Books: Sin Among the Scientists

THE SEARCH (342 pp.)—C. P. Snow—Scribner ($3.95).

"I didn't like the erotic bits," Lord Rutherford told the young novelist one day in 1934. But otherwise, Britain's most famous scientist conceded, he liked The Search—a first novel by a young spectroscopist named Charles Percy Snow. The book was one of the first to take scientists at their own high estimate of themselves, it presented science itself as a religion, and it even mentioned Rutherford himself as a high pontifical character of unapproachable magnificence.

Thanks in part to Rutherford (credited with having been first to split...

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