The Age of Radiance (16 page)

On September 13, Leo was walking the streets of London as he always did, in an absentminded haze, a man neither here, nor there, pondering Wells, Hitler, and especially Ernest Rutherford’s pronouncement in the
Times
the day before that “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.” Nothing bothered Szilard more than hearing a scientist claim something to be impossible if that impossibility hadn’t categorically been proven.

On Southampton Row in Bloomsbury,
“as I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. I didn’t see at the moment just how one would go about finding such an element, or what experiments would be needed, but the idea never left me. In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought that this might be in fact possible became sort of an obsession with me.”

On June 4, 1934, Szilard met with Rutherford about a possible slot at his Cavendish Laboratory. He wanted to conduct experiments proving or disproving the chain-reaction theory, and thinking it would help, he described what these experiments might be based on what Rutherford and his associates had achieved with alpha particles, instead of on the neutrons he himself envisioned. Rutherford immediately saw the limits of using alphas, and when Szilard then explained he’d taken out a patent on the whole notion, the Hungarian became the sole visitor that the New Zealand émigré physicist ever threw out of his Cambridge office. But the world is very, very small, and in time Rutherford would become president of Szilard’s Academic Assistance Council.

Leo meanwhile remained so obsessed with the promise of a neutron-triggered chain reaction that he spurned all his friends and social life to soak in the tub, leaving his room only to eat. After running through calculation after calculation, he finally had an answer, winning a British patent on March 12, 1934, for a method of inducing a reaction with beryllium (it would turn out that an incorrect assessment of the element’s atomic weight misled him on its nuclear potential), as well as uranium and thorium (the only two elements in nature that can in fact chain-react). He also applied for a patent to reduce libraries to images on a roll of film viewable by a “microbook,” not knowing that German industrial giant Siemens had already patented their
own “microfilm.” But the only place in England where he was allowed to do research was at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, working with medical radium, where he and St. Bart’s Thomas Chalmers discovered a new method of producing isotopes.

After donating his beryllium reactor patent to the British navy in the autumn of 1935, Leo decided to carry out an experiment completely on his own—the only time in his life this would happen—using gamma rays from radon gas to release slow neutrons from beryllium, which were corralled through a sixteen-inch tube of paraffin and then absorbed by sheets of cadmium or indium (a soft metal with a sheen like mercury, but made from zinc). He became so devoted to this investigation that everywhere he went he carried two black leather satchels, one for clothes and papers, the other for a Geiger counter, wax, metal foils, boxes, and tubes—the apparatuses of his experiment. He found on November 14, 1935, that “residual” neutrons, those not absorbed by the sheets, were affected very differently by cadmium and indium, and his results, published in
Nature
, won acclaim from Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Wigner, and Fermi. Finally, Szilard was being taken seriously by the nuclear community, so much so that Joliot-Curie offered him a position at their Radium Institute. His isotope-separation patents developed at St. Bart’s would give him $14,000 that year, his first income since leaving Germany. But after the Nazis occupied the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, and England did nothing to refute them, Szilard decided Hitler was unstoppable and that he had to flee the Continent.

On Christmas Eve 1937, he sailed on RMS
Franconia
, arriving in New York on January 2, 1938, and moving into the nine-story King’s Crown. His inamorata, Dr. Trude Weiss—a woman with the stolid character of a Paleolithic Venus—had arrived a few weeks before and was working in the emergency room at Bellevue. Szilard quickly met Lewis Strauss, a Wall Street financier whose parents had recently died of cancer, and with whom he experimented on artificially irradiated cobalt. Strauss pulled strings to get Leo’s brother through the immigration quota after Hitler annexed Austria with Bela in Vienna; then, when Bela arrived in the United States, he chose a surname spelling of Silard, so at least Americans would pronounce it correctly. Leo then worked with Sidney Barnes and the University of Rochester’s cyclotron to see if indium would shed extra neutrons depending on what hit it: neutrons, protons, or electrons.
“I don’t remember him ever sitting down,” Sidney said. “If I had anything to say, I just waited until he stopped for breath, and I’d get it in. I generally didn’t say much, though.”

Nothing worked. After five years, Szilard’s chain-reaction experiment,
which he was so certain of, had crashed into a dead end. But almost immediately after, when all hope had evaporated, in the lobby of the King’s Crown Hotel, Leo Szilard met Enrico Fermi. The gravid hand of fate and coincidence set the course of their entwined lives for better, and for worse. Enrico and Leo would jointly work a miracle, and like all its predecessors, theirs would be decidedly two-faced.

On January 16, 1939, Laura and Enrico returned to the West Fifty-Seventh Street piers to welcome Niels Bohr, arriving on the SS
Drottningholm
to lecture at Princeton, where Einstein was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study. While Einstein was pursuing unified field theory—the calculation that would unite everything, from electrons to planets, but as of this writing has not yet come to fruition—Bohr was developing quantum mechanics, which became so difficult to comprehend, and such a mixture of wave, particle, mass, energy, spin, momentum, and angle, that it seemed to approach the supernatural, even among those who studied it. Instead of the beloved planetary model, Bohr’s atom was something that could not be visualized, a blur of matter and energy with electrons that could appear in one spot and then, instantly, in another. When, to take one example, Wolfgang Pauli—considered a genius on par with Einstein, with an acid wit that earned him the nickname Wrath of God—described a theory in a letter, Bohr replied with the view of his team from Copenhagen:
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question, which divides us, is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”

Bohr carried with him to America that January day an incredible secret—a signature theory of twentieth-century science—a secret he had promised not to divulge until the Austrian physicists who’d created it, working in exile, could polish and publish their work. But when he met with Einstein at Princeton, instead of quantum mechanics versus unified field theory, all they could talk about was this latest discovery. The Austrians had proved that part of what had earned Enrico his Nobel—the discovery of a new element—was entirely in error. Additionally, their theory’s far-ranging implications so terrified Leo Szilard that he would work with Fermi to create nuclear power, and with Einstein to inaugurate the Manhattan Project—the birth of the atomic bomb.

T
his great revolution in physics that so captivated Bohr and Einstein began at the same time that the Fermis were crossing the Atlantic in December 1938, when chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute in Berlin published an article in
Naturwissenschaften
revealing that, after they bombarded uranium with neutrons, instead of the next-larger element on the periodic table Fermi had claimed to find, all they ended up with was barium. When an element is irradiated and transforms into another element—as illustrated in the half-life chart of uranium devolving to lead—it moves one or two notches up the periodic table if it absorbs the neutrons, and one or two down if some of its own are knocked out. Iron, for example, moves one spot down to become manganese, but barium, at fifty-six, was dramatically far down the table from uranium, at ninety-two. It was strange, baffling, and annoying. Hahn and Strassmann were convinced something must be wrong, and so they recalibrated their instruments, asked for second opinions from others at KWI, repeated the experiment over and over, but still the results were the same: irradiated uranium produced lots of barium. Frustrated and not knowing what to do next, chemist Hahn turned to his ex-partner, the physicist Lise Meitner, who had recently escaped Nazi Germany and was living in Stockholm. He described the details and the results of their experiments in a letter and asked for her help.

Has there been in the history of science a less likely personage to revolutionize her field and, with that, the fundamentals of human knowledge than the forgotten Lise Meitner? Striking as Curie, with jet-black hair, dark-ringed, deep-set eyes, and skin pale as a Klimt, Lise rarely weighed more than 105 pounds and was such a lady of her Victorian era that, in nearly every photograph, her neck is fully covered by a blouse’s collar. Meitner spent her first twenty-nine years in Vienna, then Europe’s most cosmopolitan city . . . yet, also the one with the highest rate of suicide. Born on Kaiser Franz Josefstrasse 27 in the Vienna suburb of Leopoldstadt, Lise was so Viennese that, after fleeing the Nazis, she refused to accept Swedish citizenship until she was allowed to retain her Austrian passport as well. Like the Hungarian Quartet, she was descended from Russian Jews, her mother, Hedwig, having emigrated to Slovakia to escape the pogroms, and like most of the Hungarians’ parents, the senior Meitners had nominally converted to Christianity, becoming Lutherans, though Lise herself was baptized as an Evangelical, and two of her sisters became Catholics. Just as all brainy boys and girls around the world have done since the dawn of time, the young Lise covered the crack at the bottom of her bedroom door so her parents wouldn’t catch her staying up all night, reading.

At the age of four or five, Albert Einstein’s father gave him a compass as a present, and when the boy turned it this way and that and saw the needle returning to its magnetic truth, he got so excited that chills ran through his
body, because now he understood that
“something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” Lise had a similar epiphany as a child, becoming exuberant to understand
“how a puddle with a bit of oil on it showed lovely colors.” Becoming amazed “that there were such things to find out about our world,” she pursued “more and more questions of that kind.” She was a fan of Mme. Curie in an era when science, especially X-rays, was a great fad in Vienna, nearly as popular as music.

An Austrian girl’s schooling at the time was almost always finished by the age of fourteen, unless she was wealthy enough for a Swiss university. Then, beginning in the late 1890s, the empire allowed women to pursue higher education, and all five of the Meitner daughters went to college. To make up for missing the gymnasium that boys attended that trained them to pass the
Matura
(a test required for university entrance), the women hired private tutors to acquire eight years of knowledge—history, literature, religion, philosophy, Greek, Latin, math, mineralogy, botany, zoology—in two. Photographs of Lise from this period show her looking physically exhausted. In July 1901, she passed her
Matura
and began studying at the University of Vienna in a physics department close to Sigmund Freud’s office and so famous for its rotting stairs and decrepit ceiling beams that the Viennese joked about its students being would-be suicides. Within, however, were two great professors, Franz Exner, friend to Wilhelm Röntgen and the Curies, and the great atomist Ludwig Boltzmann. Until the end of her life, Meitner would remember Boltzmann’s teaching as
“the most beautiful and stimulating that I have ever heard. . . . He himself was so enthusiastic about everything he taught us that one left every lecture with the feeling that a completely new and wonderful world had been revealed.”

As a student, Lise uncovered an error in an Italian mathematician’s calculations. Her professor worked with her to trace the mistake and find the correct formula and told her that she should publish. Since he had helped her so much, though, she refused to take the full credit, which he thought foolish. This high-minded deprecation to the point of self-sabotage would be Meitner’s Achilles’ heel in her professional life. All the same, her achievements in a field where she was the only woman besides the Curies cannot be undervalued. In February 1906 at the age of twenty-seven, she received her PhD in physics, the second woman’s doctorate in the school’s five hundred years. Even with this remarkable achievement, during Meitner’s first months at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm University, she was shy
“bordering on fear of people.”