Brighter than thousand suns ebook

After Germany already surrendered and Japan already was open for surrender negotiations the US under president Harry S. Truman decided to shock the world with their basically last minute attack against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two bombs alone killed over View 1 comment. Dec 12, Chris S rated it really liked it Shelves: history , usa. Utterly terrifying. Jan 22, Tatiana rated it it was amazing. The title quote suggests that this book is more exciting than any novel and it is so very true.

As exciting as it is scary. Detailed depiction of choices, circumstances and small incidents, all of which led to complete destroying of two cities, extinction of almost people and contamination by both atomic and thermonuclear weapon.

Starting as a histo The title quote suggests that this book is more exciting than any novel and it is so very true. Starting as a history of brilliant physicists at the dawn of the 20th century, this book slowly reveals historical, political and human aspects to the problems of nuclear weapon in the most unstable time. The author did a great job placing pieces of the puzzle together in thorough yet elegant manner. Sep 23, Stephen rated it really liked it Shelves: science.

Nice work about the early years of atomic research and the first WMDs, but it should be emphasized that Jungk doesn't get the facts right regarding Germany's nuclear bomb program. As others have pointed out, Jungk gets it wrong by relying on Heisenberg's own personal account of the war and Germany's nuclear program. Maybe a new edition can better explain the facts with a helpful introduction?

The book still redeems itself because of the extensive amount of characters, anecdotes, and narrative st Nice work about the early years of atomic research and the first WMDs, but it should be emphasized that Jungk doesn't get the facts right regarding Germany's nuclear bomb program. The book still redeems itself because of the extensive amount of characters, anecdotes, and narrative storytelling. May 04, James Smith rated it liked it Shelves: biography , cold-war , history , world-war-2 , nuclear-weapons.

An interesting book. It's a book about people. Very little scientific or technical detail is mentioned, but the interactions between the various scientists initially , military and political figures are mostly discussed. Interesting things to note here are the effects of the secrecy in the American government's operations. For example, at the end of the Second World War, the State Department knew very well that Japan was close to surrender, but they had no idea about the atomic bomb.

Los Alomos An interesting book. Los Alomos on the other hand, was under the impression that Japan was nowhere close to surrender.

Similarly, the Allied powers were all sure that Hitler was building the bomb, so they hurried to do the research themselves, but in reality it seems that the Nazis weren't that interested. The book seems to have been written in the mid-to-late 50s, so it covers a bit of the conflict between Teller and everyone else regarding whether to build a "super" or thermonuclear bomb which of course they do in the end. It concludes with an account of the fall of Oppenheimer. Sep 10, Arun Tejasvi rated it it was amazing.

The book presents vivid descriptions of what happened behind the scenes during the development of the atomic bomb and presents an amazing story of how the scientific community first lobbied the U. I haven't read a better account of the moral quandaries that scientists at that time faced. As with all good historical accounts, it remains incredibly relevant today. May 28, Shweta Ramdas rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction , science , society. How accountable are scientists to be for the future consequences of their inventions?

Should they remain within their domains of technical expertise, or should they step out to participate in political decisions? This is the primary question that "Brighter than a Thousand Suns" deals with. It is more an account of the minds behind the invention of the atomic bomb and less about the actual science.

It is also about the many accidents of fate that brought about the development of the bomb. These c How accountable are scientists to be for the future consequences of their inventions? These certainly made me wonder if the bomb would have developed in an age of Wikileaks, when there is considerably less left to guesswork! It's not like the issues in the book aren't relevant today. There still is a moratorium on genetic editing of human embryos; eugenics is the elephant in the golden shiny room that CRISPR has unlocked.

The sooner we start thinking about these questions, the better. Jul 24, Shiven Shiven rated it really liked it. One of the best books which i read recently. This not only gives a vivid description of the events that actually changed the world scenario and got us into an arms race but also describes the science events in a story telling fashion which makes episodes like electron discovery as a heart warming event to even the layman.

The story line is absolutely mind boggling and portrayal of the human side of some of the world famous scientists was a discovery in itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and s One of the best books which i read recently. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and so earnestly wish that there should have been a part II to this. Mar 24, Slow Reader rated it really liked it.

His descriptions of German escapees fleeing death under Nazism, "the Institute's" paranoid functioning, Einstein's untoward letter, Oppenheimer's tragic affair with a communist past lover, the ridiculous ordeal of Bikini Island, and the softly obliterating inevitability for those not in Japan of what happened when the bomb dropped stay with this reader--horrifying doesn't come close.

It's only been 75 years ish since this all happened. We have Wifi now and stuff His descriptions of German escapees fleeing death under Nazism, "the Institute's" paranoid functioning, Einstein's untoward letter, Oppenheimer's tragic affair with a communist past lover, the ridiculous ordeal of Bikini Island, and the softly obliterating inevitability for those not in Japan of what happened when the bomb dropped stay with this reader--horrifying doesn't come close.

We have Wifi now and stuff Sep 30, Dennis Cahillane rated it it was amazing. Written in while the central players were still alive but after the "Atoms for Peace" conference and associated thawing of secrecy, the best non-fiction account I've read of the people behind the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Oct 28, Matt Jarvis rated it really liked it. A thoroughly researched and fascinating account of the scientists who worked on The Manhattan Project, with particular attention paid to their feelings after the fact, and towards the development of the even more monstrous thermonuclear weapons that followed.

Aug 14, Nate Hendrix rated it did not like it. Did not like it and did not finish it. Dec 10, squid read rated it liked it. Read thai translation version. Love the content. Nov 23, Prabal Sanyal rated it it was amazing. Aug 21, Aakif Ahmad rated it really liked it. This is an amazing book.

Told in narrative, story-like form, the author recreates the story of how scientific research evolved from one driven by love of knowledge and cross-border collaboration to one that became mired in politics and personal glory. Streaming and Download help. Report this track or account. If you like Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, you may also like:. A new compilation series featuring cat-loving metal bands from every state donating their tracks for local animal welfare organizations.

Master Boot Record's latest collection of industrial techno tracks flirts with chiptune and black metal, and offers some secret surprises. Master Boot Record fires up a monstrously-efficient assembly line, powered by industrial, synth-wave, and hardcore techno. Bandcamp Album of the Day Apr 20, Max Born, at that time just thirty-eight years old, was no stranger to the Georgia Augusta. The son of a wellknown Breslau biologist, he had graduated at Gottingen in as one of the most brilliant pupils of the Mathematical Institute, receiving a prize for his work.

His studies and travels took him to Cambridge, Breslau, Berlin, and Frankfurt. With his arrival at the Second Physics Institute in the Bunsenstrasse - a red-brick building with an unspeakably homely exterior like a Prussian cavalry barracks the brief but incessantly productive golden age of Gottingen atomic physics began. A small bureaucratic error, one of those tricks of fate which can accomplish so much, helped Born soon after his arrival.

Although a chair for experimental physics already existed in Gottingen, its occupant, Professor Pohl, spent practically all his time teaching and had far too little leisure for the research to which Born was looking forward. But the new head of the institute discovered on.

This was merely due to a clerical error, he was told. Born refused to give in and insisted on the letter of the law. He was able, therefore to call to Gottingen James Frank, already well known for his experimental discoveries, including the one which later gained him his Nobel prize. Hilbert, Born, and Franck, a trio of men of high talent, tireless industry, and a fervent passion for the new view of Nature, worked together in Gottingen after Each differed fundamentally from the others.

Born was probably the most interested in the outside world, the most accessible and the most versatile. His talents were so various that he might well have become a first-rate pianist or author.

His wealthy father had given him the following advice before he began his studies: 'Be sure you try out all the courses before you decide which one to follow. He felt himself most attracted to the last because, so he said, he preferred to all the other buildings that in which lectures on the world of stars Franck, like Born, came of a Jewish family which had long been settled in Germany. He could never forget his Hamburg origin.

In spite of the cordiality and warmth which made him very popular with his students, he kept other people at a certain distance. He remained always a Hamburg aristocrat.

Later those who worked with him called him a saint. This was not only because of Franck's great kindness of heart but also because of his almost religious devotion to physics. He would tell his pupils that only one who was entirely absorbed by physics and actually dreamed about it could hope for enlightenment. He spoke of his own inspirations in the language of a medieval mystic. In almost every age a certain sphere of human reflection and creative activity exercises a peculiar fascination for gifted minds.

In others they apply themselves to painting or music, theology or philosophy. Suddenly, no one knows how it happens, the most alert spirits perceive where new ground has recently been broken and press forward eagerly to become, not only its heirs, but its founders and masters.

Atomic physics exercised this magnetic power in the years after the First World War. It was taken up by the philosophically talented, by men with artistic gifts, by politically minded young men who were repelled by the confusion of day-to-day politics, and by adventurous spirits who could find no more to conquer in a world whose most distant continents had been explored.

Disclosures were still possible in the study of the most invisible and microscopic of all phenomena. Here one might come upon traces of new laws, and might experience the peculiar delight, mingled with fear, of having thought something which no one had yet thought, of having seen something which no one had yet seen.

Since there was so much that was new and uncertain in the domain of atomic research, teachers and pupils drew closer together than in other disciplines. Experience and knowledge were worth little. Old and young became comrades on this journey into the interior of matter.

Both alike took pride in their common conquest of fragments of knowledge. Both showed equal modesty and bewilderment before the impenetrable. James Franck, who already held the Nobel prize for physics, could turn from the blackboard on which he had lost his way in a difficult calculation and inquire of one of his students, 'Perhaps you can see the next step?

They kept their pupils posted on their private correspondence where unsolved problems were discussed with their foreign colleagues, and encouraged their youthful collaborators to seek for explanations which their elders had been denied.

A highlight of every week of the term was the 'Seminar on Matter' conducted in Room of the Institute by Born, Franck, and Hilbert, gratis et privatissime. It became almost a tradition for Hilbert to open the proceedings with a pretence of innocence: 'Well, now, gentlemen, I'd just like you to tell me, what exactly is an atom?

The problem was tackled afresh every time, and every time they searched for a different solution. But whenever any of the young geniuses sought refuge on the esoteric heights of complicated mathematical explanations, Hilbert would interrupt him in broadest East Prussian: 'I just can't understand you, young man. Now tell me over again, will you? These debates were concerned more and more with the most basic problems of epistemology.

Had the discoveries of atomic physics abolished the duality between the human observer and the world observed? Was there no longer any real distinction between subject and object? Could two mutually exclusive propositions on the same topic both be regarded as correct from a loftier standpoint?

Would one be justified in abandoning the view that the foundation of physics is the close connexion of cause and effect? But in that case could there ever be any such thing as laws of Nature? Could any reliable scientific forecasts ever be made? Questions, questions, and still more questions.

They could be discussed without end and everyone had something to say about them. In the winter semester of a slender, rather delicate looking American student distinguished himself, even among such highly talented people as these. He was often able to improvise on the spur of the moment entire dissertations, so that hardly anyone else had a chance to speak.

At first the new boy was listened to with fascination. But after a time his excessive garrulity and eloquence began to cause irritation and possibly also envy among a number of his companions.

They submitted a written petition to one of the professors suggesting that a check might be put on the Wunderkind. In a little less than twenty years he was to become world famous: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was introduced to the public for the first time by the newspapers of August as the 'father of the atom bomb'.

Oppenheimer was one of the many young Americans who came to the Old World in those years to study physics. They sometimes called themselves 'Knights of Columbus in reverse', for they travelled in the opposite direction to that taken by Columbus and those who accompanied him.

They, too, were in search of a 'new continent'. They returned from it to their own country, where 'old-fashioned physics' was still being taught, bringing back incredible information and fabulous discoveries which, like the gold procured by the Spanish seafarers of the sixteenth century, were to prove of great but troublesome profit to their native land. Almost all these young Americans came to Europe richly endowed with travelling scholarships. They were joined by some older hands, teachers who were in the habit of spending their sabbatical year - twelve months of private study on full pay awarded by tradition every seven years - as learners, exchanging ideas with their European colleagues.

These scientific tourists from the other side of the Atlantic brought foreign currency into the university towns of Europe, impoverished by the war. Further capital in the shape of dollars often followed them, for the American university men were frequently successful in pleading the cause of their temporary European alma mater and in obtaining funds from philanthropic organizations.

The impoverished German scientific institutes in particular, which perpetually complained of lack of money, benefited very much from this American assistance. What would Privy Councillor Sommerfeld at Munich have done without the occasional improvement in his scanty resources provided by the Rockefeller Foundation? Whenever Wickliff Rose, the distributor of funds endowed by the oil magnate, travelled in Europe, the universities received him like a despot.

On the size of his cheque depended the number of research programmes which could be continued during the ensuing year and the number of young research workers who could be given scholarships.

The American mathematicians and physicists were particularly fond of Gottingen. Before the First World War Charles Michelson had worked there for a term as visiting professor, and Millikan and Langmuir, the grand old men of American physics and chemistry, had studied at Gottingen. In the s there were often a dozen or more Americans en- rolled in the faculty of natural science at the Georgia Augusta.

They brought with them to Gottingen a little of the unburdened atmosphere of the American campus. Their annual Thanksgiving dinners, the most memorable presided over by K. Compton in , were universally popular. The Americans showed their German colleagues how to eat turkey and sweet corn and learned in turn to drink beer, to sing and to hike. Nearly all the Americans who became well known later on for the development of atomic energy had been at Gottingen at various times between and They included Condon, who complained in lively fashion of the lack of comfort in the Gottingen lodgings; the lightningbrained Norbert Wiener; Erode, always deep in thought; the modest Richtmyer; the cheerful Pauling - one of Sommerfeld's pupils, who often came over from Munich; and the amazing' Oppie ', who managed to pursue in Gottingen not only his physical studies but also his philosophical, philological, and literary hobbies.

He was particularly deep in Dante's Inferno and in long evening walks along the railway tracks leading from the freight station would discuss with colleagues the reason why Dante had located the eternal quest in hell instead of in paradise.

One evening Paul Dirac, who was usually so silent, took Oppenheimer aside and gently reproached him. How on earth can you do two such things at once? In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry it's the exact opposite! The villa belonged to a medical man, Dr Cario, whose son Gunther was preparing for a brilliant future as a physicist while acting as one of Franck's assistants.

It was a usual practice for Gottingen families of good social position to take in students as 'paying guests'. They brought the outside world into the provincial parlour and received in return a measure of domestic security which they smiled at first but soon came to value and look track on with longing. Between those who leased the rooms and those who rented them often grew long-standing friend- ship and occasionally marriage.

A surprising number of the wives of professors on the five continents come from little Gottingen. From these families the foreign students often learned German very quickly. They frequently even wrote articles in German for scientific periodicals during the period of their studies. In conversation, however, they made amusing mistakes. The young English astrophysicist Robertson wanted one day to check the exact weight of a letter he was going to send abroad.

He burst into a shop and breathlessly asked the girl behind the counter: 'Haben Sie eine Wiege? Ich mochte etwas wagen. I want to do something risky. Icit miichte etwas wiegen. I want to weigh something. Even Oppenheimer stumbled over them. In the spring of he applied for permission to take the examination for a doctor's degree. To everyone's astonishment his request was flatly refused by the Prussian Ministry of Education, to which the University of Gottingen was subordinated.

Oppenheimer made a wholly inadequate application. Obviously the Ministry had to refuse it. He had never formally matriculated, therefore, and consequently had never been a member of the university at all! The professors of the future father of the atom bomb had to write imploring letters to the Rectorial Board and the Ministry.

Max Born said Oppenheimer's work for his doctor's degree had been so outstanding that Born wanted to publish it in one of the series of Gottingen dissertations.

The plea that the American undergraduate could not wait another term at Gottingen to take his examination in regular fashion was expressed to the authorities in a petition for the grant of belated matriculation. Was this argument justified by the facts? Oppenheimer was the son of a New York businessman who had left Germany for the United States at the age of seventeen and made a fortune there. Consequently it was not so much money that Oppie lacked, in all probability, as patience.

He was bound to regard a further term at Gottingen as a waste of time. In these years, however, little fibs of this kind had not yet become the subjects of committees of investigation. The petition went through without further objection.

Robert Oppenheimer took his oral examination on the after- noon of 11 May He passed in all subjects - except physico- chemistry - with the marks 'excellent' or 'very good'. His written work for the doctorate was pronounced by Max Born to be evidence of a high grade of scientific achievement, far above the level of the average dissertation. Born's only criticism stated that 'the one fault to be found with the work is that it is difficult to read. But this formal shortcoming counts for so little in comparison with the content that I propose the paper be marked "with distinction".

In the Gottingen of these twenty years it was possible to get along without a scholarship or a fat monthly cheque. The Russian mathematician Schnirelmann brought nothing with him but his toothbrush and a copy of his latest work on prime numbers, but the Gottingen mathematician Landau had already given a lecture on the 'Schnirelmann proposition', and the young scholar, who had.

His anonymous patrons also sent him every month a small money order to cover out-of-pocket expenses. He was often seen slowly making his way down the main street of Gottingen, his shoelaces undone and his gaze, as usual, fixed absentmindedly upon distant combinations of figures.

The eminent stage director Kurt Hirschfeld, who was studying in Gottingen at the time, tells us how odd he thought these young mathematicians and physicists were. He once saw a member of Born's 'kindergarten', who was walking along in a dream, stumble and fall flat on his face. Hirschfeld rushed up and tried to help him to his feet.

But the fallen student, still on the ground, vigorously repulsed his efforts. I'm busy! Fritz Houtermans, today a professor of physics at a Swiss university, reports that he was once awakened in the middle of the night by someone banging on the window of his ground-floor rooms in Nikolausburg Strasse. One of his fellow students was begging urgently for admission. He had just had a splendid idea, he said, which would dispose of some of the unsolved contradictions in the new theories.

Far from driving the intruder from his door, the disturbed sleeper opened it, as soon as he had got into his dressing-gown and slippers. The two worked until dawn on calculations with the newly established equations. In those exciting years it was not unusual for such sudden 'brain waves' by very young men to make a great stir in inter- national professional circles or even in certain cases to bring their authors fame almost overnight.

For example, Werner Heisenberg the son of a professor of ecclesiastical history, had spent his last year at school in the threes of the Munich 'Councils' Revolution' and served with an anti-Communist unit of schoolboys. To bring food to his starving family in the blockaded city he had twice, at the risk of his life, slipped through the lines of 'White' and 'Red' troops. While on sentry duty on the roof of a theological seminary he had read Plate and been aroused by the atomic theories of the ancient Creeks.

But the opinion stated in Plate's Timaeus that atoms were ordinary substantive bodies satisfied him as little as a drawing in his physics textbook which depicted them with hooks and eyes. This critical attitude of refusal to be impressed by any authority did not desert Heisenberg even when his instructor, Sommerfeld, took him to Gottingen in to attend the Bohr Festival Season. Far from merely listening with reverence to the great man from Copenhagen, the boy, who was then only just nineteen years old,.

Because of these conversations, which delighted Heisenberg, he decided to study physics. His name would soon be read as a collaborator in one of Sommerfeld's publications. At twenty- three he was working as assistant to Born, at twenty-four he was lecturing on theoretical physics in Copenhagen and at twenty-six he became a regular professor at Leipzig.

When he was barely thirtytwo years old Heisenberg received the Nobel prize for theoretical studies of fundamental importance, published actually some six or eight years previously, in other words at an age when most students of medicine and law have just concluded their training.

One of his closest friends states in his recollections of Heisenberg at Gottingen: He looked even greener in those days than he really was, for, being a member of the Youth Movement, the moral idealism of which greatly attracted him, he often wore, even after reaching man's estate, an open shirt and walking shorts. He always considered himself constitutionally lucky and this was quite true.

Brilliant intellectual achievements, such as his recognition of the 'uncertainty principle' or the basic ideas of the 'matrix calculus', which he afterwards developed with the help of Born and his fellow student Pascual Jordan, a few months younger than himself. Those who came to know Heisenberg later, after the political upheaval had troubled him with grief and doubt, cannot know how radiant he once was.

He had brought his revolutionary quantum mechanics with him in from Heligoland, where he used to climb on the red cliffs while he read Goethe's WestOstlicher Divan and worked in the intervals on his own ideas in a kind of intellectual intoxication. I doubt if he had any sleep worth mentioning during that blissful Whitsun vacation. The lean and lanky Dirac, son of a Swiss father and an English mother, attained a high reputation in the world of physicists when he was even younger than Heisenberg.

Even the initiated could not always follow his mental processes. The 'mystic of the atom' was not in the least worried by that. When he was not at Cambridge he could often be seen working in one of the classrooms of the Second Physics Institute at Gottingen. As if in a dream, he would be holding a mental colloquy with the rows of symbols he had chalked on the blackboard. Even in the presence of a second person Dirac hardly ever accompanied the. Speech of course would never have been able to express what he had to say.

The other physicists used to say that Dirac was so silent that he uttered an entire sentence only once every light year. Another was 'Pat' Blackett, a former British naval officer, who photographed and interpreted the miraculous world of atomic events.

That merry and freakish soul from Soviet Russia, George Gamow, had more ideas than anyone else but left it to others to distinguish the true from the false. Then there was Wolfgang Pauli, from Vienna, who once danced for joy in the middle of the Amalienstrasse at Munich because something new had just occurred to him.

They all knew, of course, that they were engaged on work of far-reaching importance. But they never dreamed that their somewhat esoteric studies would so soon, so profoundly, and so violently affect the fate of mankind and their own lives.

He's better dead than living still, When once he's past his thirtieth year! The young Austrian Houtermans could never have suspected at that time that certain ideas which he advanced one hot summer day in during a walking tour near Gottingen with his fellow student Atkinson would lead a quarter of a century later to the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, the 'absolute' weapon that might be instrumental in bringing about an end of the world.

To pass the time the two undergraduates had raised partly as a joke the old, unsolved problem of the true source of the inexhaustible energy supplied by the sun that was beating down above their heads. There could be no question in this case of any ordinary process of combustion, otherwise the substance of the sun must long since have been consumed in the fierce heat generated for so many millions of years.

But ever since Einstein's formula of the interchange ability of matter and energy the suspicion had been growing that in all probability a process of atomic transmutation was at work in that tremendous laboratory in the sky. Atkinson had participated in Rutherford's transformations of atom at Cambridge. He suggested to his companion that what had been accomplished in the Cavendish Laboratory must also be possible 'up there'.

How could it happen in the case of the sun? The theory for the first time put forward the conjecture that solar energy might be attributed, not to the demolition, but to the fusion, of lightweight atoms. The development of this idea led straight to the Hbombs that threaten humanity today. At that time, of course, neither of the two young students of the atom dreamed of such sinister consequences. Houtermans reports: 'That evening, after we had finished our essay, I went for a walk with a pretty girl.

As soon as it grew dark the stars came out, one after another, in all their splendour. Don't they sparkle beautifully? But I simply stuck out my chest and said proudly: "I've known since yesterday why it is they sparkle. Perhaps, she didn't believe it. At that movement, probably, she felt no interest whatever in the matter.

One evening a foreign physicist, as so often before, was a guest in the drawing-room. But on this occasion he was listened to with more than usual attention, for Professor Abraham Joffe came from Soviet Russia and had wonderful reports of the practical support given to scientists by the state. There they had no financial worries like those the Second Physics Institute had to contend with. The rooms at the Institute were hardly heated at all during the cold winter of At late seasons of the year, in order to save electricity, it was strictly forbidden to work before ten in the morning or after four in the afternoon.

The man from Leningrad declared that at his own institute there were three hundred students and numerous well-paid assistants. They could ail count on safe employment and steady promotion, for their aspiring country needed competent scientists.

Then he lowered his voice suddenly and added in a barely audible tone: 'I often feel as if I were living on top of a volcano. One never knows when, or for what reason, it is actually going to erupt. Certain Soviet physicists, who had previously been able to travel abroad without much difficulty, suddenly and inexplicably ceased to appear.

The few who did visit the rest of Europe began noticeably to keep their distance. The Soviet physicist Landau, who was suspected of Trotskyism, begged his colleagues at the Berlin Technical Academy not to discuss politics with him on any account. Only a few years earlier the exact opposite had been the case. Landau himself had defended the new order of society with fiery zeal.

He had come to Berlin with holes in his shoes and couldn't under- stand at all why he was given not only one but two pairs of new ones. It was rumoured in Gottingen, Cambridge, and Copenhagen that Gamow, the 'innocent' among the physicists, who had always been ready to amuse his listeners with conjuring tricks and childish games, was just then playing a decidedly less hilarious version of hide-and-seek with the secret police.

When he found that he was no longer to be allowed to visit the West, he had at first made a vain attempt to escape across the Afghan border. He was caught, but convinced the frontier guards who picked him up that he was only mountain climbing.

Gamow, who had recently married, soon made a second attempt to escape. He planned to cross the Black Sea, with his wife, in a small sailing vessel, from the Russian to the Turkish shore. Unluckily he ran into so violent a storm that he was glad to be rescued from imminent shipwreck by the motor-boats of the frontier police patrol, the very people he had intended to evade.

And yet Gamow belonged, actually, to the post-Revolutionary generation, neither for nor against Communism, but simply ready to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the-state for further education and the making of a career. Now, however, the new lords of the 'machine' in Moscow had indicated that they were no longer content with the neutral attitude of scientific specialists.

They demanded active ideological support. Modern physics in particular, in the form it had assumed in the West during the twenties, appeared ideologically suspect to the cultural commissars of Soviet.

The assertion made, above all by Bohr and Heisenberg, that in the act of observing sub-microscopic processes it was no longer possible to draw any clear distinction between the subject that which observed and the object that which was observed clashed with the doctrine of materialism.

For this view allowed the individual far too much influence over natural phenomena. Such a concession amounted in the eyes of the official philosophers of the Soviet Union to 'dangerous idealism' which could only end in 'ecclesiastical obscurantism '. Jaroslav Frenkel, in a 'lecture for the toilers' in Moscow, gave an account of the theory that light, according to the conditions under which it was observed, could at various times be described as consisting either of small particles or, nearly, of waves.

He then added, by way of a joke: 'Of course, according to the type of thinking hitherto prevalent among us, these two alternatives absolutely exclude each other So, Comrades, you can believe in the particles on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and in the waves on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

She administered a stern rebuke to the lecturer for indulging in 'bourgeois propaganda. Even the article under Frenkel's name in the Soviet Encyclopedia did not fail to censure Soviet Russia's possibly greatest contemporary teacher of physics: The philosophical ideas of Ja.

Frenkel are not notable for their lucidity and consistency so far as his attitude to materialism is concerned. Many of the statements in his books suffer directly or indirectly from idealist distortion and have been rightly subjected to strong criticism by the community of Soviet scientists.

The tranquility even of Gottingen was disturbed, when the economic crisis began in by louder and louder echoes of the grating notes of politics. The leading newspaper of the city, the Gottinger Tageblatt, a middle-class journal, had followed an extremely conservative policy for Some years.

It started to praise Adolf Hitler as a redeemer at a time when the rest of the nationalist press in Germany still qualified their judgment of the 'leader' with certain reservations. Students of the Second Physics and the Mathematical Institutes were discreetly combining into a National Socialist group. For the moment they confined themselves to spreading anti-Semitic propaganda among their followers, from which their own Jewish professors were of course exempt, since their characters, after all, were known from daily experience to be above all reproach.

There was. The matter was Investigated. Although the culprits were not discolored, the atmosphere of the institute, formerly so friendly, grew tense and suspicious. Some years before, nationalist students had hissed Einstein off the platform in Berlin from which he was lecturing on his relativity theory. The incident had disgusted people in Gottingen.

They marched out to the house of a famous Physicist who has just arrived and gave him an enthusiastic welcome by chanting in the twilight, Planck's quantum formula. The brown-shirted students made a particular onslaught against Jewish or half-Jewish undergraduates who had come from Poland or Hungary to study in Germany. These people were already victims of the 'cold' anti-Semitism of their native lands, which had denied them admission to universities under the numerus clausus law restricting the number of Jewish university students to a small quota.

Now they were sacrificed for the second time to racial prejudice. Talented young natural scientists such as Eugen Wigner, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller were at that time making notable contributions in Gottingen, Hamburg, and Berlin to discussions on the subject of atomic physics. Only a few years later they became the most active champions of the construction of the atom bomb. The alarm which they then felt at the possibility that Hitler might be the first to possess so terrifying a weapon can only be understood when one realizes what abuse and persecution they had to endure from National Socialist students in and They were never really able to get over the shock of the inroad of political fanaticism upon the peace of academic life, a shock which was destined to make history.

Long before Hitler's seizure of power a small group of German physicists, styling themselves 'national researchers', had formed around the Nobel prize winners Lenard and Stark. This group boldly declared Einstein's theory of relativity to be 'Jewish world- bluff'. They attempted to dismiss, under the summary heading of 'Jewish physics', all studies based on the data of Einstein and Bohr. Even at that time they characterized as 'Jewish-minded' the Aryans who founded their published work on relativity and quantum mechanics.

Johannes Stark was especially bitter against Sommerfeld. This arrogant inventor. Stark also held his eminent Munich colleague responsible for his dismissal from the University of Wurzburg. In reality Stark had been fired because he had used his Nobel prize money for the purchase, contrary to the statutes of the Stockholm foundation, of a china factory, and thereafter had taken more interest in this than in his scientific duties. The learned world of the Weimar Republic did not take very seriously these excursions of a few of their number into the foggy regions of demagogic racialism.

For the time being professional achievement counted more than anything else. The adherents of 'German physics' who had become agitators no longer attracted much attention, and their 'stupid clamour' was regarded as of no importance. The growing agitation of the cranks, the unrecognized and the unsuccessful who gathered about the National Socialist physicists, was in fact a symptom of the profound political and social unrest in Germany. Unemployment statistics rose week by week, Every day the newspapers reported meeting-hall riots between 'brown shirts' and members of other political parties.

Political assassination became a commonplace event. But the Gottingen atomic physicists, like most other natural scientists throughout the world, at first behaved as though it were possible to ignore these outrageous events. With an obstinacy amounting to monomania they applied themselves even more intensively than before to their work. The reasons for this ostrich-like policy were clearly analysed by Franck fifteen years later.

It was in that he told the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists: It is a custom in science - and perhaps a principle - to select from the infinite reservoir of unsolved problems only those simple ones the solution of which seems possible in terms of available knowledge and skills.

We are trained to subject our results to the most severe criticism. Adherence to these two principles results in our knowing very little, but on the other hand being very certain that we know this little. We scientists seem to be unable to apply these principles to the immensely complex problems of the political world and its social order.

In general we are. Our very objectivity prevents us from taking a strong stand in political differences, in which the right is never on one side. So we took the easiest way out and hid in our ivory tower. We felt that neither the good nor the evil applications were our responsibility.