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The 1930s and early 1940s were a time in which scientists in Britain
became increasingly radical in their political orientation, reflecting
the battle against fascism. C. P. Snow estimated that of the two hundred
brightest young physicists in Britain, around three-quarters considered
themselves left of center. Being an advocate of "complete socialism" in
the case of a figure like Patrick Blackett, who received the Nobel Prize
in Physics in 1948, tended, if anything, to enhance his public prestige
among scientists, until the Cold War produced the opposite effect. Many
of the intellectuals operating within the "Old Left" introduced their
own critical judgments. Indeed, there were, as E. P. Thompson (himself a
product of the Old Left as well as an initiator of the New) declared,
all sorts of "proto-revisionists in the Communist Party in those days,"
which for all of its increasing rigidity was also a sphere in which much
of the most creative, critical activity was taking place. This was true
not only of philosophers, like Christopher Caudwell and David Guest
(both of whom were killed in their twenties in Spain fighting for the
Republican cause) and historians like Thompson, Hobsbawm, and
Christopher Hill, but also applied to the red scientists, none of whom
restricted their judgments to a party line.
