Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  Although Wigner acknowledged Szilard’s “great influence,” he also considered Szilard “a very queer person” for the political and personal twists he gave to science. “He was a very able person,” Wigner recalled, “but his interests were concerned very strongly [for] himself and for influence. . . ”23 The two friends also disagreed about human nature, Szilard arguing that much could be achieved through applied reason, Wigner questioning this faith in the powers of the mind.

  “You are a pessimist, Wigner,” Szilard declared during one walk.

  “But am I not usually right?” Wigner replied.

  “It is hard to be right and be a pessimist,” Szilard concluded.24

  Another Lutheran Gymnasium graduate whom Szilard met in Berlin, John von Neumann, was one grade behind Wigner but two grades ahead in math. In Berlin, too, von Neumann’s love of math inspired many of their conversations. All three shared the background of middle-class, nominally Jewish families in Hungary that had enrolled in Christian religions to deflect the swelling anti-Semitism after World War I: The Szilards became Calvinists; the Wigners, Lutherans; the von Neumanns, Roman Catholics. But von Neumann’s family also had more money and loftier social pretensions; his father, a successful mortgage banker, adopted the title Neumann von Margitta, which John continued to use in the late 1920s when he taught courses with Szilard at the University of Berlin. The three were usually formal, in the style of German academia, addressing one another by last names. Szilard had no nickname in Berlin; but von Neumann was sometimes called “Jancsi,” a Hungarian nickname for Johnny; and Wigner was “Jeno,” Hungarian for Eugene, and later “Wigwam.”25 Behind his back, Wigner’s friends also called him “Pineapple Head” for the shape of his pointed crown.

  In Berlin, “Johnny led a life very different from ours,” Wigner recalled. “

  He was sort of a bon vivant and went to cabarets and all that. Szilard was also different from me. Very different.”26 Yet the three Hungarians shared an intense intellectual vigor and often met on Saturdays—at Wigner’s rented room or at Mrs. Dresel’s, where Leo and Bela lived—to talk over studies and to joke about politics. They argued about anything, as long as the replies could be clever and the thinking quick. Indeed, the three became so nervously astute together that a thought could scarcely be uttered before it was understood and refuted or refined by another voice—a routine they shared into middle age.

  From what they learned at Einstein’s seminar on statistical mechanics, von Neumann developed his pioneering ideas on quantum mechanics, and Szilard tried concepts that he used in his doctoral thesis.27 A few years later, this Hungarian circle around the University of Berlin expanded to include the chemist Michael Polanyi, an acquaintance of Szilard’s from Budapest, and the Russian-born economist Jacob Marschak. The group was eager to learn economics as a way to understand Communist social developments in the Soviet Union, and in their freewheeling discussions some ideas arose that would prove important years later. At one gathering, Marschak remembered, when he was talking about the “classical” Marshallian concepts of “demand and supply equations,” von Neumann stood up and ran around the table, saying: “You can’t mean this; you must mean inequalities, not equations. For a given amount of a good, the buyer will offer at most such-and-such price, the seller will ask at least such-and-such price!” That focus on inequalities rather than equations was later developed as “mathematical programming,” Marschak reflected in the 1960s, a technique also called “feasibility sets.”28

  Szilard had first met Michael Polanyi just after the war, when he and his brother Karl led political discussions in the Galilei Circle. Michael Polanyi had trained as a doctor and served as an army medical officer, but at war’s end he returned home to complete a doctorate in chemistry, then left for Berlin. There he began research and teaching at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fiber Chemistry in Dahlem. Wigner worked as a researcher for Polanyi there and asked him to be his thesis adviser. Szilard was good friends with Polanyi and sometimes dined with him and his wife, Magda, at their apartment. Szilard also became friends with Hermann Mark, a chemist with whom he conducted X-ray experiments at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

  Szilard had no office at Dahlem or anywhere else, but wandered about the institute chatting with researchers and suggesting experiments they should try. This practice earned him the title Generaldirektor, a name for the heads of large companies. Szilard savored this nickname. He also liked spending evenings in Dahlem, when he stayed to dine at his colleagues’ homes. Mark’s wife, Mimi, sometimes saw Szilard twice a day, first when she organized sandwiches, coffee, and tea at the laboratory’s lunch room and later when he dined at their apartment, four blocks from the institute on Werderstrasse. Both high-spirited Viennese, the Marks enjoyed Szilard’s jokes and wry comments.

  Like many Jewish men of his generation in the Austro-Hungarian culture, Szilard relished clever jokes about rabbis, and in Mark’s opinion Szilard was a champion humorist. Mark’s favorite Szilard story involved two Jewish boys who called on their rabbi to settle a dispute. The rabbi was dining with his wife but consented to hear them, and the first boy explained his side of the argument.

  “You’re right,” the rabbi said. Then the second boy stated the opposite position.

  “You’re right,” the rabbi said. At this, the rabbi’s wife protested.

  “You can’t do that,” she complained. “You can’t tell one he’s right, then tell the other that he’s right.”

  “You know,” the rabbi told his wife after a thoughtful pause, “you’re also right.”29

  Jewish colleagues, such as the Viennese-born physicist Victor Weisskopf, turned this storytelling into a friendly sport. And they usually lost. At a party in Weisskopf’s Berlin apartment one night, Szilard and his host matched each other joke for joke for more than an hour. When Weisskopf could recall no more, he retreated to the bathroom, where he had hidden a Jewish joke book, and by leaving the room a few more times, he kept up with Szilard. But eventually Weisskopf realized that he was whipped: Szilard was making up his jokes as he went along.

  For his part, Szilard delighted in his colleagues’ company and their cuisine. With no kitchen of his own in his rented rooms, he tried to reciprocate for the hospitality by inviting friends to cafés and restaurants. Szilard also enjoyed a night at the movies, especially to see the comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Those Three from the Gas Station, a German comedy heavy on slapstick, left Szilard shaking with belly laughs. He also liked to read and talk about current authors, among them the Hungarian dramatist Ferenc Molnár and Polish-born novelist Sholem Asch.30

  During the 1920s in Berlin, Szilard was thin and vigorous, in contrast to his later roly-poly appearance. He was a light and erratic eater, at first from penury, later because he wasted little time at meals and seemed almost constantly in motion. Most of his nervous energy he spent moving around the university and Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. For a while he even applied his verve to tennis games with Mark and Polanyi. On the court, Szilard’s busy legs helped to compensate for poor coordination and style. After work at the institute labs in Dahlem, Mark and Szilard often walked the few blocks south to a sports club in Lichterfelde and on some afternoons made a party of their game. For these occasions Mark invited his wife, and Szilard brought a date: usually Gerda Philipsborn and once or twice Sylvia Jacobson, an attractive blond woman who worked in a downtown department store.31

  Szilard befriended Eva Striker, a niece of Michael Polanyi’s who also knew Szilard’s sister, Rose, and Victor Weisskopf. An artist and ceramic designer, Eva was passing through Berlin in November 1927, on her way to a business meeting in Hamburg, when she called on her uncle and through him met “a young man in a trench coat who spilled over with advice.” Szilard told her: “Rose is in Hamburg. She says the city is unsafe. But there is one pension which is both safe and cheap. You must stay there.”32 Eva Striker worked at pottery factories in Hamburg and in the Black Forest and returned
to Berlin in 1930. There she rented a large fifth-floor studio apartment on Tauenzienstrasse, five doors from the Romanisches Café, an artists’ and intellectuals’ haven surveying the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Kurfürstendamm. Szilard, who lived a short walk away, often dropped by the café, and Eva made a point of inviting him to her lively parties.

  Eva’s studio was bright by day, with a tall window and two terraces that overlooked a courtyard. By night the huge, dark, high-ceilinged room resembled the set of a modernist German film; gooseneck lamps lit the spare white walls, and an ornate cast-iron stove warmed one corner. Guests streamed in and out: artists and politicians, playwrights and professors, scientists and pottery workers. Weisskopf, who sublet a room in the studio for a while, remembered Eva as “magnetically attractive, both physically and intellectually, a beauty not in the sense of the movies but in the sense that her intellectual interest and openness shone through. She was always present, always completely attentive.”33

  Expressionist Emil Nolde had a studio in the same building and often dropped in for a cup of tea or a glass of wine. Also on hand was the brooding Hungarian playwright Arthur Koestler, for a while Eva’s lover, in 1930 an editor at Berliner Zeitung am Mittag and later well known for writing Darkness at Noon, a novel about Stalinist oppression. Michael Polanyi came by, along with Russian physicist Lev Landau. Both men enjoyed chatting with Szilard. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger, then teaching a course with Szilard at the university, joined some of these talks to give science a philosophical twist. At Eva’s parties Szilard also met Manes Sperber, a politically active Jewish author from Paris, and the Austrian physicist Alex Weissberg, whom Eva would marry a few years later when they moved to the Soviet Union.34 Eva met Szilard’s friend, lawyer Hans Zeisel, during one evening gathering and would later marry him, in 1938, after Weissberg disappeared in a Soviet prison camp.

  Politics sparked comments and queries from almost everyone in 1930 as the Weimar Republic tottered into the worldwide Great Depression. With political factions multiplying, almost everyone felt obliged to take sides, and arguments about the many parties flared among the academics, artists, and politicians who crowded Eva’s noisy room. But through this uproar Szilard remained strictly independent, refusing to back any party. Although he relished the give-and-take of political discourse, by this time Szilard espoused his own solution to Europe’s impending chaos: the Bund, an apolitical institution to train and employ intellectuals as government advisers and leaders.

  Szilard’s intellectual powers often ruled his social behavior, too, sometimes yanking his attention away from friends and conversations in pursuit of some fresh idea. At Eva’s parties, Szilard argued—and listened— intently; yet he could quickly fall silent, staring in a trance of concentrated thought. If the studio’s roiling conversations suddenly seemed a bore, Szilard retreated in mid-sentence to a corner, sat down, and began reading a book or paper through the smoky light. When even reading seemed banal, Szilard omitted formal farewells and simply walked out the door, seeking new friends in the multitude of his own thoughts.

  CHAPTER 6

  Einstein

  1920–1932

  In 1920 Max von Laue’s colloquium at the University of Berlin’s Institute of Physics attracted the undisputed masters of the field, including Planck, von Laue, and Einstein. Seated in the front row of the classroom, these three defined and refined quantum mechanics and nuclear physics week by week. When Leo Szilard first sat in that spring, he had joined other students in the back row of the hall. But by the time he enrolled for a doctorate at the university that fall, he had eased to the middle and then to the front row. As one session ended, Szilard approached Einstein with a question, and within a few weeks of their first encounter the two men—both intensely shy but also both childishly open with their ideas—became nodding acquaintances. This introduction began a dialogue, then a friendship, and at times a mutual dependence that would flourish for years.1

  Despite Germany’s academic formalities and the differences in their status and ages, Einstein, then forty-one, and Szilard, twenty-two, soon fell into informal and friendly discourse. Szilard enjoyed Einstein’s skeptical attitude toward science: “Oh, no,” he often said to speakers at the colloquium. “Things are not so simple.”2 Within a year of meeting Einstein, Szilard was comfortable enough to ask him to teach a seminar in statistical mechanics; and Einstein was pleased to accept. This same openness prompted Szilard to abandon the thesis topic on relativity that von Laue had assigned him and to turn to Einstein for assurance that a completely different formulation was better.

  Szilard’s relationship with von Laue was formal; he never cracked jokes in his presence and only rarely contradicted him. Von Laue respected Szilard’s keen intellect and invited him to dinner a few times but was himself so reserved that he never engaged Szilard’s freewheeling mind in rambling conversation.3

  To foster a friendship, Szilard often walked Einstein home after the colloquium: from the Institute of Physics building behind the Reichstag, around the Brandenburg Gate, and along the edge of the Tiergarten to his apartment in the nearby Schöneberg neighborhood. Einstein taught no formal courses but enjoyed meeting researchers at home, and every Wednesday he and his wife served tea and pastries for students. Chemists Hermann Mark and Michael Polanyi attended from time to time, but Szilard appeared every week. Szilard enjoyed the conversation and on his paltry budget no doubt appreciated the tasty food, but he also gained something more from Einstein’s company. For in rejecting engineering, his father’s profession, and adopting physics, Szilard saw Einstein as a father figure he could revere.

  It helped that both men were intellectual and social misfits. They enjoyed challenging the tenets of modern physics, they shared an ironic sense of humor, and gradually they also discovered a deeper bond—the comfort that links one outsider to another. For despite his international reputation, Einstein then worked outside the mainstream of atomic physics and of German science, and Szilard, who strained to be independent in his own thoughts and actions, admired this detached quality in Einstein.4 At the same time, Einstein enjoyed Szilard’s startling and playful suggestions, which he attributed to lateral thinking, to seeing connections and similarities in apparently disparate events. Einstein played the straight man to Szilard’s impetuous proposals and comments, and as it evolved, theirs became a relationship that both men seemed to savor. For a while, the two met almost every day.5

  Besides ideas, Einstein and Szilard shared the bond of shyness. “I’m not much with people,” Einstein admitted at about this time.6 And Szilard, despite his clever verbal turns in classrooms and cafés, was for much of his life a distracted loner. Their mutual friend Eugene Wigner concluded that “

  Einstein was a naturally solitary person who didn’t want his weaknesses to show and didn’t want to be helped even when they did show.”7 He could have said the same for Szilard. Yet when Szilard slumped in an armchair in Einstein’s book-lined study, fresh thoughts and rare sympathies abounded. Mental agility and intensity came naturally in this cozy, cluttered room as both men forgot the strictures and courtesies imposed by German academic life and played with their own quirky ideas.

  When alone, this shared directness was a source of joy, but outside Einstein’s study it sometimes shocked their colleagues. In a laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem, where Einstein was a consultant and Szilard a visiting researcher, Einstein one day walked to the board to sketch out and explain his ideas for an X-ray experiment.

  “But, Herr Professor.” Szilard interrupted from the front row, “what you have now said is just nonsense.” Einstein paused, thought for a second, and smiled but said nothing. Szilard was right but rude. During another seminar at the institute, Einstein and Szilard discussed the Compton effect—an increase in the wavelengths of X-rays when they collide with electrons in matter.8 Each man in turn made his point by striding to the blackboard, scribbling an equation, and sitting down again to listen. But when Szilar
d responded to one of Einstein’s points and he failed to reply, Szilard paced over to his chair and glared down.

  “Herr Professor?” Szilard asked. “Are you opposed to this statement, or don’t you understand it?” Einstein looked cowed.

  “Yes, yes,” he muttered, peering up to Szilard. “Really, you are quite right.”9

  Einstein realized that Szilard’s impertinence made him a maverick in the formal world of German academic life and once suggested a novel alternative. Soon after Szilard earned his Ph.D., Einstein asked: “Why don’t you take a job in the patent office? That would be best for you; it is not a good thing for a scientist to be dependent on laying golden eggs. When I worked in the patent office, that was my best time of all. “10 While working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office, Einstein had developed his theory of relativity.

  Although both Einstein and Szilard sought ways to unify scientific knowledge with elegantly abstract theories, they could be intensely practical as well. After Szilard read in a newspaper that a Berlin family had perished when a toxic refrigerator coolant leaked in their apartment, he and Einstein wondered how such an accident might be prevented. A failed circulating pump had leaked, so, theoretically, the simplest solution must be to build a pump that cannot leak. To prevent leaks, they reasoned, their pump must have no moving parts and thus no gaskets and sealants that might fail. The more they thought about it, the more intrigued the two became. They considered the human heart, which works by muscular contractions. What if these spasms could be duplicated, not by mechanical surfaces that move but by another force? Electromagnetic waves can be spasmodic. Might these waves propel a liquid coolant through the system’s pipes? They knew that a magnetic field would not move water. But several metals have a liquid form. Might a liquid metal, driven by magnets, circulate as the refrigerator’s coolant?