The worship of physics and the end of the age of physics

The worship of physics and the end of the age of physics names a generational faith in scientific mastery—and the rupture Chernobyl made visible within it. Nuclear energy had promised a route beyond earthly limits, and physicists had seemed to embody the best and brightest of a modern age. But a reactor disaster could not be contained by prestige or technical confidence: radiation entered ordinary food and bodies, while warnings from specialists collided with official reassurances. In Valentin Alekseevich Borisevich’s account, the era of physics ends at Chernobyl, though its knowledge, dangers, and unfinished questions do not.

Physics as a generational faith

Borisevich connects his youthful attraction to nuclear science with the world opened by the atomic bomb. At seventeen, in 1945, he loved science fiction and imagined that nuclear energy would carry humanity into the cosmos. He enrolled at the Moscow Energy Institute and entered its most secret department, nuclear energy. In the 1950s and 1960s, he recalls, physicists occupied the elite while the humanities were pushed aside. Their elevated status, high salaries, and restricted knowledge combined to give the field both authority and romance.

The promise could be conveyed through an arresting small measure: a schoolteacher said that three little coins held enough energy to fuel an electrical power station. Borisevich also read an American account of the invention and testing of the atomic bomb, including descriptions of the explosions. In a society where so much was secret, scientific power acquired the force of an imaginative horizon. Physics was not only a profession or a body of laws; it was a story about what humanity might become.

That story had a political as well as a scientific foundation. Another testimony in the book recalls an engineer with twenty years’ experience who understood that living beings should leave the contaminated area, yet continued to take measurements and watch television after supervisors advised doing just that. Mikhail Gorbachev’s public reassurance that immediate measures had been taken did not dispel the danger. The witness describes a postwar generation trained to believe: victory in the war had seemed to prove that the country lived justly and that human beings were its highest concern. Scientific confidence and political faith therefore reinforced one another, making obedience feel compatible with knowledge even when measured reality contradicted reassurance.

Chernobyl against technical confidence

The physical evidence described in the book makes the gap between confidence and reality concrete. On a first trip into the Zone, one team measured forest background radiation five or six times higher than on roads or fields. In villages, thyroid activity in adults and children reached one hundred, and sometimes two or three hundred, times the allowable dosage. Tractors continued to run and residents worked their plots. Breast milk was radioactive; a woman breastfed her child on a bench near her house. In stores, clothing and uncovered food sat side by side. Tests of salami and an egg showed that the items could not properly be treated as food but as radioactive byproducts.

Such details overturn the assumption that danger stays within a technical site or can be understood only by specialists. The accident’s consequences appeared in a sandbox, a village shop, a field, and a mother’s milk. Instruments could register the danger, but measurement alone did not make institutions act on it. The same people who could calculate exposure still worked within routines that carried on around contaminated land and products.

A separate account of efforts to warn officials shows how technical authority could be blocked by political authority. A director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences tried repeatedly to reach Nikolai Slyunkov, then spent about two hours getting through. He warned that the radioactive cloud was moving toward Belarus and called for iodine prophylaxis and evacuation near the station. Slyunkov replied that he had received reports of a fire that had been put out. At a later meeting, he invoked advice from Moscow that everything was normal, questioned why the Institute’s men were alarming people with dosimeters, and cited the government commission and military deployment.

The disagreement was not simply between science and ignorance in the abstract. The testimony sets calculations, radiation measurements, and professional knowledge against an administrative system concerned with reassurance and control. The Institute director described thousands of tons of radioactive substances, an unknown quantity of plutonium, and 450 types of radionuclides, while officials spoke of enemies and the search for them. The disaster thus tested both the power of physics to explain material consequences and the power of institutions to decide whether that explanation would be heard.

From warning to suppression

When access to officials closed, the Institute director turned to written evidence. He sent reports, explanatory material, maps, and figures through the chain of command. Four folders, each containing 250 pages, held the accumulated facts. He made two copies, keeping one at the Institute and having his wife hide the other at home; after he returned from a trip, the folders in his office were gone. The Institute continued making trips into the affected area and was the first to compile a map of contaminated territory, with the whole south marked red.

The response described in the testimony further narrowed the distance between knowledge and power. The Institute’s radiation-measuring equipment was confiscated without explanation, and the director received threatening calls at home. Scientific evidence was not merely contested; the means of producing it and the scientist’s ability to speak publicly came under pressure. This account sharpens the book’s central irony: a culture that had elevated physics could still suppress physicists when their findings threatened the smooth operation of political authority.

Another witness explains silence through Party discipline and faith rather than fear of losing Party membership. Reports and explanatory notes were prepared, but orders were carried out without protest. In that account, belief in a fair society collapsed for many people after the disaster, with devastating personal consequences; the witness interprets Valery Legasov’s suicide as a sign of that loss. The episode makes the crisis more than a dispute over policy. When the moral story that had given scientific and political work its meaning failed, some people lost the sense that they had a reason to exist within it.

The end of an era, not of its consequences

Borisevich marks Chernobyl as the end of the era of physics, but describes how slowly that ending arrived. Scientists continued to be summoned to the site and flown in on a special charter plane. Some brought no shaving kits because they expected to stay only a few hours—even though they knew a reactor had exploded. Their expectation registers the persistence of the old confidence: expertise could make an unprecedented disaster manageable, perhaps even brief. The mismatch between that assumption and the event’s scale is one measure of how difficult it was to relinquish the culture that had formed them.

The loss of faith does not lead Borisevich to a simple replacement creed. Raised under Stalin, he says he could not imagine a supernatural power and read the Bible only later in life. He reflects on the possibility that a higher power might intervene in human affairs, while admitting that he has not convinced himself that the world is governed by someone else. His new openness to mystery stands beside, rather than erases, his scientific past. The world seems crowded for humanity; the desire to reach other planets and move beyond earthly limits remains, but no longer supplies an unquestioned guarantee of progress.

The nuclear apocalypse also exceeds the moment of explosion. Borisevich describes the possibility of nuclear winter: enormous fires filling the atmosphere with smoke, sunlight failing to reach the earth, and a chain reaction of ever-deepening cold. Even if the last nuclear warhead were destroyed, the knowledge of how to make atomic bombs would remain. Physics therefore leaves a double inheritance: extraordinary explanatory and destructive power, and knowledge that cannot simply be undone.

A new life after physics

The change in Borisevich’s outlook reaches into his sense of vocation. He had loved physics and expected to do nothing else; now he wants to write. He imagines writing about the way human beings can hinder science, about a small number of physicists changing the world, and about a new dictatorship of physics and mathematics. The wish to write does not repudiate scientific knowledge. It turns attention toward its institutions, its political uses, and the human beings who may become subordinate to its authority.

His account remains an argument between generations: younger people see the world differently, while he tries to understand what his generation believed and what the disaster has made impossible to believe in the same way. Its conclusion is not that science has vanished, or that mystery has settled every question. Rather, Chernobyl has broken the identification of physics with inevitable human betterment. The age ends as a faith, while the material consequences of its discoveries—and the responsibility to speak about them—continue.