doctrine of action-at-a-distance, which since Newton’s days had been dominating in physics. Euler’s thoughts turned up again when later (1856) in Göttingen he followed Dirichlet’s lectures in hydrodynamics. He asked himself the question: if two bodies move in a liquid, would they not, then, through the liquid as intervening medium, mutually affect each other’s movements? And will not an observer who sees the bodies, but not the liquid, believe that he has before him a case of action-at-adistance between the two separate bodies? And could not something like this lie behind nature’s actions at a distance? These questions brought him to set himself the mathematical problem of the simultaneous motion of a system of sphere-shaped bodies in a homogeneousincompressible liquid. Unfavourable conditions for his work delayed his progress. But in 1875, now already a man of fifty years, he arrived at formulas, which to a degree far beyond what he had expected, confirmed his conjecture. Although he was without education as a physicist, he took up the work of verifying his results with experiments, and in this connection, in my years at secondary school and my earliest student years, I was his co-worker. The mathematical predictions turned out to hold good at every point: the liquid behaved like a field of force which transmitted actions at a distance. But as time went by, it was necessary for me to take part in his work on a more serious basis; his strength failed in the effort to bring his results into finished form for publication. That this should lead me into meteorology was something of which I had not the faintest idea. I felt at home in pure physics and had what was almost an aversion towards meteorology, a science in which it seemed hopeless to make any headway using exact methods. The pure physicist decides for himself the conditions for his experiments; he himself sets up the snares in which he will catch nature’s secrets and varies them until the catching succeeds. And as a theoretician he has full freedom to simplify his problems until he reaches the ideal goal of being able to solve them mathematically. This my father had done; he had given the liquid the simplest possible properties. Both HELMHOLTZ and KELVIN had done the same when they developed the well-known formulas which still to this day grace the first pages of nearly every textbook in hydrodynamics: in these simplified “ideal” liquids it is the case that circulation and vortex movements are eternal; they can neither arise nor cease
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– within their field wonderfully beautiful and fruitful formulas. The meteorologist and hydrographer, on the other hand, have to accept the fact that in the air and the sea circulations and vortex movements do come into being, persist for a time and thereafter cease. But he cannot intrude and give the phenomena a simpler course of development so that the connections become clear. And the mathematician retreats from the complexities of the problem. To cite HELMHOLTZ: Under the same roof of heaven on which the eternal stars proceed as the very image of nature’s unchanging regularity, the clouds gather up, the wind shifts, the rain pours pointing to the opposite extreme, among all natural phenomena the most unpredictably changeable, which, fleeting and impossible to catch, escape every attempt to trap them under the reins of law.
While I steadily worked to penetrate deeper into my father’s field of research, during my lectures at Stockholm’s Högskola in 1897 I was led to a revision of the theory for circulation and vortex motion. It became evident that Helmholtz’s and Kelvin’s formulas regarding the maintenance of these forms of motion was one special case of two more general formulas, each of which in its own way described how such types of motion arose and died away. One of the two new formulas gave me what I had been looking for, and it became an effective means for making further progress in my father’s field of research. The other one brought something which for me was new and unexpected: it included also thermal circulation developments, which is the origin of the great movements of air and sea. By that means the way was open for an effective interaction between theoretical hydrodynamics and empirical research into the atmosphere and the sea, an interaction which the “dogma” – one is tempted to say – of the circulation’s unchanging character had more or less hindered. The new, more general formula was precisely one of the “reins of law” under which “nature’s most unpredictably changeable phenomena” had to be brought. The thread which my father had begun to spin thus divided into two: a new strand led into meteorology, geophysics and astrophysics. I thought at first only of a short visit to these sciences. The nature and extent of the problems were such that I did not want to become too involved with them. But among my audience was J.W. Sandström, then a mechanic and now Director Emeritus at the Meteorological Bureau, Stockholm. He was not afraid of the kind of work I shrank from. He gladly took on the task of working out the tables and graphical methods required for bringing the circulation theorems to bear on the material of meteorological observations, in the first place on the observations from the higher atmospheric strata which were just beginning to become available at that time.
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But the more the years passed by, the greater were my misgivings. I did see interesting results accumulate, but I saw no great goal or any hard and fast way ahead. I drew out the time for as long as possible before facing up to the truth of the matter, namely that there was only one really great problem in meteorology: that of the future weather. But could it be attacked with exact methods? I had to think through the whole matter. A system’s future state can be calculated if I know its state at a certain time, and those laws according to which its state changes. The state of the atmosphere at a certain time can be found out through observations. And the laws for its changes of state are known to us: they are the laws of physics, more especially those of hydrodynamics and thermodynamics. The problem thus can be attacked. I presented the strategy for this attack in a lecture before the Physical Society [Fysiska Sällskapet] in Stockholm in 1904. The problem falls, I said, into two parts: 1. The problem of Diagnosis: from observations to work out the most complete pictures possible of the atmosphere’s state at a point of time. 2. The problem of Prognosis: following the laws of physics to calculate for a short interval of time ahead the moved air masses’ new position and the state in which they arrive. My idea was not to solve the problem for any practical purpose, but only systematically to work through all the implicit partial problems, in order to arrive at a theoretical system for its solution. And since Sandström was not afraid of entering into this plan of work, we made a start. To begin with there was the problem of diagnosis, the synoptic three-dimensional representation of the meteorological elements, four scalar quantities, pressure, density, temperature and humidity, and one vector quantity, velocity. For the four scalar quantities everything seemed, in principle, to be quite straightforward. We saw to our great relief that Sandström’s methods for using the circulation theorem were exactly what we needed for working out the fields of pressure and mass in three dimensions. But the showing of the field of velocity by streamlines and curves for equal wind speeds, was something new. When meteorologists had drawn back and contented themselves with the entering of discontinuous wind arrows, it was surely due to a feeling of insecurity with regard to the singularities which unavoidably had to appear: neutral points, points of convergence and divergence, and lines of convergence and divergence. But they all seemed, purely kinematically, to have a rational raison d’etre, even though we could not right away make up our minds about their physical nature.
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While engaged upon this work I received – in 1905 – an invitation from Columbia University in New York to hold a series of lectures, experimental and theoretical, on the subject of hydrodynamical fields of force. From New York I was invited to Washington to deal with a theme of my own choosing. Together with two African Americans I hung up on the walls an impressive number of Sandström’s charts, and treated in my lecture the same theme as I had done the year before at the Physical Society. If any lecture of mine has ever been a success, then this was the one. The problem which I outlined had colossal dimensions, and such things are supposed to appeal to Americans. And the result was that from that time on and until the new World War caused a break, I have received generous support from the Carnegie Institution of Washington for the work on this problem. This bound me closely to the meteorological strand of the thread of thought which my father had started to spin. My first Carnegie collaborator was Sandström, and after I moved to Oslo in 1907, the two students Th. Hesselberg and Olaf Devik. For a long time, we had felt that the system of meteorological observations was not cut out for our ways of working. But over the observations presided the various Institute Directors with their international agreements. It was a rather delicate matter for an outsider to approach these. But in 1910 I felt obliged to write to the Conference of Directors in Berlin so that, among other things, I could ask about the time the published observations of the climatological yearbooks were taken. The minutes of the conference show that there was a good deal of confusion: it was not clear at all to what extent the observations still kept to the old local time, and to what extent they were taken according to the new simultaneous time. It was decided that thereafter information on this would be provided in the yearbooks. But I had other demands to make if there was to be anything earnest about the entry of physics into meteorology. At the aerological congress in Vienna 1912, I proposed that in aerology one should give up the irrational units of pressure mm Hg and inches Hg, and introduce a unit which had a place in the absolute system of units of physics. The battle for the millibar, the now internationally accepted unit of pressure, had begun. The proposal was supported not least by SIR NAPIER SHAW, who himself had similar plans, and after a sharp exchange in debate, it was accepted. But this was only a skirmish on the outer lines of defence. The next thing to do was to defend the agreement before the higher authority, the Conference of Directors in Rome the following year. But in the meantime my position had been made considerably stronger. In Vienna I had received a letter from the Ministry of Culture of Saxony with the invitation that I should come to Leipzig for negotiations concerning a call to the University there. The plans involved a chair to which eventually would be connected a new aerological institute like Assmann’s at Lindenburg or Hergesell’s at Strasbourg. I replied
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that I would rather found a first institute for the treatment of observations than yet another institute for the increase of the mass of observations. After negotiations in Leipzig and Oslo, where the offer of improving my position was made, I accepted the call to Leipzig, not to expatriate myself, but in the hope of soon being able to return home again, freed from the duties which I could no longer escape in meteorology, and free to return to the original strand of the thread of thought from my father. In my inaugural lecture in Leipzig I strongly emphasised that I limited myself to being a theoretician. I would regard my task as being fulfilled, I said, if through one year’s work I could work out correctly the change of the weather from one day to the next. It may take years, I added, to bore a tunnel through a mountain. But that does not hinder the possibility later that others then can travel through the tunnel with express-train speed. My new institute – called “geophysical” for tactical purposes towards the Ministry – immediately signalled its course by starting a publication Synoptische Darstellung atmosphärischer Zustände über Europa. Everything was done so that the first volume might be ready to submit to the Conference of Directors in Rome, as an argument for the millibar action. It was finished in time, and it had its effect; the Conference of Directors did not oppose the use of the millibar in aerology. But the uneasy mood towards the trouble-maker was unmistakable, all the more so because the submitted volume contained yet another radical demand, namely the transition from geometric to dynamic measure of height (geopotential). The work in Leipzig proceeded with liveliness and enthusiasm. My most valuable co-workers were the first institute assistant Dr. Wenger and my two Carnegie assistants, whom I had brought with me from Norway, Th. Hesselberg and, as successor to Devik, H.U. Sverdrup. In addition, there were 12 doctoral candidates. But after three semesters the World War broke out. That was something I had not foreseen. As time went by every one of the male personnel was called up, first the doctoral candidates, and then the assistants. The casualty notices were not long in coming. One fell during the invasion of Belgium, one was captured in the battle of Champagne, one fell during an assault before Verdun, one was presumed to be buried [“verschüttet”], one crashed as an airman. In 1917 our personnel were reduced to two female German doctoral candidates and my two Carnegie assistants. After Hesselberg had become Director in Oslo and Sverdrup had left to take care of the scientific preparations for Amundsen’s polar expedition, the replacements were the later professors H. Solberg and J. Bjerknes. With the thus reduced staff, and with the reduction in the capacity to work, a result of undernourishment, I saw no prospects for progress in the foreseeable future. It was then that I received a call to Bergen. Before I accepted, I managed to arrange that my first assistant and co-founder of the institute, Dr. Wenger would be called back from the front to be
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my successor. I knew that as soon as the circumstances allowed it, he would continue the work of the institute according to the established plan. But when he died in the Spanish flu epidemic shortly after the end of the war, the Leipzig institute’s line was broken. A really outstanding foreign student who had worked at the Leipzig institute, was Dr. Friedmann from Petersburg. After the revolution he became Chief of Meteorology in Russia, but he died of typhus after less than one year’s energetic work. My attempt to found a school from Leipzig had collapsed completely. However, I and my two Carnegie assistants, Solberg and Bjerknes, had now come to Bergen. The massive resources of pre-war Leipzig were not available there. How were we to get ahead with our problem? We had been washed ashore on Europe’s stormiest and meteorologically most eventful coast, where the population since the Ice Age had lived in perpetual battle with and constant watching of the weather. The author of The King’s Mirror 20 recommended crossing the great ocean only in the summer season, but says that crossing the smaller reaches of sea can be attempted in any season of the year. Then it is just a matter of looking to see if one will wait a day or two, “and that is not difficult for the weather-wise”. On a coast and in a milieu where we knew that such plain weather-wise people were still being brought up, our work ought to have some prospects, given that we specialists in pure theory could extend our work to include also practical weather forecasting. And if an effective weather forecasting service could be arranged, it would be a fine thing for branches of productive activity, such as agriculture and fisheries, during the worsening food shortages of the country. The greatest of my misgivings was that the crucial weather telegrams from the British Isles, Faeroes and Iceland were held back by England as contraband of war. That being so, we had to base everything on our own observations. In order to sound out what our possibilities were, on 21 February 1918 I paid a visit to Commander Rosenquist, Chief of the Bergen Division, Naval Defence. Under his command he had a number of “signal stations” positioned on the outermost islands, manned by men who were knowledgeable of the sea, and thus also of the weather. They had two instruments, a telescope and a sighting disc, the latter for determining, by double bearings from neighbouring stations, whether there were illegal movements in our territorial waters. After a quarter of an hour’s conversation, the Commander promised that beginning from the next day, the watchmen would send weather reports thrice daily to the Meteorological Observatory in Bergen, where meteorologist Birkeland was the manager, and where the 20 The King’s Mirror, or Kongespeilet, circa 1250. One of the most important examples of medieval literature in Norway.
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two Carnegie assistants had been given a place to work. The weather reports were to contain weather descriptions in nautical language, wind force according to nautical judgement and wind direction according to the sighting disc. At the splendidly located stations the wind directions could be taken with an accuracy of about two degrees. They readily showed a surprisingly steady parallelism from station to station, until suddenly between two stations a new wind direction revealed itself as the predominant one. And the place of convergence or of divergence for the wind, moved along the coast from the time of one set of observations to the time of the next set. Clearly the coast was cut across by the kind of convergence lines or divergence lines which we knew from our Leipzig charts. By that means we could extend our charts out over the sea, with lines which we strongly suspected of belonging to the outworks of cyclones. This gave us the hope that we could take bearings on cyclones before they reached the coast. With these observations and reports from a number of available inland stations, a private weather forecasting was improvised. Since the signs were encouraging and the plans gradually took shape, I made the journey to Oslo to speak with the authorities. Professor Sæland, who was a member of the Storting21, pledged me his support both as a scientist and as a politician, and suggested that we go together to the Government. The scene when the fate of the whole matter was to be decided, remains alive for me. I came to the meeting in the Storting’s Cabinet Room, but Sæland was somewhat delayed through a mishap. The one minister came after the other, finally also the Prime Minister, GUNNAR KNUDSEN. I had to introduce myself, unfold my maps and begin a little lecture. I had been doing this for perhaps ten minutes when the delayed Sæland arrived. Gunnar Knudsen spoke up at once and said, addressing the newly arrived one: “Yes, it is quite clear, this we must have.” One hundred thousand kroner were allocated for the first trial of an official weather forecasting service from Bergen for the months July, August and September 1918. I had been sharp in my demands. I was quite aware that weather maps of the time gave details too briefly, in summary form. I demanded that the number of telegraphic weather stations in Southern Norway be increased tenfold, from 9 to 90. Then I hoped, as I expressed it, that the observations should be able to show us the weather’s face, referring to the portraits found in newspapers which are made just from dots: ten dots yield no physiognomy, but ten thousand can give the characteristic wrinkles and lines by which a face is known. But I was extremely excited to see if this tenfold increase in the number of stations should be enough to let us see the weather’s face.
21
The Storting is the Norwegian Parliament.
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The Weather's Face
Once the state’s allocation had been made, the new system of stations had to be set up at once. The new locations had to be chosen, observers found and instructed, and the precious few available instruments had to be shared out; because of the war nothing could be obtained from abroad. Coastal traffic at that time was much reduced. But thanks to the generous willingness on the part of the Navy, the trips along the coast could be made on torpedo boats and destroyers. Little as I saw myself as a practical meteorologist, I had to carry out the establishment of many of the stations. Great emphasis was placed on the observation of the appearance of the sky, the drift of clouds, and wind. Our journey along the coast, and our contact with those who had a natural understanding of the weather, had taught us to recognise the most important of the “cloud banks” which heralded approaching rough weather. Suitable observers at the coast were given a simple instrument for measuring in degrees how high a cloud bank had reached above the horizon – it proved its worth many times. When the official service started, one of the first forecasts was a complete fiasco which was followed by a violent attack in the Bergen press. But it was possible to calm it down. The Spanish flu seriously affected our work. But otherwise the summer passed peacefully, without any brilliant progress, but still inexhaustibly instructive for us. Then came the Peace, and with it new opportunities for our studies. The telegrams from the British Isles, the Færoes and Iceland started up again. And as soon as radio at sea was cleared, we supplied our ships plying the North Sea and the Atlantic with meteorological instruments. This gave extra perspective to what we had found in our own fine-meshed network of stations. The forecasting during the three summer months of 1919 went very satisfactorily. That autumn I took part in the first meteorological meeting after the war. It was held in Paris under the presidency of SIR NAPIER SHAW. He informed me confidentially of a miracle: the English Navy had introduced the millibar barometer. Still, it was best, he thought, to keep away from the touchy question. But this point of view was not shared by the opposition; they forced an open discussion. There was a very spirited debate. The leading Directors maintained that the public would not understand the scientific unit. In an eloquent speech, Sir Napier Shaw gave the sharp reply that it was the Directors who were the opponents; the man in the street would go along with it. And the Director from New Zealand underlined the point by telling that seamen down there, who had seen the Navy’s new millibar barometer with a clear decimal number where before the incomprehensible 29 had stood, asked: “Why can’t we get the millibar?” The voting went in favour of the millibar, but this was still just a skirmish at the outer defences. Every Director had been and remained master in his own land. The conflict was to continue with great tension until the Conference of Directors in Copenhagen in 1929 when the last opponent cast his vote, with the
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result that the millibar was unanimously accepted for use in weather telegraphy. At the subsequent Conference of Directors in Warsaw in 1935 it was finally decided that the millibar would be introduced into meteorology as a whole. It is the first unit from the absolute system of units in physics to become universal. But it was not only the scientific problem that we had to struggle with in Bergen. The amount of work increased enormously. We needed more and more assistance. But it was not easy to find during the abnormal economic boom which set the scene in our country when the war ended, especially in Bergen. No one sought modestly paid intellectual work such as ours. Two examples follow. A young lad was engaged to fetch coke and take away ashes, and look after the stoves. But when he turned out to be quite capable also as an assistant in map making, he was employed entirely on that. His younger brother became the stove-boy. But he too turned out to be capable at map making, and was then employed entirely on that; both are still highly appreciated in their positions in the forecasting service. We looked in vain for a new stove-boy. I was the only one who had free hands for this work. With my old and slow-working brain, I regarded myself as quite unsuitable for competing with the young meteorologists or assistants in the express work at the weather maps. But I tried to keep the fire going, both spiritually and materially, until I had to quit the material part of this work after a fall on the ice with a large ash bucket in each hand. In the hope of gaining recruits for meteorology under the difficult circumstances, I had undertaken a lecture tour to our neighbouring universities, and offered the invitation to a meteorological vacation stay in Bergen during the summer of 1919. Right through the summer we had a lively Scandinavian cooperation. But when the vacation was over, everyone wanted to return to their studies. It looked as if the whole thing would collapse. But one of the young Swedes, CARL-GUSTAV ROSSBY, now a well-known meteorologist in the U.S.A., called together his comrades. They held council and decided that the undertaking in Bergen had to be rescued. They agreed to divide the winter between them, so that there would always be enough assistance in Bergen. TOR BERGERON took the first period of duty, just as the autumn storms started in earnest. And now it was a question of being earnest: we had decided to take the step, as responsible as it was bold, of issuing storm warnings for fishermen. So follow some glimpses of the work during that autumn and winter of excitement, which was crucial for our undertaking. The weather remained stormy. The service proceeded continuously the whole day and long into the night. We did not have our own radio receiver – we obtained that much later, because the telegraph service kept a firm hold over its “monopoly” of the ether. Through the telegraph lines, overloaded as they were with the economy booming, the telegrams arrived always delayed; we had to be grateful that they came
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at all. Imperfect and incomplete as the observation material was, it was a matter of starting from the numerous instances caught in flight, and through interpolation and extrapolation then to decide on the essential features of the storm’s structure. It was just here that there arose through extrapolation an “indirect aerology” – the deduction from the data available on the map to conditions aloft – as a substitute for the direct aerological observations which we had built on in Leipzig. Through the discussions during the long periods of waiting and when the map was finished, evolved the terminology which has now become international. The physical nature of the previously so mystical lines of convergence was now clear. They were fronts, some of them warm fronts, some of them cold fronts. At the boundary line of the outflowing polar air, the polar front or polar fronts, cyclones became formed as a wave, then to pass through what Bergeron called the phase of occlusion, to become a horizontal vortex. These empirical discoveries belong entirely to the very closely cooperating young meteorologists, not to me. But I saw with satisfaction that the solution took exactly the form of the programme which I had outlined in 1904: to determine the moved air masses’ new position and the state in which they arrive. In reality everything was more simply arranged for the fulfilment of this programme than I had suspected, in that the fronts were the divisions between air masses in different states, and having relatively uniform movements. When a map was analysed as thoroughly as the circumstances allowed, the young meteorologists faced the exciting question: storm warning or not? Which part of the coast is threatened and which is safe? These were decisions which every day could affect valuable property and human life – the Titran disaster of 1899, when 150 fishermen lost their lives in a single night of storm, was always in our thoughts. But at the same time we knew that a false alarm had to be avoided at all cost. If that happened too often, it would take away trust in the forecasts. When therefore a storm was forecast, it was not so easy for the meteorologist to fall asleep before he heard the weather start to roar. When the calmer season came, the summer, and it was possible to rest a bit, if not from work then at least from the daily tension, the great question was: what do the fishermen say about it? The answer was not long in coming. Taken to be the guilty one, I was invited to the annual district meetings of the fishermen’s associations to deliver a lecture on the new wonder. It was usually a chapel where I gave my lecture, and I have never addressed a more raptly attentive and devout assembly. From those meetings telegrams were sent to the Government with the message that this forecasting service was a benefit that they could no longer do without, and that it ought to be given the best possible support towards its further development. The continued existence of the Western Forecasting Service [Vestlandske Værvarsling] was thereby assured, and it would get a secure place in the State Budget.
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A constant source of concern in the forecasting service was the large gap between Iceland and Svalbard in the line of stations. Thanks to Engineer EKEROLD’S energy, the station on JAN MAYEN was established in 1921. A dramatic event was soon to show its worth. On the morning of 1 November 1921 the telephone of the forecasting service rang, and a not very kind voice said: “I lost maize to a value of 30,000 kroner in the harbour last night. Could not the storm have been forecast?” And in similar veins came the one piece of bad news after the other. At the request of the forecasting service the Harbour-master of Bergen investigated how much damage had been done. He estimated it to be 200,000 kroner, of which at least half could have been avoided if the forecast had come in time. What had happened, was that the telegram from Jan Mayen, which usually arrived at 7 p.m., was delayed and did not come until 10 o’clock. The storm signal was then raised, but it was not the habit at that time to look out for storm signals so late, and the storm had broken out already by 1 o’clock. The disaster had the immediate result of closer cooperation between the forecasting service and those most keenly interested, such as the harbour authority, the fire service, the railway and others. They were kept up to date whenever danger was in the offing. The quick victory for the forecasting service seemed to me to be a marvel. But we were not yet finished. The acknowledgement of the public was not enough – we had to appeal to a higher court of judgement, namely to science, not for the sake of recognition or acknowledgement, but for the continued progress of our work. Meteorologists are not like physicists, each one a master in his laboratory. All meteorologists have only one laboratory between them; the one meteorologist is dependent on the other’s observations, and he cannot say to the other one: make your observations according to my wishes. He must convince him; there must be negotiations, and decisive in the end is the Government funding, not only in one’s own, but also in other lands. If the new methods for weather map analysis and weather prediction were ever to become what they ought to be, then far-reaching new demands had to be made concerning the system of observations over the whole world. And if such demands were to make headway, then it was a question of convincing the foreign institutes of the correctness of the Bergen school’s results, in spite of the imperfect observation material on which they were based, and in spite of what we lacked, that we had to replace the instrumental observations from the higher strata with our indirect aerology. And just as we had the best hope that also this lacuna would be filled, we were to suffer a loss of the most painful kind. In ERNST CALWAGEN we had obtained an extremely valuable co-worker, not least for the reason that alongside his countryman, Bergeron, he was the only member of our staff who had previous meteorological training. He joined the work in
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Bergen with vitality and enthusiasm. “To analyse a weather chart using the Bergen methods is just like reading the most exciting novel,” is one of the things he said which I do not forget. When he became the manager of Bergen Meteorological Observatory [Det Meteorologiske Observatorium, Bergen], he planned to get the means for directly testing the analyses made from below by aerological ascents from Kjeller military airfield. But after only a few flights he crashed and was killed together with the pilot (1925). This line of progress was broken, and during the following years the prospects did not always look bright. There were criticisms and attacks, sometimes from the most unexpected quarters. And the young meteorologists who were to defend themselves and carry the responsibility for the future of the whole thing, were all in subordinate posts, pressed down by a constantly more overwhelming mass of duties, and with little opportunity to publish anything themselves or to reply to attacks. But as we now survey the situation, 25 years after the work began in Bergen, the marvel is that air mass meteorology, polar front meteorology and the Bergen methods, by virtue of their own momentum, have spread themselves over the whole world. And in that connection the international system of observations to a large extent has been reorganised in accordance with the requirements of the new methods. Director HESSELBERG together with meteorologist BERGERON deserve great credit for having driven the demands through at the international meetings. There is a lot that could be said about The Bergen Methods out in the world at large. But as I conclude, I would turn rather towards home again and accompany a fishing boat working the fishing banks of the Arctic Ocean, briefly rendered from correspondence from the author ANDREAS MARKUSSON to Arbeiderbladet [newspaper] 8 April 1939. Western Finnmark, March 1939 – On board the boat EIKEN we are on a northward course to the fishing banks … For four days we have lain in Tromsø and waited. North-westerly gales and dense snow flurries. But today it is fine, and the forecast gave calm weather … In heavy rolling in the long swell the boat makes out towards the great banks. At 7 o’clock and 10 o’clock the skipper comes in and listens to the weather forecast. Still there are prospects for good weather. Then follows a description of the fishing, where 25–30 boats work the Northern Cape Banks – I am sorry that this is outside my subject. But after a day and a half of work without rest it continues: – The weather is still fine. There is always a build-up out at sea, but that surely is not a sign of anything. We shall hear when the forecast comes. – Strong south-westerly gales, turning north-westerly and increasing to storm!
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– So there we got it. Back to port again and wait for the weather. But it is so fine … The skipper takes the telephone and gets a connection with the trawlers on Røst Bank. – Gale, yes it was true. They have stopped fishing and are on the way back towards land to wait out the gales … So now we know that. The gale is on the way northwards. – The skippers of the other boats confer. Experience has taught them that it pays to be careful. They all make for land. – Out here, says the writer, you begin to really see what a blessing forecasting and radio are. And after some strong words to those who think there is too much time given to weather forecasts on the radio broadcasts, he lets the skipper speak: “That the weather forecasting service every year rescues and saves hundreds of lives and prevents the loss of costly vessels, that is the main thing, and that everybody knows. But the thing that is also important in fishing, yet people do not think about it, is all the loss of gear that the forecasting saves us from. If it was possible to reckon it up, I believe that alone would cover the whole of what the forecasting service costs.” With these words of a skipper on an Arctic Sea fishing boat, I have come far away from where I began: with the book by EULER which my father happened to take in his hands, now, about a hundred years ago. But I have followed a thread of thought which binds together both incidents. They were deep and abstract questions which my father wondered about when he began to spin his thread. How far it will lead concerning the great mysteries of action-at-a-distance it is still impossible to say. But a strand of the thread had the practical result that the Bergen school came into existence. That is one example among the numberless threads of thought which, more or less hidden or more or less visible, are being spun, become divided, are twined together and lead the development towards goals about which no one beforehand can have any idea.
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Jewell’s sensitive and thoughtful account is a stimulating contribution to the history and philosophy of modern science and culture in Norway, Europe and North America, and not least in Bergen. I enthusiastically recommend his work to both specialists and non-specialists.
William H. Hubbard, professor emeritus of modern European history, Concordia University (Montreal) and University of Bergen
The Weather’s Face
In all these aspects Vilhelm Bjerknes embodied special qualities and abilities that enabled him (and his co-workers) to achieve remarkable scientific successes, most especially a method of viewing and understanding weather behaviour, which laid the groundwork for scientific prediction of that intractable natural phenomenon.
R alph Jewell
In The Weather’s Face the philosopher Ralph Jewell creates a fascinating and compelling portrait of Vilhelm Bjerknes, an internationally prominent Norwegian physicist, who today is largely remembered for developing the Bergen School of Meteorology. Drawing copiously on Bjerknes’s letters and writings – most of them translated into English for the first time – Jewell’s telling of the Bjerknes story has a poetic immediacy that enthrals the reader. Through Bjerknes’s experiences and thoughts, as well as Jewell’s own reflections derived from a profound understanding of the history and philosophy of science, the reader learns about the making and living of science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, crucial aspects that are now often neglected or underestimated: the role of the individual, of personality and creative inspiration, of communicative style spoken and written, of community and team-building, and of mediating intellectual leadership.
The Weather’s Face Features of science in the story of Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Bergen school of meteorology
Following extensive studies in the natural sciences as well as in philosophy, the history of science and psychology at the universities of London and Leicester, he embarked in 1964 on a long and distinguished career in teaching and research at the University of Bergen, Norway. His fascination with and research into Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Bergen School of Meteorology led him to locate and preserve from oblivion numerous primary sources pertaining to their groundbreaking work.
R alph Jewell
ISBN 978-82-450-1441-9
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Ralph Jewell was born in Falmouth, UK, in 1940.
Ralph Jewell was also the main driving force behind the Introductory Programme for international students that was initiated in the mid-1970s at the University of Bergen. His wide literary and philosophical interests, together with his deep understanding of the place of storytelling in the human experience, transformed his seminars into spaces where students from all over the world discovered that a university is truly a place to find one’s intellectual fortune.