A Manhattan Project for AI?

Neuroscientist and AI researcher Gary Marcus has an op-ed in the NYT in which he bemoans the lack of international collaboration in AI, a limitation that Marcus thinks is significant hampering progress in the field. He says that AI researchers should consider a global effort akin to CERN; a massively funded, wide-ranging project to solve specific problems in AI that would benefit from the expertise of hundreds of independent researchers. This hivemind effort could potentially clear the AI pipeline of several clogs which have held back progress.

On the face of it this is not a bad idea. Marcus's opinion is that both private and public research has some significant limitations which a meld of the two could potentially overcome.

"Academic labs are too small. Take the development of automated machine reading, which is a key to building any truly intelligent system. Too many separate components are needed for any one lab to tackle the problem. A full solution will incorporate advances in natural language processing (e.g., parsing sentences into words and phrases), knowledge representation (e.g., integrating the content of sentences with other sources of knowledge) and inference (reconstructing what is implied but not written). Each of those problems represents a lifetime of work for any single university lab.

Corporate labs like those of Google and Facebook have the resources to tackle big questions, but in a world of quarterly reports and bottom lines, they tend to concentrate on narrow problems like optimizing advertisement placement or automatically screening videos for offensive content. There is nothing wrong with such research, but it is unlikely to lead to major breakthroughs. Even Google Translate, which pulls off the neat trick of approximating translations by statistically associating sentences across languages, doesn’t understand a word of what it is translating.

I look with envy at my peers in high-energy physics, and in particular at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a huge, international collaboration, with thousands of scientists and billions of dollars of funding. They pursue ambitious, tightly defined projects (like using the Large Hadron Collider to discover the Higgs boson) and share their results with the world, rather than restricting them to a single country or corporation. Even the largest “open” efforts at A.I., like OpenAI, which has about 50 staff members and is sponsored in part by Elon Musk, is tiny by comparison.

An international A.I. mission focused on teaching machines to read could genuinely change the world for the better — the more so if it made A.I. a public good, rather than the property of a privileged few."

This is a good point. For all its commitment to blue sky research, Google is not exactly the Bell Labs of 2017, and except for highly targeted research like that done at Verily and Calico, it's still committed to work that has more or less immediate applications to its flagship products. And as Marcus says, academic labs suffer from limits to capacity that keep them from working on the big picture.

A CERN for AI wouldn't be a bad idea, but it would be different from the real CERN in some key aspects. Most notably, unlike discovering the Higgs Boston, AI has immense potential social, economic and political ramifications. Thus, keeping the research at a CERN-like facility open and free for all would be a steep challenge, with governments and individuals constantly vying for a piece of the pie. In addition, there would be important IP issues if corporations were funding this endeavor. And even CERN had to contend with paranoid fears of mini black holes, so one can only imagine how much the more realistic (albeit more modest) fears of AI would be blown out of proportion.

As interesting as a CERN-like AI facility is, I think another metaphor for a global AI project would be the Manhattan Project. Now let me be the first to say that I consider most comparisons of Big Science projects to the Manhattan Project to be glib and ill-considered; comparing almost any peacetime project with necessarily limited resources to a wartime project that benefited from a virtually unlimited supply of resources brought to bear on it with great urgency will be a fraught exercise. And yet I think the Manhattan Project supplies at least one particular ingredient for successful AI research that Marcus does not really talk about. It's the essential interdisciplinary nature of tackling big problems like nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence.

What seems to be missing from a lot of the AI research taking place today is that it does not involve scientists from all disciplines working closely together in an open, free-for-all environment. That is not to say that individual scientists have not collaborated in the field, and it's also not to say that fields like neuroscience and biology have not given computer scientists a lot to think about. But a practical arrangement in which generally smart people from a variety of fields work intensely on a few well-defined AI problems seems to still be missing.

The main reason why this kind of interdisciplinary work may be key to cracking AI is very simple: in a very general sense, there are no experts in the field. It's too new for anyone to really claim expertise. The situation was very similar to the Manhattan Project. While physicists are most associated with the atomic bomb, without specialists in chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance, engineering and electronics the bomb would have been impossible to create. More importantly, none of these people were experts in the field and they had to make key innovations on the fly. Let's take the key idea of implosion, perhaps the most important and most novel scientific contribution to emerge from the project: Seth Neddermeyer who worked on cosmic rays before the war came up with the initial idea of implosion that made the Nagasaki bomb possible. But Neddermeyer's idea would not have taken practical shape had it not been for the under-appreciated British physicist James Tuck who came up with the ingenious design of having explosives of different densities around the plutonium core that would focus the shockwave inward toward the core, similar to how a lens focuses light. And Tuck's design would not have seen the light of day had they not brought in an expert in the chemistry of explosives - George Kistiakowsky.

These people were experts in their well-defined fields of science, but none of them were expert in nuclear weapons design, and they were making it up as they went along. But they were generally smart and capable people, capable of thinking widely outside their immediate sphere of expertise, capable of producing at least parts of ideas which they could then hand over in a sort of relay to others with different parts.

Similarly, nobody in the field of AI is an expert, and just like nuclear weapons the field is still new enough and wide enough for all kinds of generally smart people to make contributions to it. So along with a global effort, we should perhaps have a kind of Manhattan Project of AI that brings together computer scientists, neuroscientists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians and biologists at the minimum to dwell on the field's outstanding problems. These people don't need to be experts or know much about AI at all, they don't even need to know how to implement every idea they have, but they do need to be idea generators, they need to be able to bounce ideas off of each other, and they need to be able to pursue odd leads and ends and try to see the big picture. The Manhattan Project worked not because of experts pursuing deep ideas but because of a tight deadline and a concentrated effort by smart scientists who were encouraged to think outside the box as much as possible. Except for the constraints of wartime urgency, it should not be hard to replicate that effort, at least in its essentials.

Born on this day: Physicist Emilio Segrè, who changed the direction of the Manhattan Project

The road to mutually assured destruction unintentionally started in 1944, at the end of a mountain trail with flowers and snakes, with a man called The Basilisk. But he didn't know it then. In the fall of 1944, the sprawling, top secret atomic bomb project at Los Alamos faced a huge crisis. Ever since the laboratory had been set up in 1943, it had been working on two kinds of bombs. One would work on uranium which was being separated using cyclotrons at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The other would work on plutonium which was being created in nuclear reactors in Hanford, Washington. The basic design for nuclear weapons had been worked out in 1942 and was simple in principle: slam together two lumps of uranium and plutonium using a "gun" so that they come together to create a critical mass, and the ensuing exponential chain reaction would guarantee a tremendous explosion. In 1944 it seemed like that design was well underway for both uranium and plutonium. 

Then in the fall of 1944 came news that this design would be useless for plutonium. Millions of 1944 dollars and the resources of thousands of workers and scientists were at stake. The laboratory's director, Robert Oppenheimer, felt so embattled that he briefly considered resigning. The man who delivered this bad news to Oppenheimer and the others was Emilio Segrè.

Emilio Segrè who was born today in 1905 was a member of the small band of brilliant physicists led by Enrico Fermi in Rome in the 1930s. Each member of the team had a nickname. Fermi was "The Pope" because of his infallible knowledge of physics. Segrè's sharp tongue and quick mind made others name him "The Basilisk". Segrè was part of all of Fermi's key experiments, including the ones leading up to his Nobel Prize. Segrè himself won a Nobel Prize later for his discovery of the antiproton. But in 1944, he must have been seen as the bearer of bad news. This news, however, galvanized the lab and forced it to explore a novel idea that became the basis of nuclear arsenals around the world.

At Los Alamos Segrè was assigned the task of measuring the neutron properties of uranium and plutonium and their byproducts. Because his work involved large quantities of potentially dangerous neutrons, he was put in a cabin several miles removed from the main laboratory. The cabin was at the end of a trail populated by rattlesnakes and beautiful flowers. What Segrè discovered in that cabin was that the plutonium bomb would fizzle out prematurely if it were assembled by the gun technique. Premature explosion had been considered by the Los Alamos scientists and was not thought to be a serious issue. The probability of premature explosion depended on the rate of neutrons spontaneously generated by the fissile mass. Left to themselves, uranium and plutonium have a small but fixed background rate of spontaneous neutron emission. During critical assembly, a high rate of neutron emission meant that the fission would start occurring before the critical mass was reached, and the result would at best be a small, inefficient explosion. It was thus essentially a contest between this rate and the speed with which the two pieces were brought together that would decide the fate of the bomb.

Physicists were not ignorant of the rate of spontaneous fission in uranium and plutonium and in fact had measured it to reassure themselves that it would not matter. However, they had reached this conclusion based on experiments on small quantities of uranium-238 and plutonium-239 produced in cyclotrons built by Ernest Lawrence's team at Berkeley. However cyclotrons cannot be used to make plutonium in any measurable quantity. By the time the Manhattan project picked up steam, Pu-239 was being produced in gram quantities in the nuclear reactors at Hanford.

What the physicists had not realized was the role that a rogue isotope of plutonium would play in thwarting their plans for a gun type bomb. It turns out that the spontaneous fission depends on the precise isotope under consideration. Plutonium-239 is produced by bombarding uranium-238 by neutrons. However there is another isotope of plutonium that is produced in the process: Pu-240. Pu-240 has a much greater spontaneous fission rate than Pu-239. The net rate depends on the ratio of the two isotopes.

The crucial discovery which Segrè made was that reactor-produced plutonium had a much higher percentage of Pu-240 than cyclotron-produced plutonium and therefore a much higher spontaneous fission rate. All the spontaneous fission rate measurements done by the physicists on cyclotron-produced plutonium were therefore useless for reactor-produced plutonium. The high spontaneous fission rate in reactor-produced plutonium would doom a gun type plutonium weapon to a premature fizzle. Chemical separation of the Pu-240 from the Pu-239 was also out of the question: chemically separating uranium 235 (the fissile isotope of uranium) from the more abundant uranium 238 was already a mammoth undertaking that strained the country's resources. Separating Pu-240 from Pu-239 would be almost impossible.

Segrè's bad news plunged the laboratory in a big crisis. Fortunately there was a physicist named Seth Neddermeyer who had proposed a backup alternative for assembling a plutonium bomb. This alternative was implosion and consisted of rapidly squeezing a sphere of plutonium inwards to criticality. Implosion would be much faster than a gun type assembly and the spontaneous fission rate would not be a problem. The laboratory was rapidly reorganized by Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves to make implosion a high priority.

Implosion was still a risky endeavor, so the first atomic bomb test that the world saw on July 16, 1945 was of the implosion bomb. Less than a month later, Nagasaki was destroyed by the same kind of bomb. And ten years later the United States and other countries were building terrible hydrogen bombs in which plutonium implosion was an essential mechanism. Since then thousands of hydrogen bombs have been added to the world's nuclear arsenals, placing humanity at the risk of instant obliteration. What Segre thought about this is lost to history.

The man with an inside track to God: A new biography of Enrico Fermi

Scientists come in at least as many flavors as fruit. Some are inspired philosophers, others are get-your-hands-dirty mechanical craftsmen, yet others are like birds which can survey multiple parts of the scientific landscape from a very high altitude. But whatever other classification you may use, there are two distinctions which scientists have always exemplified. They can be either theoreticians or experimentalists, and especially these days, they are all specialists. In an age where it can take a lifetime to understand the complexities of even a narrow part of your science, excelling at every subfield of a scientific discipline, let alone both theory and experiment, would seem like an impossible feat.

Enter Enrico Fermi, the likes of whom we are unlikely to see for a very long time. Bucking almost every neat scientific distinction, Fermi was the only scientist of the twentieth century who was supremely accomplished in both theoretical and experimental physics. Almost any of his discoveries would have been enough to net a Nobel Prize, and yet he made at least half a dozen of them. In addition he was one of the three or four physicists of the century who were universalists, making contributions to and displaying a sound grasp of pretty much every branch of physics, from the microscopic to the cosmic. In my opinion, among his contemporaries only Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman and Luis Alvarez came close to demonstrating the same breadth, and none of them excelled in both theory and experiment. You could ask Fermi any problem, and as long as he could calculate it he could give you an answer: no wonder that his colleagues called him the "Pope of Physics". It also helped that he lived through a century in which physics made momentous contributions to the human intellect and condition, and he was both fortunate and supremely qualified to be a major part of these contributions. As just one aspect of his extraordinary imprint on physics, no scientist has as many measurements, rules, laws, particles, statistics, units, and energy levels named after him as Fermi. He was also one of America's greatest immigrants.

This is a fine biography of Fermi written by Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin - a practicing physicist and a historian of science - who both had connections to Fermi through their families. Hoerlin's father worked on the Manhattan Project. Segre is the nephew of Emilio Segre, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of Fermi's closet friends and collaborators. The authors document Fermi's upbringing in Italy at the turn of the century. The Fermis came from a verdant, hilly region of Italy known for its industrious farming community, and throughout his life Fermi maintained his love for manual labor and the mountains, qualities endemic to many people from this region. His father was a railway inspector. Enrico was a child prodigy who combined great intellect with hard self-reliance and perseverance, qualities which were inculcated by his hardworking parents. A life-changing tragedy at age fifteen - the sudden death of his brother with whom he was best friends - turned him toward physics and mathematics. His performance as a seventeen year old in the entrance examination for a well-known university in Pisa displayed knowledge that would have been substantial for a graduate student. From then on his scientific development proceeded smoothly, and before he was 30 he was both Italy's leading physicist as well as one of the world's greatest scientists.

The book lays out many of Fermi's major discoveries. Two in particular bracket his unsurpassed talents as both a theoretician and an experimentalist. In 1933 Fermi came up with a mathematical theory of radioactive decay and the weak nuclear force. And in 1942 he and his team assembled the world's first nuclear reactor. It is almost impossible to imagine any other scientist accomplishing these two very different and very important feats; the famed historian C. P. Snow paid Fermi the ultimate tribute in this regard when he said that, had Fermi been born twenty years before, he could have discovered both Niels Bohr's quantum theory of the atom (theory) and Ernest Rutherford's atomic nucleus (experiment). In the 1930s Fermi and his team became the world expert on neutrons; life in the physics institute on Via Panisperna in Rome was bucolic in spite of being intense. He almost single-handedly discovered the power of slow neutrons which are used to harness nuclear energy in reactors. He and other leading physicists also narrowly missed discovering nuclear fission, mistaking fission products for elements beyond uranium. Rome under his scientific tutelage became a magnet for scientists like Hans Bethe and Edward Teller who learnt the art of problem-solving in physics from the master. Fermi's marriage to a very intelligent and resourceful woman, Laura, cemented his family life. But the pall of fascism was dropping on Italy through the person of Benito Mussolini. Laura was Jewish, and by 1938 Fermi realized that he had to emigrate to another country. Fortunately the receipt of the 1938 Nobel Prize gave him the perfect opportunity to flee to the United States. Along with other brilliant scientists like Bethe, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and John von Neumann, Fermi became one of fascism's greatest gifts to this country.

In the United States Fermi was already known as the leading nuclear physicist of his generation. When nuclear fission was discovered in Germany at the end of 1938, there were legitimate fears that the Nazis would harness it to build an atomic bomb. Efforts to investigate fission in the US kicked into high gear, especially after Pearl Harbor. It was not surprising that the scientific community turned toward Fermi to assemble the world's first nuclear reactor. The book's account of this tremendous feat involving black graphite bricks and faces, the squash stand at the university and the sometimes amusing consequences of secrecy is worth reading. First at Columbia and then memorably at Chicago, Fermi and his team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction on December 6, 1942: a coded telegram went out to the leaders of the Manhattan Project saying that the "Italian navigator had landed in the New World". Even if he had accomplished nothing else this would have been sufficient to enshrine Fermi's name in history. But he kept on making major contributions, first at Chicago and then at Los Alamos. At Los Alamos Fermi's universal expertise was so valued that Oppenheimer created an entire division named after him (the F division). He became a kind of all-round troubleshooter who could solve any problem in theoretical or applied physics, or in engineering for that matter. He had an uncanny feel for numbers, and became known for posing and solving 'Fermi problems' which benefited from quick, back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude estimates. The iconic realization of the Fermi method was during the world's first atomic test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, when, as the shockwave reached him, Fermi threw pieces of paper into the air and calculated the yield of the test based on the distance at which they fell. This calculation compared favorably with more sophisticated measurements that took several days to acquire.

After the war Fermi became a professor at Chicago where he again served as a magnet for the new generation of physicists exploring the frontiers of particle physics and cosmology. He was an incredibly clear and succinct teacher, and gave his students a true feel for the entire landscape of physics. Teaching was not just limited to classrooms but spilled over into the lunch cafeteria and on hikes. Physicists like Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman made pilgrimages to see him from around the country, and six of his students received Nobel Prizes. Even after winning enough accolades for a lifetime, he worked harder and more diligently than anyone else. His colleagues joked that he was the man with an inside track to God, so all-encompassing were his scientific and computing abilities. His notes on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and nuclear physics are still available and they attest to his clarity. At Chicago he not only made important contributions to experimental particle physics but he also made the first forays into computing. The so-called Monte-Carlo method which allows one to explore features of a system by making random jumps bears his imprint.

While not a very sentimental man, Fermi's friendliness, integrity, modesty and impartial, non-emotional attitude endeared him to almost everyone he came in contact with. He was friendly and had an impish sense of humor, but while not cold was also not a warm person who engaged intimately with those around him; this quality led to a family life which while not unhappy was also not particularly joyous, and his relative lack of affection was reflected in the brisk relationship that Fermi had with his daughter and son. He despised politics but still served on important government committees because of his feelings of duty toward his adopted country. Remarkably, his neutrality through some very politically fraught times was not detested, and he was one of the very few scientists who was admired by people who were each other's sworn enemies. While he opposed the hydrogen bomb on moral terms and testified on behalf of Oppenheimer during the latter's infamous hearing, he also served as a consultant to Los Alamos once he realized that the Russians might also get the bomb; characteristically enough, he correctly predicted how long it would take them to build their first thermonuclear weapon. People looked to him for impartial guidance in almost every matter which could benefit from rational introspection.

Art and music baffled Fermi, but his rational analysis of these things only endeared him more to his friends and colleagues. At an art exhibit on the immigrant experience for instance, he calculated the ratio of the lengths of legs and heights of the immigrants in the photos and concluded that his own dimensions fit the statistical distribution. At Los Alamos he quickly memorized the rules of square dancing and danced with unerring accuracy but almost zero passion. His modesty and tendency to shun the limelight was also a great draw. He could as easily chat with janitors as with other Nobel Laureates. No task was beneath him, and his great ability to perform routine work without complaints or fatigue was instrumental in his success: whatever it took to solve a problem, Fermi would do it. When flabbergasted scientists asked him how he did it, Fermi would often reply with a smile, "C.i.f, con intuito formidable" ("with formidable intuition"). Often his distinguishing quality was pure stamina; whether it was a tennis match or a physics problem, he would beat the problem (and his opponents) into submission by sheer perseverance and doggedness. His manner of playing sports mirrored his manner of doing science: shun the style and elegance, and go straight and relentlessly for the solution using every technique at your disposal. The method of approximate guesses which came to be named after him has been used to estimate a wide variety of disparate numbers, from the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy to the number of piano tuners in Chicago (his favorite example).

This giant of science was struck down by cancer in 1954 when he was still in his prime. The book talks about visits made by various famous scientists and friends to the hospital where he was installed after exploratory surgery indicated no hope. They could not believe that the indefatigable Enrico would soon be no more. All came away shaken, not because they saw an emotionally fraught man in pain but because they saw a perfectly calm and rational man who had reconciled himself with reality. He knew exactly what was happening to him and was making plans for publishing his last set of notes. Characteristically, he was measuring the rate of saline intake and calculating how many calories he was getting from it. When he came home and his wife rented a hospital bed for him, he predicted that he would only need it until the end of the month. True to his amazing calculating prowess, he passed away two days before the predicted date, on November 28, 1954.

This book in general lays out a warm and engrossing picture of Enrico Fermi. As I see it, it is up against two challenges. Firstly, it's relatively sparse on the science and does not always provide adequate background. In this context it is a light read and comes across unfavorably compared to Richard Rhodes' seminal book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" which goes into great depth regarding Fermi's work, especially on the Chicago nuclear reactor. Rhodes' volume is also better on giving us a detailed picture of Fermi's contemporaries. Secondly, it cannot resist comparison with two old Fermi biographies. His wife Laura's endearing biography of him named "Atoms in the Family", published only a few months before his death, provides as intimate a picture of the personally reticent Fermi as we can expect. This book's view understandably is not as intimate. The same goes for "Enrico Fermi: Physicist", a biography of Fermi written by his friend, fellow Nobel laureate and uncle of one of the present book's authors, Emilio Segre. Segre was a top-notch physicist who worked with Fermi from the beginning and who does much recreating the early days of Fermi's childhood and his experiments in Rome. That description provides another personal touch which is again not as vivid in this volume.

Notwithstanding these comparisons, I am glad that Segre and Hoerlin wrote this book to introduce one of history's greatest and most unique scientists to a new generation. No scientist has contributed more practically and in a more versatile manner to modern physics. And few scientists have combined extraordinary and universal scientific talents with the kind of personal humility and decency that Fermi exemplified. For all this his life story needs to be known anew.

Lessons on management styles from Edward Teller, Hans Bethe and Robert Oppenheimer: A question of temperament

Oppenheimer entertaining at Los Alamos. He could be a
wonderful host.

March, 1943. War is raging across the European continent. The Nazis have faced two significant drawbacks in their relentless quest for racial and geographical conquest - one at El Alamein in North Africa and the other at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union - but Hitler's war machine shows no sign of stopping.

Meanwhile, halfway across the world, the largest and most secret scientific project in history is underway. A laboratory high up in the New Mexico mountains is being staffed with some of the world's best physicists, chemists, engineers, army officers and other personnel. Its express purpose is to build an atomic bomb before Hitler's scientists do so. The brilliant, conflicted Robert Oppenheimer, a polymath equally at home with nuclear physics and Sanskrit poetry, has been chosen to lead the project. He has tapped universities, industrial laboratories and other institutions across the country, recruiting the wealth of brilliant emigre scientists who have fled Nazi Germany for new shores; Adolf Hitler's greatest gifts to the United States. His well known powers of persuasion are on full display as he convinces friends and colleagues to join a secret project whose details he cannot yet fully divulge.

At the top of the list of scientists who Oppenheimer wants to recruit are the Hungarian-born Edward Teller and the German-born Hans Bethe. Both have arrived in the United States during the early 1930s and are now firmly ensconced in their scientific homes - Teller at George Washington University and Bethe at Cornell University. Both men who are still in their late 30s have already made significant contributions to physics. While Teller is more comfortable contributing to the more molecular and chemical aspects of the field, Bethe has uncovered the puzzle to one of science's oldest puzzles - the source of energy in the sun. Both men have been close friends for almost a decade, and Teller has been best man at Bethe's wedding. When the war started the duo wanted to help with the country's war effort, and even though they then lacked a security clearance, worked together on a theory of shock waves (ironically, the paper was classified after it was published, thus closing off access to its own authors).

Teller has also been one of the select key people responsible for sounding the alarm and alerting the government to the potential destructive applications of nuclear fission. Before Oppenheimer and Bethe had fully grasped the implications of a nuclear chain reaction, Teller had already driven his friend, Leo Szilard, to Albert Einstein's summer home in Long Island for what turned out to be a fateful meeting. Szilard had convinced his old friend Einstein to draft a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt; that letter had set the wheels of our nuclear future rolling toward their uncertain destination. Teller is thus one of three or four people, mostly Hungarian emigre scientists, to have been in the loop since the beginning as far as nuclear weapons are concerned. Along with Bethe, he has also been part of a summer study in Berkeley in 1942 led by Oppenheimer in which a handpicked group of physicists worked out the preliminary principles of a fission bomb. More than almost any other scientist and certainly more than Oppenheimer and Bethe, Teller has lived with the bomb since 1939. In fact Bethe did not even believe in an actual bomb until Teller showed him Enrico Fermi's famed nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago in late 1942.

Now, in March 1943, Oppenheimer is in the process of making some key strategic decisions that would shape the organization of the Manhattan Project. Among these decisions, few are as important important as deciding who to put in charge of the theoretical physics division at Los Alamos. It was theoretical physicists who first worked out the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction, and it would undoubtedly be theoretical physicists who would continue to play a foundational role in the success of the project.

Teller, having lived and breathed the bomb, having contributed to both its politics and its science, having seen the vision of its even more powerful descendant (a bomb drawing its energy from nuclear fusion), thinks of himself as a logical choice to head the division.

Oppenheimer instead picks Bethe. It's an omission Teller will not forget.

The decision would have far-reaching consequences for the organization of the Manhattan Project. It would sow the seeds of discontent that would fracture the community of American physicists a decade later. And it would drive home the interplay between management philosophies and the mechanics of complex technological projects that is relevant to this day.

Why did Oppenheimer pick Bethe instead of Teller, and what does this decision say about his own management style and about those of Teller and Bethe? Teller and Bethe actually shared similar backgrounds. Both were born in the early years of the 20th century to cultured and educated middle class parents in Hungary and Germany. Both were seized by a passion for mathematics and physics, and studied the subjects under two world-class masters of the trade: Teller with Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig and Bethe with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich. Coming as they did from enlightened Jewish families, both became ominously aware of the noose of fascism tightening around Germany in the early 1930s, and left for the United States where they established leading centers of physics research and study. 

Unlike many American scientists who had led relatively tranquil lives until then, Teller and Bethe were acutely sensitive to the spread of totalitarian regimes, and they grasped the political implications of the chain reaction before many others. But Teller who had seen both Nazi and Communist occupations was the more sensitive of the two, and this awareness led him to be an early proponent of American dominance in nuclear weapons. It was at a conference organized by Teller and his fellow physicist, Russian emigre George Gamow, that Niels Bohr brought news of fission to American shores at the end of 1938.

But there the similarities between the two physicists ended, and it was their differences that led to their very different and fateful life trajectories. Throughout his life Teller was known to be as volatile and moody as brilliant. He was often short-tempered and brooding and could not always be relied upon to carry calculations to their fruition; while to be fair to him he fully recognized this quality, most of his papers were with collaborators who made sure his calculations were fully fleshed out and correct. Teller later classified physicists as 'brick builders' and 'bricklayers', and called Bethe a 'builder of tiny bricks'. In his view his own skills as well as those of Oppenheimer were more suited to bricklaying. Interestingly, both men's bricklaying was more inspired than thorough, brilliant than always right. Their personalities too shared commonalities: both of them could be sharp-tongued, vicious and unpredictable, charming at one moment and cold at another.

Bethe in contrast was one of the most thoroughgoing scientists of the twentieth century, a steady rock of Gibraltar in both science and life. He could meticulously carry through every task to completion; in the 1930s he single-handedly authored a comprehensive survey of nuclear physics running to hundreds of pages that was so all-encompassing and up to date that it became known as 'Bethe's Bible'. He was also a universalist who could solve problems in almost any branch of pure or applied physics. Renowned for ploughing ahead through obstacles and going straight for the solution, his colleagues fondly called him "The Battleship". Stability and wholeness exemplified his personal and professional lives. Unlike Oppenheimer and Teller he was almost always mild-mannered and diplomatic, gentle if firm in his opinions.

Bethe (second from left) on a weekly mountain hike at
Los Alamos with other scientists such as Enrico Fermi.

Given these highly desirable personal qualities, it should come as no surprise that Oppenheimer picked Bethe instead of Teller to head the theoretical division. Bethe's take on the decision recognizes Teller's contribution but also drives home the requirements of the project at this stage and Bethe's suitability for these requirements.

"That I was named to head the division was a severe blow to Teller, who had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and who considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer. I believe I was chosen because my more plodding but steadier approach to life and science would serve the better at that stage of its development, where decisions had to be adhered to and detailed calculations had to be carried through, and where therefore a good deal of administrative work was inevitable...I believe Teller resented my being placed on top of him." 

Teller's assessment of Oppenheimer's choice is unsurprisingly critical: "Bethe was given the job to organize the effort, and in my opinion, in which I may well have been wrong, he over-organized it. It was too much of a military organization, a line organization."

Considering the fact that an explicit military style organization was rejected by Oppenheimer and weekly open seminars were set up to avoid compartmentalization, it's hard to substantiate Teller's opinion. Moreover, there is no evidence that Bethe's leadership of the theoretical division was anything but highly accomplished. Implosion, computing, the gun-type bomb design; everything proceeded smoothly under his direction, and during the process he also led outstanding theorists like Richard Feynman, Stan Ulam and Robert Serber.

Feeling sidelined by Bethe's appointment, nursing his passionate dream of a fusion weapon, increasingly loathe to do the kind of detailed calculations that Bethe's group was good at, Teller finally asked Oppenheimer to relieve him of his position in Bethe's division. He spend most of the rest of the war largely thinking about what became the hydrogen bomb. Unlike Bethe's role, Teller's role at Los Alamos was not indispensable. He made some valuable contributions in calculating the behavior of imploding plutonium cores at superdense pressures, but beyond this he seems to have mainly focused on his pet project and kept half a dozen Nobel Laureates awake at night by playing the piano.

Teller was an accomplished pianist

Strikingly, the one thing that stands out even from the embittered Teller's view of Los Alamos is his outstanding paean to Oppenheimer's leadership. Especially considering his growing animosity toward Oppenheimer and the general resentment he must have felt, this tribute is nothing short of profound and speaks to Oppenheimer's extraordinary role in making Los Alamos work.

"Throughout the war years, Oppie knew in detail what was going on in every part of the laboratory. He was incredibly quick and perceptive in analyzing human as well as technical problems. Of the more than ten thousand people who eventually came to work at Los Alamos, Oppie knew several hundred intimately, by which I mean that he knew what their relationships with one another were and what made them tick. He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, soother feelings - how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so. He was an exemplar of dedication, a hero who never lost his humanness. Disappointing him somehow carried with it a sense of wrongdoing. Los Alamos's amazing success grew out of the brilliance, enthusiasm and charisma with which Oppenheimer led it."

Not a bad tribute to a man who, when he was appointed to lead the project, left almost everyone astonished and dismayed because of his lack of experience. A man who had not even led a university department and who, in the words of one of his eminent colleagues, was "not fit to run a hot dog stand." A man who lacked a Nobel Prize but who was asked to lead a group of the world's most brilliant physicists, many of whom would either win or had already won a Nobel Prize. And yet Oppenheimer seems to have blown everyone away, and this includes men like Bethe and Fermi who were far from easily impressed; Bethe said that Oppenheimer was "intellectually superior" to everyone at Los Alamos.

Physicist Victor Weisskopf also attested to Oppenheimer's quality of instantly comprehending everyone's problem, inspiring them and seemingly being everywhere at once:

"He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time."

Oppenheimer's quintessential quality in doing all this seems to have been that of an actor, a man who could always wear whatever role history had chosen for him like the finely tailored three piece suits which his wealthy New York father's trust fund allowed him to indulge in. Some of his qualities had been on display when he was a highly regarded professor at Berkeley. It seemed he was acutely tuned to the wishes of everyone in the room. His martinis were spicy and his parties famous for their joie de vivre, and his immensely wide knowledge of esoteric subjects like Sanskrit and 17th century French poetry mostly seemed to amplify his charisma. There were a few people who found him pretentious, but these were in the minority; his students emulated his mannerisms. At Los Alamos he was at the peak of his powers, and his instant grasp of every technical and human matter, lightning fast mind and ability to connect with everyone's problems seem to have charmed even Edward Teller.

When the war ended, Bethe, Teller and Oppenheimer went their own ways. Oppenheimer carried over his Los Alamos charm to the leadership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he presided over the likes of Einstein, Godel, and von Neumann. Unfortunately the same powers of persuasion that had been so effective at Los Alamos did not work so well in Washington's corridors of power. Oppenheimer made enemies among politically well-connected men who accused him of hindering the country's hydrogen bomb program. Their unconstitutional tactics and allegations of guilt by association combined with his own equivocation on some of his left wing history and casual arrogance led to a hearing in 1954 and brought about his downfall. He spent the rest of his life speaking out on the philosophy of science and on the relationship between science and society, still efficiently leading the Princeton institute and evoking admiration around the world.

Bethe spent the rest of his career - all 60 years of it - at Cornell University. In the process he elevated Cornell to a world center of physics, advised half a dozen presidents on nuclear arms control, and kept on doing significant scientific work well into his 90s. The same qualities of steadfast stability and integrity that had been on display before served him exceedingly well during the politically tumultuous times of the Cold War and gained him the admiration and loyalty of scores of friends and colleagues. Just like Oppenheimer, he became a wise man whose advice fueled and reassured the hopes of others.

Teller's trajectory was less tranquil. He became the century's most vocal proponent of nuclear weapons and spent most of the next decade obsessing over the hydrogen bomb. He started a rival laboratory which competed with Los Alamos in building the next generation of lethal nuclear weapons, and his own brand of volatile proselytizing drew the admiration of a select group of mostly right wing scientists and politicians. Like Bethe he became advisor to conservative presidents and was a key force in advocating the ill-fated 'Star Wars' weapons system during the Reagan administration's tenure. Most importantly, his fateful testimony against Oppenheimer during Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing was considered an act of betrayal by the majority of the scientific establishment. While Teller lost many of his friends as the result of his testimony, this also allowed him to shed past aspects of his life and make new friends who were more sympathetic to his cause.

By most standards Teller with his volatile temperament and inability to carry projects through to their conclusion should have been largely unsuited for leadership. And yet there was another side of him, a side that could charm and display loyalty. This side could allow him to occasionally perform the function of inspiring others which most of us expect from a good leader. It was a side that was on full display when he became part of a team put together to design an intrinsically safe nuclear reactor, one whose safety features would depend not on the IQ of the operator but on the natural laws of physics. Teller was not technically the leader of the team. The leader was a physicist named Frederic de Hoffmann who along with Teller, recruited other brilliant scientists like Freeman Dyson.

In his biography, Dyson praised the fun and inspiration that Teller brought to the project. He had interacted with Teller at the University of Chicago before and liked Teller's playful attitude toward physics; Dyson thought Teller was a man who did physics for fun rather than glory. That attitude seemed to be particularly visible during the reactor project.

"Working with Teller was as exciting as I had imagined it would be. Almost every day he came to the schoolhouse with some hare-brained new idea. Some of his ideas were brilliant, some were practical and some were brilliant and practical. I used his ideas as starting points for a more systematic analysis of the problem...I fought with Teller as I had fought with (Richard) Feynman, demolishing his wilder schemes and squeezing his intuitions down into equations. Out of our fierce disagreements the shape of the safe reactor gradually emerged."

What lessons do Bethe, Oppenheimer and Teller hold for present day managers and CEOs? Today's CEOs face the same problem that Oppenheimer faced. They have to direct the work of a large group of scientists and other personnel of diverse skill sets and temperaments. They have to soothe egos and give everyone adequate freedom to pursue their ideas while still constraining them to meet project guidelines. They have to please shareholders and the general public. And they have to do all this without appearing to do so, without giving the impression of being heavy handed and dictatorial.

From Oppenheimer they can learn the value of keeping on top of all aspects of a project, whether managerial or technical, and for being informed enough about the role of every person to assure that person of their importance to the team. Like Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, they also have to inspire people to give their very best and to inject enthusiasm and hope into the work especially when things are not going well. And just like the technical seminars at Los Alamos which encouraged open and free discussion, they have to let everyone voice their opinions.

From Bethe they can learn the vital importance of being technically accomplished even as an administrator, and of the importance of perseverance and meticulousness. One of the laments about the present day pharmaceutical industry for instance is that too often you have CEOs with MBA degrees who have little understanding of the great technical challenges of biotechnology or drug discovery. A Hans Bethe would have combined deep knowledge of the science with a plodding and careful approach to getting things done. In addition he would have combined geniality with a gravity that was inspiring rather than intimidating or depressing. Just like Bethe, the best CEOs would combine technical excellence with outstanding managerial capabilities, and even CEOs without a technical background should learn enough of the technical material to empathize with the scientists in the trenches.

Teller exemplifies a different kind of lesson for today's CEOs. In an age where employees are often supposed to fit a particular mold, Teller provides a refreshing example of someone who constantly tried to think outside the box. People like Teller provide a unique function in an organization by frankly speaking their mind and pushing the envelope on what can be achieved. They are useful in shaking up everyone's conventional thinking and charting new directions. Not all their ideas work, but the ones that do can lead to novel horizons. They need to be guided by good managers like Oppenheimer and Bethe who can make them work harmoniously with other employees. These employees in turn must have the patience to actually implement the ideas of Teller-like minds. As long as the Tellers of the world are not allowed to go rogue, they can actually be valuable additions to all kinds of organizations. What matters is whether there is an Oppenheimer or Bethe to lead the way.

What if the Manhattan Project had been like an Alzheimer's disease drug discovery project

The vast K-25 gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge - an
engineering endeavor (Image: Nuclear Secrecy Blog)

Every once in a while you will find someone comparing a major scientific or technological challenge to the Manhattan Project - among such comparisons would be the Human Genome Project and the Brain Map Initiative. It's also not unheard of for drug discovery being uttered in the same breath as the Manhattan project; for instance administrators and scientists have been calling for new antibiotic discovery to be placed on the same footing as the wartime quest to build the first atomic bomb.

To be honest, most of these comparisons obfuscate more than they instruct. It's not that they are entirely invalid, but their core kernels of truth significantly differ.

To see why, let's compare a typically challenging, novel drug discovery project like finding a cure or mitigating therapy for Alzheimer's disease to designing Fat Man or Little Boy. The mandate for the Manhattan Project was, "produce a practical military weapon that works by harnessing energy from nuclear fission of uranium or plutonium". The mandate for Alzheimer's disease would be "discover and develop a small molecule that mitigates or cures the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and that is potent, safe, enters and exits the body in a reasonable period of time and causes minimal side effects".

The first thing to notice is the difference between the word "produce" and "discover". Manhattan was not a discovery project, and the word "produce" in fact appeared in the first line of 'The Los Alamos Primer', the indoctrination lectures given by physicist Robert Serber at the beginning of the adventure. Production is more akin to engineering than science, so that word sets the tone for the entire project. That is not to say that Manhattan did not involve science and scientists - of course it did. But the key thing to realize is that the basic discovery part of the science had been done between 1938 and 1942. This part was symbolized by four milestones: the discovery of fission in December 1938 by Hahn and Strassmann, the first 'proof of principle' calculations by Frisch and Peierls in March 1940 indicating the feasibility of a fission weapon, the working out of the actual mechanism and effects of a bomb in the summer of 1942 by Oppenheimer and his associates at Berkeley and the successful initiation of a nuclear chain reaction by Fermi and his associates in Chicago in December 1942. By the time the project started in March 1943, the atomic constitution of matter was thus firmly mapped and the elementary particles which were required to harness fission were all discovered and their properties charted as either 'known knowns' or 'known unknowns'.

The major challenges associated with the project were thus not discovery challenges. It was fully known by the beginning of the project that if you suddenly bring a sufficiently large lump of highly purified uranium-235 together you would cause a very big bang. The key words there were 'large', 'purified' and 'suddenly' and these words really signaled the enormous engineering challenges. To produce a large and purified lump of uranium or plutonium would take vast chemical and engineering complexes in Oak Ridge, TN and Hanford, WA which employed hundreds of thousands of workers and whose use of resources like electricity and copper would rival the size of the US automobile industry. That was really mostly engineering, the unimaginably strenuous application of man and machine in separating two isotopes from each other and in creating a novel element.

The 'sudden' part of the challenge was equally important and again heavily steeped in engineering. For the uranium bomb this was not a big issue since a heavy modified gun would do the job. The really novel find - and this would be classified as a discovery, albeit of an applied kind - was the mechanism of a plutonium weapon. In the summer of 1944 it was realized for good that given the spontaneous rate of fission of Pu-240 which was contaminating the samples of Pu-239 produced in the Hanford reactor, a gun-type weapon that would work for uranium would simply cause an equivalent plutonium weapon to pre-detonate. The solution circumventing this problem - implosion using shaped 'lenses' - was probably the most novel discovery/invention to come out of the Manhattan Project. The novelty of this solution was why they tested the plutonium bomb in July 1945 but not the uranium bomb. In fact implosion could be considered to be the one truly novel 'secret' to come out of the project.

But again, putting implosion into practice was almost completely engineering. Brilliant scientists like John von Neumann did contribute in calculating how you would get a perfectly symmetrical, inward-looking shock wave to compress the plutonium core, but the key challenges were designing and fashioning the explosive lenses - layered arrangements of slow and fast-burning plastic charges that would alternately diverge and then precisely converge a shock wave - that would make implosion possible as well as crafting detonators that would fire simultaneously on the surface of the weapon to send the shock waves in. To that end the metallurgists and chemists at Los Alamos were put to work refining these plastic arrangements from hot molds, shaping them and smoothing out even the tiniest air imperfections in the form of bubbles that would cause the shock waves to deviate from perfect symmetry. Similarly experts in electronics were put to work inventing new timing systems for detonators. This work was all chemistry, chemical engineering, electronics and machine shop. It involved not exalted, Nobel Prize-winning minds but the most practical minds, minds which sometimes lacked even a college degree but which could work wonders with their hands (one of these minds happened to be that of David Greenglass, the spy who shuttled secrets to Klaus Fuchs). In fact this part of the project was so important that much of the details are still classified, and rightly so. Master the design of explosive lenses and you command the explosive consequences of plutonium.

The culmination of all this engineering and science is well known, but the tone for that was set in 1943. No wonder Richard Feynman, when describing the Manhattan Project in his memoirs, called it "not science, mostly engineering". He was right.

Now what if the Manhattan Project had been like a novel drug discovery project for Alzheimer's disease? The physicists working on it would still be in the dark ages. The equivalent of fission in Alzheimer's would be the mechanism(s) that causes it, both on the molecular level and on a more global level. We don't know that yet. The Alzheimer's equivalent of protons, neutron and electrons would be the molecular or epidemiological components that cause the disease. There are scattered clues about them, but we really don't know those yet either. Consider the rogue, misfolded protein Aß (amyloid beta) for instance: ten years ago it was regarded as possibly the major culprit in the disease; now it is regarded simply as something associated with the disease in a major way, but nobody knows exactly how. Every major clinical trial that promises to target interesting mechanisms and components in Alzheimer's has failed miserably over the last few years, which is probably not too surprising if we were in ignorance of the real molecular components and were targeting the wrong mechanisms to begin with. 

And even if we knew the mechanisms and the components, the ensuing development of an Alzheimer's drug is no mere engineering challenge. That's because even the most basic processes of drug discovery - things like getting drugs across cell membranes or even getting them to dissolve in an aqueous solution - are too poorly understood to be able to be predicted accurately. Thus, the engineering part of drug discovery is far more tied to a woefully deficient understanding of the science than the engineering part for the Manhattan Project was. The implication of this is that because prediction is largely futile, we have to test tens of thousands of candidates in drug discovery to see what works: What if the Manhattan project needed to build thousands of bomb prototypes to find the one that finally worked? The difference between bomb design and drug design is thus not one of manpower, resources or engineering; it is one of a basic lack of information and deep, dark patches of ignorance. And it arises from the fundamental complexity of biological systems compared to engineering systems.

Thus, if the Manhattan Project were truly an Alzheimer's disease drug discovery project, the physicists working on it would have started not knowing about nuclear fission and not even knowing about protons, neutrons and electrons, let alone about cross sections or plutonium. Here's what their mandate would have looked like then: "Discover what stuff is made up of. Find if any of it can be manipulated to release large amounts of energy. And if you find this, then try to figure out if you can get enough of this special material to make a practical military weapon." In other words, there probably would not have been a mandate to build an atomic bomb in the first place.

However I am ready to take bets on whether this mandate - given to all those brilliant minds in 1942 - would have led to Little Boy or Fat Man by 1945.

Afterthought: So if the Manhattan Project was in fact mostly engineering, it's worthwhile asking why it's associated with science and scientists - and especially physics as opposed to chemistry which was equally important - in the public imagination. I believe the answer in one word is 'myth-making'. Men like Feynman and Oppenheimer are considered so brilliant and fascinating that they have inevitably come to stand in for the whole project.

Other posts on the complexities of biology and the futility of comparing drug discovery with engineering challenges or physics:

1. Why chemistry (and biology) is not physics.
2. Why drug design is like airplane design. And why it isn't.
3. Derek Lowe on what he calls the 'Andy Grove Fallacy': 1, 2.
4. Why it's hard to explain drug discovery to physicists.