Richard Rhodes

Richard Lee Rhodes

Richard. (Nuclear). Rhodes

Traces the development of the atomic bomb from Leo Szilard's concept through the drama of the race to build a workable device to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Sebastian Stockmarr

"Make it seem inevitable," Louis Pasteur used to advise his stu- dents when they prepared to write up their discoveries.

"Knowledge," Niels Bohr once noted, "is itself the basis for civilization." You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn't filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome.

"It is a profound and necessary truth," Robert Oppenheimer would say, "that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them."

Szilard had already given a year of his life to the Army and two years to engineering. He wasted no time advancing through physics. In the summer of 1921 he went to Max von Laue and asked for a thesis topic. Von Laue apparently decided to challenge Szilardthe challenge may have been friendly or it may have been an attempt to put him in his place-and gave him an obscure problem in relativity theory. "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." Szilard worked on it for six months, until the Christmas season, "and I thought Christmastime is not a time to work, it is a time to loaf, so I thought I would just think whatever comes to my mind." What he thought, in three weeks, was how to solve a baffling inconsistency in thermodynamics, the branch of physics that concerns relationships between heat and other forms of energy. There are two thermo- dynamic theories, both highly successful at predicting heat phenomena. One, the phenomenological, is more abstract and generalized (and therefore more useful); the other, the statistical, is based on an atomic model and corresponds more closely to physical reality. In particular, the statistical theory depicts thermal equi- librium as a state of random motion of atoms. Einstein, for example, had demonstrated in important papers in 1905 that Brownian motion-the continuous, random motion of particles such as pollen suspended in a liquid -was such a state, But the more useful phenomeno- logical theory treated thermal equilibrium as if it were static, a state of no change. That was the inconsistency. Szilard went for long walks-Berlin would have been cold and gray, the grayness sometimes relieved by days of brilliant sunshine"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 eveningI wrote it down." It was, he thought, the most creative period of his life. "Within three weeks I had produced a manuscript of something which was really quite original. But I didn't dare to take it to von Laue, because it was not what he had asked me to do."

Szilard pursued one version or another of his Bund throughout his life. It appears as late as 1961, by then suitably disguised, in his popular story "The Voice of the Dolphins": a tankful of dolphins at a "Vienna Insti- tute" begin to impart their compelling wisdom to the world through their keepers and interpreters, who are U.S. and Russian scientists; the narrator slyly implies that the keepers may be the real source of wisdom, exploiting mankind's fascination with superhuman saviors to save it.

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