California Q
& A
An interview with Joel Hildebrand
By TIMOTHY PFAFF
Cover photo:
©
g. Paul Bishop 1981
CALIFORNIA MONTHLY
The young Joel Hildebrand wore wire-rimmed glasses.
"Now," says Hildebrand, who will celebrate his 100th birthday
November 16, [1981], "I can see without them." Remarkable, yes, but
not really surprising to anyone who has come in contact with Berkeley's
celebrated emeritus professor of chemistry and one of its most beloved
teachers. It seems especially fitting for a man who has devoted his life to
seeing nature, both physical and human, ever more clearly.
Joel Henry Hildebrand was invited to the University of
California (from the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his doctorate
in chemistry in 1906) in 1913, when Professor Gilbert N. Lewis was assembling
on this campus one of the most distinguished groups of physical chemists in
the world. (The department still enjoys international renown.) In what proved
to be a characteristic move, Hildebrand accepted the position at Berkeley, at
$2,000 a year, in preference to a more lucrative offer from the U.S. Bureau of
Standards. His reasons were the greater freedom in research that he would have
at Berkeley and, he later stated, "because I was born to teach. I had
discovered as a young lad the pleasure to be had from explaining the wonders
of nature to my less well read playmates."
Hildebrand was an autodidact from the start. An 1858 text, Classbook
on Chemistry, which he discovered in his grandfather's library,
"started me on the road to science." Without downplaying the
education he received from others (his teachers at Pennsylvania sent him to
Berlin to learn physical chemistry when it was "a new-fangled
subject"), he quickly acknowledges his best teachers: insatiable
curiosity and avid reading. "Things that interested me intellectually
came largely from books."
His high school chemistry teacher gave him the keys to the
laboratory when it became clear that the young Hildebrand knew more chemistry
than he did. He also gave his pupil a book, Josiah Cooke's Chemical
Philosophy. With his own experiments, Hildebrand demonstrated that the
correct formula for nitric oxide gas was NO, not N2O2,
as given in the text. "That experiment was a milestone in my
career," Hildebrand has noted. "It demonstrated that even a lad in
high school could, by a well-reasoned experiment, demolish a theory asserted
in a pretentious book by a Harvard professor." Indeed, the only things
Hildebrand regularly explored in the lab were the unclear theories of other
chemists. And those he replaced with simpler and more experimentally sound
ones.
It is safe to assume that Hildebrand knows virtually all
there is to know about liquids. His early fascination with the color of iodine
solutions spawned a lifetime's work --- and a general theory of regular
solutions. His professional life has been devoid to a refinement of his own
work, and the work of others, on the nature of non-electrolytic solutions. As
Hildebrand is fond of pointing out, more than half of his scholarly articles
have appeared since his so-called retirement. His most recent paper in his
field appeared in 1979.
In the introduction to Hildebrand's Viscosity and
Diffusivity (1977), J.O. Hirschfelder writes that Hildebrand "somehow
... has the ability to sweep away all of the complexities and discover simple
relationships which will take theoreticians another generation to
derive." Fellow chemists are awed by his ability both to avoid and
obfuscating complexities of thought and to arrive at simple explanations that
are at the same time more accurate. In fact, scientific scruples have
occasionally prompted him to refute the more rococo concepts and theories of
less clear headed scientists. Some prime examples are described in his 1977
paper, "Operations on Swollen Theories with Occam's Razor."
For all the theoretical aspects to his research, Hildebrand
is, still, a practical scientist. His very decision to investigate the nature
of solutions was a practical one, since an understanding of regular solutions
is critically important to "pure" and applied science alike; his
work has proved valuable to chemical engineers as well as to other physical
chemists. His experiments with the solubility of helium have led to important
advances in deep-sea diving, and his scientific efforts enlisted by the
government during both world wars.
While his fellow scientists, present and future, will
regard him as one of the century's great chemists, countless thousands of
Berkeley alumni will remember him as the greatest teacher they ever had. His
freshman chemistry course remains a campus legend. Having been instrumental in
designing the course (among other things, he wrote its text, Principles of
Chemistry), he himself taught it to at least 40,000 spellbound freshmen.
Delivering the lectures without electrical amplification (he credits the voice
training his mother urged on him as a youth), he spoke --- some would say
performed --- to 500 students at a time. Not all of them became chemists, but
his students did all leave with a deep respect for the methods. and the
importance, of science.
Some students also owe him their introduction to the arts,
particularly music. Lectures often closed with an exhortation to hear the
symphony that night in Harmon Gym, and anyone willing to stay after class
found a scientist willing to tell them what to listen for in a Beethoven
symphony. While Hildebrand went on supervising doctoral candidates long after
his official retirement in 1952, throughout his career he promoted ---in
principle and in practice --- the idea that freshmen needed to be taught by
the very best teachers on the faculty.
In addition to his work as teacher and researcher,
Hildebrand served the University three times as dean --- "for periods as
short as I could decently make them," he has added. "I think that
able members of a faculty should be willing to undertake tours of duty in
hearing a share of the housework. If they will not, then deanships are eagerly
seized by second rate scholars who hold onto them for life, if permitted, with
the result that policies and recruitment are not in the hands of men who are
in touch with leaders in the field." Without interrupting his science,
Hildebrand served as dean of men (1923-26), dean of the College of Letters and
Science (1939-43), and dean of the College of Chemistry (1949-51). He also was
chairman of the Department of Chemistry from 1941 to 1943 and took an active
role in the work of the Academic Senate throughout his career.
Hildebrand has worked closely with liquids in places
outside the lab. A member of the University of Pennsylvania crew, he has spent
a healthy portion of his robust, athletic life in or on the water. His expert
swimming and remarkable physical condition in general were extolled in remarks
by his son Roger, on the occasion of his father's receiving the Gibbs Medal
from the American Chemical Society in 1953. Roger recounted an anecdote about
a "grandfather's race" in which Hildebrand was to take part. Needing
several laps to warm up, Hildebrand entered the water alone, to swim laps in
the various strokes he knew. When it was time to begin, the race was called
off. One by one, the other contestants had quietly walked away.
His love of nature and the great outdoors (he learned to
ski at 40 and stopped skiing at 75, at his wife's insistence) led to an
interest in the Sierra Club. Hildebrand was its president from 1937 to 1940.
And his delight in explaining nature came out in several books on camping and
backpacking published by the Sierra Club and UC Press.
Few men could lead a life this full and still have time for
family, or at least for a happy family. But for Hildebrand, and the clan that
adores him, family has always been central. He and his now-95-year-old wife
Emily have produced a large and distinguished family. The four children,
Alexander, Milton, Roger, and Louise, and their descendents now lavish on
their parents the affection richly deserved by the pair, from the beginning,
devoted individual and unstinting attention on each of the children --- and
still do.
He insists that his life has been its own reward, noting
that he has never sought an award. Nonetheless, he has received them. Among
the greater honors: election to the National Academy of Science in 1929 and to
the American Philosophical Society in 1951. The American Chemical Society,
whose president he was in 1955, awarded him the Nichols Medal in 1939, a
teaching award in 1952, the Willard Gibbs Medal in 1953, and the Priestly
Medal, its highest honor, in 1962. The University awarded him an honorary
doctorate in 1954, and on Charter Day 1980 he was awarded the Clark Kerr Medal
for "Distinguished Service to Higher Education."
Few scientists, and rather few writers, have understood
writing as Hildebrand has. Although he has written on a wide range of
subjects, his aim has always been the same: to be interesting and to be clear.
From the beginning (he was an autodidact in writing, too), his models were the
great writers of the past, including those of classical antiquity. From their
example he developed a style at once as lucid and as tightly structured as the
Mozart and Hayden symphonies he loves.
In our interview Hildebrand explained that he has done the
things he has done because he has taken pleasure in them. His writing is no
exception. Now weary of answering questions he has answered, in one form or
another, for 70 years, he encouraged us to draw on his speeches and essays as
well. Taking his suggestions, we discovered a remarkable consistency in both
tone and content of the things he has said and written over the years. His
conversation, after all, has a certain loftiness that is echoed, curiously, in
the down-to-earth quality of his prose. Perhaps Hildebrand's obvious delight
in language is responsible for the blurring of the usual distinction between
spoken and written word. Or perhaps it is more a function of his passionate
desire to communicate.
Q: What were your first impressions of the University,
when you visited it in 1913?
A: California was obviously a fresh, young university
in the making. There were no precedents that one was bound to follow. One
could propose something new.
Q: What did you make of the chemistry department which
Dean Lewis was about to invite you to join?
A: I could easily sense the kind of department he was
trying to make. He was trying to make a scientific department with young men.
His policy all along was not to try to strengthen the department by getting
somebody who was well-known from another institution---a shining light. Such a
man, of course, thinks he's doing you a great service. But selecting a young
man who'd be grateful for the opportunity, as I was. We all grew up together.
Q: Once you accepted and came to Berkeley, did the
reality match your expectations?
A: I sensed an eager curiosity at Berkeley about
natural phenomena that was quite absent from the department in Philadelphia,
where a research conference was conducted by a professor who did no research.
Arriving in Berkeley, I felt that I had escaped from a dungeon into sunshine.
Lewis took as much satisfaction in the productivity of his
colleagues as in his own. We were just a group of young fellows who were all
trying to do a good job of teaching in order to produce some graduate students
who would be the kind we wanted. We couldn't expect in those days that anybody
would come out from New England to do research under us; they didn't know
about us. So we had to start with "the child in the cradle." We'd
meet weekly to discuss how we would teach the freshman and other courses. We
all would talk about what we were trying to do and what the important ideas of
chemistry were.
Q: How did you set out to create "something
new"?
A: We started a new student right out with research. In
Pennsylvania you had to spend at least two years learning what was known
before you could venture into the unknown. Well, here Lewis' ideas was to
teach by using unanswered questions, rather than committing to memory the
answers to existing questions, which are often wrong. So the whole spirit was
a different spirit. And the spirit ever since has been to teach through
questions and not through answers.
We rapidly achieved a national standing; students were
coming to us from the East. By the late '20s, we were helping to staff the
departments of good universities.
Q: Is it true that the methods your department devised
had wider ramifications in the University community?
A: It became a tradition that lecturing to large
freshman and sophomore classes was not something to avoid but was a challenge
which many people gladly accepted. It became a tradition here that good
teaching should begin with a freshman year and not wait until the graduate
period. The fact that I could turn out 400 or 500 freshmen a year who felt
that Chemistry 1A was worthwhile would become known to their parents and
established goodwill toward the University. And there were other men in the
faculty who were doing a similar job, although few on such a scale. However,
in some departments, such as history, we had some men who like me were ham
actors and could give a lecture on a historical period that would be attended
gladly by students and auditors. What students go home and tell their parents
has a lot to do with support of the University, if they respect the people.
Entertainment isn't the important thing; respect for the caliber of the
teacher is.
Q: Over the years you've had a good deal to say about
teaching. To your mind, what makes a good teacher?
A: Good teaching is primarily an art, and can be
neither defined nor standardized. My own methods varied, depending on whether
I was lecturing to a class of 500, or conducting a quiz section of grade A
students, or one of grade C students. Good teaching is a personal performance.
Each teacher must do it in his own way. I am sure I would have become a
frustrated man if I had not become a teacher. One of the wisest decisions I
ever made, early in my career, was to reject a fine position in the Bureau of
Standards to remain in a university at slightly more than half the salary. No
one should enter the teaching profession unless he takes such pleasure in
explaining things that he would rather do it than spend the extra money he
might make doing something more lucrative.
A good professor must be devoted to the truth and a
competent seeker after truth in his own field. No amount of processing can
make a good teacher out of unsuitable material. The right material must first
of all be born, because good teachers are both born and made; neither
part of the process can be omitted.
Q: What, then, in your opinion, are the essential
materials?
A: First, I put an enthusiasm for significant
knowledge. No quality in a teacher is more important than this, for no teacher
who lacks such enthusiasm can stimulate it in students. But a desire to know
is not enough. There must be also an urge to communicate. Good teaching is an
art of communication, like painting, and requires the establishment of a
rapport. Ideas must "get across." Closely allied to the urge to
explain is the verbal facility and capacity for clear, orderly presentation
necessary to pull it over. The teacher must not be like the student who, asked
to define the term "vacuum," said, "I have it in my head, but I
cannot explain it."
Fourth, I would specify a sense of humor. The value of
humor to lighten and season what might otherwise be heavy diet is obvious, but
there is a deeper reason. The essence of humor is paradox, the ability to see
more than one thing at a time, and this is a quality certainly required for
good teaching, because the teacher must bear in mind simultaneously both the
matter he is trying to explain and the reaction produced by it in the minds of
his students. He must try to hitch the new idea to one already there.
The list of qualities could go on, but I'll complete it
with one more, namely, personality. This is, of course, a composite of many
characteristics, and while it is easy to recognize, it is difficult to define.
No one who lacks it can become an actor, or a leader, or a successful
politician, or a greater teacher, for without it he cannot make himself
interesting to his associates, nor command their attention.
Q: After your years of tremendous success teaching
chemistry, do you see things about the teaching of chemistry, or science in
general, that are specific to those disciplines?
A: A student once asked me to define chemistry. I
answered with the best definition I can construct, "Chemistry is what
chemists do and how they do it." It is essentially an enterprise, not a
defined content. The most important element in the education of a chemist---I
mean a scientist, not a technician---is association and apprenticeship with
chemists at work and thinking.
In the course of my long years of observation of the
policies of different departments, I have arrived at the following rough
generalization, which has been called "Hildebrand's Law": the number
of different courses offered by a department is inversely proportional to the
eminence of its staff and to the significance of what has been achieved in the
field.
Q: In your years of battling for subject-centered, basic
education, you have consistently promoted the nurturing of curiosity in
individual students and decried the presence, in an academic setting, of an
atmosphere of intellectual authoritarianism. Would you expand on that?
A: Any intellectual interest that has been aroused is
so precious that it should be carefully nurtured and used as a basis for
expansion, not interrupted by a rigid curriculum designed by persons who do
not appreciate individual variability. If a student is eager to delve deeply,
by all means let him do so. His interests can later on be broadened gradually
and naturally. A lad whose interest has been awakened in chemistry soon
learns, if he is in a good environment, that mathematics and physics belong
with chemistry, and if he finds that the men who teach these subjects are not
ignorant of history, and have some taste in literature, music, or art, his
range of interest is easily expanded to include such objects.
Q: In your writing, you described a theory of liberal
education based on the analogy of a pyramid, "with a broad base laid
during the first two years, and then narrowing during the last two to the apex
of a 'major.'" In its place you proposed the analogy of a tree, which
begins as a stalk and only later branches and bears fruit. Is that what you
are talking about here?
A: Intellectual interest, when first awakened, is
likely to be fixed on some narrow object. Only as it matures does it expand to
include related matters. No person is liberally educated by virtue of the
credits upon his report card at the end of his sophomore year or even his
senior year. The time to appraise his education is in middle life, by what he
reads and talks about when away from his job. A degree should represent not a
store of knowledge completed but a scientific career started in the right
direction. We should be training athletes, not fattening hogs.
Q: How is this brought to bear, particularly, on the
making of scientists?
A: I regard all the functions of science as
interdependent. I assert only that discovery is basic to all the others, and
sufficiently different as to require that a person, in order to be a success
at it, must have certain special aptitudes and training. A scientist must be,
above all, the kind of person who takes a special delight in devising and
answering questions of his own.
The ablest men in any occupation are always in short
supply. Even when there are men seeking jobs, there are always jobs seeking
the best men to be found. We need not worry about producing too many top
flight scientists; they make their own jobs, as well as jobs for others. They
help to prevent depressions.
We are in danger of missing the fundamental point when we
discuss the production of scientists chiefly in numerical terms of demand and
supply. There was no demand in England for a Michael Faraday, except,
fortunately, by Sir Humphrey Davy, as his laboratory helper. The more critical
demand today is not that of routine positions that await filling but a demand
that we ought to be making that every potential Michael Faraday among out
youth should have the opportunity to develop to his full capacity. We need
every Michael Faraday we can produce, as well as everyone at all approaching
the stature of a Faraday.
Partially because I have grown up in an age which has
tended to glorify science as a field apart, I had a mental picture of the
scientist as a man apart, and even above other men, different from most,
dispassionate, non-believing, unconcerned with the social problems of mankind.
This is as inaccurate as labeling all lawyers as scoundrels or all doctors as
unselfish servants of society. I realize now that being a scientist does not
make the man. However, it occurs to me that the converse is partly true. Being
a man, in the sense of being a mature adult, does make the scientist. For
science, as I am beginning to "feel" it, is not the development of
the cobalt bomb, not the conquering of virus diseases, indeed, not even all
the inventions of the ages. Science is a way, a discipline of mind, a way of
approaching a task, a problem without prejudice and fear. And these are
traits, I think, of a real man.
Q: Is that the basis of your belief that science itself
is not immoral, even if it is thought by some that its discoveries have been
put to immoral uses?
A: Yes. The history of science furnishes abundant
evidence that a scientist usually serves his fellow men better by extending
the boundaries of knowledge than by aiming directly at some social result.
Penicillin was not discovered by a bedside physician. Basic knowledge has been
the main source of countless beneficent applications. It has afforded vastly
increased opportunities to enjoy leisure, music, travel, and stimulating
social intercourse. It has supplied valuable correctives to human thought. It
is significant that those who deprecate the gifts of science never renounce
any of them to live like the contemporaries of St. Augustine.
A scientist can seldom predict just what he will discover,
least of all its possible later misuse in the hands of evil men. Few
scientists have that kind of imagination. Many of the most valuable
discoveries have been stumbled upon in the search for something else. A
visitor at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley asked Professor E.O. Lawrence
what they expected to find with the new bevatron. He replied, "If I knew
what we would discover, we would not have had to build the bevatron." A
scientific investigation is a question, not a prophecy.
Q: What was your own association with Professor
Lawrence?
A: I was very well acquainted with Lawrence. In fact,
when the University of Texas offered him $1,000,000 to build his cyclotron
there, Lawrence wanted to build his cyclotron, but he didn't want to leave
Berkeley. I had a good deal of influence on President Robert G. Sproul. He had
called me and others for advice about whether he should spend money in certain
ways. He consulted me about what he ought to do. I wrote to Sproul saying that
I thought he ought to bend every effort to raise the money to keep Lawrence
here. I said there were two reasons. One is that it would be a serious blow at
our good sense to allow any young fellow as brilliant as Lawrence to be
enticed away to a second or third rate university. The other would be a more
ethical reason. That is, the byproduct of the cyclotron could have a profound
influence on other sciences, as, for instance, furnishing isotopes. And it
would be a scientific crime to have the cyclotron located anywhere else than
in the greatest possible center of scientific activity. Sproul has a Scotch
sense of money, but he also had an imagination for great things. So he raised
the money and kept Lawrence here.
Q: What about the offers, like the one relatively early
from Cal Tech, that you have had to go elsewhere to work and to teach? Why
have you stayed at Berkeley?
A: The University of California has treated me well. I
didn't see any reason for leaving Berkeley. I was very happy here and had
everything I wanted. Facilities for continuing research have been generously
afforded. Many institutions dismiss all professors as a prescribed age.
Friends of mine have been completely evicted, regardless of their distinction
and continuing productivity. At 70 I could still swim and ski better than any
of the regents, and I was publishing scientific papers. President Sproul
invited me to continue teaching on a scale that permitted me to receive a
certain pension. I stopped teaching for greater freedom, but the University
negotiated grants for research that enabled me to have Ph.D. research
assistants. At the age of 90 I could say that 43 percent of all my scientific
publications had been published since my pseudo-retirement in 1952. I am
very grateful.
Q: Needless to say, the University is grateful, too, for
all the ways in which you served. What are your reflections on the time spent
as an administrator and dean?
A: Sproul wanted me very much to become dean of Letters
and Science. I didn't want to, but he kept at me, and he was a friend of mine,
so I reluctantly agreed. But I said, "I don't want to punch a time clock;
I want the freedom to run the office according to my best judgment." He
said, "I don't care whether you're ever in the office if you'll be
responsible for it."
My idea of a good administration is that he devotes himself
to making the next year's model a better model, rather than operating the
current machinery. If a man can't pick able assistants whom he can trust and
inspire, you wonder whether he's competent to make the decisions himself.
I might digress and tell about one of the changes I
engineered. One of the requirements for graduation was two years of physical
education. It meant, really, two half hours a week of actual participation,
and that could hardly make a difference in a student's health. And the fact
that it was a requirement made it odious. I proposed that we abolish the
requirement. Some stout professors were afraid the students wouldn't exercise.
I exercised a great deal, and I suggested that we, more appropriately continue
to require intellectual efforts, and we could leave safely to most students
whether they took physical exercise. I got the requirement repealed, and
immediately there was a big increase in the demand for lockers in the
gymnasium.
Q: You must tire of being asked about your longevity.
But what do you think about your own level of creativity across nearly a
century?
A: I recently read a dictum that little creative work
can be expected from a man after the age 35. That is unquestionably true,
because few persons do anything very creative even before 35. But there is no
arbitrary age deadline after which a person can no longer enjoy the pleasures
of the mind. There are notable instances of extraordinary creativity
continuing to twice 35 and beyond. Galileo was 72, ill, and a house prisoner
of the Vatican when he wrote his greatest work, The Two New Sciences.
Verdi was 80 when he composed his best opera, Falstaff. Goethe
completed Faust at 80. Benjamin Franklin at 80 wrote on Marine
Observations. Peter Debye published excellent research until his death at
82. Michelangelo continued to produce superb sculpture and architecture until
the eve of his death at nearly 90.
What I have contributed to science has been small compared
with the works of these great men, but to have contributed even a minor part
to the present imposing structure of science, and to have seen most of it
under construction during my lifetime, has filled my days with exciting
intellectual adventure.
Q: It seems an understatement to refer to your days as
"filled." Still, you speak with evident fondness of your personal
and private life. What has that time been like?
A: The finest hours of life are not those spent among
large groups of people, but in conversation with just a few, in reading great
books, in listening to great music, wandering in a forest of giant sequoia,
peering into a microscope, unraveling nature's secrets in a laboratory. The
men who have had most to give to their fellow men are those who have enriched
their minds and hearts in solitude. It is a poor education that does not fit a
man to be alone with himself.
Q: What about your remarkable health?
A: A completely good life includes good health. This
requires good luck and sensible management. I have great respect for my body.
I have never had a headache. I have not dosed my lungs with tar. The only
carbon monoxide I breathe is that which my associates generate. I have lived a
physically active life; I celebrated my 77th birthday by swimming a half mile
in 22 minutes.
I take care of a large garden, which is more fun than
swinging dumbbells. Redwood trees I planted when three feet tall are now 100
feet tall, and two are twelve feet in girth. I raise wood for the fireplace. I
grow beautiful camellias.
I used to be a pretty good skier, but my legs no longer
obey me very well. I am probably dying from my feet upward, which is better
than starting at the top.
Q: And you family life?
A: I am the patriarch of a tribe numbering 40,
including our four children. They shower my wife and me with affection. We all
love each other. There are no generation gaps. They are our best friends.
I live with my wife Emily. I have been in love with her
since the day I met her, in 1908. I met her at a musical. The moment I saw her
I knew she was the woman for me. The feeling was mutual. She turned 95 in June
[1981].
Q: How do you spend your evenings?
A: After an early light supper, my wife and I sit
before the fire in comfortable chairs, and I read aloud from a book of the
sort that should be read aloud, and good enough to have read before, perhaps
by Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Robert Frost, or Stephen Vincent Benet. This
reading aloud stimulates good conversation. The great novelists and dramatists
are the keenest observers of human nature.
After 8 p.m., we listen, perhaps, to a great symphony by
Hayden, Schubert, or Mozart, or to a concerto by Dvorak. With such music in
our minds we go to bed early and sleep soundly.
We are living in harmony with the Irishman's wish:
"May you live till you die and never grow old." It's been a great
life.
___________
Pfaff, Timothy. "California Q & A:
An Interview with Joel Hildebrand." California Monthly.
92, No. 1 (October 1981), pp. 8-12.
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