Despite the bowling balls and child's hoe that had been thrown her way as a child, MAJA EINSTEIN became her big brother's closest friend. In 1906 she moved to Bern in part to be close to him, and ended up taking a doctorate (in Romance languages) from the university there, an extremely rare achievement for a woman at the time. When Einstein began teaching at that university she—and Besso—regularly attended some of his first classes, so that the authorities would be less likely to notice how few other students Einstein was then getting.
ERNEST RUTHERFORD died suddenly in 1937, following an intestinal rupture, which was possibly linked to overvigor-ous gardening he was doing at his weekend cottage. His final words were for his wife to be sure to arrange that scholarship funds be sent to Nelson College, in New Zealand, which is where he had received the schooling that raised him from rural poverty, and prepared him for his own scholarship to England, THE CAVENDISH LABORATORY he left behind never again achieved the same preeminence in nuclear research. In time a new director shifted it increasingly toward biology. This included welcoming a young American, James Watson, who it was thought might work well with the physics-trained Francis Crick, in using the Cavendish's resources to try investigating the structure of DNA.
HANS GEIGER, Rutherford's young man who'd had the knack of making such useful radiation counters, returned to Germany, and soon assumed senior academic positions. His years in England had, however, little effect in making him a believer in tolerance or freedom. He was one of the most active of senior German physicists in supporting the rise of Hitler, and welcoming students with swastikas. He turned against his Jewish colleagues, including ones who'd helped him over the years; as Hans Bethe and others have noted, he seemed to enjoy coldly turning down any of their requests for aid in obtaining foreign posts.
SIR JAMES CHADWICK was holidaying with his family on the Continent when the German invasion of Poland began in 1939, and although he was assured by his hosts that there was no chance of being caught behind enemy lines, he brought his family back to England with remarkable alacrity. Having stood up to Oppenheimer enough to impress General Groves, he was brought into the centers of power in Washington, and turned out to be one of the most effective administrators of the Manhattan Project. He lived into the 1970s, but had been so distressed by what the bomb explosions could lead to that "I had then to start taking sleeping pills. It was the only remedy. I've never stopped since then. It's 28 years, and I don't think I've missed a single night in all those 28 years."
ENRICO FERMI had been at ease with virtually everyone he worked with in Italy, and repeated the process in America. He worked hard to master American colloquialisms, and admitted failure in his Americanization efforts only when it came to clearing the lawn of his first suburban house of crabgrass—for did it not, he and his wife inquired, have as much of a right to grow there as anything else?
His participation in the Manhattan Project was central to its success, but as with a number of the participating scientists, he was hit by cancer when he was still only in middle age. He was notably calm in the hospital room during his last few months. When the Hindu Chandrasekhar came in, unsure what to say, Fermi put him at ease by asking, with a smile, if Chandra could tell him if he was going to come back as an elephant the next time.
America's largest high-energy physics research center is located about 30 miles southwest of Chicago. It is called FERMILAB.
OTTO HAHN received the Nobel Prize for the work that Lise Meitner had led him toward. Instead of explaining that this was a mistake, and that she should have been honored, even if only jointly, he began to write her out of the story. In his first postwar interviews he started saying that she had merely been a junior research assistant; later he pretended (believed?) that he'd barely heard of her at all.
For many years, the workbench Meitner had used in Berlin, with all the devices she'd accumulated for the key experiment, was on display in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It was labeled the Arbeitstisch von Otto Hahn: The workbench of Otto Hahn.
As a mark of Hahn's fame, when a new chemical element, number 105 was created, it was named HAHNIUM. In 1997, however, the name vanished from the the Periodic Table; the new element was officially relabeled Dubnium in honor of the Russian city where it had first been created.
FRITZ STRASSMANN was disappointed at Hahn's antics, and refused the 10 percent of the Nobel Prize money that Hahn later offered him. He kept his liberal sympathies even in the midst of the war, hiding the Jewish pianist Andrea Wolffenstein for several months in his Berlin apartment— for which he was later honored at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem. After the war Strassmann wrote to Meitner, asking her to return to Germany, but noting that he'd understand if she didn't.
LISE MEITNER was hurt at what her lifelong partner Hahn did to her, but put it down to his desire to suppress everything about the recent German past. She left Stockholm for Cambridge, England, and in the 1960s could be seen as a slender very old woman, browsing in the bookshops. Into her mid-eighties she kept a notebook of questions to ask her young nephew. These included topics in current theoretical physics, as well as perplexing vocabulary words such as highfalutin and juke box. She died in relative obscurity in October 1968, a few weeks after the world-famous Hahn.
In the 1970s feminist scholars began to reexplore her career. When a new chemical element, number 109 in the Periodic Table, was created in 1982, it was named MEITNERIUM.
The young nephew, ROBERT FRISCH, managed to get out of Denmark before the German army invaded. Successfully reaching England, he was barred from classified work on radar because he was an enemy alien, and so had time for the computations that showed that much less uranium than suspected would be enough for a bomb. This was the basis for the classified report that jump-started the U.S. bomb project when it was finally brought out of Lyman Briggs's safe.
Frisch played an important role at Los Alamos, though by March 1945 he was back in Cambridge, where he happened to be at the Cavendish laboratory when the young Fred Hoyle came by, in need of some listings of nuclear masses for an idea he'd had about the way elements were formed inside stars. Frisch supplied them.
After the war, with his first name now "Otto," Frisch continued to be a firm anglophile, though he always retained a suspicion that "the weather" was something which had only recently arrived in Britain, this being the only reasonable explanation as to why the populace commented on it so frequently. To his great pleasure, in 1947 he was offered a named professorship at Cambridge—so allowing him to share in the tradition as had an earlier immigrant, Ernest Rutherford.
As soon as the bombs to be used against Japan were delivered, J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER went back to being as sarcastic as ever, suddenly addressing the staff who remained at Los Alamos as second raters. He also applied his sharp tongue to Lewis Strauss, head of the new Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), as well as to Edward Teller, which meant that he had serious enemies when a witch-hunting AEC committee investigated his 1930s attendance at left-wing parties, as well as his moral reticence about the hydrogen bomb. In 1954 he was purged from all government service.
LESLIE GROVES always kept a soft spot for Oppenheimer. Retired from the army, and an executive at Remington Rand, he refused to condemn Oppenheimer wholeheartedly (as most other army staff did) at the 1954 hearings. Groves always held that Oppenheimer was "A real genius. . . . Lawrence is very bright, [but] he's not a genius, just a good hard worker. Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn't know about. He doesn't know about sports."
Using material from Lawrence's lab, EMILIO SEGRÈ had become the first person to create the element technetium. He also managed to stay at the Berkeley Lab long enough to become the codiscoverer of plutonium, the element used in the Nagasaki explosion. At the reduced salary Lawrence gave him, there had been no chance of bribing any consular officials to get his elderly parents out of Italy. His mother was cap
tured during a Nazi manhunt in October 1943, and murdered soon after that; his father, who had been safely hidden in a papal palace, died of natural causes the next year.
When the war was over Segre went to his father's tomb, scattering a small sample of technetium from Lawrence's lab over it: "The radioactivity was minuscule, but its half-life of hundreds of thousands of years will last longer than any other monument I could offer."
As soon as Denmark was liberated, GEORGE DE HEVESY went back to the jar of strong acid in which he'd dissolved the Nobel gold medals at Niels Bohr's Copenhagen institute, and simply precipitated them back out. The Nobel foundation then recast them, and they were returned to their rightful owners. When de Hevesy had first dissolved them he'd only just recovered from a full-fledged midlife crisis, convinced that at age fifty he was past the age for fresh invention. The recovery was quite complete, for soon he had a Nobel medal of his own, awarded for work he did—at an age when most physicists' creativity is long gone—on radioactive tracers.
All laureates are offered Swedish citizenship, but de Hevesy was one of the few who took that up, settling in Stockholm for the rest of his long life. In the 1960s, he could sometimes be seen strolling in La Jolla, California, an erect elderly man, happy visiting with his American grandchildren, telling them what he remembered of life growing up in the 1880s in a baronial palace in Hungary.
ERNEST LAWRENCE came out of the war in triumph, and succeeded in raising more and more funds, and building larger and larger machines, until finally he proposed a cyclotron that violated the special theory of relativity, and so was physically impossible. None of his young men would dare to explain that to him, however, and the failure of his efforts to get it to work ended up wrecking his health. A little before he died, in 1958, he told a group of graduate students at the University of Illinois: "Why, fellows, you don't want a big machine. There's too much emphasis these days on sheer size for its own sake."
WERNER HEISENBERG became the grand old man of German science, and after a brief six-month internment in the luxury of a grand country house in Cambridgeshire, England, was soon respected worldwide as a sage and philosopher. He rarely spoke of the war, but when he did, would give the impression through hints and nodding gestures that he had been able to make a bomb all along, but had willfully led the research in the wrong direction, to keep the Nazi government from getting the weapon.
Heisenberg never realized he was being recorded at the Cambridgeshire country house.
HEISENBERG: Microphones installed? [laughing] Oh no, they're not as cute as all that. I don't think they know the real Gestapo methods; they're a hit old-fashioned in that respect.
But when the recordings were released a half century later they proved Heisenberg's cover story false. There was a fine justice in Heisenberg and the others being sequestered there, for it was only a short distance from the other elegant country house that the British secret service kept, where the six Norwegians who destroyed his project had prepared for their mission.
Heisenberg almost hadn't survived to be captured, for the predecessor of the CIA had sent an assassin, the ex-athlete Moe Berg, against him during that final Swiss trip. Berg was planted in the audience of the seminar Heisenberg gave in Zurich. If Heisenberg showed evidence that his bomb project was on the right tracks, he would be killed. Berg had a gun, and understood some undergraduate-level physics, but the talk was too technical for him to follow. His scrawled notes from that meeting still survive in official archives: "As I listen, I am uncertain—see: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle—what to do to H. . . ." He left Heisenberg alone.
KNUT HAUKELID survived the war, despite the vast manhunt that began after his sinking of the Lake Tinnsjo ferry. Transcripts from Heisenberg's internment finally clarified the significance of that sinking, where the equivalent of about 600 liters of concentrated heavy water had gone down. (In the following extract, Heisenberg is speaking in English, thus the imperfect grammar):
HEISENBERG: We have tried to make a machine which can be made out of ordinary uranium. . . .
(QUESTIONER): With a little bit of enrichment?
HEISENBERG: Yes. That worked out very nicely and so we were interested in it.
(Pause)
After our last experiments, if we had 500 liters more heavy water, I don't doubt that we had got the machine going. . . .
Haukelid became an officer in the Norwegian army; another member of the original commando team put Thor Heyerdahl at ease by sailing with him on Kon-Tiki.
The heavy water facility at VEMORK continued in operation till the early 1970s, when, having outlived its economic usefulness, it was blown up by Norsk Hydro engineers. Some of the rubble was removed by truck and train, but much was left in place, and simply paved over. Several thousand visitors walk over it each year, for the old generating station behind it has been converted into an excellent museum, and the location of the commando raid is directly under the route to the entrance.
The I. G. FARBEN company, which had taken over the plant's operation during the war, was briefly broken up by Allied authorities, after the Nuremberg trials showed its executives profiting from the purchase and subsequent death of human slaves. One of its main constituents, the BAYER company, though popularly known just for its aspirin, continued to be a major force in general chemicals worldwide.
The BERLIN AUER factories, where female slaves from Sachsenhausen had been worked to death to supply the German project with uranium oxides, almost survived intact till the end of the war. In the last few months, though, they were obliterated by Allied bombers acting on Groves's instructions, in large part to keep them from falling into Russian hands. Almost all the Berlin Auer executives avoided jail sentences, and indeed even before the war ended had been thinking of their future. American investigators found that all Europe's supplies of radioactive thorium had been purchased by an unknown buyer—it was the Berlin Auer company, which planned to use it to make white-glowing toothpaste once more.
War crime trials in Oslo after the war led to the conviction of several guards—both Germans, and Norwegian collaborators— responsible for the deaths of the surrendered BRITISH AIRBORNE TROOPS. Many of the troops had been thrown into shallow graves, with their hands tied behind their backs with barbed wire. They were disinterred for reburial; the head of the Norwegian collaborationist government, Vidkun Quisling, was forced to help dig up the remains of other prisoners who'd been killed with them.
The once-secret reactor at HANFORD, WASHINGTON, which had played such an important role in creating the plutonium used in the Nagasaki and later bombs, continued as a central site for the production of American nuclear weapons. After several decades of service, though, a changed national mood increasingly saw it as a center of environmental despoliation: cleanup costs for its leaked or inadequately stored radiation were estimated at $30-$50 billion.
CECILIA PAYNE'S thesis advisor nearly brought her career to a halt by making sure she was kept from any of the new electronic equipment coming in. He also ensured, as director of Harvard's observatory, that when she did give courses, they weren't listed in the Harvard or Radcliffe catalog; she even found out, years later, that she had been classified as "equipment expenses" when her salary came due. When the worst of the sexism ended, and a decent director of the observatory took over in the postwar era, it was too late. She had such a heavy teaching load by then that "there was literally no time for research, a setback from which I have never fully recovered."
Instead, she became one of the kindest supporters of the next generation at Radcliffe, always available for long talks to students at loose ends. She also kept intellectually nimble by learning languages, to add to the Latin, Greek, German, French, and Italian she'd been comfortable with when she'd arrived in America. "Icelandic was a minor challenge," her daughter wrote, though "I cannot say she truly mastered it." Cecilia Payne had the pleasure of seeing that daughter become an astronomer—and publishing several papers with her.
ARTHUR STAN
LEY EDDINGTON became increasingly resistant to the main trends of modern astronomy. One of his final works, published in 1939, had a chapter beginning "I believe there are 15 747 724 136 275 002 577 605 653 061 181 555 468 044 717 914 527 116 709 366 231 425 076 185 631 031 296 protons in the universe, and the same number of electrons." He was perplexed that professional astronomers stopped paying any attention to him.
In 1950, four years after FRED HOYLE'S paper on bomblike implosion inside stars, the merits of Cambridge nepotism were demonstrated when a director of radio talks from his old college overlooked the stern injunction against Hoyle in BBC files, and invited him anyway to give a series of broadcasts on astronomy. In the rush to prepare a script for the final talk, Hoyle coined a somewhat mocking phrase for a then-unproven theory about the origins of the universe. He called it the "Big Bang."
The BBC talks and subsequent book were such a success that not only did Hoyle and his wife get enough money to buy their first refrigerator, but it led to a career popularizing science, which he carried on in parallel with his academic research. This allowed him to put enough savings aside that in 1972, when he told Cambridge administrators he would resign if they continued going back on their word about funding for the successful astronomical research center he'd created, he was able to startle them ("Fred won't resign. Nobody resigns a Cambridge Chair"), and politely walk out. He has continued to publish innovative papers, some of them flighty, some of them profoundly sensible—as has been the wont of top scientists from Newton on. If it weren't for the way his Yorkshire honesty irritated the old guard in Britain and the astronomical community generally, it's generally accepted that he would have long since been granted a Nobel Prize for his work on the formation of the elements.
E=mc2 Page 19