The Making Of Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes ↗

Some highlights so far

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

Only wholeness leads to clarity, And truth lies in the abyss.

This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier

Neils Bohr

Philosophically the phenomenon could be interesting, but as a practical matter ratiocination is a way of stalling. If work is never finished, its quality cannot be judged. The trouble is that stalling postpones the confrontation and adds that guilt to the burden. Anxiety increases; the mechanism accelerates its spiraling flights; the self feels as if it will fragment; the multiplying “I” dramatizes the feeling of impending breakup.

But it was not in Møller that Bohr found solid footing. He needed more than a novel, however apposite, for that. He needed what we all need for sanity: he needed love and work.

One of the great arguments of the day was vitalism versus mechanism, a disguised form of the old and continuing debate between those, including the religious, who believe that the world has purpose and those who believe it operates automatically and by chance or in recurring unprogressive cycles.

He (Bohr) was reminding himself and his colleagues that physics is not a grand philosophical system of authoritarian command but simply a way, in his favorite phrase, of “asking questions of Nature.”

Quantum is the neuter form of the Latin word quantus, meaning “how great.”

I try not to speak more clearly than I think.

“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.

Later Bohr would develop far more elaborately the idea of mutual limitations as a guide to greater understanding.

Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit: only wholeness leads to clarity.

The name he chose for this “general point of view” was complementarity, a word that derives from the Latin complementum, “that which fills up or completes.

Emilio Segrè, who heard Bohr lecture at Como in 1927 as a young engineering student, explains complementarity simply and clearly in a history of modern physics he wrote in retirement: “Two magnitudes are complementary when the measurement of one of them prevents the accurate simultaneous measurement of the other.497 Similarly, two concepts are complementary when one imposes limitations on the other.

Chaim Weizmann and Balfour Declaration

When our difficulties were solved through Dr. Weizmann’s genius,” continues Lloyd George, “I said to him: ‘You have rendered great service to the State, and I should like to ask the Prime Minister to recommend you to His Majesty for some honour.’ He said, ‘There is nothing I want for myself.’ ‘But is there nothing we can do as a recognition of your valuable assistance to the country?’ I asked. He replied: ‘Yes, I would like you to do something for my people.’ . . . That was the fount and origin of the famous declaration about the National Home for Jews in Palestine.”332

The “famous declaration” came to be called the Balfour Declaration, a commitment by the British government in the form of a letter from Arthur Balfour to Baron Edmond de Rothschild to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.

Chaim Weizmann’s experience was an early and instructive example of the power of science in time of war. Government took note. So did science.

World War I

The Germans sometimes chose to disguise mustard with xylyl bromide, a tear gas that smells like lilac, and so it came to pass in the wartime spring that men ran in terror from a breeze scented with blossoming lilac shrubs.

The chemists, like bargain hunters, imagined they were spending a pittance of tens of thousands of lives to save a purseful more. Britain reacted with moral outrage but capitulated in the name of parity.

Haber told her what he had told Hahn, adding for good measure, patriot that he was, that a scientist belongs to the world in times of peace but to his country in times of war.352 Then he stormed out to supervise a gas attack on the Eastern Front. Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night.

It fitted Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz’s doctrine of total war in much the same way that submarine attack did, carrying fear and horror directly to the enemy to weaken his will to resist.

The Germans bombed to establish “a basis for peace” by destroying “the morale of the English people” and paralyzing their “will to fight.

“I go forward,” a British soldier writes of his experience in an attacking line of troops, “ . . . up and down across ground like a huge ruined honeycomb, and my wave melts away, and the second wave comes up, and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the ruins of the first and second, and after a while the fourth blunders into the remnants of the others.

What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you.

“The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman,” Siegfried Sassoon allows a fictional infantry officer to see. “What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.

Whatever its ostensible purpose, the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses.

But external circumstance is no sure measure of internal wounding, and there are not many horrors as efficient for the generation of deep anger and terrible lifelong insecurity as the inability of a father to protect his child.

Oppenheimer

“Up to now,” he told that group in 1963, “and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took an action, hardly did anything or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper in physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.

Rutherford

Newspapers soon published the discovery in plainer words: Sir Ernest Rutherford, headlines blared in 1919, had split the atom.

There are those about us who say that such research should be stopped by law, alleging that man’s destructive powers are already large enough. So, no doubt, the more elderly and ape-like of our prehistoric ancestors objected to the innovation of cooked food and pointed out the grave dangers attending the use of the newly discovered agency, fire. Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.

Francis Aston

“It is the theory which decides what we can observe,” Einstein had said.

He was not the first man of ambition to find himself stalling on the summit ridge of a famous future.

The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established—and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks.