Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

That same year, 1927, Heisenberg was appointed professor at Leipzig at just twenty-six. His youth, lack of formality, and skill at Ping-Pong endeared him to his students, one of whom was the young Hungarian Edward Teller, later to be known as the “father” of the H-bomb. Science was Teller’s earliest passion. He had gained his first respect for technology from a ride in his grandparents’ car. The end of the First World War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Teller was ten, had destroyed his comfortable, middle-class world, just as Heisenberg’s had disintegrated. Many of Teller’s games consisted of playing with numbers, finding security in the patterns they created. In the newly independent Hungary a communist takeover was followed by hunger and uncertainty. Soldiers were billeted on the Tellers in their Budapest home, and Edward had perforce to learn to sing the “Internationale” at school. Many of the communist leaders were Jews, and when the communist regime collapsed it triggered a vicious anti-Semitic backlash against Jewish families like the Tellers. In 1919 the new right-wing “white” Hungarian government under Admiral Horthy conducted a purge. Over five thousand people, many of them Jewish, were executed, and thousands more fled. Anti-Semitism became so open and pervasive that, even as a youngster, Teller worried whether “being a Jew really was synonymous with being an undesirably different kind of person.”

During his final years at school, knowing that science was his great love, Teller sought the company of three young scientists, all from Budapest’s Jewish community, all of whom were studying in Germany. The theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, later winner of the Nobel Physics Prize in 1963, and the mathematician John von Neumann, later the designer and builder of some of the first modern computers in the late 1940s, were in their early twenties. The third man, the eccentric Leo Szilard, was a little older. Listening to their discussion, occasionally daring to ask questions, Teller decided to study mathematics but knew that it would be hard to climb the academic ladder in Hungary, where Jews were subject to a quota system. His father urged him to go to Germany, which in the 1920s, according to Teller, appeared to be free of anti-Semitism. He also urged his son to study something more practical than mathematics, and they compromised on chemistry.

In 1926 Teller’s protective parents accompanied the seventeen-year-old onto an express train to Karslruhe, where he enrolled in the Technical Institute. However, within two years Teller had abandoned chemistry and was studying physics and mathematics with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich. He did not achieve the rapport that Heisenberg had enjoved with his brilliant teacher. Teller wrote of Sommerfeld that he was “very correct, very svstematic, and very competent. I disliked him.” However, he found his new field—particularly the new science of quantum mechanics—deeply exciting.

Lost in thought on his way to meet friends for a hike in the Bavarian Alps in 1928, Teller absentmindedly slipped while dismounting from a trolley bus and was caught by its wheels. Unlike Pierre Curie, he survived, but the bus severed his right foot. What Teller remembered most of his recuperation was the sudden disappearance of a Dr. von Lossow, who had been treating him. He later found out that the doctor was a relative of General von Lossow, who had arrested Hitler after his abortive 1923 Munich beer hall putsch. By 1928 public dissatisfaction with the weak Weimar Republic and the weak economy over which it presided was growing, and conflicts between the extreme right and left were beginning again. As Hitler’s Nazis reemerged as a political and street-fighting force, Dr. von Lossow had probably realized that Germany held no future for him.

Teller, however, still caught up in the heady atmosphere of new ideas, did not allow the sinister undercurrents to worry him. Released from the hospital and learning that Sommerfeld had gone abroad for a year, he headed happily for Leipzig and Heisenberg. He was eager to study under the man he revered not only for giving mathematical expression to quantum mechanics but also for giving it philosophical expression through his uncertainty principle.

ATOMIC PHYSICISTS, looking back from a less innocent age, would recall the 1920s as “a heroic time… a time of creation.” Such an intoxicating atmosphere exactly suited a charismatic young Russian, Peter Kapitza, who arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory to become Rutherford’s star pupil. The son of a czarist general, Kapitza had, in 1921, left a Russia riven by civil war and famine as a member of a Soviet mission sent to renew scientific relations with other countries. The mission’s leader, Abram Joffe, a sympathetic individual as well as one of Russia’s foremost physicists, had brought Kapitza to help him overcome a devastating trauma. Kapitza had recently lost his two-year-old son to scarlet fever, followed, within a month, by the loss of his wife, baby daughter, and father to the Spanish flu epidemic sweeping through Europe.

Liking what he saw in Cambridge, Kapitza asked Rutherford to take him on as a research student. Rutherford, fearing that Kapitza might be a left-wing agitator, consulted Chadwick, who advised that the Russian would be an asset, provided he agreed not to talk politics. Kapitza accepted the condition and soon formed an unlikely friendship with the quiet, retiring Chadwick, allowing the Englishman to pilot his motorbike and, by misjudging the curves, to send them both flying. When Chadwick married Aileen Stewart-Brown, the daughter of a prominent Liverpool stockbroker, in 1925, Kapitza was his best man in a borrowed top hat.

Kapitza’s enthusiasm attracted other students, and a lucky thirty were invited to the “Kapitza Club,” which met in his rooms every Tuesday evening for milky coffee and boisterous debate. Above all, Kapitza came to idolize Rutherford, calling him “the crocodile” for “in Russia the crocodile is the symbol for the father of the family and is also regarded with awe and admiration because it has a stiff neck and cannot turn back. It just goes straight forward with gaping jaws—like science, like Rutherford.” He could twist Rutherford around his finger, winning concessions that others would not even have dared to seek. Kapitza’s great interest was creating magnetic fields of greater and greater power. In 1928 he was put in charge of the Cavendish’s new Department of Magnetic Research.

Rutherford had become convinced that using subatomic particles naturally emitted by radioactive substances as projectiles to smash atoms was too limiting. The particles lacked the energy to barge through the electrical defenses of the nucleus. Under Rutherford’s guidance and with industrial help, two of the Cavendish team, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, began developing machines—today known as “accelerators”—that would use high voltages to hurl particles at sufficient speed to penetrate the nuclei of the target.

Elsewhere, others were having similar ideas. In the United States, at MIT, Robert Van de Graaff was building a huge electrostatic device, while at the University of California at Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence, a young experimental physicist from South Dakota, was planning the world’s first “cyclotron”—a machine combining electric and magnetic fields to send particles spiraling away at high speed. He was determined to invade the nucleus, sitting snug behind its protective screen of electrons like, as he put it, “a fly inside a cathedral.”