Science Lessons of 1940!

In just the first 20 pages of Gerard J. DeGroot's fascinating new history of The Bomb (Harvard U. Press), the twists and turns in the path leading to the U.S. creating the first atomic weapon, provide at least three lasting lessons.

The background is that in the mid-1930s, few physicists had even thought about an atomic bomb, or if they had, believed one was possible; or if they believed it was theoretically possible, that it could be made a practical reality. But between 1938 and the autumn of 1941, the bomb went from a little known or believed theoretical possibility to a massive research and development program in the U.S., and lesser but still significant programs in Germany and the USSR.

1. Suicide by Prejudice

The first is pretty well known: though Germany eventually mounted a credible program, Hitler subverted his own efforts in 1933 by directing that non-Aryans be fired from civil service jobs, which included universities and scientific institutes. Eleven physicists who had won or would win Nobel Prizes were dismissed. Around 100 German physicists, most of them Jews, wound up in the U.S. by 1941. They not only provided the scientific talent but a lot of the motivation for the U.S. bomb program.

Hitler and his minions attacked physics as "Jew science." The prejudice was racial but also religious. Today in America there is no need to put Jew in front of science. With few if any exceptions, science is seen as not supporting fundamentalist Christian beliefs and often runs counter to them. It's not racial, strictly speaking, but there is a component. We have Hitler's prejudices, supported by and energizing an ideology that was political and even in some sense religious, to partly thank for Germany's failure to build and use the atomic bomb in World War II. But such prejudices now, supporting other ideologies and plain old greed, endanger the world even more profoundly. Hitler could have dominated the western world, for awhile. But the climate crisis could destroy this planet's capacity to sustain human civilization, and perhaps human and other life as we know it.

2. Even science is hampered by prejudice.

Enrico Fermi (an Italian with a Jewish wife who would flee Italy for the U.S. because of anti-Semitism imported by Mussolini's German ally) got some puzzling results by bombarding elements with neutrons in 1933. Physics was a small global club, with information still freely shared across all borders. For awhile no one could explain Fermi's results, until Ida Noddack, a woman physicist in Germany, came up with an unorthodox interpretation in 1934 that turned out to be the key to nuclear power. She saw the possibility of nuclear fission.

Everyone ignored her. Hitler and his scientists ignored her, or else (DeGroot speculates) they might have embarked on a bomb program early enough to build some before war's end. But other physicists everywhere else also ignored her, because, DeGroot says, she was a woman, and did not have the reputation of some other physicists, whose ideas were immediately taken seriously.

Simon Singh's new book, The Big Bang, also reveals the contributions of women in physics and astronomy through the years, though they didn't get much credit. In this case, the prejudice against women moved them lower on the pecking order within physics. As much as scientists like to promote themselves as beyond such considerations, they aren't. Sometimes one generation has to die off, Singh says, before the insights of the next generation are accepted.

The lesson for us is not to project too much; the sins we see in others might be in ourselves as well. Humility is always in order, as is self-examination, even for the "reality-based."


3. Before it can be done, it must be imagined.

It wasn't until 1938 that somebody else-Fermi himself, still in Italy then---came to the same conclusion as Noddack. Fermi's work was immediately published, partly through the efforts of a man who was a British agent, who wanted to make sure the information got out before Germany clamped down on publication. At this point, free exchange of information was useful to the Allies. But nobody yet really grasped what all of these theories and experiments really might mean. Except Leo Szilard. And he figured it out, including what must be done, because years before he had read a science fiction novel by H.G. Wells.

In 1914, Wells published The World Set Free, which dramatized a war carried out with atomic bombs. He invented the term "atomic bomb" in that novel. He got a lot of other things right about the science as well, including the nature of what would be called Plutonium, which even in 1938 hadn't been discovered.

Szilard not only remembered the bomb, but also the war, and how it happened. He realized, from his reading of Wells, that if knowledge of fission and the bomb got out, it could mean the end of civilization.

Szilard won the Nobel Prize in 1938, and after picking up the award in Sweden, he and his wife emigrated to America. In addition to his own researches, Szilard was instrumental in first, getting U.S. and British physicists to stop publishing anything about fission, and then getting Albert Einstein to write that famous letter to FDR, and to enlist other influential people in convincing the U.S. government to develop the bomb before Hitler did.

Ironically, one of the problems the physicists had in convincing U.S. government and military officials was that the whole idea smacked of science fiction to them. It took a few key people to explain the possibilities and the need in plain English before FDR gave the word. Szilard, Fermi and others who worked on the bomb didn't believe it should ever be used, if Hitler didn't develop one. Because Szilard at least had already seen the consequences, in a novel written a generation earlier.

In the whole history of The Bomb, the public was told all sorts of contradictory things by officials, politicians and scientists. The public perception was most affected, first by photographs from Hiroshima, but later by fiction and movies, like Dr. Strangelove, and The Day After.

The science lesson for us now is that we need to imagine the era we're entering of global effects of the climate crisis. Early attempts, like the movie The Day After Tomorrow, had some effect, and will be looked at again. The powerful imagining of this future that really motivates people has yet to be seen or heard. Yet it may start with a few, like Szilard, who have read or seen or imagined the story of things to come.

While we're here, let's add a fourth lesson. While we're aware of the moral complexities involved, especially given the lack of real information about what each country was doing and what making a bomb would actually entail, there is a lesson in why each of these programs got started.

Politicans and military people had their frameworks for war, and nuclear pipedreams didn't fit into it, to the point where they couldn't understand it. In each case, as DeGroot demonstrated, it took an act of good communication to get things moving.

In particular he contrasts the muddled presentations and even the less than clear Einstein letter of those advocating the American program, with the clear, one paragraph presented to Hitler (so Germany started before the U.S.)

What convinced FDR was not Einstein's letter but a story, a metaphor. Alexander Sachs was an international financier and friend of Einstein. He got it. He was the one who got the letter to FDR. But it was his meeting with FDR the next day that convinced him. He simply told FDR a story about a young American inventor who went to Napoleon during wartime and offered his invention, which the emperor turned down. The inventor was James Watt, the invention the steam engine. This got Roosevelt's attention.

The lessons for our time are that clarity is essential, and metaphor is helpful, and communication is the key to turning good science into good policy. Not the only prerequisite, of course, but one we can do something about.