by P. D. Smith
By the end of Döblin’s novel, people have turned their backs on cities and science to re-establish agricultural communities: humankind returns to nature. The message of the book is clear: ‘We were not mature enough for these things.’45 Döblin, who was trained in the medical sciences, depicts a civilization which has not grown wise in proportion to its power. His warning is clear and parallels that in Goethe’s Faust: greater knowledge does not necessarily lead to wisdom and self-understanding. The fears expressed in Döblin’s novel echoed across the decades. Many of his themes would return in the fiction of the 1950s, when writers imagined the atomic mushroom cloud billowing above their cities.
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht had been a medical orderly during the war. In 1918 he caused uproar when he recited his poem ‘The Legend of the Dead Soldier’ in public. The poem tells how a dead soldier was dug up by medical men, revived with a ‘fiery schnapps’ and sent back to the trenches to fight for the fatherland. In the previous year, a short play published in the British Strand Magazine had described a similarly grotesque scenario.
‘Blood and Iron’ appeared in Strand in 1917. Perley Poore Sheehan and Robert H. Davis’s dramatic sketch expresses the anger and resentment now felt by many people towards scientists. A German scientist has created a half-man, half-machine: a ‘supersoldier’.46 This World War I RoboSoldier has a telescopic eye with night vision, a metal leg and hands, and metal teeth which can ‘bite barbed wire in twain’. Before the war, even superweapons had served the best interests of humanity. But now the scientist places his lethal creation at the service of the unmistakably Teutonic Emperor. As Fritz Haber had said, at times of war a scientist’s loyalty was not to humanity, but to his ruler.
The scientist in ‘Blood and Iron’ treats the Emperor with ‘an air of fawning enthusiasm’. He is ‘a small, thin man’ with ‘bulging eyes, horn spectacles’ and – rather predictably for a scientist – a ‘heavy head of grey hair’. No matter how badly wounded the soldier is, boasts the scientist, science can now return him to the trenches as a ‘supersoldier – no longer a bungling, mortal man – but a beautiful, efficient machine!’ He promises the Emperor ‘a million cripples transformed into a million fighting units’.
For turning shattered men into superweapons, the scientist is immediately awarded the highest honour the Emperor can bestow: the Order of Merit. ‘You have brought the greatest advance in the history of civilization,’ proclaims the Emperor. As in Brecht’s poem, the man of science is no longer the saviour of the people but the servant of the despised regime. It would be a theme Brecht himself would return to many years later in his great cold-war play on the misuse of science, The Life of Galileo.
But despite his mechanized body, the supersoldier – who is known only as Number 241 – still has a mind of his own. In halting, robotic tones he tells the Emperor that the advance of science means that he will now be brought twice to the slaughter. Now that science can resurrect men, even death cannot guarantee a release from the suffering of war: ‘By – doubling – the – strength – of – your – army – you – have – multiplied – human – grief.’ The powerful implication of ‘Blood and Iron’ is that progress has been perverted. Science no longer sets people free, but enslaves them. The drama ends with the scientific supersoldier killing the Emperor with his bare, metallic hands.
Just as it seemed as though people were becoming disillusioned with scientists, a new scientific hero hit the headlines in 1919, one whose fame would soon exceed even Röntgen’s or Marie Curie’s. On 6 November, almost exactly a year after the Kaiser had abdicated, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity was spectacularly confirmed. Earlier that year, two scientific expeditions had set out to observe an eclipse of the sun from West Africa and Brazil. The results of the British expeditions were announced in Burlington House, in London’s Piccadilly, at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society.
The atmosphere in the room was tense as the assembled scientists waited for the announcement. It felt like a scene from a Greek tragedy, recalled Alfred North Whitehead, who was in the audience. The only difference was that in the modern era the laws of physics had become the decrees of fate. Standing beneath a portrait of the most famous physicist of them all, Sir Isaac Newton, the president of the Royal Society stressed the significance of the occasion: ‘This is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day.’47 The photographs of stars visible near the eclipsed sun bore out Einstein’s prediction that the sun’s mass would warp the geometry of space, causing starlight to be bent. A new understanding of gravity had been born.
The next day, even the usually cautious London Times could hardly conceal its excitement. REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE, shouted its headline, NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE– NEWTONIAN IDEAS OVERTHROWN.48 Einstein could only sigh at such bold claims. On the wall of his spartan study in Haberlandstrasse was a picture of his scientific hero, Sir Isaac Newton. Later he even felt moved to apologize in print to the great English physicist. ‘Newton, forgive me; you found just about the only way possible in your age for a man of highest reasoning and creative power.’49 Although in politics and even in his science Einstein was described as a Bolshevist, he was in reality a reluctant revolutionary.50
Arthur Eddington, the Cambridge professor of astronomy who had led the West African expedition to observe and photograph the eclipse, wrote to Einstein the following month to tell him that ‘all England is talking about your theory’.51 A Quaker and a pacifist, Eddington had refused to fight in the war. ‘I cannot believe that God is calling me to go out to slaughter men,’ he had bravely told the draft board.52
That December in Germany, the popular Berlin Illustrirte Zeitung depicted a brooding Einstein on its cover. The caption read ‘A new celebrity in world history: Albert Einstein. His research signifies a complete revolution in our concepts of nature and is on a par with the insights of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton.’53 This solemn photograph of Einstein, with his head resting on his hand and his eyes cast downwards showed a man who has stared deeply into the nature of things. He appears as a modern seer or even a wizard, a nickname regularly applied to Edison in America. In the atomic age, the scientific wizard would even have a magic formula that mystified and terrified the public in equal measure. Following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein was depicted on the cover of Time against a mushroom cloud on which was written his equation E = mc2.
Einstein was unimpressed by his new-found fame. He told a friend that ‘the newspaper drivel about me is pathetic’.54 To his former wife, Mileva Marić, he wrote: ‘I feel now something like a whore. Everybody wants to know what I am doing all the time.’55 Einstein never sought the limelight, but once it had found him he was happy to use it to highlight what he felt were deserving causes, such as pacifism and Zionism. Fame had its downside, though. Although he liked nothing better than to puff away at a cigar, Einstein was shocked when a man from a tobacco company visited him one day and asked if he would allow his now famous face to be printed on a box of their latest product, ‘Relativity Cigars’. Without a word, Einstein showed him the door. Despite all the media frenzy, fame never went to his head – although, as he said to a Swiss friend in 1919, ‘with fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon’.56
In 1919 and 1920, Einstein gave his first series of candid interviews to journalist Alexander Moszkowski. Their conversation covered a wide range of subjects from atomic energy to the education of women. His views turned out to be surprisingly conservative on both these issues. Women were not natural scholars, he said, and he refused to agree that the latent energy in matter, revealed by his equation E = mc2, would ‘be the panacea of all human woe’. Moszkowski was disappointed on this last point: ‘I drew an enthusiastic picture of a dazzling Utopia, an orgy of hopeful dreams, but immediately noticed that I received no support from Einstein for these visionary aspirations.�
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‘At present,’ Einstein replied,
there is not the slightest indication of when this energy will be obtainable, or whether it will be obtainable at all. For it would presuppose a disintegration of the atom effected at will – a shattering of the atom. And up to the present there is scarcely a sign that this will be possible. We observe atomic disintegration only where Nature herself presents it, as in the case of radium, the activity of which depends upon the continual explosive decomposition of its atom. Nevertheless, we can only establish the presence of this process, but cannot produce it; Science in its present state makes it appear almost impossible that we shall ever succeed in so doing.57
But a few months later, Ernest Rutherford announced that he had done just that. In the final year of the war, he had failed to attend government meetings to report on his research into submarine detection. Explaining his absence, he told the committee quite bluntly that his experiments were more important – he had disintegrated the atom. Rutherford had found that when he fired alpha particles into a container of nitrogen gas, atoms of oxygen and nuclei of hydrogen were created. He deduced that the alpha particles were punching the hydrogen nuclei – which he later christened protons – out of the nitrogen atoms.
Rutherford published his results in 1919. ‘We must conclude’, he wrote,
that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated under the intense forces developed in a close collision with a swift alpha particle, and that the hydrogen atom which is liberated formed a constituent part of the nitrogen nucleus… The results as a whole suggest that if alpha particles – or similar projectiles – of still greater energy were available for experiment, we might expect to break down the nuclear structure of many of the lighter atoms.58
This was the realization of the alchemists’ dream of transmutation: of transforming one element into another. The newspapers claimed that he had split the atom, but the curmudgeonly Rutherford insisted on calling it ‘artificial disintegration’.59 In 1920 he suggested that protons and electrons might join together in the atomic nucleus to form ‘neutral doublets’.60 This is the first mention of the particle that would one day revolutionize atomic physics. The neutron, discovered in 1932 by his colleague James Chadwick, would fulfil Rutherford’s dream of an electrically neutral particle that could be fired into the heart of an atom and blow it clean apart.
When Moszkowski raised the subject of atomic energy again with Einstein, after Rutherford’s results had been published, Einstein ‘declared with his usual frankness, one of the treasures of his character, that he had now occasion to modify somewhat the opinion he had shortly before expressed’, the journalist wrote. Nevertheless, Einstein was still sceptical about exploiting atomic energy: ‘in Rutherford’s operations the atom is treated as if he were dealing with a fortress: he subjects it to a bombardment and seeks to fire into the breach. The fortress is still certainly far from capitulating, but signs of disruption have become observable. A hail of bullets caused holes, tears, and splinterings.’61
Clearly Einstein still believed that the dream of unlimited supplies of energy was a long way off. However, when he was asked by a newspaper later that year, he responded more positively. On 25 July 1920, the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper ran a feature article under the headline 1 GRAM OF MATTER = 3,000 TONNES OF COAL. As French demands for German coal (part of the huge burden of reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty) became ever more difficult to meet, scientists were being questioned about possible alternative energy sources. Haber, Nernst, Planck and Einstein all contributed to the feature. In the light of Rutherford’s transmutation of nitrogen, Einstein comments that ‘it is not improbable, that from this will come new energy sources of enormous power’.62
Alexander Moszkowski was already convinced that the popular dream of unlimited atomic energy was within reach, now that Rutherford had shown that ‘it is possible to split up atoms of one’s own free will’. Indeed, he felt there was another reason for optimism: ‘It seems feasible that, under certain conditions, Nature would automatically continue the disruption of the atom, after a human being had intentionally started it, as in the analogous case of a conflagration which extends, although it may have started from a mere spark.’63 Moszkowski had put his finger on the key to atomic energy: a chain reaction.
Fiction too explored this possibility. A couple of years later, the English chemist and popular novelist Alfred Walter Stewart, under his pen name of J. J. Connington, described how Rutherford had shattered the atom. In his scientific thriller Nordenholt’s Million (1923), mutated bacteria destroy the nitrogen in the soil, threatening humanity with starvation. It is a dynamic technocrat, Nordenholt, and atomic energy that eventually save the human race from extinction. The atom’s energy is released by an explosive chain reaction. The physicist, who is working with uranium, describes how:
if we could trap that store of energy which evidently lies within the atom we should have Nature at our feet. She would be done for, beaten, out of the struggle: and we should simply have to walk over the remains and take what we wanted.
To achieve his goal, Connington’s physicist is trying to create an explosive chain reaction in matter. He graphically depicts this using a row of matchboxes:
it requires a certain force in a blow from my finger to knock down one of these boxes; and if I take ten boxes separately, it would need ten times that force to throw them all flat. But if I arrange them so that as each one falls it strikes its neighbour, then I can knock the whole lot down with a single touch. The first one collides with the second, and the second in falling upsets the third, and so on to the end of the line. Well, that is what I have been following out amongst the atoms.64
Ten years later, when James Chadwick announced the discovery of the neutron – the particle that could penetrate the atomic nucleus – Leo Szilard was the first to see that this was Moszkowski’s ‘spark’ that would ignite the atomic fire. Neutrons would create an atomic domino effect. Alexander Moszkowski was nearer the truth than he suspected when he concluded his interview with the discoverer of relativity in 1919: ‘Einstein’s wonderful “Open Sesame”, mass times the square of the velocity of light, is thundering at the portals.’65
III
The Dark Heart of Matter
The creative scientist has much in common with the artist and the poet. Logical thinking and an analytical ability are necessary attributes of a scientist but they are far from sufficient for creative work. Those insights in science which have led to a breakthrough operate on the level of the subconscious. Science would run dry if all scientists were crank turners and if none of them were dreamers.
Leo Szilard
8
The Capital of Physics
The deeper we search the more we find there is to know, and as long as human life exists, I believe it will always be so.
Albert Einstein (1933)
On 6 January 1920, a young Hungarian stepped off the train in Berlin after a long and tiring journey. The 21-year-old Leo Szilard had left his home in Budapest on Christmas Day. The photograph in his passport showed a serious but fresh-faced man with large and wistful eyes, reminiscent of the young Einstein.
When this portrait was taken just a few weeks earlier, Szilard had been staring into an unknown and possibly dangerous future. He knew one thing for certain: he urgently needed to leave his homeland. Since the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, Hungary had been swinging between political extremes of the left and the right. Béla Kun’s Communist government lasted just a few months before it was kicked out in autumn 1919 by a right-wing regime led by the former commander of the Austro-Hungarian navy, Miklós Horthy de Nagyba´nya.
It soon became clear to Szilard that he was not wanted in Horthy’s Hungary. When he and his younger brother, Bela, tried to resume their engineering studies at Budapest’s Technical University in September, they were confronted at the entrance by a group of right-wing students.
‘You can’t study here!
You’re Jews!’ they shouted. When the brothers tried to argue, they were beaten up.1 Traumatized by this treatment, Szilard immediately applied for an exit visa. At first he was turned down. According to Horthy’s secret police, he and his brother were among the top five ‘most aggressive and dangerous’ Communist students at the university.2 They were being followed by plain-clothes police.
Leo and Bela were certainly not dangerous revolutionaries. In spring 1919, the brothers had founded the Hungarian Association of Socialist Students, an amateurish attempt at political organization. At its one and only meeting, Leo handed out copies of his plans for socialist tax reform. He had also attended meetings of the Galilei Circle, an influential discussion group of radical students and intellectuals. But more importantly for the anti-Semitic Horthy regime, the Szilards were Jewish.
Eventually, after an anxious wait and the payment of a number of bribes, Leo received his exit visa. Bela would follow in his brother’s footsteps a few months later. The visa was valid only for travel from 25 December to 5 January. When Christmas Day finally arrived, Leo was so terrified of being stopped by Horthy’s secret police at the train station that he bought a one-way ticket to Vienna on a Danube steamship. He lugged on board a large suitcase crammed with books and clothing. Tucked beneath the inner sole of a shoe in his luggage was a bundle of banknotes his father had given him. It was most of the family’s savings.
Szilard sat on the steamer to Vienna, watching his homeland pass slowly by and anxiously wondering what the future had in store for him. A man on the bench opposite noticed his long face and asked why he was looking so sad.