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he was often not sturdy enough, physically andmentally, to handle the load that he imposedon himself. This was compounded by hissometimes shaky marriage to a fragile and notalways faithful woman. That he produced somuch despite all this is remarkable. The por-trait that emerges is of a refined intellectual ofthe highest ethical standards, unwilling orunable to advocate effectively on his ownbehalf — even accepting his wife’s demandthat their children should not attend the Nobelceremonies. Although he was a refugee fromNazi Germany, he was profoundly disturbedto see his beloved pure physics spawningnuclear weapons in the hands of some of hismost talented students: Robert Oppenheimer,Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf and the spyKlaus Fuchs.

So does this book fill what is a serious gap inthe history of twentieth-century physics? Incontrast to the other great figures in the quan-tum revolution, Born’s personality has neverbeen described in any depth, and this part of

the gap is filled exceptionally well. As forBorn’s science, the job is done for the physicist,who can apply well-informed opinions tograde the significance of the people and dis-coveries described. But other readers wouldhave benefited from an account of Born’s workthat did a better job of separating the wheatfrom the chaff.

All the book’s readers would have benefitedhad the editor insisted that we do not need toknow the names of all those Alpine hotels theBorns visited, what they ate there, and a bar-rage of other details. This mass of minutaeoften produces a haze that could make it hardfor readers to see what is most exceptional andlong-lasting among Born’s many achieve-ments. Nevertheless, there is no question thatany future work on Born will find this book tobe an indispensable study of this major figurein one of the most profound transformationsin the history of science. ■

Kurt Gottfried is in the Physics Department,Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.

much more to the development of ethology ifthey’d had the resources and the intellectualfreedom to pursue their empirical studies anddevelop new ideas. A particularly poignantexample of this is the pioneering biologistWallace Craig, who greatly influenced Lorenzbut struggled to make ends meet for most ofhis life. When the great British ethologistWilliam Thorpe lectured at Harvard in 1951,he paid tribute to his American colleaguesCharles Otis Whitman, Wheeler and Craig.Thorpe was surprised that only one or twomembers of his large audience seemed to

know who Craig was. According to Burkhardt:“Thorpe, supposing Craig was dead, wasastonished to learn that Craig was not onlyalive but in the audience.”

The development of ethology has beengreatly influenced by the different personali-ties involved. Nowhere is this shown moreclearly than in the relationship between thetwo key figures in the field, Lorenz and Tin-bergen. The characters of these two men couldhardly have been more different. WhereasLorenz was vain, self-centred, an extrovert anda self-styled philosopher, Tinbergen was mod-est, an introvert and an empiricist. Lorenzcharacterized himself as a ‘farmer’, who mainlyobserved the domesticated birds that he keptaround his own house, in contrast to the‘hunter’, Tinbergen, who conducted controlledexperiments both in the field and in the labo-ratory. The contrast between the two menbecame painfully obvious during the SecondWorld War, when Lorenz was a doctor in theGerman army and Tinbergen was interred in a detention camp for Dutch intellectuals.Burkhardt devotes an entire chapter toLorenz’s conduct during the Nazi regime, andshows that, blinded by ambition, Lorenz didnot distance himself from Nazi doctrine. Afterthe war it took some time for the wounds toheal so that the two friends could resume their scientific partnership.

One of Tinbergen’s lasting contributions isthe identification of the four main problems inanimal behaviour: evolution, function, devel-opment and causation. Tinbergen has creditedBritish biologist Julian Huxley with identifyingthree of these as the main problems in biology,to which he merely added development. Onreading Burkhardt’s account, however, itseems that Tinbergen was being rather gener-ous towards Huxley. “It is from a failure to dis-tinguish between ultimate cause, immediate

Acting on instinctPatterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, NikoTinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology by Richard W. Burkhardt, JrUniversity of Chicago Press: 2005. 636 pp.$80, £56 (hbk); $29, £20.50 (pbk)

Johan J. BolhuisThe Austrian Konrad Lorenz and DutchmanNiko Tinbergen founded ethology, the studyof animal behaviour, at the start of the twenti-eth century. The history of the ‘study ofinstinct’, as it was once known, attracts inter-est from a range of disciplines, and this natu-rally affects the viewpoint of books on thesubject. Niko’s Nature (Oxford UniversityPress, 2003), for example, a recent biographyof Tinbergen, was written by his one-timefriend and pupil Hans Kruuk (for a review seeNature 427, 293–294; 2004). In contrast,Richard Burkhardt is a historian, not an ethol-ogist, so his book Patterns of Behavior is quitedifferent. Nevertheless, it is not a dry factualbiography of a scientific discipline, but a fascinating and often entertaining account ofthe life and work of some of ethology’s key figures. Burkhardt has done a tremendousjob, meticulously analysing and describingthe rise of ethology. He consulted a multitudeof written sources and interviewed many ofthe important players.

Modern history of science is not only aboutscientific concepts, Burkhardt explains, but isjust as much about the social context of theindividual scientists — what he likes to call“ethology’s ecologies”. The term ‘ethology’ wasintroduced by the American William Wheeler,and US biologists active around the end of thenineteenth century might have contributed Up close and personal: Konrad Lorenz liked to observe birds in their natural habitats.

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cause, and mere necessary machinery, that somuch of the barren disputes of biology aredue,” wrote Huxley. It would seem that, withsuch a sloppy and essentially misguided inter-pretation, these disputes would not be solvedin a hurry. Unfortunately, even Tinbergen’scareful analysis of cause and function couldnot prevent a confusion of concepts that con-tinues to this day.

Some will say that ethology is no longer ascientific discipline in its own right, but that

depends on who you ask: a behavioural ecolo-gist and a cognitive ethologist might give youdifferent answers. Nevertheless, Burkhardtnotes that the core ideas of classical ethologydissipated astonishingly rapidly; few contem-porary ethologists would use such concepts as ‘action-specific energy’, for example. Thisdiscarding of outmoded ideas would seemnatural for any vibrant scientific discipline.

Burkhardt rightly maintains that it was theempirical and theoretical approach introduced

by Lorenz, Tinbergen and their colleagues thatmade the study of animal behaviour what it istoday. In order to study the genomic or neuralmechanisms of behaviour, we need to knowhow behaviour works, and for that an ethologi-cal analysis is crucial. This wonderful bookshows very clearly how early ethologists madesuch analysis possible. ■

Johan J. Bolhuis is in the Department of Biology,Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands.

think, he shied away from specifically repre-senting relativity in the piece, alluding only inthe title to that theory’s central tenet of a con-stant speed of light. Brownian motion, on theother hand, is a concept easily reflected in themovements and configuration of the dancers.But it is the ideas surrounding the photoelec-tric effect that dominate Constant Speed.

Running on to the stage, fists clenched andelbows pumping, the white-clad dancers couldbe photoelectrons, released as the seemingly

metallic stage is bathed in light.Or they could be photons, tightpackets of energy that also haveconcerted, wave-like motions.Then the whiteness is subsumedby red, with red lighting and redcostumes as more dancers jointhe fray, evolving eventuallythrough the full spectrum ofcolour. The colour-coded dancersare compartmentalized — quan-tized, if you like — each pairexploring its own motion at itsown frequency until the rainbowfinale. The music by Franz Lehár,composed like Einstein’s physicsin 1905, adds another dimension:you can almost imagine Einsteinday-dreaming, seeing the multi-coloured quanta of his theorybefore him as he hummed alongto the pop music of his day.

At just 27 minutes long, theswirling colour of Constant Speedseemed to be over all too quickly.But the work was superbly com-plemented by the preceding pro-gramme, especially Momenta,created by Rambert dancerMikaela Polley. To music byPatrick Nunn, the dance buildssteadily in energy, speed andcoherence (more physics!). Dif-ferent moods were created by thetawdry humour of the openingpiece, Judgement of Paris, and theheart-rending emotion of Dark

Elegies. However, the maturity of these pieces,choreographed by Anthony Tudor in the1930s, perhaps highlighted a few rough edgesin Constant Speed.

The physics is there if you look — but don’tlook too hard. As Baldwin said, this is not aphysics lesson. Rather, Constant Speed is aboutinspiration: inspiring physics and inspireddance. ■

Alison Wright is the editor of Nature Physics.➧ www.nature.com/naturephysics

Getting physical: dancers of the Rambert Dance Company.

Constant SpeedRambert Dance CompanyAt Sadler’s Wells, London, 24–28 May2005. UK tour begins September 2005.www.rambert.org.uk

Alison WrightI admit, I cringed when I heard that the UKInstitute of Physics (IOP) had commissioned aballet to celebrate the World Year of Physics2005, or ‘Einstein Year’. Truly enlighteningmeetings of art and science are rare indeed.Einstein: The Ballet? Please, no.

But the IOP had wisely put themselves inthe hands of the Rambert Dance Company,and the results, revealed at a Sadler’s Wells pre-mière on 24 May, are stunning.

Constant Speed is inspired by Einstein’s 1905publications; the World Year of Physics cele-brates their centenary. From the patent officein Bern, Switzerland, Einstein dashed off five papers, all of them seminal work, on threethemes: brownian motion, the photoelectriceffect and the special theory of relativity.

Relativity, and E�mc2, will be forever asso-ciated with Einstein. But it is his work on thephotoelectric effect, which established thenotion of the ‘quantum’, that Einstein himselfregarded as his most revolutionary. The effectdescribes the release of electrons from a metalwhen light is shone on its surface. To explainthe relation between the energy of the electronsreleased and the frequency of the incidentlight, Einstein proposed that light energy istransferred to the electrons in distinct chunks,or quanta. No less significant was his study offluctuation phenomena within the frameworkof kinetic-molecular theory — work thatrecalled the brownian motion seen in thedance of pollen grains in water decades earlier.

Choreographer Mark Baldwin, the artisticdirector of the Rambert, developed ConstantSpeed through conversations with Ray Rivers,professor of theoretical physics at ImperialCollege London. Although he claims to beignorant of physics, Baldwin was struck by asimilarity of language — space, time, energy —between physics and dance. Quite rightly, I

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