What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

The plan worked, to a point: the letter did get FDR’s attention, but he appointed Lyman Briggs, the ineffectual leader of the Bureau of Standards, to head a Uranium Committee. Briggs and his committee did little, and the project stalled for over a year while Hitler occupied Denmark, captured Paris, and relentlessly bombed London. When the US government finally started to seriously investigate atomic power in the fall of 1941, Wigner met with Arthur Compton, an American physicist who was preparing a report for FDR’s Top Policy Group on the feasibility of developing atomic bombs. “[Wigner] urged me, almost in tears, to help get the atomic program rolling,” wrote Compton. “His lively fear that the Nazis would make the bomb first was the more impressive because from his life in Europe he knew them so well.”