A Brief History of Science with Levity Read online

  After the war, Einstein continued to work on many key aspects of the theory of general relativity, such as wormholes, the possibility of time travel, the existence of black holes and the creation of the universe. However, he became increasingly isolated from the rest of the physics community. The huge developments in unravelling the secrets of atoms and molecules were spurred on by the development of the atomic bomb. The majority of scientists were working using quantum theory, not relativity. Another reason for Einstein’s detachment from his colleagues was his obsession with discovering his unified field theory. In the 1930s, Einstein engaged in a series of historic private debates with Niels Bohr, the originator of the Bohr atomic model. In a series of “thought experiments”, Einstein tried to find logical inconsistencies in the quantum theory, but was unsuccessful. However, in his later years, he stopped opposing quantum theory and tried to incorporate it, along with light and gravity, into the larger unified field theory he was developing.

  In the last decade of his life, Einstein withdrew from public life, rarely traveling far and confining himself to long walks around Princeton with close associates, whom he engaged in deep conversations about politics, religion, physics and his unified field theory.

  On 17th April 1955, while working on a speech he was preparing to commemorate Israel’s seventeenth anniversary, Einstein suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm and experienced internal bleeding.

  He was taken to the University Medical Centre at Princeton for treatment, but refused surgery, believing that he had lived his life and was content to accept his fate. “I want to go when I want,” he stated at the time. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share and it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” Einstein died at the University Medical Centre early the next morning on 18th April 1955 at the age of seventy-six.

  During the autopsy, Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein’s brain, seemingly without the permission of his family, for preservation and future study by doctors of neuroscience. His remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered in an undisclosed location. After decades of study, Einstein’s brain is now located at the Princeton University Medical Centre.

  We will conclude the discussion of other pioneering physicists Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, James Chadwick and Werner Heisenberg in the next section covering scientific advances made between 1930 and 1970. Although all of these scientists were born between 1885 and 1901, their main achievements were made in the 1930s.

  CHAPTER 8

  When looking at the explosion in scientific advances made between 1930 and 1970, one must appreciate that the astonishing German advances made up until mid-1945 were all under the control of the Nazis and the SS. The main figures in this area were changed frequently at Hitler’s whim, and to fully understand what was happening we need to understand the hierarchy within the Schutzstaffel (SS). Long before Hitler became German chancellor in 1933, the SS was well established.

  For one of the many examples of the confusion and disinformation created during this period, look no further than Wernher von Braun. When he was taken to the USA in 1945, the Americans also took Wehrmacht (Army) General Walter Dornberger, who they claimed was Wernher von Braun’s boss. This was pure window dressing for American public consumption. US intelligence knew full well that Von Braun was a Major in the SS, and had used slave labour from concentration camps to build his V2 rockets. He would have seen these labourers beaten, hanged and worked to death on a daily basis. Von Braun actually reported directly to SS General Hans Kammler. Kammler held the third highest position in the SS, but the Americans knew that the truth would not go down well with the powerful Jewish lobby in Washington.

  From 1929 onwards and throughout World War II, the top commander (Reichsführer) of the SS was Heinrich Himmler. At the outbreak of war, his number two was generally accepted to be Rudolf Hess, as although he was at the time Hitler’s deputy, he also held the rank of General in the SS. However in 1941, Rudolf Hess flew alone to Scotland, was arrested and spent the rest of the war in the Tower of London.

  Following this, the next man to be appointed to the position of SS second-in-command was Reinhard Heydrich. He was an SS Obergruppenführer, which was the equivalent rank to a five-star general in the Wehrmacht and most other armies. Heydrich was subsequently assassinated in Prague in May 1942 by Czech and Slovak commandos trained by British Intelligence. Although the assassination attempt was initially bungled, he died from his injuries a week later. The vacant SS number two position was then given to SS Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl.

  During the second half of World War II, the SS number three position was occupied by SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler. He had achieved a meteoric rise through the ranks of the SS due to his intelligence, ruthlessness, organisational skills and talent for understanding advanced technologies.

  He was originally educated as a Dr of Engineering, but throughout the war he masterminded the SS takeover of virtually all of the important military manufacturing from Albert Speer and the armament ministry, and absolutely all of the high-technology research and development.

  His achievements and the towering breakthroughs made by his group of scientists and engineers were truly ground-breaking, and the security system that he put in place to surround and protect these operations was never broken. Apart from Hitler himself, it is believed that no other member of the Nazi party knew of his work, let alone anyone on the Allied side. The work of his group is so significant that a section will be devoted to their achievements later in the book.

  In the dying days of the war, another SS Obergruppenführer named Ernst Kaltenbrunner was promoted to the number two position in the SS. However, this was only after Kammler and Pohl had disappeared off the radar, leaving Himmler and Kaltenbrunner to their fate as the Third Reich collapsed. Some people have commented that the SS uniforms were very impressive. They should be, as they were designed and made by Hitler’s good friend Hugo Boss.

  We will now look at the main figures responsible for the scientific advances during the 1930s and 1940s. Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who made great contributions to the understanding of atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. He was born in 1885 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

  Bohr went on to become an accomplished physicist who came up with a revolutionary theory on atomic structures and radiation emission. After working on the Manhattan Project in the United States, Bohr, like Einstein, called for responsible and peaceful applications of atomic energy across the world.

  Bohr’s own research led him to theorise in a series of articles that atoms give off electromagnetic radiation as a result of electrons jumping to different orbit levels, departing from a previous model by Ernest Rutherford. Although Bohr’s discovery would eventually be tweaked by other scientists, his ideas formed the basis of future atomic research.

  After teaching at Manchester University, Bohr settled again at Copenhagen University in 1916 with a professorship position. Then, in 1920, he founded the university’s Institute of Theoretical Physics, which he would run indefinitely.

  Bohr worked with Werner Heisenberg and other scientists on a new quantum mechanics principle connected to Bohr’s concept of complementarity, which was initially presented at an Italian conference in 1927. The concept asserted that physical properties on an atomic level would be viewed differently depending on experimental parameters, hence explaining why light could be seen as both a particle and a wave. Bohr would also come to apply this idea philosophically as well, with the belief that evolving concepts of physics deeply affected human perspectives. Another physicist by the name of Albert Einstein didn’t fully see eye-to-eye with all of Bohr’s assertions, and their talks became renowned in scientific communities.

  Bohr went on to work with the group of scientists who were at the forefront of research on nuclear fission during the late 1930s, to which he contributed the liquid droplet theory. Outside of his pioneering ideas, Bohr was known for
his wit and warmth, and his humanitarian ethics would greatly influence his later work.

  With Adolf Hitler’s rise in power, Bohr was able to offer German Jewish physicists refuge at his institute in Copenhagen, which in turn led to travel to the United States for many. Once Denmark became occupied by Nazi forces, the Bohr family escaped to Sweden, with Bohr and his wife eventually making their way to the US as well. Bohr then worked with the Manhattan Project in Nevada, where the first atom bomb was being created. Because he had concerns about how the bomb could be used, he called for future international arms control and active communication about the weapon between nations. This idea met with resistance from Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  After the end of the war, Bohr returned to Europe and continued to call for peaceful applications of atomic energy. In his “Open Letter to the United Nations,” dated 9th June 1950, Bohr envisioned an “open world” mode of existence between countries that abandoned isolationism for true cultural exchange.

  In 1954, he helped to establish CERN, the European-based particle physics research facility, and put together the Atoms for Peace Conference of 1955. In 1957, Bohr received the Atoms for Peace Award for his trailblazing theories and efforts to use atomic energy responsibly.

  Bohr was a prolific writer with more than a hundred publications to his name. After having a stroke, he died on 18th November 1962, in Copenhagen. Bohr’s son, Aage, shared with two others the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on motion in atomic nuclei.

  Two years after Bohr came another great physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. I remember his work well, as all undergraduate physics students in my day had to be able to derive the famous “Schrödinger Equation” from first principles.

  Born in 1887 in Vienna, Austria, Erwin Schrödinger went on to become a famed theoretical physicist and scholar who came up with a ground-breaking wave equation for electron movements. He was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with British physicist P.A.M. Dirac, and later became a director at Ireland’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

  Schrödinger joined the University of Zurich in 1921. His tenure as a professor at Zurich over the next six years would prove to be one of the most important periods of his physics career. Immersing himself in an array of theoretical physics research, Schrödinger came upon the work of fellow physicist Louis de Broglie in 1925, which sparked his interest in explaining that an electron in an atom would move as a wave, contrary to de Broglie’s belief. The following year, he wrote a revolutionary paper that highlighted what would be known as the Schrödinger wave equation.

  Following the atomic model of Niels Bohr and a thesis from de Broglie, Schrödinger articulated the movements of electrons in terms of wave mechanics as opposed to particle leaps. He provided a mode of thought to scientists that would become accepted and incorporated into thousands of papers, thus becoming an important cornerstone of quantum theory. Schrödinger made this discovery in the 1930s, with most theoretical physicists sharing ground-breaking finds during this period.

  Schrödinger then left his position at Zurich for a new, prestigious opportunity at the University of Berlin, where he met Albert Einstein. He held this position until 1933, opting to leave upon the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party and the related persecution of Jewish citizens.

  Shortly after joining the faculty of physics at Oxford University in England, Schrödinger learned that he had won the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing the award with another quantum theorist, Paul A.M. Dirac. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Schrödinger stated that his mentor, Fritz Hasenöhrl, would have been accepting the award if he had not died during World War I.

  Following a three-year stay at Oxford, Schrödinger travelled and worked in different countries, including in Austria at the University of Graz. In 1939, he was invited by Irish Prime Minister Éamon de Valera to work at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland, heading its School for Theoretical Physics. He remained in Dublin until the mid-1950s, returning in 1956 to Vienna, where he continued his career at his alma mater.

  Four years after the birth of Schrödinger, James Chadwick made further great advances in developing our knowledge of physics. Chadwick was an English physicist, who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. He was born in 1891, in Bollington, UK, and educated at Manchester University, where he studied under Rutherford. After the war, Chadwick followed Rutherford to Cambridge University.

  Chadwick chose to attend the University of Manchester as he had not studied Latin, and enrolled in 1908. Like most students, he lived at home, walking the 4 miles (6.4 km) to the university and back each day. At the end of his first year, he was awarded a Heginbottom Scholarship to study physics. The physics department was headed by Ernest Rutherford, who assigned research projects to final year students, and he instructed Chadwick to devise a means of comparing the amount of radioactive energy of two different sources.

  The idea was that they could be measured in terms of the activity of one gram (0.035 ounces) of radium, a unit of measurement which would become known as the Curie. Unfortunately, Rutherford’s suggested approach was unworkable, something Chadwick knew but was afraid to tell Rutherford, so Chadwick pressed on alone, and eventually devised the required method. The results became Chadwick’s first paper, which, co-authored with Rutherford, was published in 1912.

  Having devised a means of measuring gamma radiation, Chadwick proceeded to measure the absorption of gamma rays by various gases and liquids. This time the resulting paper was published under his name only. He was awarded his Master of Science (MSc) degree in 1912, and was appointed a Beyer Fellow. The following year he was awarded an Exhibition Scholarship, which allowed him to study and research at a university in Continental Europe.

  In his research, Chadwick continued to probe the atomic nucleus. In 1925, the concept of spin had allowed physicists to explain the Zeeman Effect, but it also created unexplained anomalies. At the time it was believed that the nucleus consisted of protons and electrons, so nitrogen, for example, with a mass number of 14, was assumed to contain 14 protons and 7 electrons. This gave it the right mass and charge, but the wrong spin.

  At a conference at Cambridge on beta particles and gamma rays in 1928, Chadwick met Geiger again, who brought with him a new model of his Geiger counter, which had been improved by his post-doctoral student Walther Müller. This was something that Chadwick had not used since the war, and the new Geiger-Müller counter was potentially a major improvement over the scintillation techniques then in use, which relied on the human eye for observation.

  The major drawback with it was that it detected alpha, beta and gamma radiation, and radium, which the Cavendish laboratory normally used in its experiments, and was therefore unsuitable for what Chadwick had in mind. However, Chadwick knew that polonium was an alpha emitter, and Lise Meitner sent Chadwick about 2 mCi of this material from Germany.

  In January 1939, Meitner created an uproar with a paper that explained how uranium atoms, when bombarded by neutrons, broke into two roughly equal fragments, a process they called fission. They calculated that this would result in the release of about 200 MeV, implying an energy release orders of magnitude greater than chemical reactions. It was soon noted that if neutrons were released during fission, then a chain reaction was possible. Bohr theorised that fission was more likely to occur in the uranium 235 isotope, which made up only 0.7 percent of natural uranium.

  Chadwick did not believe that there was any likelihood of another war with Germany in 1939, and took his family for a holiday on a remote lake in northern Sweden. The news of the outbreak of WWII therefore came as a shock. Determined not to spend another war in an internment camp, Chadwick made his way to England by boat. In October 1939, Chadwick received a letter from Sir Edward Appleton, the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, asking for his opinion on the feasibility of an atomic bomb. Chadwick responded cautiously. He did not dism
iss the possibility, but carefully went over the large number of theoretical and practical difficulties involved.

  The matter of cooperation on the atomic bomb had to be taken up at the highest level in the UK and US. Chadwick then began a tour of the Manhattan Project facilities in November 1943, except for the Hanford Site, which he was not allowed to visit. Observing the work in the facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he realised how wrong he had been about building the plant in wartime Britain. In early 1944, he moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico with his wife Aileen and their twins, who now spoke with Canadian accents. For security reasons, he was given the cover name of James Chaffee.

  By early 1945, Chadwick was spending most of his time in Washington, and his family relocated from Los Alamos to a house on Washington’s Dupont Circle in April 1945. He was present at the meeting of the Combined Policy Committee on 4th July when Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson gave Britain’s agreement to use the atomic bomb against Japan. Chadwick was also present at the Trinity nuclear test on 16th July when the first atomic bomb was detonated.

  Inside its core was a polonium-beryllium modulated nuclear initiator, a development of the technique that Chadwick had used to discover the neutron over a decade before. As described by William Lawrence, the New York Times ace reporter, “Never before in history had any man lived to see his own discovery materialize itself with such telling effect on the destiny of man.”

  The final great physicist that we will discuss before turning our attention to the technological advances made during the Nazi era, and in particular the developments in gravity drive propulsion, is Werner Heisenberg.