SCIENCE WITH STREET VALUE

A physicist joins a secretive philosophical society in Modis’ fictionalized account of true events.

Ted seems as if he was destined to become a scientist, as he “had been passionately attracted to physics from a tender age.” But long after achieving professional success and respectability working in Geneva for CERN, “the most important laboratory for particle physics in the world,” he experiences a nagging “disenchantment” with “hard science.” He feels that it has failed to generate practical applications for ordinary life and to tackle big questions, such the purpose of humanity. With Aris and Mihali, two of his friends from graduate school, he forms a group that meets for “intellectual introspective get-togethers”—free-wheeling discussions that are unrestrained by the strictures of academic science. The trio becomes particularly intoxicated by the ruminations of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, a 20th-century philosopher for whom a European institute is named, which Ted tracks down and joins. Modis meticulously chronicles Ted’s fascinating philosophical awakening, which expresses itself first as an exercise in being “unfaithful to science” and then in an exploration of ways to mine science for far-reaching wisdom. At one point, Ted forcefully answers an objection that he’s “cheapening” science: “Science is not meant to be locked up in ivory towers and be accessible only to a select group of people. It is meant to deliver value by all possible means, including ways not anticipated by scientists.” Although the story is presented like fiction, with a third-person perspective, the book is Modis’ self-proclaimed “personal account of true events and real people,” and it reads like a memoir more than it does a novel. The real drama of the book is in the tension between the intellectual and the emotional, and the author provides a thoughtful, if sometimes forbidding, account of his characters’ philosophical peregrinations. Overall, Modis offers a lively discussion even if it frequently feels like excerpts from a textbook.

An intellectually intriguing, if sometimes-dry, account of a physicist’s philosophical growth.