Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  The separation wouldn't be easy. While they were courting, Pauling had been honest enough to tell Ava Helen, "If I had to choose between you and science, I'm not sure that I would choose you." She was becoming accustomed to straight talk from her beau, but this particular remark cut her—she would remember it for the rest of her life. She replied with something about it being all right as long as she was part of the package. And she went to work to make sure he wouldn't forget her in California.

  She didn't have to worry. A poem doodled on the inside of an OAC textbook at the end of his senior year gives an insight into Pauling's feelings:

  April 11, 1922

  Fully 21 years old, and

  with very few regrets.

  Let us sincerely hope that

  they shall remain just as few.

  By the way, life is odd,

  My vision has increased, and

  I really am happy; but I wish that

  My little troubles didn't worry me.

  I wonder why amo is the Latin word I remember? Thus

  Te amo

  Je t'aime

  Ich liebe dich.

  A few weeks later, Pauling delivered the senior class oration at graduation. By now he had tempered his optimistic belief in progress with a recognition of social turmoil and a sense of obligation to others. The technological horrors unleashed during World War I had spurred a strong reaction against, and a critique of, science. Science, the argument went, made war more deadly and the workplace less human. Technological advances were widening the income gap between rich and poor. Science was becoming the new god of society, but it was a god without morals.

  Pauling's response, like that of many of the day's leading scientists, was to stress the technological nature of the problems facing society and to ask scientists to step to the forefront in facing them. The answer, he told his fellow graduates, was a credo of service to others:

  The problems looming up in the development of the state and country are enormous in volume and overwhelming in complexity. Advancement and growth depend upon the discovery and development of the resources of nature, and the investigation and interpretation of the laws of nature. In the course of progress social relations are strained, and industrial, political and educational problems arise. The country is crying for a solution of all these difficulties, and is hopefully looking to the educated man for it. This, then, is the way we can repay OAC— by service. . . . We are going into the world inspired with the resolution of service, eager to show our love for our college and our appreciation of her work by being of service to our fellow men.

  Thus inspired, at the end of the summer of 1922, Pauling boarded a train and headed for Caltech.

  CHAPTER 4

  Caltech

  An Idea Under Construction

  Even the air was different in Pasadena, soft and warm, flower scented. The color palette was pastel: cantaloupe, orchid, ivory, and sand beneath a robin's-egg-blue sky. The town was rich, small, and quiet, nestled at the foot of the pink-and-purple San Gabriel Mountains, a well-tended bedroom community for the well-heeled of Los Angeles. A village of millionaires, it had been called, and there were sections that looked it: curved streets lined with palm trees, sprawling bungalows, and Spanish-style mansions set well back, the only sounds the snip of gardeners' shears and the hiss of sprinklers. Compared to rough-and-tumble Portland, with its dark fir forests and chilling rains, Pasadena seemed like paradise.

  Pauling had arranged to room with his Oregon Agricultural College (OAC) classmate Paul Emmett, who was living with his mother in a house in town. After dropping off his suitcases, he set out immediately for Caltech, on the edge of town, across the street from the old Rose Bowl. The small campus—thirty acres of weedy fields, scrub oak, and an old orange grove—consisted of just three finished buildings: the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry and the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, both relatively new, and old Throop Hall, the campus's original building, with its squat dome and Mission-style facade. An auditorium was under construction. The faculty club was a nearby farmhouse.

  What mattered at Caltech, though, was not the campus but the minds gathering there. Just two decades earlier it had been an undistinguished manual training school without a major endowment or any well-known researchers. In 1907 the Chicago astronomer George Ellery Hale had adopted it as a base camp for his Mount Wilson Observatory up in the San Gabriels and, over the next decade, gradually built a network of financial support. The school became a serious center for research science only three years before Pauling arrived, when Hale lured A. A. Noyes to Pasadena by building him a fine new research building and giving him the chance to run a chemistry program as he saw fit. Noyes and Hale then rounded up enough private backing to put together another new laboratory building, a one-of-a-kind high-voltage facility, money for staff and equipment, and the offer of the presidency of the institute—a package grand enough to entice the nation's best-known physicist, Robert A. Millikan, from the University of Chicago. Millikan arrived just a year before Pauling.

  When Pauling first saw it, Caltech was still an idea under construction. The faculty consisted of eighteen Ph.D.s; there were only twenty-nine graduate students, ten of them in chemistry. But the institute was poised for greatness. A number of factors were working in its favor: the economic boom in Southern California, the efficient fund-raising of Hale and Millikan, a "corporate" administrative style that gave maximum independence to researchers, and its small size, which allowed for maximum contact between students and faculty. But perhaps most important of all was the commitment of Caltech's three founders, Hale, Noyes, and Millikan, to the relatively new concept that scientific research could best be done by working across and above old disciplinary boundaries. In Pasadena chemists would regularly attend physics seminars; physicists would test theories of chemical evolution by looking out into space; astronomers would work with physicists and chemists to unlock the secrets of the stars. Interdisciplinary research would be reflected in a new approach to education, devised mainly by Noyes, that would make Caltech, in a very short time, one of the nation's best places—if not the best in some areas—to receive training in the physical sciences.

  For four years as an undergraduate Pauling had been frustrated, asking questions about chemistry that his professors at Oregon Agricultural College couldn't answer. Now he would find himself inundated with answers—and new questions—presented by the best scientific minds in the world. At Caltech the most stimulating ideas, the latest findings, the most important issues, were discussed openly and critically on a daily basis. At Caltech, Pauling's intellect would flower. And it was due, in great part, to the sun.

  - - -

  George Ellery Hale loved the sun. That's what had brought the Chicago astronomer to Pasadena in 1903: sun to clear his daughter's bronchitis-clogged lungs and cloudless skies for the new solar observatory he wanted to build. Hale was an ambitious man, and he wanted to build the largest, best-equipped astronomical facility in the world. On a visit to California he found the clear weather, clean air, and accessible building site he was looking for—a place for what astronomers call "good seeing"—at the top of Mount Wilson in the San Gabriels. He had no money to build his new observatory and no researchers to run it. But he had an attitude, typified by his motto Make No Small Plans. And he had an uncommon ability to make big plans come true.

  Hale was, like most American scientists, impressed by the success of Johns Hopkins University, which, since its founding in 1876, had changed the face of higher education in the United States. Johns Hopkins was modeled on German universities, emphasizing scholarly research among the faculty, the close association of graduate students with researchers, and the introduction of seminar-type teaching, with small groups of students attacking problems with the aid of their professor. It was a school devoted to teaching graduate students how to do independent scientific research, and the German system worked beautifully in the sciences. The rational cultivation of scientific research was of
interest to industrialists as well, and oil baron John D. Rockefeller, impressed by Johns Hopkins, funded the new University of Chicago with some of the same ideas in mind. All it took to start a school was money, and the nation's growing respect for science was making money easier to get. Perhaps, Hale thought, he could create a new kind of scientific institution on the West Coast. He had made his scientific reputation by using the tools of other scientific disciplines to aid his study of astronomical phenomena and had written of creating what he called the New Astronomy, "a new science," he wrote in 1899, "which offers problems not to be solved by the astronomer alone but only by the combined skill of the astronomer, the physicist, and the chemist." In Pasadena, he thought, he could create a place devoted to this ideal of cooperative research. He went to work, persuading the board of trustees of a local vocational school called Throop Polytechnic Institute to jettison the school's elementary manual training courses and art program and concentrate instead on a bachelor's program in engineering. He arranged to have a sympathetic acquaintance selected as president. He started raising money to build new laboratories. And he began looking for scientific talent.

  Hale knew how the game worked. The big-money foundations— Andrew Carnegie's and John D. Rockefeller's paramount among them—were beginning to funnel money into scientific research. But the dollars were not spread evenly; they went disproportionately to what Carnegie called "the exceptional man," a few elite scientists, proven producers who could guarantee a return on investment. If elite scientists would come to Pasadena, money would follow. But Hale didn't have a chance to attract them without decent facilities, and Throop consisted of one building unequipped for scientific research. He began building enthusiasm for expansion among the Throop board and redoubled his efforts to convince the Carnegie people to expand their funding beyond the observatory they were helping him build at Mount Wilson.

  And he put out feelers in the scientific community, starting at the top. One of the first men he approached was a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, now friend, the best-known teacher of chemistry in America, Arthur Amos Noyes.

  - - -

  Noyes, a Yankee born and bred, descended from Puritans who settled in Massachusetts in the 1630s. His father, a lawyer, was a gentleman more interested in history and writing than in making money. Noyes was raised in the small town of Newburyport, where, despite his family's modest circumstances, he was considered one of the gentry by right of birth. As he grew older, Noyes's Puritan inheritance became evident in his modest—some would say shy—manner, his reverence for learning, his disapproval of overt displays of wealth, and his lifelong habit of working up to sixteen hours a day. Noyes could often be found eating breakfast in his laboratory after sleeping there all night.

  He also had a passion for the delights of literature, propelled in that direction by his mother, who would be his close companion until her death. Noyes would later impress students and colleagues by reciting long stretches of verse from memory—not the modern stuff, Pauling remembered, but "good old-fashioned poetry." Noyes believed in the unity of all things beautiful, both scientific and artistic; he could write a long letter about thermodynamics to a friend and sign it "Arturo."

  Noyes became interested in chemistry early, but poverty delayed his entrance into MIT until he could receive a scholarship. After earning his master's degree, Noyes made what was becoming a common pilgrimage for American chemistry students in the 1880s, sailing for Germany to study with the masters. He thought he wanted to be an organic chemist. But then, in Leipzig, he came under the influence of the charismatic young firebrand Wilhelm Ostwald.

  Only thirty-five, Ostwald had already earned a worldwide reputation for his research and visionary outlook. Although his gentle manner belied it, he was incredibly energetic, gifted with wide interests and talents (which included painting, making music, and philosophizing as well as working in the laboratory), and he was propelled by a vision. All of science is one, he preached, and each field should learn from others. He especially wanted to "illuminate the dark recesses of chemistry with the torch of physics." Physics, to Ostwald, was a more advanced field than chemistry, more precise, more mathematical, more theoretical. Chemists amassed facts; physicists explained them. Borrowing the techniques and approaches of physics, he and a handful of other like-minded researchers created the hybrid field eventually called physical chemistry, refocusing chemistry away from the study of chemical substances themselves to the reactions in which they participated, from the mere description and classification of compounds to the discovery of the general laws that guided their behavior. Great thoughts were born in his physical chemistry institute in Leipzig—new ideas about how chemicals behaved in solution, the effects of electricity, how catalysts worked. When Noyes was studying with him, Ostwald had not yet been rewarded for his insights; his laboratory was badly lit, poorly ventilated, and crowded with students speaking a babble of tongues. It would be twenty years before he won his Nobel Prize. But in the 1880s and 1890s it was a thrilling place to study, and the students who flocked there scattered to spread Ostwald's gospel around the world.

  Noyes returned to a faculty position at MIT with a German doctorate, a respect for German preeminence in science (he would publish many of his own scientific papers first in German journals, believing that only then could they come properly to the attention of the international community), and a desire to re-create the excitement of Ostwald's institute in America. He asked MIT to fund a research laboratory devoted to physical chemistry, but the school was not in a financial position to do so. Fortunately for the history of chemistry in America, in 1898, Noyes codiscovered a valuable waste-recovery process for the photographic industry. When it was commercialized, it brought him a thousand dollars a month for years—about five times what he was earning as a full professor at MIT. He had no wife, no family, and apart from sailing, no expensive tastes, so he invested the money in his dream laboratory. He struck a deal with MIT in which he agreed to pay for half the cost of the new facility. In return, he was granted an unusual degree of control, including a final say in decisions on faculty hiring, the use of graduate students, and the setting of research priorities.

  The MIT Research Laboratory of Physical Chemistry, christened in 1903, was a bit of Germany in Back Bay. The German scientific institutes, such as Ostwald's, were successful because they recognized the value of basic research both for its own sake and as part of the educational process. They were generally built around the reputation of a central researcher, whose renown would draw students and funding. They were often physically separate from their mother universities, with their own libraries and teaching rooms as well as laboratories. Freed from academic pressures and interdepartmental squabbles, institute members could devote more of their time to independent research and the introduction of advanced students to the latest findings. Teaching was intensive, with heavy use of small seminars in which students and teachers critically examined the latest advances. But of course the most important education happened in the lab: Graduate students were expected to spend long hours doing their own original research. Today it is a cliché to say that higher education must be tied to research, that students must be exposed to the latest advances and techniques in order to prepare them to take the next steps in their fields. But Noyes, working in the German style, was among the first American scientific educators to make it happen.

  While the form of his laboratory was borrowed, Noyes quickly put his own stamp on it. Many of his ideas have become common practice, but nearly a century ago they were revolutionary: his emphasis on how rather than what to think; his stress on basing chemistry firmly on mathematics and physics; his real affection for students (they formed, in a way, his surrogate family); and his creation of an atmosphere in which students and faculty interacted constantly and informally. Many of the foremost physical chemists of the next generation would remember sailing off Boston Harbor in Noyes's yacht Research, conversing about the latest chemical
theories, smiling at spontaneous bursts of poetry. Although he had a solid research reputation, Noyes would have a much greater impact on chemistry through his dedication to altering the way chemistry students were taught. And Noyes was, Pauling remembered, "a great teacher of chemistry."

  "It is hard to overestimate the importance of the Research Laboratory of Physical Chemistry in the development of science in America," Pauling later wrote. Noyes's lab led the way as physical chemistry's influence grew, buttressed by important findings about the mechanisms and processes involved in chemical reactions, about thermodynamics and free energies. Physical chemistry was succeeding in building a theoretical base for the field, in finding the laws that underlay chemistry. Nobel Prizes began going to physical chemists; to van't Hoff in 1901 for discovering the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure, to Arrhenius in 1903 for his electrolytic theory of dissociation, and to Ostwald himself in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria, and the rates of chemical reactions. Money followed success. In America, 85 percent of the Carnegie Institution chemistry funding before World War I went to physical chemists, Noyes prominent among them. MIT began drawing the best faculty and the brightest physical chemistry postdoctoral fellows from around the world—even a few, in a historic reversal, from Germany. Noyes's lab became a sort of chemical Camelot. And Noyes was given an appropriate nickname by his students: King Arthur.