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Teller generalized it later from his own experience of lost wars and their aftermaths: “Not only do wars create incredible suffering, but they engender deep hatreds that can last for generations.”479
Schrödinger came down with a cold and took to his bed. Unfortunately he was staying at the Bohrs’. “While Mrs. Bohr nursed him and brought in tea and cake, Niels Bohr kept sitting on the edge of the bed talking at [him]: ‘But you must surely admit that . . .’ ”489 Schrödinger approached desperation. “If one has to go on with these damned quantum jumps,” he exploded, “then I’m sorry that I ever started to work on atomic theory.”
But it led Heisenberg immediately to a stunning conclusion: that on the extremely small scale of the atom, there must be inherent limits to how precisely events could be known.
Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit: only wholeness leads to clarity. Bohr was never interested in an arrogant reductionism. He called instead—the word appears repeatedly in his Como lecture—for “renunciation,” renunciation of the godlike determinism of classical physics where the intimate scale of the atomic interior was concerned.496 The name he chose for this “general point of view” was complementarity, a word that derives from the Latin complementum, “that which fills up or completes.” Light as particle and light as wave,
He scolded his distinguished colleague finally in Einstein’s own terms. God does not throw dice? “Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world.”502
The density of their packing requires more or less binding energy, and that in turn requires more or less mass: hence the small variations.
there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.
The fatherless young man finds a masterful surrogate father of warmth and dignity, identifies with him and proceeds to emulate him. In a later stage of this process the independent scientist works toward becoming a mentor of historic stature himself.
faculty wife crossing the campus the next evening heard a startling “I’m going to be famous!” as the young experimentalist burst past her on the walk.
is a physics of bank shots. It works the sides and the corners and uses the full court but prefers not to drive relentlessly for the goal.
It encourages highly individualized and even autistic ways of thinking.”553
the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established—and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks.
Chadwick got into the wrong line. He had already begun to answer the lecturer’s questions when he realized he was being questioned for a physics course. Since he was too timid to explain, he decided that the physics lecturer impressed him and he would read for physics.
Members met in college rooms and Kapitza frequently opened discussions with deliberate howlers so that even the youngest would speak up to correct him, loosening the grip of tradition on their necks.
“It is not the discovery of an outlying island but of a whole continent of new scientific ideas.”617 That was news. The Times headlined it REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE and the word spread. From that day forward Einstein was a marked man.
He found a hotel and asked where all the students had gone. Perhaps to see Notre Dame, the clerk said. “Was I crazy?” Infeld asked himself. “Notre Dame is in Paris. Here is Princeton with empty streets. What does it all mean?”
Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.
Given the progress of science, he said, “we are entitled to think that scientists, building up or shattering elements at will, will be able to bring about transmutations of an explosive type. . . . If such transmutations do succeed in spreading in matter, the enormous liberation of useful energy can be imagined.”
An American physicist who worked with the middle-aged Fermi thought him “cold and clear. . . . Maybe a little ruthless in the way he would go directly to the facts in deciding any question, tending to disdain or ignore the vague laws of human nature.”779
A dignified Spaniard showed up one day to confer with “His Excellency Fermi.” Rome’s young professor of theoretical physics, a dirty lab coat flying out behind him, nearly knocked the visitor down.
Leo Szilard had emerged from his bath that spring of 1934 to pursue his favorite causes, not yet joined, of releasing the energy of the nucleus and of saving the world. In
And he understood what would happen if he assembled a critical mass, spelling out the results simply on the fourth page of his application:805 If the thickness is larger than the critical value . . . I can produce an explosion. As if to mark in some distant inhuman ledger the end of one age and the beginning of another, Marie Sklodowska Curie,
if Germany achieved a chain reaction first, and he argued for “an attempt, whatever small chance of success it may have . . . to control this development as long as possible.”841 Secrecy was the way to achieve such control: first, by winning agreement from the scientists involved to restrict publication, and second, by taking out patents.
“It is reasonable to assume that the atomic number of the active element should be close to the atomic number . . . of the bombarded element.”868 But Fermi seldom left anything to assumption, however reasonable.
Forty-two years old in 1938, Lewis Strauss was a full partner at the New York investment-banking house of Kuhn, Loeb, a self-made millionaire, an adaptable, clever but thin-skinned and pompous man.
But would irradiation harm the tobacco? Among Szilard’s surviving papers is lodged a fading letter from Dr. M. Lenz of the Montefiore Hospital for Chronic Diseases that reports the decisive experiment: On April 14, 1938, at 2:30 p.m.907, your six cigars were irradiated with 100 kv., a filter focus distance of 20 cm. with ten minutes in front and ten minutes over the back of each cigar. This gave them 1000 r. in front and 1500 r. in back of each cigar. I hope that your friend finds the taste unchanged.
George Placzek, a Bohemian theoretician working in Copenhagen whose tongue was almost as sharp as Pauli’s, had already encapsulated that cruel truth. “Why should Hitler occupy Denmark?” Placzek quipped to Frisch one day. “He can just telephone, can’t he?”
The purpose of science, he believed, was to set men free. Totalitarianism, in Hannah Arendt’s powerful image, drove toward “destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other.”
They had discovered the reason no elements beyond uranium exist naturally in the world: the two forces working against each other in the nucleus eventually cancel each other out.
Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, “You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?” And I answered, “binary fission.” He wanted to know if you could call it “fission” alone, and I said you could. Frisch the sketch artist, good at visualizing as his aunt was not, had metamorphosed his liquid drop into a dividing living cell.1016
The next day, in a letter to George Uhlenbeck at Columbia, “quite something” became “might very well blow itself to hell.”
He cupped his hands as if he were holding a ball. “A little bomb like that,” he said simply, for once not lightly mocking, “and it would all disappear.”1075
that “changing from an odd number of neutrons to an even number of neutrons released one or two MeV.”1093 Which meant that U235 had an inherent energetic advantage over its two competitors: it accrued energy toward fission simply by virtue of its change of mass; they did not.
had experimenters like Hahn, Strassmann and Frisch been able to coax the highly fissionable U235 out of hiding.
Szilard had known what the neutrons would mean since the day he crossed the street in Bloomsbury: the shape of things to come. “That night,” he recalled later, “there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.”1117
What did surprise me was his physique. He had come in from sailing and was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It was a massive body, very heavily muscled: he was running to fat round the midriff and in the upper arms, rather like a footballer in middle-age, but he was still an unusually strong man.
We realized that, should atomic weapons be developed, no two nations would be able to live in peace with each other unless their military forces were controlled by a common higher authority. We expected that these controls, if they were effective enough to abolish atomic warfare, would be effective enough to abolish also all other forms of war.
hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives.
Wars waged with atom bombs as regularly recurring events, that is to say, nuclear wars as institutions, do not seem reconcilable with the survival of the participating nations.
“Alex,” said Roosevelt, quickly understanding, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.”1221 “Precisely,” Sachs said. Roosevelt called in Watson. “This requires action,” he told his aide.
He always thought that weapons were very important and that this is what costs money, and this is why the Army needs such a large appropriation. But he was very interested to hear that he was wrong: it’s not weapons but the morale which wins the wars. And if this is correct, perhaps one should take a second look at the budget of the Army, and maybe the budget could be cut.1241
and then I sat down happily with a sheet of paper and a reading lamp and worked until about one o’clock at night—until I began to have hallucinations. . . . I began to see queer animals against the background of my room, and then I thought, Oh, well, better go to bed.’ ”
At that point we stared at each other and realized that an atomic bomb might after all be possible.1270
The most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar weapon.
Why start on a project which, if it was successful, would end with the production of a weapon of unparalleled violence, a weapon of mass destruction such as the world had never seen? The answer was very simple. We were at war, and the idea was reasonably obvious; very probably some German scientists had had the same idea and were working on it.”1280
You who are scientists may have been told that you are in part responsible for the debacle of today . . . but I assure you that it is not the scientists of the world who are responsible. . . . What has come about has been caused solely by those who would use, and are using, the progress that you have made along lines of peace in an entirely different cause.