The widow of a banker with two sons and a daughter, Mrs. Dresel provided the Szilards room and board. Their room was small and comfortable, but the Szilard brothers spent most of their time in an adjacent salon, a large, formal room with worn but elegant silk-upholstered furniture where they worked on their school assignments each night. The board was minimal, leading Szilard to wonder if the lodgers or their landlady was poorer.
Lunch at the Mensa, the institute’s cafeteria, never seemed filling enough, so the Szilards walked home with big appetites. Weekdays they fixed dinner in their room: usually Schrippen, the Berlin hard rolls, with butter and cold cuts; occasionally, tinned sardines. On weekends, Mrs. Dresel cooked dinner, but all she could offer was fried potatoes, occasionally served with onions or a vegetable. This was their hardiest fare of the week. The bleak diet was relieved only rarely, when food packages arrived from Mrs. Dresel’s brothers in America or on a few Sundays when the Szilards bought liverwurst and bratwurst for everyone—occasions they called their “festive meals.” Mrs. Dresel was the same age as Mrs. Szilard and easily fell into mothering Leo and Bela. Leo, especially, seemed to need her comforting attention, but he alternately respected her kindly efforts and then became impatient with her concern.
Leo soon became impatient with the maid as well for removing a bedside chair on which he routinely dropped his clothes. He continued to drop his clothes where the chair had stood, insisting to Bela that this was logical behavior. “As it is not my job to place the chair where it ought to be,” Leo announced one night, “it couldn’t be my duty either to check whether that job has been done. So I just do what I have always done and let my clothes drop on what is supposed to be there.”
This kind of persistent “logic” often drove conversations around the Dresel household, for Leo seemed to ponder everything that was said, no matter how mundane.
“Close the window; it’s cold outside,” Bela complained one evening.
“I will close the window,” Leo answered immediately, “but that will not make it less cold outside.”
Being busy and curious, the Szilards soon made friends with some fellow students. They also dispensed advice and aided anyone who asked. Bela helped with drafting; Leo, with math problems or counsel about careers. As their advice became more popular, however, the Szilards had to post a sign in the salon: Friendly Invitations to Stay a Little Longer Should Not Be Taken at Face Value.
In Berlin, Leo became friends with Budapest acquaintances he had first met during high school science competitions. One was Albert Kornfeld, an institute student for whom Szilard found a room on the floor below Mrs. Dresel’s. But because Kornfeld’s eccentric landlady alternately pestered and pampered him, he studied most nights with the Szilards. Many nights the three sat around the salon for hours, devising solutions to “problems” that others might not even imagine. To simplify and speed haircuts, for example, they agreed that barbers’ chairs should be charged with a slight electric current that would stand the customer’s hair on end for a simple mowing operation.
One problem that did exist was a drastic shortage of apartments, and Szilard had met several young men in Berlin who had married after returning from the war but could still only afford to live with their parents. His solution was a “Bride-and-Groom Exchange,” a scheme for young married couples to contract with others to swap quarters. It is only “logical,” Szilard reasoned, that living with another person’s parents would create less strife than living with your own in-laws. Szilard also devised a way for lovers to communicate secretly. His “Bride-o-Mat” was a coinoperated mail drop for people living with their families who could not risk receiving love letters at home.
During his musings in the salon at Herderstrasse, Szilard even thought of a way to hold up women’s stockings. He noticed that women in Berlin seemed preoccupied with hiking up their stockings but was mystified by how they were suspended. With no lady friend to ask about such matters, he turned to his own imagination. Szilard’s system had flexible iron threads woven into the stocking tops and two powerful magnets in the woman’s lower jacket pockets.
With such schemes Szilard probed the thin line between seriousness and humor. Rarely seen laughing or smiling as a youth, Szilard nonetheless forced humor from situations he saw as absurd or surprising, his jokes often delivered with tongue in cheek. Indeed, for most of his life Szilard admitted having trouble knowing when he was serious and when he was joking, a trait that confused both his companions and himself. His hyperactive imagination found release when Szilard asked his friends simple questions, then offered clever answers.
“Question: What is an optimist?” he often asked new acquaintances. “Answer: one who thinks that the future is uncertain.” In that sense, Szilard was not an optimist, for he usually predicted that things would get worse before they might improve.
Little had changed for the Szilard brothers since the time in 1919 when they first studied together at the Technical University in Budapest. Bela was industrious and conscientious, while Leo spent most of his time just sitting and thinking, seldom reading course books, and rarely attempting the practical exercises that were essential to engineering studies. In fact, Leo seemed not to study at all except when he struggled with quick pencil sketches for his engineering-drawing assignments. Then he became so exasperated he dropped them on Bela’s lap, expecting him to finish and copy them in India ink.
While sitting and thinking one night, Leo came up with a scheme that the Szilard brothers found very helpful. Unfamiliar with German prices, they had trouble deciding whether something that cost, say, two marks and fifty pfennig was expensive or cheap. And ceaseless postwar inflation made all values relative. To cope with this everyday confusion, Leo decreed that all prices be converted to the price of a Schrippe, the familiar hard roll sold in Berlin.
Szilard soon found himself impatient with the practical subjects taught at the institute and began daydreaming about physics. “I really lost interest in engineering,” he recalled years later, finding it too much “routine application of already established knowledge. . . “Physics was not taught at the Technical Institute but at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University (now the University of Berlin), across from the opera house on Unter den Linden in the heart of the city, and at the Institute of Physics, behind the Reichstag (Parliament) building near the Brandenburg Gate. Late one afternoon, Szilard wandered through the Tiergarten to the institute and sat in on a physics colloquium—a meeting where the latest articles from scientific journals were summarized and discussed. The topics and talk were fascinating, and soon Szilard made a weekly excursion to the colloquium. When the spring semester ended at the Technical Institute, he picked up a university catalog, eyed the pages of listings for courses and seminars, and applied. His application was delayed for two months, however, while Szilard ordered more transcripts and certificates from home, and this kept him from classes until two weeks after the winter semester began, in October 1920. But the wait was soon rewarded.
Berlin in the early 1920s was the capital of modern physics, attracting to the university and nearby research institutes the pioneers of the generation. At the university were Max Planck, Max von Laue, Walther Nernst, Fritz Haber, and James Franck. Planck, who had won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918, was considered the founder of quantum theory. He had speculated that atoms, then considered the basic building blocks of nature, did not absorb and emit energy continuously but only in discrete bundles, or “quanta,” an idea that revolutionized modern physics. With the work of Planck, a divide opened between classical (Newtonian) and modern (quantum) physics. Classes and discussions at the university constantly probed and defined that division.
Von Laue, a student of Planck’s, had received a 1914 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering X-ray diffraction by crystals. Nernst had established a “third law” of thermodynamics to describe how matter behaves at temperatures near absolute zero, for which he would soon receive the 1920 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Haber, who had directed Ge
rmany’s chemical-warfare research in World War I, received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918 for his process to synthesize ammonia from its elements. And Franck, a physicist who was then visiting Berlin from his teaching post in Göttingen, specialized in atomic structure and photosynthesis. Franck would share with Gustav Hertz the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics for their studies of electron collisions within the atom. At the time, Albert Einstein studied on his own at the Prussian Academy of Science and directed theoretical physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, a prestigious research center in Berlin’s western suburb of Dahlem. But Einstein gave a weekly seminar at the university—a meeting always crowded by faculty and the brightest invited students—and he attended other colloquia. He would receive the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics.
Szilard was excited about joining this lively academic community and valued the intellectual energy and talent around him, although he was not overawed. “I only want to know the facts of physics,” Szilard told Planck in November 1920, when he called on the professor to apply for his course. “I will make up the theories myself.” When Planck related Szilard’s remark to Franck, the two men laughed. Whether he was serious or not, they could not help liking Szilard’s cocky exuberance.7
During Szilard’s first semester at the university, from October 1920 to March 1921, he registered for ‘Theory of Temperature,” Planck’s “Exercises in Mathematics and Physics,” “General Theory of Relativity and Non- Euclidian Geometry,” von Laue’s “Proseminar in Physics,” and a “Seminar in Applied Mathematics” with Richard von Mises, a pioneer in developing a philosophical approach to probability theory. He also attended “Exercises in Integral Calculus,” a “Colloquium for Advanced Students,” “Electrotechnical Experiments” and “Electrical Engineering,” and “Practical Exercises for Beginners.” Szilard enrolled in the university’s philosophy faculty, not that of natural sciences, and in his first semester studied the “General History of Philosophy.” In fact, Szilard continued taking philosophy and ethics courses throughout his work for a Ph.D.8
Despite this heavy course load, Szilard seemed to have almost nothing to study when he returned each night to his rooms at Mrs. Dresel’s. In the salon after supper, while Bela and his colleagues from the Technical Institute pored over engineering assignments, Leo routinely sat in an armchair and thought. Sometimes he read a book; sometimes he joined in their debates. But most often he just stared ahead, as if looking through all objects in his gaze. At the university, he attended lectures and followed his professors’ remarks with intense concentration. But his true excitement with physics came in the seminars and colloquia, the often noisy meetings where scientists discussed and debated their latest ideas. When the physics colloquium convened each Thursday afternoon at the Institute of Physics, Szilard was usually there. In the front row sat the heroes of his new profession—von Laue, Nernst, and Einstein—who chided one another with pointed comments and corrections. After the formal presentations, everyone met for coffee, cakes, and more discussion.9
Szilard came to enjoy his lectures and conversations with von Laue, a formal but wry gentleman whose stiff appearance was belied by a surprising twinkle in his eyes. From von Laue, Szilard learned Einstein’s general theory of relativity and became fascinated with thermodynamics, especially for its statistical complexities and subtleties. And through von Laue, Szilard confronted “Maxwell’s demon,” a creature that would come to challenge his own impishness.
At the time, a student could take any courses he fancied and faced an examination only after as many as four years’ study. For a doctorate, a thesis that involved original scientific work was also required, on a topic posed by the student or suggested by a professor. At the beginning of the 1921 winter semester, Szilard asked von Laue to become his thesis adviser, and he suggested a topic concerned with the theory of relativity. First posed by Einstein in 1905 and expanded in 1915, the relativity theory asserted that space and time are not absolute but are relative—both in themselves and to each other. In 1911, von Laue had been the first person to write a monograph on the theory of relativity, and now he enjoyed teaching a course on the subject and leading students to understand, explain, and quantify it. But the thesis topic that von Laue posed troubled Szilard, perhaps because the basic premise had already been proven and he preferred to disprove scientific tenets.
Szilard’s mind was also engaged by statistical mechanics, which he had boldly asked Einstein to teach to a few friends that semester. When Einstein had agreed, Szilard invited the brightest people he knew, among them three Hungarian friends who would later revolutionize science: Eugene Wigner, a 1963 Nobel laureate in physics; John von Neumann, creator of game theory and developer of the modern computer; and Dennis Gabor, inventor of holography and a 1971 Nobel physics laureate. Wigner, who became a close friend of Szilard’s for much of his life, thinks that in Einstein’s seminar Szilard confronted a fundamental problem with his own scientific career. Szilard was “pleased to have helped inspire the course,” Wigner concluded years later, and he “made strong proposals in the seminar and began a long friendship with Einstein,” often visiting him at home. Yet the seminar also troubled Szilard because “it seemed to convince him he wasn’t good enough at mathematics to change theoretical physics.” Szilard might have been lazy, which he could be as often as he was stubbornly creative. Or he might have preferred to pursue other topics. “There is no need to study mathematics,” Szilard told Gabor at this time. “One can always ask the mathematician!”10
Whatever Szilard learned from Einstein in the fall of 1921 convinced him that von Laue’s thesis topic was a waste of time, for despite weeks of hard thinking, Szilard recalled, “I couldn’t make any headway with it. As a matter of fact, I was not even convinced that this was a problem that could be solved.” For almost three months, Szilard forced himself to work on the problem, but the more he thought about it and the more he scribbled his calculations and fiddled with his slide rule, the more he seemed to lose his way to a solution. When the university holidays began in December 1921, Szilard decided to stop work entirely. Back in Budapest, the Horthy regime was more repressive and anti-Semitic than ever, so a visit home seemed too risky. “Christmastime is not a time to work,” Szilard thought, “it is a time to loaf.” He decided to “just think whatever comes to my mind.”11
Through December’s damp and blustery winds Szilard walked and wondered, pacing the Tiergarten’s broad promenades and weaving through narrow streets in the nearby residential districts of Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf. Szilard in motion was a peculiar sight: his gait more a stride than a shuffle; his head cocked high, chin out, chest breathing in air and exhaling confidence. There was nothing pensive about these walks; they were times to expound on the world and its wonders, to expand on pet theories and peeves. The more he walked, Szilard discovered, the further his mind wandered from von Laue’s relativity topic. Soon Szilard was musing on the state of science itself, on the gaps between the “old” physics of Newton and the “new” physics of Planck. How, he wondered, might they be reconciled?
Szilard later recalled:
I went for long walks and I saw something in the middle of the walk. When I came home I wrote it down; next morning I woke up with a new idea and I went for another walk; this crystallized in my mind, and in the evening I wrote it down. There was an onrush of ideas, all more or less connected, which just kept on going until I had the whole theory fully developed. It was a very creative period, in a sense the most creative period in my life, where there was a sustained production of ideas.
Returning to the rooms on Herderstrasse each evening, Szilard sat in the salon scribbling his thoughts. Soon he saw a pattern, then a thread to unite his calculations, and finally a thesis of his own. He would try to use statistics rather than commonly accepted experimental evidence to confirm the second law of thermodynamics. The law posits that some heat energy is always lost when converted into mechanical work, and the proof he derived statistically seemed to apply no
t only to temperature fluctuations but to all calculated variables. “I had produced a manuscript of something which was really quite original,” Szilard wrote later. “But I didn’t dare take it to von Laue, because it was not what he had asked me to do.”
12 Instead, Szilard turned for advice to a man of comparable authority but a gentler disposition, a man he was destined to share a close relationship with as both a scientist and a friend. He called on Einstein. At first, Szilard asked for the chance to describe his recent work. The courtly professor nodded and listened intently to the calculations and their results. When Szilard had finished, he looked to Einstein for a response.
“That’s impossible,” Einstein said. “This is something that cannot be done.”
“Well, yes,” Szilard replied, “but I did it.”
“How did you do it?” Einstein wondered. “It didn’t take him five or ten minutes to see, and he liked this very much,” Szilard recalled.
This reaction from Einstein gave Szilard the courage to face von Laue once the Christmas break ended, in January 1922. Although he rarely chose to, Szilard could be deferential when necessary. Now it was necessary. He waited until after class, approached von Laue, and confessed that he had not written the paper assigned to him. But he had written a paper. Something original in thermodynamics, which was von Laue’s field. Might this new paper be considered as his dissertation for a doctorate? Von Laue looked at Szilard quizzically but took the manuscript in hand, agreed to read it, and walked out.
Genius in the Shadows Page 10