Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

It seemed to me that if I went back to the beginning, even to before the beginning, when releasing the enormous energies held latent in the nuclei of atoms was simply an interesting and challenging physics problem, that I might rediscover abandoned pathways which could, if reilluminated, lead toward an outcome different from the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse. (Location 87)

Six months later Szilard wrote another paper in thermodynamics, “On the decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings,” that eventually would be recognized as one of the important foundation documents of modern information theory. (Location 389)

A wild burst of optimism—or opportunism—energized Szilard in 1930 to organize a group of acquaintances, most of them young physicists, to begin the work of banding together. (Location 437)

No doubt he was also alert as always to the peculiar tension in the air that signaled the possibility of new developments. (Location 453)

“It is of paramount importance,” he confessed in his Scientific Autobiography, “that the outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.” Of all the laws of physics, Planck believed that the thermodynamic laws applied most basically to the independent “outside world” that his need for an absolute required. (Location 597)

He discovered a traditional organization far different from what most nonscientists suppose. A “republic of science,” he called it, a community of independent men and women freely cooperating, “a highly simplified example of a free society.” Not all philosophers of science, which is what Polanyi became, have agreed.93, 94 Even Polanyi sometimes called science an “orthodoxy.” (Location 627)

“Millions are spent annually on the cultivation and dissemination of science by the public authorities,” Polanyi wrote once when he felt impatient with those who refused to understand his point, “who will not give a penny for the advancement of astrology or sorcery. In other words, our civilization is deeply committed to certain beliefs about the nature of things; beliefs which are different, for example, from those to which the early Egyptian or the Aztec civilizations were committed.” (Location 637)

Most young people learned no more than the orthodoxy of science. They acquired “the established doctrine, the dead letter.” (Location 641)

They practiced experimental proof in routine research. They discovered science’s “uncertainties and its eternally provisional nature.” That began to bring it to life.97 (Location 643)

To become a scientist, Polanyi thought, required “a full initiation.” Such an initiation came from “close personal association with the intimate views and practice of a distinguished master.” The practice of science was not itself a science; it was an art, to be passed from master to apprentice as the art of painting is passed or as the skills and traditions of the law or of medicine are passed. (Location 645)

No more could you learn science, because nothing in science ever quite fits; no experiment is ever final proof; everything is simplified and approximate. (Location 649)

Even if we know every rule, however . . . what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world. (Location 657)

belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But “no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestioningly accepted.” (Location 663)

Becoming a scientist is necessarily an act of profound commitment to the scientific system and the scientific world view. (Location 666)

“Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements—and this is untrue.” (Location 667)

The best way to do the job, Polanyi argued, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing. “Let them work on putting the puzzle together in the sight of the others, so that every time a piece of it is fitted in by one [worker], all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence.” That way, even though each worker acts on his own initiative, he acts to further the entire group’s achievement.104 The group works independently together; the puzzle is assembled in the most efficient way. (Location 679)

Alerted by their network of scientific publications and professional friendships—by the complete openness of their communication, an absolute and vital freedom of speech—scientists rushed to work at just those points where their particular talents would bring them the maximum emotional and intellectual return on their investment of effort and thought. (Location 685)

“This network is the seat of scientific opinion,” Polanyi emphasized; “of an opinion which is not held by any single human brain, but which, split into thousands of different fragments, is held by a multitude of individuals, each of whom endorses the other’s opinion at second hand, by relying on the consensual chains which link him to all the others through a sequence of overlapping neighborhoods.”107 Science, Polanyi was hinting, worked like a giant brain of individual intelligences linked together. That was the source of its cumulative and seemingly inexorable power. (Location 696)

Science succeeds in the difficult task of sustaining a political network among men and women of differing backgrounds and differing values, and in the even more difficult task of discovering the rules of the chess game of the gods, by severely limiting its range of competence. (Location 701)

Books and lectures might teach rules; masters taught controlled rebellion, if only by the example of their own original—and in that sense rebellious—work. (Location 709)

He had a model made, a heavy electromagnet suspended as a pendulum on thirty feet of wire that grazed the face of another electromagnet set on a table.179 With the two grazing faces matched in polarity and therefore repelling each other, the pendulum was deflected into a parabolic path according to its velocity and angle of approach, just as the alpha particles were deflected. He needed as always to visualize his work. (Location 1036)

The prism spectroscope, invented in 1859, advanced the science. It used a narrow slit set in front of a prism to limit the patches of light to similarly narrow lines; these could be directed onto a ruled scale (and later onto strips of photographic film) to measure their spacing and calculate their wavelengths. Such characteristic patterns of lines came to be called line spectra. Every element had its own unique line spectrum. (Location 1504)

Helium was discovered in the chromosphere of the sun in 1868 as a series of unusual spectral lines twenty-three years before it was discovered mixed into uranium ore on earth. (Location 1507)

Bohr would have known these formulae and numbers from undergraduate physics, especially since Christensen was an admirer of Rydberg and had thoroughly studied his work. But spectroscopy was far from Bohr’s field and he presumably had forgotten them. (Location 1522)

Besides proposing a useful model of the atom, it demonstrated that events that take place on the atomic scale are quantized: that just as matter exists as atoms and particles in a state of essential graininess, so also does process. Process is discontinuous (Location 1544)

Because original work is inherently rebellious, his paper was not only an examination of the physical world but also a political document. It proposed, in a sense, to begin a reform movement in physics: to limit claims and clear up epistemological fallacies. Mechanistic physics had become authoritarian. It had outreached itself to claim universal application, to claim that the universe and everything in it is rigidly governed by mechanistic cause and effect. (Location 1549)

To identify a kind of freedom of choice within the atom itself was a triumph for his carefully assembled structure of beliefs. The separate, distinct electron orbits that Bohr called stationary states recall Kierkegaard’s stages. They also recall Bohr’s attempt to redefine the problem of free will by invoking separate, distinct Riemann surfaces. And as Kierkegaard’s stages are discontinuous, negotiable only by leaps of faith, so do Bohr’s electrons leap discontinuously from orbit to orbit. (Location 1568)

Bohr insisted as one of the two “principal assumptions” of his paper that the electron’s whereabouts between orbits cannot be calculated or even visualized.284 Before and after are completely discontinuous. (Location 1572)

By contrast, the continuous process predicted by classical mechanics, which Bohr apparently associated with the licentiate’s endless ratiocination, tears the atom apart or spirals it into radiative collapse. (Location 1574)

physics is not a grand philosophical system of authoritarian command but simply a way, in his favorite phrase, of “asking questions of Nature.” (Location 1581)

“It is wrong,” he told his colleagues repeatedly, “to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is”—which is the territory classical physics had claimed for itself. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”290 (Location 1591)

In 1920 the Horthy regime introduced a numerus clausus law restricting university admission which required “that the comparative numbers of the entrants correspond as nearly as possible to the relative population of the various races or nationalities.” (Location 2322)

“It will be left to historians of science,” Ulam writes, “to discover and explain the conditions which catalyzed the emergence of so many brilliant individuals from that area. . . . Johnny used to say that it was a coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or else face extinction.”422 (Location 2332)

Toward the end of May 1925 his hay fever flared; he asked Born for two weeks’ leave of absence and made his way to Heligoland, a stormy sliver of island twenty-eight miles off the German coast in the North Sea, where very little pollen blew. He walked; he swam long distances in the cold sea; “a few days were enough to jettison all the mathematical ballast that invariably encumbers the beginning of such attempts, and to arrive at a simple formulation of my problem.”442 A few days more and he glimpsed the system he needed. (Location 2427)

It was early March and it would have been cold, but Heisenberg was a vigorous walker who did his best thinking outdoors. (Location 2715)

that on the extremely small scale of the atom, there must be inherent limits to how precisely events could be known. If you identified the position of a particle—by allowing it to impact on a zinc-sulfide screen, for example, as Rutherford did—you changed its velocity and so lost that information. If you measured its velocity—by scattering gamma rays from it, perhaps—your energetic gamma-ray photons battered it into a different path and you could not then locate precisely where it was. One measurement always made the other measurement uncertain. (Location 2720)

The dream or bad joke of the Marquis de Laplace, the eighteenth-century French mathematician and astronomer, that if he knew at one moment the precise location in time and space of every particle in the universe he could predict the future forever, was thus answered late at night in a Copenhagen park: nature blurs that divine prerogative away. (Location 2728)

The situation in physics, he said, “bears a deep-going analogy to the general difficulty in the formation of human ideas, inherent in the distinction between subject and object.”498 (Location 2761)

In 1926 he had written to Max Born concerning the statistical nature of quantum theory that “quantum mechanics demands serious attention. But an inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice.” (Location 2767)

Psychometricians have closely questioned American scientists of this first modern generation, curious to know what kind of men they were—there were few women among them—and from what backgrounds they emerged.523 Small liberal arts colleges in the Middle West and on the Pacific coast, one study found, were most productive of scientists then (by contrast, New England in the same period excelled at the manufacture of lawyers). Half the experimental physicists studied and fully 84 percent of the theoreticians were the sons of professional men, typically engineers, physicians and teachers, although a minority of experimentalists were farmers’ sons. None of the fathers of the sixty-four scientists, including twenty-two physicists, in the largest of these studies was an unskilled laborer, and few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen. The physicists were almost all either first-born sons or eldest sons. Theoretical physicists averaged the highest verbal IQ’s among all scientists studied, clustering around 170, almost 20 percent higher than the experimentalists.524 Theoreticians also averaged the highest spatial IQ’s, experimentalists ranking second. (Location 2947)

Dramatically and significantly, almost half the scientists in this study reported themselves to have been fatherless as children, “their fathers dying early, or working away from home, or remaining so aloof and nonsupportive that their sons scarcely knew them.”527 Those scientists who grew up with living fathers described them as “rigid, stern, aloof, and emotionally reserved.” (Location 2971)

Guiding that research was usually a fatherly science teacher.530 Of the qualities that distinguished this mentor in the minds of his students, not teaching ability but “masterfulness, warmth and professional dignity” ranked first.531 One study of two hundred of these mentors concludes: “It would appear that the success of such teachers rests mainly upon their capacity to assume a father role to their students.”532 The fatherless young man finds a masterful surrogate father of warmth and dignity, identifies with him and proceeds to emulate him. In a later stage of this process the independent scientist works toward becoming a mentor of historic stature himself. (Location 2979)

“the tedious nature of Rutherford’s technique . . . repelled most prospective nuclear physicists. (Location 3004)

Despite Lawrence’s reputation as a go-getter—perhaps because no one encouraged him, perhaps because the idea was solid and sure in his head but the machine on the laboratory bench might not be—he kept putting off building his spiral particle accelerator. He was not the first man of ambition to find himself stalling on the summit ridge of a famous future. (Location 3050)

To all these emotional troublings—Oppenheimer’s and Lawrence’s, as Bohr’s and others’ before and since—science offered an anchor: in discovery is the preservation of the world. (Location 3140)

The laboratory, Chadwick remembers, “passed through a relatively quiet spell. Much interesting and important work was done, but it was work of consolidation rather than of discovery; in spite of many attempts the paths to new fields could not be found.” (Location 3268)

The scintillation method of detecting radiation had reached its limit of effectiveness: it was unreliable if the counting rate was greater than 150 per minute or less than about 3 per minute, and both ranges now came into view in nuclear studies. (Location 3278)

1497 But Compton was distressed to discover he could not move the engineers on the review committee—the practical souls Bush had insisted be added to bring the NAS reviews down to earth—to estimate either how much time it would take to build a bomb or how much the enterprise would cost: With one accord they refused. . . . There weren’t enough data. The fact was that they had before them all the relevant information that existed, and some kind of answer was needed, however rough it might be, for otherwise our recommendation could not be acted upon. After some discussion, I suggested a total time of between three and five years, and a total cost . . . of some hundreds of millions of dollars. None of the committee members objected. So the American numbers came out of a scientist’s hat, as the British numbers had. Atomic energy was still too new for engineering. (Location 8043)

The bomb in its ultimate manifestation, nuclear holocaust, would eliminate that inequality by destroying rich and poor, democratic and totalitarian alike in one final apocalypse. It followed complementarily that the opening up of the world necessary to prevent (or reverse) an arms race would also progressively expose and alleviate inequality, but in the direction of life, not death: (Location 11214)

Notice that Bohr does not propose a world government of centralized authority but a consortium: “An open world where each nation can assert itself solely by the extent to which it can contribute to the common culture and is able to help others with experience and resources must be the goal to put above everything else.”2032 And most generally and profoundly: “The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.”2033 (Location 11224)

“The present situation would seem to offer a most favourable opportunity for an early initiative from the side which by good fortune has achieved a lead in the efforts of mastering mighty forces of nature hitherto beyond human reach.” (Location 11229)

Frankfurter had the good sense to recognize the document’s merit—it is still the only comprehensive and realistic charter for a postnuclear world—and about a week later told Bohr he had handed it to the President. (Location 11237)

The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard. *   *   * (Location 11282)

The IBM equipment arrived early in April 1944 and the Theoretical Division immediately put it to good use running brute-force implosion numbers. Hydrodynamic problems, detailed and repetitious, were particularly adaptable to machine computation; the challenge apparently set von Neumann thinking about how such machines might be improved. (Location 11419)

No essence was ever expressed more expensively from the substance of the world with the possible exception of the human soul. *   *   * (Location 11621)

He and Fermi, among others, sometimes scaled Lake Peak across the Rio Grande in the Sangre de Cristos, one of Bethe’s admiring group leaders remembers, to “sit there in the sunshine” at 12,500 feet “discussing physics problems. This is how many discoveries were made.” (Location 11903)

“The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” he wrote at the end of his career, “is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.” (Location 12911)

What for Bohr was the inevitable outcome of a solution to the problem of the bomb—an open world where differences in social and political conditions would be visible to everyone and therefore under pressure to improve—Stimson imagined should be a precondition to any initial exchange. (Location 12980)