The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, Pt. 3

One of the many astonishing things that Richard Rhodes does in The Making of the Atomic Bomb is to match the tone and pace of each of the major sections to their theme. It’s common enough in good novels, but uncommon in non-fiction, and vanishingly rare in a non-fiction work of this size and scope. The third and final part is just two long chapters, one on the Trinity test and the other on Hiroshima. They are tales of awe and terror. The middle section takes eight chapters to show the immense logistical effort to create what was necessary to build the first bomb, including wholly new cities and one of the world’s largest industrial plants, all in secret and in competition with everything else urgently needed to win the war. Those chapters are methodical, urgent, but also bureaucratic, tales of memos and transfers. The first section is all about understanding the atom, about the excitement of discovery. Words like “surprise” and “joy” recur throughout this part, as scientists take unusual experimental results and try to make sense of them, or propose theories about matter that can be tested, and then devise experiments to find out.

“As his protégé James Chadwick said, [Ernest] Rutherford’s ultimate distinction was ‘his genius to be astonished.’ He preserved that quality against every assault of success…” (p. 36) Rhodes details how Rutherford’s first experimental astonishment led to discoveries in radio waves that, for a time, put him ahead of Marconi. He went on to discover radioactive half-life, the difference between alpha and beta particles, to put forward the theory that an atom’s mass is concentrated in its nucleus, to co-develop atomic numbering, and to lead the laboratory that discovered the neutron. Those are some astonishing astonishments.

“[Niels] Bohr learned about radiochemistry from [George] de Hevesy. He began to see connections with his electron-theory work. His sudden burst of intuitions then was spectacular. He realized in the space of a few weeks that radioactive properties originated in the atomic nucleus but chemical properties depended on the number and distribution of electrons.” (p. 67) Within a year Bohr wrote a three-part paper titled “On the constitution of atoms and molecules” laying out an important step forward in modeling atomic structure, one that is still taught as a gateway to more complex models.

Rhodes jointly introduces a group of Hungarians who were startlingly brilliant, even by the standards of nuclear physicists of the early 20th century: Theodor von Karmán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller. They became known as the “Martians of science,” the joke being that super-intelligent extraterrestrials had already made contact with Earth, they had just disguised themselves as Hungarians.

Here’s a longer bit about young Walter Heisenberg and the process of discovery:

Toward the end of May 1925 his hay fever flared; he asked [Max] Born for two weeks’ leave of absence and made his way to Heligoland, a stormy sliver of island twenty-eight miles off the German coast in the North Sea, where very little pollen blew. He walked; he swam long distances in the cold sea; ‘a few days were enough to jettison all the mathematical ballast that inevitably encumbers the beginning of such attempts, and to arrive at a simple formulation of my problem.’ A few days more and he glimpsed the system he needed. It required a strange algebra that he cobbled together as he went along where numbers multiplied in one direction often produced different products from the same numbers multiplied in the opposite direction. He worried that his system might voolate the basic physical law of the conservation of energy and he worked until three o’clock in the morning checking his figures … By then he saw that he had ‘mathematical consistency and coherence.’ And so often with deep physical discovery, the experience was elating but also psychologically disturbing:

At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me. I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea. I now did so without too much trouble, and waited for the sun to rise.

Back in Göttingen Max Born recognized Heisenberg’s strange mathematics as matrix algebra … In three months of intensive work Born, Heisenberg and their colleague Pascual Jordan then developed what Heisenberg calls ‘a coherent mathematical framework, one that promised to embrace all the multifarious aspects of atomic physics.’ Quantum mechanics, the new system was called. It fit the experimental evidence to a high degree of accuracy. (p. 117)

The discoveries keep coming, the universe making new kinds of sense, human understanding probing ever more profoundly the stuff of which everything is made. Rhodes shows the excitement, the joy of learning and knowing, the awe of coming up with ideas about atoms and devising experiments to test the ideas. Archimedes’ “Eureka!” echoes in every chapter of this part.

Happy Petrov Day.

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Optional musical accompaniment to this post:

Red Car, by Trees.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, Part 1, Part 2.