Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do. - Steve Jobs
The
body of men and women who built the atomic bomb was vast, diverse, talented and
multitudinous. Every conceivable kind of professional - from theoretical
physics to plumber - worked on the Manhattan Project for three years over an
enterprise that spread across the country and equaled the US automobile
industry in its marshaling of resources like metals and electricity.
The
project may have been the product of this sprawling hive mind, but one man saw
both the essence and the implications of the bomb, in both science and
politics, long before anyone else. Stepping off the curb at a traffic light across from the British Museum in
London in 1933, Leo Szilard saw the true nature and the consequences of the
chain reaction six years before reality breathed heft and energy into its
abstract soul. In one sense though, this remarkable propensity for seeing into
the future was business as usual for the Hungarian scientist. Born into a
Europe that was rapidly crumbling in the face of onslaughts of fascism even as
it was being elevated by revolutionary discoveries in science, Szilard grasped early
in his youth both a world split apart by totalitarian regimes and the necessity
of international cooperation engendered by the rapidly developing abilities of
humankind to destroy itself with science. During his later years Szilard once
told an audience, "Physics and politics were my two great interests".
Throughout his life he would try to forge the essential partnership between the
two which he thought was necessary to save the human species from annihilation.
It's Leo Szilard's birthday today. A
couple of years ago historian Bill Lanouette brought out a new revised edition of his authoritative, sensitive and
sparkling biography of Szilard. It is essential reading for those who want to
understand the nature of science, both as an abstract flight into the deep
secrets of nature and a practical tool that can be wielded for humanity's
salvation and destruction. As I read the book and pondered Szilard's life I
realized that the twentieth century Hungarian would have been right at home in
the twenty-first. More than anything else, what makes Szilard remarkable is how
prophetically his visions have played out since his death in 1962, all the way
to the year 2016. But Szilard was also the quintessential example of a
multifaceted individual. If you look at the essential events of the man's life
you can see several Szilards, each of whom holds great relevance for the modern
world.
There's of course
Leo Szilard the brilliant physicist. Where he came from precocious ability was
commonplace. Szilard belonged to the crop of men known as the "Martians" -
scientists whose intellectual powers were off scale - who played key roles in
European and American science during the mid-twentieth century. On a strict
scientific basis Szilard was perhaps not as accomplished as his fellow Martians
John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but that is probably because he found a
higher calling in his life. However he certainly did not lack originality. As a
graduate student in Berlin - where he hobnobbed with the likes of Einstein and
von Laue - Szilard came up with a novel way to consolidate the two microscopic
and macroscopic aspects of the science of heat, now called statistical
mechanics and thermodynamics. He also wrote a paper connecting entropy and
energy to information, predating Claude Shannon's seminal creation of
information theory by three decades. In another prescient paper he set forth
the principle of the cyclotron, a device which was to secure a Nobel Prize for
its recognized inventor - physicist Ernest Lawrence - more than a decade later.
Later during the
1930s, after he was done campaigning on behalf of expelled Jewish scientists
and saw visions of neutrons branching out and releasing prodigious amounts of
energy, Szilard performed some of the earliest experiments in the United States
demonstrating fission. And while he famously disdained getting his hands dirty,
he played a key role in helping Enrico Fermi set up the world's first nuclear
reactor. When Fermi was building the reactor his experiments were plagued by graphite moderator containing impurities of boron which absorbed neutrons and slowed down the reaction; with his background in engineering and his business connections, Szilard found a chemical engineering firm which supplied high purity graphite. Interestingly, the Germans encountered the same problem but instead of getting around it they got dissuaded and decided to use heavy water as a moderator instead. This led to them depending on the heavy water facility at Vemork in Norway; that facility was destroyed by the Allies in 1943, consigning the German atomic bomb effort to a certain end.
Szilard as scientist
also drives home the importance of interdisciplinary research, a fact which
hardly deserves explication in today's scientific world where researchers from
one discipline routinely team up with those from others and cross
interdisciplinary boundaries with impunity. After the war Szilard became truly
interdisciplinary when he left physics for biology and inspired some of the
earliest founders of molecular biology, including Jacques Monod, James Watson
and Max Delbruck. His reason for leaving physics for biology should be taken to
heart by young researchers - he said that while physics was a relatively mature
science, biology was a young science where even low hanging fruits were ripe
for the picking.
Szilard was not only
a notable theoretical scientist but he also had another strong streak, one
which has helped so many scientists put their supposedly rarefied knowledge to
practical use - that of scientific entrepreneur. His early training had been in
chemical engineering, and during his days in Berlin he famously patented an electromagnetic
refrigerator with his friend and colleague Albert
Einstein; by alerting Einstein to the tragic accidents caused by leakage in
mechanical refrigerators, he helped the former technically savvy patent clerk
put his knowledge of engineering to good use (as another indication of how
underappreciated Szilard remains, the Wikipedia entry on the device is called
the "Einstein refrigerator"). Szilard was also finely attuned to the
patent system, filing a patent for the nuclear chain reaction with the British
Admiralty in 1934 before anyone had an inkling what element would make it work,
as well as a later patent for a nuclear reactor with Fermi.
He also excelled at
what we today called networking. Szilard's networking
abilities were evident in his connections with prominent financiers and
bankers who he constantly tried to conscript in supporting his scientific and
political adventures; in attaining his goals he would not hesitate to write any
letter, ring any doorbell, ask for any amount of money, travel to any land and
generally try to use all means at his disposal to secure support from the right
authorities. In his case the "right authorities" ranged, at various
times in his life, from top scientists to bankers to a Secretary of State
(James Byrnes), a President of the United States (FDR) and a Premier of the
Soviet Union (Nikita Khrushchev). Interestingly Szilard also became an early confidant
of financier (and future Oppenheimer nemesis) Lewis Strauss who he convinced to
fund and support his projects; later when the vindictive Strauss turned against
Oppenheimer Szilard repudiated his advances.
I am convinced that
had Szilard been alive today, his abilities to jump across disciplinary
boundaries, his taste for exploiting the practical benefits of his knowledge
and his savvy public relations skills would have made him feel as much at home
in the world of Boston or San Francisco venture capitalism as in the ivory
tower.
If Szilard had
accomplished his scientific milestones and nothing more he would already have
been a notable name in twentieth century science. But more than almost any
other scientist of his time Szilard was also imbued with an intense desire to
engage himself politically - "save the world" as he put it - from an
early age. Among other scientists of his time, only Niels Bohr came closest to
exhibiting the same kind of genuine and passionate concern for the social
consequences of science that Szilard did. This was Leo Szilard the political
activist. Even in his teens, when the Great War had not even broken out, he
could see how the geopolitical landscape of Europe would change, how Russia
would "lose" even if it won the war. When Hitler came to power in
1933 and others were not yet taking him seriously Szilard was one of the few
scientists who foresaw the horrific legacy that this madman would bequeath
Europe. This realization was what prompted him to help Jewish scientists find
jobs in the UK, at about the same time that he also had his prophetic vision at
the traffic light.
It was during the
war that Szilard's striking role as conscientious political advocate became
clear. He famously alerted Einstein to the implications of fission - at this
point in time (July 1939) Szilard and his fellow Hungarian expatriates were
probably the only scientists who clearly saw the danger - and helped Einstein
draft the now iconic letter to President Roosevelt. Einstein's name remains
attached to the letter, Szilard's is often sidelined; a recent article about
the letter from the Institute for Advanced study on my Facebook mentioned the
former but not the latter. Without Szilard the bomb would have certainly been
built, but the letter may never have been written and the beginnings of fission
research in the US may have been delayed. When he was invited to join the
Manhattan Project Szilard snubbed the invitation, declaring that anyone who
went to Los Alamos would go crazy. He did remain connected to the project
through the Met Lab in Chicago, however.
In
the process he drove Manhattan Project security up the wall through his
rejection of compartmentalization; throughout his life Szilard had been - in
the words of the biologist Jacques Monod - "as generous with his ideas as
a Maori chief with his wives" and he favored open and honest scientific
inquiry; this aspect of Szilard’s scientific philosophy would have been acutely
appreciated by many modern scientists who favor open-access publication and
collaborative, crowdsourced science. At one point General Groves who was the
head of the project even wrote a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson
asking the secretary to consider incarcerating Szilard; Stimson who was a wise
and humane man - he later took ancient and sacred Kyoto off Groves's atomic
bomb target list - refused.
Szilard's day in the
sun came when he circulated a petition directed toward the president and signed
by 70 scientists advocating a demonstration of the bomb to the Japanese and an
attempt at cooperation in the field of atomic energy with the Soviets. This was
activist Leo Szilard at his best. Groves was livid, Oppenheimer - who by now
had tasted power and was an establishment man - was deeply hesitant and the
petition was stashed away in a safe until after the war. Szilard's
disappointment that his advice was not heeded turned to even bigger concern
after the war when he witnessed the arms race between the two superpowers.
In
1949 he wrote a remarkable fictitious story titled 'My Trial As A War Criminal'
in which he imagined what would have happened had the United States lost the
war to the Soviets; Szilard's point was that in participating in the creation
of nuclear weapons, American scientists were no less or more complicit than
their Russian counterparts. Szilard's take on the matter raised valuable
questions about the moral responsibility of scientists, an issue that we are
grappling with even today. The story played a small part in inspiring Soviet
physicist Andrei Sakharov in his campaign for nuclear disarmament. Szilard also
helped organize the Pugwash Conferences for disarmament, gave talks around the
world on nuclear weapons, and met with Nikita Khrushchev in Manhattan in 1960;
the result of this amiable meeting was both the gift of a Schick razor to
Khrushchev and, more importantly, Khrushchev agreeing with Szilard's suggestion
that a telephone hot-line be installed between Moscow and Washington for
emergencies. The significance of this hot line was acutely highlighted by the
1962 Cuban missile crisis. Sadly Szilard's later two attempts at meeting with
Khrushchev failed.
After
playing a key role in the founding of the Salk Institute in California, Szilard
died peacefully in his sleep in 1964, hoping that the genie whose face he had
seen at the traffic light in 1933 would treat human beings with kindness.
Since Szilard the
common and deep roots that underlie the tree of science and politics have
become far clearer.
Today
we need scientists like Szilard to stand up for science every time a scientific
issue such as climate change or evolution collides with politics. When Szilard
pushed scientists to get involved in politics it may have looked like an
anomaly, but today we are struggling with very similar issues. As in many of
his other actions, Szilard's motto for the interaction of science with politics
was one of accommodation. He was always an ardent believer in the common goals
that human beings seek, irrespective of the divergent beliefs that they may
hold. He was also an exemplar of combining thought with action, projecting an
ideal meld of the idealist and the realist. Whether he was balancing
thermodynamic thoughts with refrigeration concerns or following up political
idealism with letters to prominent politicians, he taught us all how to both
think and do. As interdisciplinary scientist, as astute technological inventor,
as conscientious political activist, as a troublemaker of the best kind, Leo
Szilard leaves us with an outstanding role model and an enduring legacy. It is
up to us to fill his shoes.
This is a revised version of a past post.
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