DNF. Was just a bit too science-y for me. ## Highlights These are not nearly all the gases and poisons developed in the boisterous, vicious laboratory of the Great War. There were sneezing gases arsenic powders and a dozen tear gases and every combination. The French loaded artillery shells with cyanide to no point except hatred, as it turned out, because the resulting vapors were lighter than air and immediately lofted away. By 1918 a typical artillery barrage locomoting east or west over the front lines counted nearly as many gas shells as high-explosive. Germany, always logical at war to the point of inhumanity, blamed the French and courted a succession of increasingly desperate breakthroughs. The chemists, like bargain hunters, imagined they were spending a pittance of tens of thousands of lives to save a purseful more. Britain reacted with moral outrage but capitulated in the name of parity. It was more than [[Fritz Haber]]'s wife could bear. [[Clara Immerwahr]] had been Haber's childhood sweetheart. She was the first woman to win a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Breslau. After she married Haber and bore him a son, a neglected housewife with a child to raise, she withdrew progressively from science and into depression. Her husband's work with poison gas triggered even more desperate melancholy. "She began to regard poison gas not only as a perversion of science but also as a sign of barbarism," a Haber biographer explains. "It brought back the tortures men said they had forgotten long ago. It degraded and corrupted the discipline [i.e., chemistry] which had opened new vistas of life." She asked, argued, finally adamantly demanded that her husband abandon gas work. Haber told her what he had told Hahn, adding for good measure, patriot that he was, that a scientist belongs to the world in times of peace but to his country in times of war. Then he stormed out to supervise a gas attack on the Eastern Front. Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night. (Page 95) --- [[Werner Heisenberg]] was athletic, vigorous, eager-"radiant," a close friend says. "He looked even greener in those days than he really was, for, being a member of the Youth Movement he often wore, even after reaching man's estate, an open shirt and walking shorts." In the Youth Movement young Germans on hiking tours built campfires, sang folk songs, talked of knighthood and the Holy Grail and of service to the Fatherland. Many were idealists, but authoritarianism and anti-Semitism already bloomed poisonously among them. When Heisenberg finally got to Copenhagen at Eastertime in 1924 [[Niels Bohr]] took him off on a hike through north Zealand and asked him about it all. "But now and then our papers also tell us about more ominous, anti-Semitic, trends in Germany, obviously fostered by demagogues,'" Heisenberg remembers Bohr questioning. "Have you come across any of that yourself?" "That was the work of some of the old officers embittered by the war, Heisenberg said, "but we don't take these groups very seriously." (Page 116) --- With the possible exception of French prayer, in fact, Gottfried Kuhnwald's shrewd prediction held true for the first two years of the rescue effort: the British alone nearly equaled the rest of the world in temporary appointments, and American contributions, largely from foundations like 196 the Rockefeller, matched the rest dollar for dollar. Then, as the Depression began to ease and the English academic system pinched, emigration increased to the United States. Under official Emergency Committee auspices thirty scientists and scholars arrived in 1933, thirty-two in 1934, only fifteen in 1935; but forty-three came in 1938, ninety-seven in 1939, fiftynine in 1940, fifty in 1941. Nor were many of these physicists: with their international network of friendships and acquaintances the physicists were better able than most to provide for each other. About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941. (Page 195) --- When [[Enrico Fermi]] began his neutron-bombardment experiments he was thirty-three years old, short, muscular, dark, with thick black hair, a narrow nose and surprising gray-blue eyes. His voice was deep and he grinned easily. Marriage to the petitely beautiful Laura Capon, the daughter of a Jewish officer in the Italian Navy, had encouraged him in methodical habits: he worked for several hours privately at home, arrived at the physics institute at nine, worked until twelve-thirty, lunched at home, returned to the institute at four and continued work until eight in the evening, returning home then for dinner. With marriage he had also gained weight. (Page 209) --- The tall, handsome Englishman ([[Frederick Lindemann]]), forty-nine years old in 1935, had been born in Germany, at Baden-Baden, because his mother chose not to allow advanced pregnancy to interfere with a visit to that fashionable spa. To provide their son with an outstanding education his English parents had sent him to the Gymnasium in Darmstadt. As a student before the Great War at the Darmstadt Technische Hochschule, where he was a protégé of the physical chemist Walther Nernst (the 1920 chemistry Nobelist), he had enjoyed such exceptional family connections that he found himself at times playing tennis with the Kaiser or the Czar. Inevitably the war made suspect such golden afternoons. Lindemann was chagrined and angered in 1915 to find that the British Army, noting his German birth certificate and German-sounding name, was unwilling to extend him a commission. The Army's decision injured him deeply and may have changed his life. He had served as a co-secretary to the 1911 Solvay Conference, standing up proudly with Nernst, Rutherford, Planck, Einstein, Mme. Curie, but even before that youthful apotheosis Nernst had predicted difficulty: "If your father were not such a rich man," the blunt German had said, "you would become a great physicist." When the Army questioned Lindemann's patriotism, writes a refugee colleague, "he became withdrawn to avoid exposing himself to slights and insults. Secretiveness about his personal life developed into a mania and he discouraged personal approaches by a stand-offishness which was easily mistaken for arrogance." Lindemann retreated from original work and became a talented administrator, "the Prof," an "unbending Victorian gentleman," always impeccable in bowler hat, summer gray suit, winter dark suit, rolled-up umbrella and long, dark coat. If he could not win a uniform he would adopt one of his own. 223 He worked for his country during the war at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, designing what are now called avionics and doing aeronautical research. Tailspins were recognized maneuvers in air fighting by 1916, a good way to shake off an attacker. Lindemann was the first to study them scientifically. To do so he took flying lessons-only changing from civilian clothes to flying clothes on the runway beside the plane-then coolly flew spin after spin, memorizing his instrument readings as he plummeted and writing them down after he had recovered level flight. After the war Lindemann accepted appointment to an Oxford still donnishly disdainful of science. He escaped from that further condescension, says his colleague, into "gracious living," enjoying weekends with the nobility that were seldom vouchsafed to less well-born Oxford dons. By then a Rolls-Royce was part of his regalia. In June 1921, on a weekend at the country estate of the Duke and Duchess of Westminster, Lindemann met Winston Churchill, twelve years his senior. "The two men, so different in background and character, took to each other immediately and their acquaintance soon turned into a close friendship." Churchill recalled that he "saw a great deal of Frederick Lindemann" during the 1930s. "Lindemann was already an old friend of mine. We came much closer from 1932 onwards, and he frequently motored over from Oxford to stay with me at Chartwell. Here we had many talks into the small hours of the morning about the dangers which seemed to be gathering upon us. Lindemann my chief adviser on the scientific aspects of modern war. became To this illustrious personage, a vegetarian who daily consumed copious quantities of olive oil and Port Salut, Szilard turned in the early summer of 1935 to discuss "the question whether or not the liberation of nuclear energy ... can be achieved in the immediate future." (Page 222) --- One fine October Thursday in [[1937]] [[Ernest Rutherford]], a vigorous sixty-six, went out into the garden of his house on the green Cambridge Backs to trim a tree. He took a bad fall. He was "seedy" later in the day, Mary Rutherford said-nausea and indigestion and she arranged for a masdoctor. He suffered from a slight umbilical hernia, which he confined with seur. Rutherford vomited that night. In the morning he called his family a truss; his doctor found a possible strangulation, consulted with a specialist and directed the Rutherfords to the Evelyn Nursing Home for emergency cial affairs were all in order. She said his illness wasn't serious and asked surgery. Rutherford told his wife along the way that his business and finanhim not to worry. Surgery that evening confirmed a partial strangulation, released the imprisoned portion of the small intestine and restored its circulation. Saturday Rutherford seemed to be recovering but he began vomiting again on Sunday and there were signs of infection, deadly in those days before antibiotics. Monday he was worse; his doctors consulted the surgeon, a Melbourne man, who advised against a second operation given the patient's age and symptoms. Rutherford was made comfortable with intravenous saline, six pints by Tuesday, and a stomach tube. Tuesday morning, October 19, he was slightly improved, but though his wife judged him "a wonderful patient [who] bears his discomforts splendidly" and believed she discovered "just a thread of hope," he began that afternoon to weaken. A bequest he decided late in the day suggests he found gratitude in those last hours reviewing his life. "I want to leave a hundred pounds to Nelson College," he told Mary Rutherford. "You can see to it." And again loudly a little later: "Remember, a hundred to Nelson College." He died that evening. "Heart and circulation failed" because of massive infection, his doctor wrote, "and the end came peacefully." 229 An international gathering of physicists in Bologna that week celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Luigi Galvani; Cambridge cabled the news of Rutherford's death on the morning of October 20. Bohr was on hand and accepted the grim duty of announcement. "When the meeting scheduled for that morning assembled," writes Mark Oliphant, "Bohr went to the front, and with faltering voice and tears in his eyes informed the gathering of what had happened." They were shocked at the abruptness of the loss. Bohr had visited Rutherford at Cambridge a few weeks earlier; the Cavendish men had seen their leader in fine fettle only days ago. Bohr "spoke from the heart," says Oliphant, recalling "the debt which science owed so great a man whom he was privileged to call both his master and his friend." For Oliphant it was "one of the most moving experiences of my life." Remembering Rutherford in a letter to Oppenheimer on December 20 Bohr balanced loss with hope, complementarily: "Life is poorer without him; but still every thought about him will be a lasting encouragement." And in 1958, in a memorial lecture, Bohr said simply that "to me he had almost been as a second father." The sub-dean of Westminster immediately approved interment of Rutherford's ashes in the nave of Westminster Abbey, just west of Newton's tomb and in line with Kelvin's. Eulogizing Rutherford at a conference in Calcutta the following January, James Jeans identified his place in the history of science: > Voltaire said once that Newton was more fortunate than any other scientist could ever be, since it could fall to only one man to discover the laws which governed the universe. Had he lived in a later age, he might have said something similar of Rutherford and the realm of the infinitely small; for Rutherford was the Newton of atomic physics. Ernest Rutherford unknowingly wrote his own more characteristic epitaph in a letter to A. S. Eve from his country cottage on the first day of that last October. He reported of his garden what he had also done for physics, vigorous and generous work: "I have made a still further clearance of the blackberry patch and the view is now quite attractive." (Page 228) --- [On [[Lise Meitner]]] If she hid her shyness behind formidable reserve, among friends, Frisch says, "she could be lively and cheerful, and an excellent storyteller." Her nephew thought her "totally lacking in vanity." She wore her thick dark hair, now graying, pulled back and coiled in a bun and her youthful beauty had muted to bright but darkly circled eyes, a thin mouth, a prominent nose. She ate lightly but drank quantities of strong coffee. Music moved her; she followed it as other people follow trends and fashions in art (a family cultivationher sister, Frisch's mother, was a concert pianist). She made a duet at the piano on visits with her musical nephew, "though hardly anybody else knew that she could play." She lived in an apartment at the KWI and when there was time she took long walks, ten miles or more a day: "It keeps me young and alert." Her most holy commitment, Frisch thought, "the vision she never lost" that filled her life, was "of physics as a battle for final truth." (Page 234) --- Before then [[Leo Szilard]] had located a possible patron there, a Jewish financier of Virginia background named Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, his first and middle names honoring his East Prussian maternal grandfather, his last name softened in Southern fashion to straws. Forty-two years old in 1938, Lewis Strauss was a full partner at the New York investment-banking house of Kuhn, Loeb, a self-made millionaire, an adaptable, clever but thin-skinned and pompous man. Strauss had dreamed as a boy of becoming a physicist. The recession of 1913-14 had staggered his family's Richmond business-wholesale shoes and his father had called on him at seventeen to drum a four-state territory. He did well; by 1917 he had saved twenty thousand dollars and was once again preparing to pursue a physics career. This time the Great War intervened. A childhood accident had left Strauss with marginal vision in one eye. His mother doted on him. She allowed his younger brother to volunteer for military service but looked for some less dangerous contribution for her favorite son. It turned up when Woodrow Wilson appointed the celebrated mining engineer and Belgian relief administrator Herbert Hoover as Food Administrator to manage U.S. supplies during the war. The wealthy Hoover was serving in Washington without pay and assembling a prosperous, unpaid young staff, Rhodes scholars preferred. Rosa Lichtenstein Strauss sent her boy. He was twenty-one, knew how to ingratiate himself, knew also how to work. Improbable as it appears against a field of Rhodes scholars, within a month Hoover appointed the high-school-graduate wholesale shoe drummer as his private secretary. After the Armistice young Strauss shifted with Hoover to Paris, hastily picked up French at tutoring sessions over lunch and helped organize the allocation of 27 million tons of food and supplies to twenty-three countries. On the side he assisted the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in its work of relieving the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees streaming from Eastern Europe in the wake of war. THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB Strauss believed God had planned his life, which contributed greatly to his self-confidence. God let him take up employment when he was twenty-three, in 1919, at Kuhn, Loeb, a distinguished house with a number of major railroads among its clients. Four years later he married Alice Hanauer, daughter of one of the partners. His salary and participation reached $75,000 a year in 1926; the following year it escalated to $120,000. In 1929 he became a partner himself and settled into prosperous gentility. The 1930s brought him pain and grief. After resisting Chaim Weizmann's attempts to convert him to Zionism at a Jewish conference in London in 1933-"My boy, you are difficult," Weizmann told him; "we will have to grind you down" he returned to the United States to discover his mother terminally ill with cancer. She died early in 1935; the disease took his father as well in the hot summer of 1937. Strauss looked for a suitable memorial. "I became aware," he reports in his memoirs, "of the inadequate supply of radium for the treatment of cancer in American hospitals." He established the Lewis and Rosa Strauss Memorial Fund and turned up a young refugee physicist from Berlin, Arno Brasch (Page 237)