Why the world needs more Leo Szilards

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.

The enduring legacy of Leo Szilard, father of the atomic age

70 years ago on this day, a flash above Hiroshima silenced a hundred thousand voices and heralded the beginning of a new Faustian relationship between man and his machines. But one man had seen the flash 12 years before at a traffic light in London. Here's an account of my minor pilgrimage to that traffic light and a rumination on the enduring legacy of physicist Leo Szilard on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

A few years ago I made a research-related trip to London. While making headway on a collaboration to discover new anticancer drugs was the stated purpose of the trip, my other key goal was to simply stand at a particular traffic light near the British Museum in Bloomsbury and take a photo of myself standing there. I was so drawn to this mundane everyday object that I had made up my mind to visit London at least once in my lifetime for the sole purpose of standing at the intersection. What was so special about this traffic light? The answer had to do with Leo Szilard.

Leo Szilard – peripatetic Hungarian genius, impetuous habitué of hotel lobbies, soothsayer without peer among scientists – stands as a unique signpost at the intersection of twentieth century science and politics. Among his fellow scientists he was the great prophet who anticipated both the advent of Nazism and the coming of the nuclear arms race. To the few members of the public who are familiar with his name, he is perhaps best known as the man who persuaded Albert Einstein in July 1939 to send the famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning the president of the consequences of nuclear fission which had been discovered eight months earlier in Germany. Szilard’s role in the Einstein letter was entirely consistent with his predilection for prediction. Part of the group of brilliant Hungarian “Martians” – scientists like John von Neumann and Edward Teller whose intellects and achievements were considered almost preternatural – Szilard was the most perspicacious in anticipating world events, and the most politically savvy. Even as a student in Berlin, where he hobnobbed with the likes of Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, Szilard was convinced that Europe would soon go to war and that world government was the only solution to our collective problems; this conviction was only strengthened after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Partly by accident and partly by design, Szilard played a key role in some of the most important scientific events of the twentieth century. He always saw key world events before anyone else, and planned accordingly. Born at the turn of the century to a well-off civil engineer and his wife, Szilard’s background prepared him well for anticipating consequential events. Steeped in languages and showing precocious talent for mathematics at an early age, he also became mindful of changing political fortunes after a succession of communist and fascist regimes took over Hungary after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919.

Like so many of his fellow scientists he left Hungary for Germany whose scientists were heralding new horizons in physics. It was German scientists like Planck and Einstein who, within a span of only twenty years, had fomented both the quantum and the relativity revolutions. In Berlin Szilard befriended Einstein and later filed a patent for a safe refrigerator with the technically savvy former patent clerk. Filing patents became a Szilard trademark; in fact his penchant for exploiting the commercial benefits of his ideas through would have made Szilard feel at home in the twenty-first century world of venture capitalism. Predating Claude Shannon by forty years, he also made important contributions to what we now call information theory. Politically Szilard could see that the country was a mess; while the 1920s Berlin of Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin” (later turned into the musical "Cabaret") gleamed with dizzying decadence, unprecedented inflation, political instability and social discontent had brought people to their knees and were encouraging the slow but steady rise of fascist elements, ingredients which were congealing into a recipe for a major disaster. 

It was clear to Szilard, even in the 1920s, that the short-term future for Europe was dismal. He soon started living out of a suitcase, a habit that was certainly prudent and prescient for a Jewish intellectual in 1930s Germany. Acutely aware of the fate of colleagues who had been driven out of their jobs, he became active in a British committee which was helping expelled Jewish scientists secure employment. A man who was averse throughout his life to stable, salaried jobs that would deny him the pleasure of travel and squelch his free-thinking spirit, Szilard spent his time taking long walks and hounding the delis of European capitals in search of his beloved pastrami. 1933 found him living in London on a modest budget, subsisting on money earned from patents and private physics lessons. It was during one of his walks that Szilard had an epiphany that would gain him a place in the history books and, six decades later, compel a callow student of the history of science to seek out a traffic light in London.

Adolf Hitler had come to power in January, The Depression was raging and the future looked bleak to many. On the morning of September 12, 1933, on a miserable, wet English autumn day, at the intersection where Russell Square meets Southampton Row, Szilard waited impatiently at a traffic light waiting for it to change from red to green. He had just been sitting in a cafe, reading an article in The Times reporting a lecture by the great English physicist Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford, known to many as the father of nuclear physics, was discussing the newly prophesied release of energy from atoms, most notably by science-fiction pioneer H G Wells in his book “The World Set Free” which Szilard had recently read. It had been only one year when a Rutherford protégé named James Chadwick had discovered the elusive neutron, the third component of the nuclear atom along with electrons and protons. The past few years had seen a succession of experiments designed to shoot various particles into the heart of the atomic nucleus to probe its structure. Since every one of these particles had been charged they had to contend with the fearsome charged barrier erected by protons and electrons; lacking charge, the neutron was considered an ideal candidate as an atomic projectile. 

The science of nuclear physics was then in its heyday, as were social strife and the rise of fascism. Wells was not averse to speculating on a potentially explosive meld of the two. In his book the great powers of the world wage war with what Wells calls “atomic bombs”, gadgets deriving their enormous stores of energy from the forces holding the atomic nucleus together. Wells’s prognostications as well as Rutherford’s response to it had both made the front page of The Times. When asked whether there was any realistic chance of harnessing energy from the atom, Rutherford in his baritone voice dismissed this fanciful idea as nonsense. Any thought of releasing the energy locked inside the nucleus, he said, was “moonshine”.

Szilard was irritated by this flippant repudiation. Accomplished as he was, how could even the great Lord Rutherford know what the future held in store? During his own days Szilard had seen the great scientific minds of his time not fly but grope toward the truth and he was well aware how unpredictable the course of scientific discovery can be. Steeped in the pioneering discoveries in physics over the last four decades, Szilard himself had thought deeply about nuclear matters before, most often during extended morning bathtub ablutions in expensive hotels. Now, waiting for the light to change, he pondered Rutherford’s words…

What happened next has been immortalized by historian Richard Rhodes in his seminal work, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”. The first time I read about it the words got seared into my mind.

“In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come”…

Time cracked open indeed. What Szilard realized as he stepped off that curb was that if we found an element that when bombarded by one neutron would release two neutrons, it could lead to a chain reaction that could possibly release vast amounts of energy. Leo Szilard had discovered the nuclear chain reaction long before anyone else, six years before the discovery of nuclear fission and any inkling that anyone could have had about the release of atomic energy, let alone the woeful apocalyptic future that would await the world because of its release. In his later days Szilard told an audience, “Physics and politics were always my two great interests”. That September morning the two unexpectedly collided at the traffic intersection and foretold a chain reaction of world events.

I first read Rhodes’s book in college; it was one of the books that sealed my resolve to become a scientist. The book begins with this story. Since then the event has been etched in my mind like words in red-hot steel. The description is so riveting, the tale so profound and evocative, the person so singular and the implications so prophetic, that I resolved to visit Szilard’s traffic light even if I had to once make a trip to London for just this purpose. Several years later I had the opportunity.

The traffic light itself is completely nondescript, standing among dozens of other nondescript lights. My friend and I almost missed it. As I mused aloud about my great disappointment in a cafe and wished I had a map, a Spanish tourist sitting at the next table saved my life and procured one. The intersection was there; we had missed it by a block. Back we went and indeed there it was, with not an indication that a famous and prophetic physicist had seen into the future at that light some 75 years ago. I stood at the intersection and had my friend take a photo for posterity. A moment captured in time, in homage to another moment prophesying the possible end of time.

As it happened, Szilard’s choice for the element he was thinking about turned out to be wrong. He dutifully filed a patent about his idea with the British Admiralty, which promptly stashed it away in the dark as the fanciful meanderings of an eccentric scientist. In fact nuclear fission would be discovered only six years later in Germany after a series of close misses in Italy and France. When Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman reported the unexpected breaking up of the uranium nucleus, it was Szilard’s vision on that wet English day that allowed him to grasp the significance of the discovery instantly and prompted him to persuade Einstein to send his famous letter to FDR. He would go on to work with Enrico Fermi on the world’s first nuclear reactor, exasperate Manhattan Project security with his contempt for compartmentalization and unsuccessfully try to get another letter to FDR - this time presciently warning that direct use of the bomb would spark an arms race - before a stroke unexpectedly cut the president’s life short. Ironically when the first atomic bomb test was conducted on July 16, 1945 in the deathly stillness of the New Mexico desert, the flash was so bright that it would have been seen reflected off the moon. It was, literally, “moonshine”. The rest was history. Leo Szilard died peacefully in his sleep in 1964, hoping that the genie he and his fellow scientists had unleashed would co-exist harmoniously with mankind.

But that day I lived one of my minor dreams at that traffic light in London. A light illuminating a tale of human triumph and folly. Leo Szilard’s light. Standing at the intersection, I could not help but feel my mind racing across gulfs of time and forging a connection with this remarkable man. I stood there in silence for a few minutes, contemplating the consequences of Szilard’s vision for the future. Then we went on our way. A light rain began to batter the sidewalk.

References:
1. William Lanouette - Genius in the Shadows (this remains the best and most authoritative biography of Szilard)
2. Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb (this remains the most eloquent and definitive history of the birth of the atomic age).

The intersection of Russell Square and Southampton Row where I stood. Of course, it's probably impossible to say which of the four lights Szilard was standing at (I was at the one to the right myself).

Why the world needs more Leo Szilards

This is a repost of an old post in honor of Leo Szilard who celebrates his 117th birthday today.

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.

Last year William 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 2014. 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.

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; his networking skills were on full display for instance when he secured rare, impurity-free graphite from a commercial supplier as a moderator in Fermi’s nuclear reactor; in fact the failure of German scientists to secure such pure graphite and the subsequent inability of the contaminated graphite to sustain fission damaged their belief in the viability of a chain reaction and held them back. Szilard’s networking abilities were also 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).

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 probably 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. 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.

Celebrating the 1939 Leo Szilard letter to FDR and setting the record straight

Leo Szilard was the principal architect of the famous
letter to FDR. But even today Einstein's name is the one
most associated with the event. This needs to change
(Image: NNSA).

Today marks the 74th anniversary of the famous letter that physicist Leo Szilard wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt. In the letter Szilard alerted the president to the startling recent discovery of nuclear fission and more ominously, warned him that Germany had likely started working on the implications of this discovery for waging war. When FDR saw the letter, he famously called his aide "Pa" Watson and handed the letter to him saying, "Pa, this requires action".

Thus began the momentous road leading down to the Manhattan Project. But Szilard had seen this road six years before, at a traffic light in London when, stepping off the curb he saw the essence of energy from the atom before anyone else.

The above account may sound strange and raise eyebrows since I seem to have omitted the name of the one famous person who is most associated with the FDR letter - Albert Einstein. But the point that I want to make is that a story about the letter focusing exclusively on Szilard will still be more accurate than a story focusing exclusively on Einstein. Both accounts would be inaccurate, but in Isaac Asimov's words the second would be "wronger", and yet it's the one that has stuck in the minds of most people.

Leo Szilard remains one of the most brilliant, wide-ranging and underappreciated scientists in history. Bill Lanouette has performed an invaluable social service in writing a brilliant and definitive biography of the man which is a must read. In case of the so-called "Szilard-Einstein letter", Szilard's role cannot be overemphasized. First of all, he was the one who, based on his unique traffic light insight six years back, instantly grasped the terrifying implications of nuclear fission for war. This was based not just on his scientific insight but on his incredible political insight, a trait that had constantly marked him apart from his fellow scientists. More than almost any of them Szilard saw political events before they overtook the world, and this time was no different.

But Szilard was not just a man of thought, he was also one of determined and preemptive action. He immediately recruited the efforts of his fellow Hungarian scientists Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller in communicating the importance of the momentous discovery to the highest powers. At first Szilard's overriding concern was regarding the existence of uranium ore in the Belgian Congo which Germany could hoard. He wanted to alert the Belgian royal family, and he realized that the one person in his circle who knew them was Einstein. Szilard and Einstein were old friends and colleagues, having filed a patent for a refrigerator during their carefree time in heady Berlin in the 1920s. 

But Szilard also realized that any action on fission would need government support on a massive scale. And he again realized that nobody else in his circle carried the weight that Einstein did. So he recruited Wigner in driving him to Einstein's summer cottage on Long Island. The first meeting was on July 12: When Szilard told Einstein about the discovery of fission and its implications Einstein was completely surprised, saying "Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht" ("I had not thought about that"); his surprise indicates Szilard's overarching role in initiating the set of events. Szilard not only approached Einstein but also drafted two letters, one addressed to the Belgian ambassador and another to FDR. The emissary for delivering the second letter was going to be Alexander Sachs, an economist who knew Szilard and who had the ear of the president.

On August 2 Szilard again had himself driven by Teller to Einstein's cottage. This time Einstein modified the letter and dictated the revised version in German. Szilard came back to Columbia University where he was then installed and asked a stenographer - who thought she must be dealing with a nutcase - to transcribe it in English. The letter clearly laid out the possibility of atomic bombs based on Enrico Fermi's work and also warned about Germany's access to both brilliant physicists and the uranium ore in the Congo.

Szilard had the letters signed by his famous friend and gave both of them to Sachs. The rest is history. But the set of events that transpired make Szilard's absolutely essential role in the "Einstein letter" obvious. In fact it's not too much to say that without Szilard the letter would not have been written. Szilard not only instantly grasped the implications of fission but he alerted Einstein, he explained what the problem was and he drafted the letter. Einstein's main role was in listening, approving and signing. These were all important roles, but surely not as important as Szilard's role in willing the letters into existence in the first place.

So let's make no mistake about it every time we talk about the famous letter to FDR. Einstein played an important role in being the messenger, but Szilard was both the medium and the message. Without Szilard there would have been no letter. And without Szilard this chapter from Einstein's life would have been erased. As he did in 1939, it's a pity that even today Szilard remains the genius in the shadows. He deserves to always have his memory kept alive.

P.S. The Wikipedia entry on the topic is actually a pretty good and accurate account.

The Traffic Light

Part of the reason I made the trip to London in September was a single goal; to stand at a particular traffic light near the British Museum and take a photo of myself standing there. Later when I told people about the reason, most thought it was silly, and perhaps it was. But all of us have a romanticised impression of certain people, places and events in our mind which other people could find silly. In this particular case, the person, place and event involved were profound even if little known to the general public. In fact this light was so important for me that I had made up my mind to visit London once in my lifetime for the sole purpose of standing at the light, if not for anything else. What was so special about this traffic light?

It was 1933. Adolf Hitler had come to power in January, The Depression was raging and the future looked bleak to many. On the morning of September 12, 1933, on a miserable, wet, quintessentially English autumn day, at the intersection where Russell Square meets Southampton Row, Leó Szilárd waited irritably at a traffic light waiting for it to change from red to green. He had just attended a lecture by the great English physicist Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford, known to many as the father of nuclear physics, was discussing the newly prophesied release of energy from atoms, most notably by science-fiction pioneer H G Wells in his book The World Set Free. In his baritone voice, Rutherford, acknowledged master of the atomic domain, dismissed this fanciful idea as nonsense. Any thought of releasing the energy locked in atoms, he said, was "moonshine".

Szilárd was irritated by this flippant repudiation. Accomplished as he was, how could even the great Lord Rutherford know what the future held in store? Szilárd, peripatetic Hungarian genius, imperious habitué of hotel lobbies, soothsayer without peer among scientists, had himself thought deeply about nuclear matters before, most often during his extended morning bathtub ablutions. Now waiting for the light to change, Szilárd pondered Rutherford's words...I will let the acclaimed nuclear historian Richard Rhodes do the talking here. It was the riveting description of this event in Rhodes's magnificent book that engraved it in my mind like nothing else:

"In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come"

Time cracked open indeed. What Szilard realised as he stepped off that curb, was that if we found an element that when bombarded by one neutron would release two neutrons, it could lead to a chain reaction that could possibly release vast amounts of energy. Leo Szilárd had discovered the nuclear chain reaction long before anyone else, six years before the discovery of nuclear fission and any inkling that anyone could have had about the release of atomic energy, let alone the woeful apocalyptic future that would await the world because of its release.

I first read Rhodes's book in 2000. The book begins with this story. The description is so riveting, the tale so profound and evocative, the person so singular and the implications so prophetic, that I resolved to visit Szilárd's traffic light, my traffic light, even if I had to once make a trip to London for just that. Since then, the event has been etched in my mind like words in red hot steel. Seven years later I got a chance.

The traffic light itself is completely non-descript, standing among dozens of other non-descript lights. We almost missed it; as I mused aloud about my great disappointment to my friend in a cafe and wished I had a map, a Spanish tourist sitting at the next table saved my life and procured one. The intersection was there. We had missed it by a block. Back we went and indeed there it was, with not an indication that a famous and prophetic physicist had seen into the future at that light some 75 years ago.

As it turned out at the time, Szilárd's choice for the element he was thinking about turned out to be wrong. Nuclear fission would be discovered only six years later in Germany after a series of close misses in Italy and France. But Leo Szilárd went down in history as the man who saw death before anyone else, a glimpse into mankind's Faustian pact with fate, the shape of things to come.

Ironically, when the first atomic bomb test was conducted in the New Mexico desert in the deathly stillness of the morning, in the midst of war and hope, the flash was so bright that it would have been seen reflected off the moon. It was, literally, "moonshine". The rest was history.

But I lived one of my dreams that day at that traffic light in London. Szilárd's traffic light. My traffic light.