His activism made him famous, and though he never won the Nobel Prize for physics, many eminent scientists and Nobel laureates believed he deserved it, while others argued he should win the Nobel Peace Prize for his attempts to stop nuclear war. For his part, Szilard joked he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for failing to discover nuclear fission in the 1930s, which he believed, not without good reason, would have inevitably led to a nuclear-armed Nazi Germany. Yet, in a torment worthy of the ancient Greeks, as his fame grew his influence paradoxically waned, his ideas and influence fell out of
...more
