It would be years before it became apparent, but Oliphant had also laid bare the secret that sits at the malignant heart of the stockpiled weapons so imminently capable of destroying the planet that the sun’s radiation nurtures. While the enormous temperature and pressure generated by the sun can never be reproduced on earth, the explosion of an atomic (fission) bomb within a concentrated mass of deuterium can trigger nuclear fusion on a huge scale, which is why the hydrogen bomb (as it became known) poses such a chilling threat. In addition, the tritium that Oliphant had discovered – with Harteck’s experimental input, and Rutherford’s interpretive clarity – would also prove a vital ingredient in the nuclear warheads that superseded the atomic bomb.
More than once in the ensuing years, Mark Oliphant was nominated – without reward – for a Nobel Prize for his work in the successful creation, explanation and appellation of tritium. The first occasion was in 1956, when his name was put forward for the physics prize by Croatian-born Leopold Ruzicka, who had become a Nobel laureate (in chemistry) in 1939.
A second testimonial was compiled for the Nobel Foundation in 1975 by Dr John Hughes from the Australian National University’s physical sciences research school, which Oliphant had founded after leaving Britain in 1950. Hughes argued that, in the wake of the first OPEC oil crisis, Oliphant’s discovery of tritium raised the possibility that hydrogen might solve humans’ ongoing energy dilemma: a prospect still advanced by scientists today.
Deuterium–tritium fuel will have the lowest ignition threshold in both magnetic and inertially confined thermonuclear reactors of the future and could see mankind through a critical 50–200 year period whilst pure deuterium, and possibly hydrogen–boron, reactors are perfected.
Not only has Oliphant’s discovery of tritium led to the promise of the lowest threshold fuels for thermonuclear reactors of the 21st Century but, from the viewpoint of fundamental research into the physics of super-dense matter in the laboratory, Oliphant’s tritium can be compressed to a higher density than that possible with any other material under identical experimental conditions. The discovery of tritium must, therefore, be ranked as a major discovery in experimental physics which may not be fully appreciated until the 21st Century.4
Oliphant and Rutherford’s paper detailing the meticulous processes involved in unearthing the two new isotopes and determining their respective masses has been described as being ‘of little less moment than [Otto] Hahn and [Fritz] Strassmann’s 1939 paper on the fission of the uranium nucleus’.5 For the latter, Hahn would earn a Nobel Prize – albeit bestowed while he was held under house arrest in England during the final phase of the Second World War. But because Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, that honour will forever elude Mark Oliphant.
After he and Rutherford finalised the paper and sent it off for publication in Nature, Oliphant allowed himself to bask briefly in his share of the glow of achievement that continued to illuminate the Cavendish.
‘Only in the [Second World] War was I to experience such a hectic few days of work,’ he would recall of the brief but brilliant period that introduced hydrogen-3 and helium-3 to the world. ‘But at no other time have I felt the same sense of accomplishment, nor such comradeship, as Rutherford radiated that day [when the final draft of the paper was submitted to Nature].’6
Yet the most rewarding of Mark Oliphant’s scientific triumphs had played out against the dark backdrop of desperate personal despair.
* * *
The successes Oliphant had enjoyed in the laboratory throughout physics’ gilded days had brought with them further financial comfort. As a result, in late summer of 1933, he arranged for his parents to take the six-week voyage from Adelaide in order to witness first-hand the life their first-born – with his wife and son – had built in Britain.
While Rosa and Beatrice Oliphant lavished love on Geoffrey, now nearing his third birthday, Mark and Baron took the ferry from Dover for a few days’ sightseeing on the Continent. It was the first weekend of autumn; the onset of the winter, from which Mark had so adamantly shielded his son during their visit to Australia two years earlier, still remained a distant enemy.
As the Oliphant men wandered among the decorated guildhalls and regal landmarks of Brussels’ Grote Markt, Rosa and her mother-in-law took Geoffrey to the park near their home in the village of Grantchester (three kilometres from Cambridge, where Mark had found larger premises during his wife and son’s extended stay in Australia in late 1931). The little boy ran helter-skelter across the grass, which was tinged yellow in places by the summer just passed, and beamed at his mum and grandma as he was propelled backwards and forwards on his favourite swing-set. ‘He seemed as happy as a king,’ Rosa would remember of that Monday afternoon, less than a week before she turned thirty.7
That night, Geoffrey slept in a cot that had been shifted into Rosa’s room to accommodate the house guests, and she was wakened in the small hours by the chilling sounds of her son in obvious distress. The strangled grunting and rasping coming from his tiny bed were accompanied by a raging fever that Rosa detected the moment she reached down to cradle the traumatised boy.
By sunrise, his condition had worsened, and a doctor was summoned to the house from Cambridge. Rosa and Beatrice’s anguish over Geoffrey’s wellbeing was compounded by their bewilderment as to how they might alert Mark and Baron to the escalating crisis.
Rosa sought out her closest Cambridge friend, and Elizabeth Cockcroft rushed to be with her. Having lost their own infant son years before, the Cockcrofts inherently understood Rosa’s predicament as Geoffrey continued to deteriorate. A definitive diagnosis could not be reached and, with antibiotic medicine barely grown to infancy in the 1930s, his outlook was dire.
Mark had left only a bare outline of his itinerary, and it showed plans for him and Baron to travel from Belgium’s capital to Bruges on that Tuesday, 5 September. So John Cockcroft cabled an urgent message to the chief of police in the Belgian medieval market town. ‘Please do utmost to find Dr Oliphant tall Australian wearing glasses arriving from Brussels today staying tonight Bruges ask to return immediately child dangerously ill. Cockcroft.’8
Hours dragged painfully by without word from the travellers as Rosa and Beatrice Oliphant watched Geoffrey struggle in and out of consciousness. By mid-afternoon, another telegram was sent in desperation, with a plea that the original message be broadcast on local radio, in both Flemish and English.
It met with success – though not until the following morning, when a waiter recognised the Australian physicist from the broadcast description, and alerted him to the harrowing news.
Neither Mark nor Baron had previously flown aboard a commercial airliner, but in such an emergency they raced to the nearest airfield to secure a bone-jarring flight across the Channel. Any discomfort they felt was numbed by gut-churning worry.
Upon landing in England, the distraught men jumped on the first available express train to Cambridge, and arrived to find that Geoffrey was dead. Stricken with what was formally deemed to be meningitis, he had not survived twenty-four hours from the time his symptoms first became apparent.
What had been planned as a family celebration of Mark and Rosa Oliphant’s upward fortunes after those bleak early years of poverty and private traumas became, within a day, a trial of merciless grief. The suffocating sadness was exacerbated by an unspoken understanding that, in light of the health problems that had befallen Rosa in her earlier pregnancies and mindful of the tragedy visited upon Eileen Rutherford, the couple who had waited so stoically for – and then doted so dearly on – their cherished son could not consider conceiving another child.
‘It was very tragic for me, but it was of course most tragic for my wife,’ Mark Oliphant would recall. ‘I was so upset that I hadn’t been there to help her at that time . . .’9
The toll was severe on Rosa for reasons that lay deeper than the absence of her husband during those desolate hours. She had long been haunted by her own childhood memories. He
r twin sister Alice’s death just months after the girls were born had seen her parents’ affection trained upon her older brother. When he died from typhoid aged two, Rosa became an only child who, in adulthood, regularly recalled the mantra learned from her mother and father: that her twin had been the ‘pretty daughter’ and Rosa was simply the one left behind.
The road from remorse lay much more clearly signposted for Mark Oliphant. It had, after all, been traversed by Cockcroft and then Rutherford in the immediately preceding years. And, in 1936, it would also be travelled by Ernest Walton upon the death of his infant son.
For each of these bereaved fathers, solace awaited behind the heavy oak gates of the Cavendish Laboratory.
12
TYRANNY’S DARK CLOUDS
Cambridge, 1933 to 1934
Following the success of the deuterium experiments, Oliphant’s ambition grew to mirror his confidence. The spectacular disintegration results he had witnessed using the ‘heavy’ particles at comparatively low voltages led him to wonder what might reveal itself if those big bullets were fired at far greater velocities.
With Rutherford in South Africa on another of his lecture tours, and with Crowe therefore freed to act as accomplice, Oliphant constructed a high-voltage canal-ray accelerator in which deuterium ions could be absorbed completely in deuterium gas. His hope, after noting the ferocity of collisions in his earlier heavy hydrogen experiments, was that the new system would yield more energy than was applied.
These experiments indeed brought about an incandescent reaction, but not from the updated apparatus.
Rather, Oliphant’s attempt to manufacture a net energy gain clashed headlong with Rutherford’s publicly argued belief that the output from an atomic nucleus could not exceed what was put in.
In an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Leicester in September 1933, Rutherford had famously rebutted suggestions that the atomic nucleus might one day yield limitless resources of energy for commercial and industrial use. Even if that resource could be tapped through the deployment of considerably lower voltages than were currently needed to achieve atomic disintegration, he would not be swayed from his belief that never would the nucleus’s output exceed the amount of energy put in. A report in The Times paraphrased his outburst in Leicester that mining atoms for their riches ‘was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine’.1
Consequently, for almost the first time – though notably not the last – Oliphant inflamed his mentor’s legendary ire. On returning to the Cavendish and learning of the work undertaken in his absence, Rutherford berated Oliphant for what he adjudged a flagrant waste of time. ‘Surely I have explained often enough that the nucleus is a sink, not a source of energy!’ he railed.2
As was Rutherford’s way, and to Oliphant’s great relief, ‘he soon calmed down and we did some arithmetic. This satisfied him that I was not a fool, but foolish, and he asked me to stick to the search for facts, not fantasies.’3
In Oliphant’s mind, Rutherford’s vehemence in refuting suggestions that the energy stored within atomic structures might one day be harnessed and harvested through controlled nuclear disintegration seemed at odds with the professor’s own understanding of the science – especially considering some of Rutherford’s earlier calculations on the possible splitting of weightier atoms such as those of uranium. As Oliphant later noted, Rutherford had ‘often speculated on the energy which could be derived from another nuclear process, the combination of hydrogen nuclei to produce heavier elements’.4
However, perhaps Rutherford’s stubborn refusal to accept that the atom might be plundered for its still-hidden riches was not at all founded upon willing misconception. Rather, Oliphant would reflect, it may have been purposely employed due to an all too clear understanding of such a quest’s consequences.
Those who did not know Rutherford well could conclude that he seemed to be deliberately obtuse, a rare phenomenon in one whose mind absorbed so rapidly and completely any nuclear information. I believe that he was fearful that his beloved nuclear domain was about to be invaded by infidels who wished to blow it to pieces by exploiting it commercially. Also, he disliked speculation about the practical results which could follow from any discovery, unless there were solid facts to support it.5
Rutherford’s caution would prove well founded. The potential of those experiments that Oliphant had brazenly conducted without his director’s imprimatur, and that stood no hope of succeeding at the low voltages he employed, would be exposed a decade later when the first plutonium bomb was unleashed on Nagasaki. Had Oliphant known what he was looking for, or had access to the sort of complex technology needed to find it, he might just have been that ‘fool in a laboratory’ against whom Rutherford would routinely warn.
Oliphant would not be shaken by Rutherford’s uncharacteristic fallibility in maintaining there was nothing beyond scientific benefit to be gained from probing the atom. He would maintain an enduring assessment of Rutherford as the pioneer of the science that brought atomic energy – and with it, nuclear warfare. Later Oliphant would repeatedly take to task fellow scientists, historians and commentators who dared suggest it was Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, which quantified the relationship between mass and energy, that began the race to the atomic bomb.
There were occasions when Einstein visited Cambridge and took an interest in the ongoing nuclear research work at the Cavendish. He delivered lectures to enthralled students, with Oliphant occasionally among their number.
Rutherford’s distrust of theoreticians meant he would jokingly refer to Einstein’s theories as ‘a magnificent work of art’, while laughing off any suggestions that he understood them. However, he was unashamedly inspired by Einstein’s repudiation of inhumanity, and in 1933 he clearly saw the huge influence he might exert as tyranny’s dark clouds gathered across Europe.
It was in that ominous year, as Germany installed Adolf Hitler as its chancellor and fell increasingly under his spell and jackboot, that Rutherford helped to found and front the Academic Assistance Council. It was an organisation that aimed to provide support and, ultimately, safe harbour for scientists targeted by Nazi and fascist regimes. This would yield profound implications for the final outcome of the Second World War.
In May 1933, Rutherford had been approached to lend his credibility and perspicacity to the council as it aimed to provide whatever help it could, including possible repatriation. Despite his typically arduous workload, Rutherford agreed to become president of the organisation and oversee its ambitious charter to raise £1 million (almost £70 million today) to provide relief for intellectuals and teachers – mostly of Jewish heritage – rendered refugees by Hitler’s race-based purges.
‘Rutherford was appalled by this brutality,’ recalled Oliphant, whose repugnance for Hitler’s Germany also grew. ‘Especially as the greatest of the German scientists, some of whom had worked with him and many of whom he knew intimately, were among the victims.’6
The first major fundraising initiative was an evening at London’s Royal Albert Hall in October 1933, which more than 10,000 attended to hear Rutherford speak and then introduce Einstein, the event’s star turn. Earlier that year, Einstein had renounced his German citizenship, and he was about to take up permanent residency in the United States. His address that evening was entitled ‘Science and Civilisation’, and while both he and Rutherford tactfully avoided overt mentions of politics or nationalism, they successfully rallied the crowd around the importance of ensuring that science progressed, peacefully unimpeded.
Rutherford might have held scant regard for politics and many of its practitioners, despite holding a seat in the Lords, but as Oliphant would note, he more intrinsically ‘hated war and violence of every kind, though not to the point of tolerating injustice’.7 This was the height of the great global depression, and the Cavendish’s already minimal
ist resources under Rutherford’s parsimony were stretched ever tighter. Yet those exiled scientists who sought refuge and resumption of their careers in Cambridge were welcomed without resentment or restriction by the increasingly international laboratory team.
Notable in that first wave of academic refugees was Max Born, the future Nobel laureate who in 1933 was removed from his position at Göttingen University under Hitler’s anti-Semitic race laws. Born was quickly offered a temporary position at Cambridge, which he gratefully accepted. He moved to England with his wife, Hedwig (known as Hedi), his son, Gustav, and his daughters Margarethe (known as Gritli) and Irene (who later married Cambridge-educated academic turned intelligence officer Brinley Newton-John before the couple emigrated to Australia in 1954 with their children, including daughter Olivia, who would later forge a career as a singer and actor).
However, the Borns’ family dog, Trixi, was forced into quarantine by British authorities at kennels some distance from the university. Upon learning of the distress the separation had caused, the Rutherfords offered the weekend use of their car – and themselves as drivers – to convey the worried family to and from the impeached pooch. Throughout those visits, Ernest and Mary sat patiently in the vehicle, reading, until it was time for the homeward leg.
* * *
Also among the European influx that year was Austrian physicist Otto Frisch, whose grandfather was a Polish Jew. Frisch was visiting Niels Bohr at his Copenhagen Institute when he first heard rumours that the Reichstag fire in Berlin, which would be used by Hitler to invoke totalitarian rule, might have been the Nazis’ own handiwork. Frisch feared the ideological madness that he had been prepared to dismiss as a fad now posed a serious and escalating threat. Soon after returning to his job at Hamburg’s Institute of Physical Chemistry, Frisch quietly packed his belongings into two luggage trunks and slipped aboard a small freighter, which plied the dangerous North Sea to London.
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