Edward E. Altshuler:The Rise and Fall of Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories
- Taschenbuch 1995, ISBN: 9781481832519
Simon & Schuster. Good. Paperback. 1995. 928 pages. Cover worn<br>With a new Introduction by the author, t he twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning epi… Mehr…
Simon & Schuster. Good. Paperback. 1995. 928 pages. Cover worn<br>With a new Introduction by the author, t he twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic about how the atomic bomb came to be. In rich, human, poli tical, and scientific detail, here is the complete story of the n uclear bomb. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly?or h ave been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nu clear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of h ardly more than twenty-five years. What began merely as an intere sting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Proj ect, and then into the Bomb with frightening rapidity, while scie ntists known only to their peers?Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bo hr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and von Neumann?stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight. Richard Rhodes takes us on tha t journey step-by-step, minute by minute, and gives us the defini tive story of manÂ's most awesome discovery and invention. The Ma king of the Atomic Bomb is at once a narrative tour de force and a document as powerful as its subject. Editorial Reviews Amazon Review If the first 270 pages of this book had been publishe d separately, they would have made up a lively, insightful, beaut ifully written history of theoretical physics and the men and wom en who plumbed the mysteries of the atom. Along with the followin g 600 pages, they become a sweeping epic, filled with terror and pity, of the ultimate scientific quest: the development of the ul timate weapon. Rhodes is a peerless explainer of difficult concep ts; he is even better at chronicling the personalities who made t he discoveries that led to the Bomb. Niels Bohr dominates the fir st half of the book as J. Robert Oppenheimer does the second; bot h men were gifted philosophers of science as well as brilliant ph ysicists. The central irony of this book, which won a National Bo ok Critics Circle Award, is that the greatest minds of the centur y contributed to the greatest destructive force in history. Abou t the Author Richard Rhodes is a widely published author. His art icles have appeared in numerous national magazines. He graduated from Yale University and has received fellowships from the Ford F oundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Gu ggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapt er 1 Moonshine 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 t o change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, S eptember 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain wo uld begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story l ater he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destinat ion intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped o ff the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before hi m and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all ou r woe, the shape of things to come. Leo Szilard, the Hungarian theoretical physicist, born of Jewish heritage in Budapest on Feb ruary 11, 1898, was thirty-five years old in 1933. At five feet, six inches he was not tall even for the day. Nor was he yet the s hort fat man, round-faced and potbellied, his eyes shining with i ntelligence and wit and as generous with his ideas as a Maori chi ef with his wives, that the French biologist Jacques Monod met in a later year. Midway between trim youth and portly middle age, S zilard had thick, curly, dark hair and an animated face with full lips, flat cheekbones and dark brown eyes. In photographs he sti ll chose to look soulful. He had reason. His deepest ambition, mo re profound even than his commitment to science, was somehow to s ave the world. The Shape of Things to Come was H. G. Wells' new novel, just published, reviewed with avuncular warmth in The Tim es on September 1. Mr. Wells' newest 'dream of the future' is its own brilliant justification, The Times praised, obscurely. The v isionary English novelist was one among Szilard's network of infl uential acquaintances, a network he assembled by plating his arti culate intelligence with the purest brass. In 1928, in Berlin, where he was a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin and a con fidant and partner in practical invention of Albert Einstein, Szi lard had read Wells' tract The Open Conspiracy. The Open Conspira cy was to be a public collusion of science-minded industrialists and financiers to establish a world republic. Thus to save the wo rld. Szilard appropriated Wells' term and used it off and on for the rest of his life. More to the point, he traveled to London in 1929 to meet Wells and bid for the Central European rights to hi s books. Given Szilard's ambition he would certainly have discuss ed much more than publishing rights. But the meeting prompted no immediate further connection. He had not yet encountered the most appealing orphan among Wells' Dickensian crowd of tales. Szila rd's past prepared him for his revelation on Southampton Row. He was the son of a civil engineer. His mother was loving and he was well provided for. I knew languages because we had governesses a t home, first in order to learn German and second in order to lea rn French. He was sort of a mascot to classmates at his Gymnasium , the University of Budapest's famous Minta. When I was young, he told an audience once, I had two great interests in life; one wa s physics and the other politics. He remembers informing his awed classmates, at the beginning of the Great War, when he was sixte en, how the fortunes of nations should go, based on his precociou s weighing of the belligerents' relative political strength: I said to them at the time that I did of course not know who would win the war, but I did know how the war ought to end. It ought to end by the defeat of the central powers, that is the Austro-Hung arian monarchy and Germany, and also end by the defeat of Russia. I said I couldn't quite see how this could happen, since they we re fighting on opposite sides, but I said that this was really wh at ought to happen. In retrospect I find it difficult to understa nd how at the age of sixteen and without any direct knowledge of countries other than Hungary, I was able to make this statement. He seems to have assembled his essential identity by sixteen. H e believed his clarity of judgment peaked then, never to increase further; it perhaps even declined. His sixteenth year was the first year of a war that would shatter the political and legal ag reements of an age. That coincidence -- or catalyst -- by itself could turn a young man messianic. To the end of his life he made dull men uncomfortable and vain men mad. He graduated from the Minta in 1916, taking the Eötvös Prize, the Hungarian national pr ize in mathematics, and considered his further education. He was interested in physics but there was no career in physics in Hunga ry. If he studied physics he could become at best a high school t eacher. He thought of studying chemistry, which might be useful l ater when he picked up physics, but that wasn't likely either to be a living. He settled on electrical engineering. Economic justi fications may not tell all. A friend of his studying in Berlin no ticed as late as 1922 that Szilard, despite his Eötvös Prize, fel t that his skill in mathematical operations could not compete wit h that of his colleagues. On the other hand, he was not alone amo ng Hungarians of future prominence in physics in avoiding the bac kwater science taught in Hungarian universities at the time. He began engineering studies in Budapest at the King Joseph Institu te of Technology, then was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army . Because he had a Gymnasium education he was sent directly to of ficers' school to train for the cavalry. A leave of absence almos t certainly saved his life. He asked for leave ostensibly to give his parents moral support while his brother had a serious operat ion. In fact, he was ill. He thought he had pneumonia. He wanted to be treated in Budapest, near his parents, rather than in a fro ntier Army hospital. He waited standing at attention for his comm anding officer to appear to hear his request while his fever burn ed at 102 degrees. The captain was reluctant; Szilard characteris tically insisted on his leave and got it, found friends to suppor t him to the train, arrived in Vienna with a lower temperature bu t a bad cough and reached Budapest and a decent hospital. His ill ness was diagnosed as Spanish influenza, one of the first cases o n the Austro-Hungarian side. The war was winding down. Using fami ly connections he arranged some weeks later to be mustered out. N ot long afterward, I heard that my own regiment, sent to the fron t, had been under severe attack and that all of my comrades had d isappeared. In the summer of 1919, when Lenin's Hungarian proté gé Bela Kun and his Communist and Social Democratic followers est ablished a short-lived Soviet republic in Hungary in the disorder ed aftermath of Austro-Hungarian defeat, Szilard decided it was t ime to study abroad. He was twenty-one years old. Just as he arra nged for a passport, at the beginning of August, the Kun regime c ollapsed; he managed another passport from the right-wing regime of Admiral Nicholas Horthy that succeeded it and left Hungary aro und Christmastime. Still reluctantly committed to engineering, Szilard enrolled in the Technische Hochschule, the technology ins titute, in Berlin. But what had seemed necessary in Hungary seeme d merely practical in Germany. The physics faculty of the Univers ity of Berlin included Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Max Planc k and Max von Laue, theoreticians of the first rank. Fritz Haber, whose method for fixing nitrogen from the air to make nitrates f or gunpowder saved Germany from early defeat in the Great War, wa s only one among many chemists and physicists of distinction at t he several government- and industry-sponsored Kaiser Wilhelm Inst itutes in the elegant Berlin suburb of Dahlem. The difference in scientific opportunity between Budapest and Berlin left Szilard p hysically unable to listen to engineering lectures. In the end, a s always, the subconscious proved stronger than the conscious and made it impossible for me to make any progress in my studies of engineering. Finally the ego gave in, and I left the Technische H ochschule to complete my studies at the University, some time aro und the middle of '21. Physics students at that time wandered E urope in search of exceptional masters much as their forebears in scholarship and craft had done since medieval days. Universities in Germany were institutions of the state; a professor was a sal aried civil servant who also collected fees directly from his stu dents for the courses he chose to give (a Privatdozent, by contra st, was a visiting scholar with teaching privileges who received no salary but might collect fees). If someone whose specialty you wished to learn taught at Munich, you went to Munich; if at Gött ingen, you went to Göttingen. Science grew out of the craft tradi tion in any case; in the first third of the twentieth century it retained -- and to some extent still retains -- an informal syste m of mastery and apprenticeship over which was laid the more rece nt system of the European graduate school. This informal collegia lity partly explains the feeling among scientists of Szilard's ge neration of membership in an exclusive group, almost a guild, of international scope and values. Szilard's good friend and fello w Hungarian, the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, who was stu dying chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule at the ti me of Szilard's conversion, watched him take the University of Be rlin by storm. As soon as it became clear to Szilard that physics was his real interest, he introduced himself, with characteristi c directness, to Albert Einstein. Einstein was a man who lived ap art -- preferring originality to repetition, he taught few course s -- but Wigner remembers that Szilard convinced him to give them a seminar on statistical mechanics. Max Planck was a gaunt, bald elder statesman whose study of radiation emitted by a uniformly heated surface (such as the interior of a kiln) had led him to di scover a universal constant of nature. He followed the canny trad ition among leading scientists of accepting only the most promisi ng students for tutelage; Szilard won his attention. Max von Laue , the handsome director of the university's Institute for Theoret ical Physics, who founded the science of X-ray crystallography an d created a popular sensation by thus making the atomic lattices of crystals visible for the first time, accepted Szilard into his brilliant course in relativity theory and eventually sponsored h is Ph.D. dissertation. The postwar German infection of despair, cynicism and rage at defeat ran a course close to febrile halluc ination in Berlin. The university, centrally located between Doro theenstrasse and Unter den Linden due east of the Brandenburg Gat e, was well positioned to observe the bizarre effects. Szilard mi ssed the November 1918 revolution that began among mutinous sailo rs at Kiel, quickly spread to Berlin and led to the retreat of th e Kaiser to Holland, to armistice and eventually to the founding, after bloody riots, of the insecure Weimar Republic. By the time he arrived in Berlin at the end of 1919 more than eight months o f martial law had been lifted, leaving a city at first starving a nd bleak but soon restored to intoxicating life. There was snow on the ground, an Englishman recalls of his first look at postwa r Berlin in the middle of the night, and the blend of snow, neon and huge hulking buildings was unearthly. You felt you had arrive d somewhere totally strange. To a German involved in the Berlin t heater of the 1920s the air was always bright, as if it were pepp ered, like New York late in autumn: you needed little sleep and n ever seemed tired. Nowhere else did you fail in such good form, n owhere else could you be knocked on the chin time and again witho ut being counted out. The German aristocracy retreated from view, and intellectuals, film stars and journalists took its place; th e major annual social event in the city where an imperial palace stood empty was the Press Ball, sponsored by the Berlin Press, Simon & Schuster, 1995, 2.5, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Paperback. GOOD. Spine creases, wear to binding and pages from reading. May contain limited notes, underlining or highlighting that does affect the text. Possible ex library copy, will have the markings and stickers associated from the library. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included., CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2.5<
