The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Ratiocination—that is the technical term for what the licentiate does, the term for what the young Bohr did as well—is a defense mechanism against anxiety. Thought spirals, panicky and compulsive. Doubt doubles and redoubles, paralyzing action, emptying out the world. The mechanism is infinitely regressive because once the victim knows the trick, he can doubt anything, even doubt itself. Philosophically the phenomenon could be interesting, but as a practical matter ratiocination is a way of stalling. If work is never finished, its quality cannot be judged. The trouble is that stalling postpones the confrontation and adds that guilt to the burden. Anxiety increases; the mechanism accelerates its spiraling flights; the self feels as if it will fragment; the multiplying “I” dramatizes the feeling of impending breakup. At that point madness reveals its horrors; the image that recurred in Bohr’s conversation and writing throughout his life was the licentiate’s “bottomless abyss.”