Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (30 page)

Another experiment Uncle Abe showed me was to electrify a silk tassel – he did this by stroking it with a piece of rubber – so that its threads, now charged with electricity, repelled one another and flew apart. But as soon as he brought the radium near, the threads collapsed, their electricity discharged. This was because radioactivity made the air conducting, he said, so the tassel could not hold its charge anymore. An extremely refined form of this was the gold-leaf electroscope in his lab – a sturdy jar with a metal rod through its stopper to conduct a charge and two tiny gold foil leaves suspended from this. When the electroscope was charged, the gold leaves would fly apart just like the threads of the tassel. But if one brought a radioactive substance near the jar, it would immediately discharge, and the leaves would drop. The sensitivity of the electroscope to radium was amazing – it could detect a thousand-millionth of a grain, millions of times less than the amount one could detect chemically, and it was thousands of times more sensitive even than a spectroscope.

I liked to watch Uncle Abe’s radium clock, which was basically a gold-leaf electroscope with a little radium inside, in a separate, thin-walled glass vessel. The radium, emitting negative particles, would gradually get positively charged, and the gold leaves would start to diverge – until they hit the side of the vessel and got discharged; then the cycle would start all over again. This ‘clock’ had been opening and closing its gold leaves, every three minutes, for more than thirty years, and it would go on doing so for a thousand years or more – it was the closest thing, Uncle Abe said, to a perpetual motion machine.

What had been a mild puzzle with uranium had become a much more acute one with the isolation of radium, a million times more radioactive. While uranium could darken a photographic plate (though this took several days) or discharge an ultrasensitive gold-leaf electroscope, radium did this in a fraction of a second; it glowed spontaneously with the fury of its own activity; and, as became increasingly evident in the new century, it could penetrate opaque materials, ozonize the air, tint glass, induce fluorescence, and burn and destroy the living tissues of the body, in a way that could be either therapeutic or destructive.

With radiation of every other sort, going all the way from X-rays to radio waves, energy had to be provided by an external source; but radioactive elements, apparently, had their own power and could emit energy without decrement for months or years, and neither heat nor cold nor pressure nor magnetic fields nor irradiation nor chemical reagents made the least difference to this.

Where did this immense amount of energy come from? The firmest principles in the physical sciences were the principles of conservation – that matter and energy could neither be created nor destroyed. There had never been any serious suggestion that these principles could ever be violated, and yet radium at first appeared to do exactly that – to be a
perpetuum mobile
, a free lunch, a steady and inexhaustible source of energy.

One escape from this quandary was to suppose that the energy of radioactive substances had an exterior source; this indeed was what Becquerel first suggested, on the analogy of phosphorescence – that radioactive substances absorbed energy from something, from somewhere, and then reemitted it, slowly, in their own way. (He coined the term
hyperphosphorescence
for this.)

Notions of an outside source – perhaps an X-ray-like radiation bathing the earth – had been entertained briefly by the Curies, and they had sent a sample of a radium concentrate to Hans Geitel and Julius Elster in Germany. Elster and Geitel were close friends (they were known as ‘the Castor and Pollux of physics’), and they were brilliant investigators, who had already shown radioactivity to be unaffected by vacua, cathode rays, or sunlight. When they took the sample down a thousand-foot mine in the Harz Mountains – a place where no X-rays could reach – they found its radioactivity undiminished.

Could radium’s energy be coming from the Ether, that mysterious, immaterial medium that was supposed to fill every nook and cranny of the universe and allow for the propagation of light and gravity and all other forms of cosmic energy? This was Mendeleev’s opinion when he visited the Curies, though given a special chemical twist by him, for he conceived that the Ether was composed of a very light ‘ether element,’ an inert gas able to penetrate all matter without chemical reaction, and with an atomic weight about half that of hydrogen. (This new element, he thought, had already been observed in the solar corona, and named coronium.) Beyond this, Mendeleev conceived of an ultralight etheric element, with an atomic weight less than a billionth that of hydrogen, that permeated the cosmos. Atoms of these etheric elements, he felt, attracted to the heavy atoms of uranium and thorium, and absorbed by them somehow, endowed them with their own etheric energy.«62»

(I was puzzled when I first came across reference to the Ether – often spelled
Aether
, and capitalized – confusing this with the inflammable, mobile, sharp-smelling liquid my mother kept in her anesthetic bag. A ‘luminiferous’ Ether had been postulated by Newton as the medium in which light waves were propagated, but, as Uncle Abe told me, even in his youth people had already become suspicious of its existence. Maxwell was able to bypass it in his equations, and a famous experiment in the early 1890
s
had failed to show any ‘Ether drift,’ any effect of the earth’s motion on the velocity of light, such as one might expect if an Ether existed. But clearly the idea of the Ether was still very strong in the minds of many scientists at the time when radioactivity was discovered, and it was natural that they should turn to it first for an explanation of its mysterious energies.«63»

But if it was imaginable – just – that a slow dribble of energy such as uranium emitted might come from an outside source, such a notion became harder to believe when faced with radium, which (as Pierre Curie and Albert Laborde would show, in 1903) was capable of raising its own weight of water from freezing to boiling in an hour.«64» It was harder still when faced with even more intensely radioactive substances, such as pure polonium (a small piece of which would spontaneously become red-hot) or radon, which was 200,000 times more radioactive than radium itself – so radioactive that a pint of it would instantly vaporize any vessel in which it was contained. Such a power to heat was unintelligible with any etheric or cosmic hypothesis.

With no plausible external source of energy, the Curies were forced to return to their original thought that the energy of radium had to have an
internal
origin, to be an ‘atomic property’ – although a basis for this was hardly imaginable. As early as 1898, Marie Curie added a bolder, even outrageous thought, that radioactivity might come from the disintegration of atoms, that it could be ‘an emission of matter accompanied by a loss of weight of the radioactive substances’ – a hypothesis even more bizarre, it might have seemed, than its alternatives, for it had been axiomatic in science, a fundamental assumption, that atoms were indestructible, immutable, unsplittable – the whole of chemistry and classical physics was built on this faith. In Maxwell’s words:

Though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the [atoms] out of which these systems are built – the foundation stones of the material universe – remain unbroken and unworn. They continue to this day as they were created – perfect in number and measure and weight.

All scientific tradition, from Democritus to Dalton, from Lucretius to Maxwell, insisted upon this principle, and one can readily understand how, after her first bold thoughts about atomic disintegration, Marie Curie withdrew from the idea, and (using unusually poetic language) ended her thesis on radium by saying, ‘the cause of this spontaneous radiation remains a mystery…a profound and wonderful enigma.’

Cannery Row

T
he summer after the war, we went to Switzerland, because this was the only country on the Continent that had not been ravaged by war, and we longed for normality, after six years of bombing and rationing and austerity and constriction. The transformation was evident as soon as we crossed the border – the uniforms of the Swiss customs officers were new and shining, unlike the shabby uniforms on the French side. The train itself seemed to become cleaner and brighter, to move with a new efficiency and speed. Arriving in Lucerne, we were met by an electric brougham. Tall, upright, with huge plate-glass windows, a vehicle such as my parents had seen, but never ridden, in their own childhood, the ancient brougham conveyed us noiselessly to the Schweizerhof Hotel, a hotel vaster, more splendid, than anything I had ever imagined. My parents would generally choose relatively modest lodgings, but this time their instincts led them in the opposite direction, to the most sumptuous, most luxurious, most opulent hotel in Lucerne – an extravagance permitted, they felt, after six years of war.

The Schweizerhof stays in my mind for another reason, because it was here that I gave the first (and last) concert of my life. It had been a little over a year since Mrs. Silver, my piano teacher, had died, a year in which I had not touched a piano, but now something sunny, something liberating, brought me out, made me want to play again, all of a sudden, and for other people. Though I had been brought up on Bach and Scarlatti, I had grown (under Mrs. Silver’s influence) to love the Romantics – especially Schumann and the propulsive, exuberant Chopin mazurkas. Many of these were technically beyond me, but I knew them, nonetheless, all fifty-odd of them, by heart, and could at least (I flattered myself) give a sense of their feel and vitality. They were miniatures, but each seemed to contain an entire world.

Somehow my parents persuaded the hotel to arrange a concert in its salon, to let me use the grand piano (it was bigger than any I had ever seen, a Bosendorfer with some extra keys our Bechstein did not have), and to announce that, on the coming Thursday night, there would be a recital by ‘the young English pianist Oliver Sacks.’ This terrified me, and I grew more and more nervous as the day approached. But when the evening came, I donned my best suit (it had been made for my bar mitzvah the month before), entered the salon, bowed, arranged my features into a smile, and (almost incontinent with terror) sat down at the piano. After the opening bars of the first mazurka, I got swept away by it, and carried it to a flamboyant conclusion. There was clapping, there were smiles, there was forgiveness of my blunders, so I charged on to the next, and the next, finishing up finally with a posthumous opus (which I vaguely imagined had somehow been completed after Chopin’s death).

There was a special, rare pleasure about this performance. My chemistry and mineralogy and science were all private, shared with my uncles but with nobody else. The recital, in contrast, was open and public, with appreciation, exchange, giving and receiving. It was the opening of something new, the start of an intercourse.

We gloried shamelessly in the luxury of the Schweizerhof, lying for hours, it seemed, in the enormous marble baths, eating ourselves sick in the opulent restaurant. But eventually we grew tired of overindulgence and started to wander through the old city with its crooked streets and its sudden views of mountain and lake. We took the funicular train up its cogwheel track to the summit of Mount Rigi – my first time on a funicular, or a mountain. And then we moved to the alpine village of Arosa, where the air was cool and dry, and I saw edelweiss and gentian for the first time, and tiny churches of painted wood, and heard the alpenhorn resound from valley to valley. It was in Arosa, I think, even more than Lucerne, that a sudden sense of joyousness finally overcame me, a feeling of liberation and release, a sense of the sweetness of life, of a future, of promise. I was thirteen – thirteen! – did not life stand before me?

On the return journey, we stopped in Zurich (the town, Uncle Abe once told me, where Euler the mathematician had been born). And this stay, while otherwise unremarkable, remains in my memory for a very special reason. My father, who always sought out a swimming pool wherever he stayed, located a large municipal pool in the city. He immediately started lapping the pool, with the powerful overarm of which he was a master, but I, in a lazier mood, found a corkboard, hoisted myself upon it, and decided, for once, to let it buoy me, and just float. I lost all sense of time as I floated, lying still on the board, or paddling very gently. A strange ease, a sort of rapture came upon me – a feeling I had sometimes known in dreams. I had floated on corkboards, or rubber rings, or waterwings before, but this time something magical was happening, a slowly swelling, enormous wave of joy that lifted me higher and higher, seemed to go on and on, forever, and then finally subsided in a languorous bliss. It was the most beautiful, peaceful feeling I had ever had.

It was only when I came to take off my swimming trunks that I realized I must have had an orgasm. It did not occur to me to connect this with ‘sex,’ or other people; I did not feel anxious or guilty – but I kept it to myself, feeling it as magic, private, a benison or grace that had come upon me spontaneously, unsought. I felt as if I had discovered a great secret.

In January 1946 I moved from my prep school in Hampstead, The Hall, to a much larger school, St. Paul’s, in Hammersmith. It was here, in the Walker Library, that I met Jonathan Miller for the first time: I was hidden in a corner, reading a nineteenth-century book on electrostatics – reading, for some reason, about ‘electric eggs’ – when a shadow fell across the page. I looked up and saw an astonishingly tall, gangling boy with a very mobile face, brilliant, impish eyes, and an exuberant mop of reddish hair. We got talking together, and have been close friends ever since.

Prior to this time, I had had only one real friend, Eric Korn, whom I had known almost from birth. Eric followed me from The Hall to St. Paul’s a year later, and now he and Jonathan and I formed an inseparable trio, bound not only by personal but by family bonds too (our fathers, thirty years earlier, had all been medical students together, and our families had remained close). Jonathan and Eric did not really share my love of chemistry – although they joined in the sodium-throwing experiment and one or two others – but they were intensely interested in biology, and it was inevitable, when the time came, that we would find ourselves together in the same biology class, and that all of us would fall in love with our biology teacher, Sid Pask.