Will T. Wilkinson’s biography of William Happer, published by the CO2 Coalition, is at once a family chronicle, a physics primer, and a case study in scientific dissent. It succeeds because it never lets any one of those threads swallow the others. By the closing chapters, the reader understands as much about spin-polarized helium-3 and the logarithmic behavior of infrared absorption as about a Scottish roofer’s grandson who became one of the twentieth century’s most decorated atomic physicists and one of its most contested climate scientists.
The book wisely spends its early chapters establishing just how unsettled the world was when its subject arrived in it. Happer was born on July 27, 1939, in Vellore, India, the child of two physicians running rival hospitals in the Telugu-speaking city of Guntur, his father in charge of the Indian Government Hospital and his mother heading a Lutheran missionary hospital. Within weeks of his birth, Europe was sliding into world war. By the time his family fled India by ship two years later, sailing the long way around South Africa to dodge Nazi submarines, the old imperial order that had shaped his parents’ lives was already cracking apart at every seam. Reading these early pages, it becomes hard to see Happer’s later career as anything but consistent with its beginning. A childhood bookended by war, the twilight of empire and transoceanic flight from danger does not, on the evidence the book presents, produce cautious adults. It produces people comfortable standing alone against institutional pressure, and that is precisely the disposition Wilkinson traces through the rest of the man’s life.
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