That same year, Rutherford left Manchester for Cambridge to replace an aging J. J. Thomson as head of the Cavendish Laboratory—the most prestigious scientific academic post in Britain. Thomson wished to step aside to focus on his own research. The Rutherfords installed their modest possessions in Newnham Cottage, a comfortable house on the banks of the Granta with a large garden which became Lady Rutherford's passion. It was also useful in ensuring that student guests had no opportunity to outstay their welcome. Rutherford would hospitably invite his students to tea on Sunday afternoons. They arrived at 2:30 p.m. in "best suits and dresses," as the young Australian Mark Oliphant later recalled, and sat in a semicircle. Rutherford kept up lively conversation, while his short, plump, down-to-earth wife poured the tea. She would loudly remind her husband, "Ern, you're dribbling," if while trying to talk, eat, and drink at the same time he spilled tea or food from his mouth in the excitement of the moment. After an hour or so Lady Rutherford, who called everyone "Mister" regardless of status, would ask her guests whether they would like to see the garden. It was a command rather than an invitation. After a stroll "we were led firmly to the door in the outer wall where we shook hands and departed."
Rutherford's first task at the Cavendish was to reorganize the laboratory, which, with so many men being demobilized, was, in his view, crowded to excess with students and sadly lacking in space and equipment. These returning researchers included the physicist Francis Aston, who in 1919 invented the mass spectrograph—an instrument capable of differentiating both elements and isotopes by mass and which helped validate Rutherford's model of the atom. James Chadwick proved a staunch administrative ally. He had returned from his long internment in Berlin malnourished, dyspeptic, and impoverished, but matured by his experiences. Rutherford brought him to Cambridge, where he not only showed himself to be a creative and intuitive scientist—helping Rutherford disintegrate further elements—but progressively became Rutherford's lieutenant. A natural administrator, he kept the Cavendish running, watching over both its finances and its researchers.
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The 1920s were hectic, even chaotic, years for atomic physics. Scientists were teasing out ever more facts but also seeking theories and systems to make sense of the bewildering, often conflicting mass of new information. Sometimes supplies of data ran ahead of theory. At other times, theories could not be validated for want of satisfactory data. The main centers of atomic science were the British, revolving around Rutherford, the French, centered on Marie Curie's Radium Institute, and the German in Berlin. Each school had its pet interests and its own personality. Each believed itself superior. The British view of the French was that "where we try to find models or analogies, they are quite content with laws." The French, conversely, considered their own approach a model of synthesis, simplicity, and precision and a happy contrast to "the haphazard fact-finding sorties of the British, who wanted to turn everything into wheels within wheels," or the "grandiose, woolly theorising and niggling accumulations of useless data" of the Germans.
Atomic science was also becoming well established in Japan, helped by close and enduring links with Western universities. The Japanese had entered the First World War on the Allied side toward the end of August 1914, two weeks after fighting had begun. In doing so they had cited a strict interpretation of their recent alliance with Britain. In reality, they were keen on enhancing their strategic position in the Pacific and in China at Germany's expense. Their initial action was to give the Germans six days to surrender Kiaochow, one of the treaty ports they held in China. The Germans refused. The kaiser sent a telegram to the governor of Kiaochow, proclaiming, "It would shame me more to surrender Kiaochow to the Japanese than Berlin to the Russians." However, the Japanese captured the port within three months and also seized several German colonies and other treaty ports, including among the latter Tsingtao in northern China—famous for its brewery—where the Japanese took 4,600 POWs. According to one German prisoner, the Japanese "treated them as guests" and provided plentiful food, including German sausage, and provision for exercise. Among the considerable gains from the Germans that Japan retained as colonies at the end of the war were the Caroline Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the northern Marianas group—including Saipan and Tinian—in the Pacific*
Once the First World War was over and Japan held a respected place among the victors, Japanese scientists eagerly resumed their academic contacts overseas. In 1923 Yoshio Nishina, an urbane, cosmopolitan thirty-three-year-old who would become the founder of experimental nuclear and cosmic ray research in Japan, arrived in Denmark to study with Niels Bohr. Seven other young Japanese physicists also came to Copenhagen. Another, Nobus Yamada, worked in Paris with the Curies preparing polonium sources. Their mentor back in Japan was Hantaro Nagaoka, professor of physics at Tokyo University who had studied in Germany in the 1890s and later visited Ernest Rutherford in Manchester. He wrote to Rutherford of his admiration for "the simpleness of the apparatus you employ and the brilliant results you obtain."
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Yoshio Nishina (center) with Niels Bohr (right)
In postwar France, Marie Curie's problem was shortage of money to fund research. Her laboratory had no new equipment and only one gram of radium, which was being used to treat cancer. An American benefactress, Mrs. William Brown Meloney, editor of the New York magazine Delineator and known as "Missy," came to the rescue. She raised over $ 150,000 in the United States to purchase a gram of American radium for the scientist she considered "the greatest woman in the world." The news so excited the French press that they forgot Marie Curie was the scarlet woman of the Affaire Langevin a decade earlier and eulogized her. At a gala evening at the Paris Opera, Sarah Bernhardt tremulously declaimed an "Ode to Madame Curie," hailing her as "the sister of Prometheus."
Missy Meloney coaxed an initially reluctant and prematurely frail Marie to cross the Atlantic to receive the radium in person. In 1921 President Warren Harding presented it to her—or at least a symbol of it. The radium in its lead-lined containers was far too precious to be brought to the ceremony. The transatlantic journey was a strain, but the radium enabled Marie Curie to continue her work, helped by her daughter Irene, who had become her closest collaborator. Now in her midtwenties, Irene was tall and sturdily built, with a direct, piercing, sometimes disconcerting gaze. Einstein thought she had the characteristics of a grenadier. Other contemporaries recalled her as sometimes haughty and conscious of her status as Marie Curie's daughter and at other times "very uncouth." She had little concern for appearances or convention, happily hiking up her skirts to rummage in her petticoat for a handkerchief on which she then noisily blew her nose and at mealtimes throwing unwanted bread over her shoulder.
In 1926 Irene married Frederic Joliot, three years her junior. He was athletic, high-spirited, ambitious, and, as her own father, Pierre, had been, the son of a Paris Communard. Joliot had joined Marie Curie's institute the year before, feeling very nervous of "La Patronne"—the owner—as Marie was known, as well as of her daughter. On his joining the laboratory, a colleague quickly told him that Irene was "a cow," but, nevertheless, he soon won her affections. Marie Curie introduced him to visiting dignitaries as "the young chap who has married Irene," while otherwise paying him little attention.
At the age of nearly sixty, Marie could not visualize life without her laboratory. However, cataract problems, which she concealed for a long time, and increasing frailty were hampering her. In 1926 the Hungarian organic chemist Elizabeth Rona, working alongside her, was horrified by Marie's clumsy and ill-advised attempts to open a flask containing a solution of radium salt. The contents were highly volatile. As she approached a naked flame with the flask, "a violent explosion scattered glass all over." It was a miracle neither woman was badly injured. Marie did not associate her physical decline with radiation, and her approach was characteristic of the casual attitude at the Radium Institute toward handling radioactive material. A student once watched Irene "shaking the
radioactivity out of her hair and clothing." Even fifty years after her death, Marie Curie's home cookbooks would remain radioactively contaminated by contact with her.
Nor was the general public yet alert to the risks. Radioactivity was still regarded as the great panacea, and there was a ready market for associated products. Greedy manufacturers offered the public "Curie Hair Tonic," which supposedly prevented hair loss and restored its original color, and a cream guaranteed to confer eternal youth. Gullible purchasers were assured that Marie Curie "promises miracles." Other radioactive products included bath salts, suppositories, and chocolates.
Advertisement for Tho-Radia hair tonic
But danger signs were emerging around the world. In France several radiologists and researchers died of leukemia and severe anemia. A newspaper published their photographs, together with gruesome accounts of amputations, lost eyesight, and dreadful suffering. It posed the question "Can one be protected against the murderous rays?" In Japan the scientist Nobus Yamada, who had worked in the Curie laboratory on preparing polonium sources, sickened and died within two years of returning to Japan. In America in 1925 a young woman working as a painter of luminous watch dials in New Jersey sued her employer for putting her at risk. Her work required her to moisten her brush—dipped in a luminous paint containing radium—with her lips. Nine coworkers had already died. Others were suffering from "radium necrosis," severe anemia and damage to their jaws. An investigation concluded that radiation was to blame. By 1928 fifteen watch painters had died. An American journalist asked Marie whether she had any advice that might help the dial painters. She was sympathetic, but her only suggestion was that they should eat calves' liver as a source of iron and take plenty of exercise in the fresh air—her universal remedy for radiation-related sickness. Irene's view was that anybody who worried about radiation hazards was not committed to science.
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Eclipse proving Einstein's theory of relativity
In bleak, postwar Germany "the stronghold of physics" was Berlin. Nobel laureates Max Planck and Max von Laue were teaching at the university. So was Albert Einstein, who, in the spring of 1914, had accepted a professorship there and become a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Separated from Mileva, who had returned to Switzerland with their two sons, and living alone, he had been extending his ideas on relativity. He was concerned, in particular, that his "special theory," published in 190c, did not give due weight to gravitational forces. In November 191c he had published his new "general theory"—read by the interned James Chadwick—postulating that light was bent by gravity at twice the value predicted by Newton. If correct, this meant that space was not flat but curved.
J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron, hailed Einstein's theory as one of the greatest achievements in the history of human thought and the greatest discovery in connection with gravity since Newton. Many, though, remained skeptical until on 29 May 1919 English astronomer Arthur Eddington took advantage of a solar eclipse in West Africa to photograph beams of starlight. Eddington's image showed the deflection of starlight by gravity to be exactly as Einstein had predicted. The New York Times declared that stars were "not where they seemed or were calculated to be" but added reassuringly that "nobody need worry." The report in the London Times was headlined "New Theory of the Universe—Newtonian Ideas Overthrown." However, it was for his work on the photoelectric effect and light quanta—not relativity—that Einstein received the Nobel Physics Prize in 19 21.
By then Mileva had divorced him for adultery committed with his cousin, Elsa Einstein, whom he had subsequently married. Einstein was now so famous that a little girl wrote to him asking whether he really existed. However, his celebrity had made him the focus of a virulent attack from parts of the German media and academia angry that this much-lauded international figure was a Jew. They also resented his determined and outspoken pacifism during the war. Einstein received death threats and was warned that "it would be dangerous for him to appear anywhere in public in Germany." He and Elsa departed on a trip to Japan and the Far East until the mood calmed.
Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner
Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner were working together at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in the Dahlem suburb of Berlin. The institute—sponsored jointly by government and industry and one of a network of such bodies set up in Germany across the scientific disciplines, including one for physics under Einstein's directorship—had opened back in 1912 in a blaze of celebration led by the kaiser in white-plumed hat. That year Meitner had for the first time begun to receive a salary.
Like Rutherford, she and Hahn had continued their research sporadically, despite their war work. Meitner had volunteered as an x-ray nurse with the Austro-Hungarian army but had returned to the institute in 1916 to continue a task started two years earlier: the tracking down of a new element. She consulted Hahn, engaged in gas warfare research, by letter. He replied when he could and occasionallv visited her in Berlin. The work was often overshadowed by wartime tragedies, such as the news that one of Max Planck's two sons had been killed in France in 1916. However, in March 191 8 she and Hahn announced that they had found the new element—proactinium. Meitner had done most of the work, but the paper was in their joint names. Later that year she worked briefly with Einstein, and their admiration was mutual. Shortly afterward she was given the title of professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. It was some compensation for the difficult and uncertain times in which she was living. A brief visit to friends in Sweden provided an opportunity to eat foods that were just a memory in Germany: "eggs, butter, bacon, puddings, in short everything good."
Germany's defeat and the kaiser's abdication in November 191 8 had produced revolution, mutiny, street fighting, and strikes throughout the country. Discharged soldiers and sailors joined rival "red" and "white" militias supporting the socialist or conservative factions. Civil order disintegrated and living conditions deteriorated as workers quit their posts for the barricades. In Berlin Hahn was among those volunteering to keep the local power station going, raking the hot cinders to keep the coal burning well. The establishment of the Weimar Republic—named after its seat of government, Weimar, in eastern Germany—brought some stability, but life remained very tough. In 1922 terrifying inflation took hold, reducing the mark's worth to almost nothing. The professors brought rucksacks and suitcases to collect salaries that were now paid daily in bundles of increasingly worthless paper. Hahn's wife, Edith, whom he had married in 1913, met him every day to get his salary and then cycled frantically off to the grocer's, hoping to be in time "to do her shopping at the previous day's prices."
In November 1923—the height of the economic mayhem—food riots broke out, and Adolf Hitler failed in his attempted putsch in Munich. Against this background, work was a welcome refuge for the scientists of Berlin. Hahn wrote that "while we were busy in the laboratory we simply forgot all our worries about food and food-coupons." Paradoxically, despite the political and economic turmoil that launched them, they would remember the 1920s as a period of enthusiasm, openness, generosity, collaboration, and achievement in German science. They had stumbled on "the secrets of nature" and "whole new processes of thought, beyond all the previous notions in physics, would be needed to resolve the contradictions."
The University of Gottingen, founded in 1737, played a leading role in reconciling these contradictions. Gottingen was an ancient city on the slopes of the Hain Mountain in lower Saxony, some sixty miles southeast of Hanover. Its professors, living in creeper-clad villas, seemed demigods. One of the most highly esteemed was the theoretical physicist Max Born, who had found solace from his war work with Einstein. Together they played violin sonatas and discussed relativity. Born had been attached to an army research unit whose task was "sound ranging"—calculating the position of enemy guns by measuring the arrival times of their reports at various listening posts. His experiences convinced him that "henceforth not heroism but technology would become decisive
in war."
The intellectual atmosphere in Gottingen was highly charged and at times surreal. Young scientists argued and debated in cafes, improvising mathematical formulae on tablecloths. Reputedly they roamed the streets at night, unable to sleep and impatient for the doors of their laboratories to open. In 1922 Gottingen hosted a Bohr Festival. Niels Bohr was by then a major international figure. He had persuaded the University of Copenhagen to open a theoretical physics institute and, reluctantly declining Rutherford's invitation to come to England and "make physics boom," had become its director. Later that year, he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his quantized model of the atom. The chance to hear Bohr attracted a fit, blond, boyish twenty-year-old student, Werner Heisenberg, from Munich.
Heisenberg's adolescence had been traumatic. As he later recalled, the war had burst open "the cocoon in which home and school protect the young in more peaceful periods." In 1919 he had witnessed street fighting between the communists of the Munich Soviet Republic and government troops. With his family close to starvation, he had dodged through the lines to fetch bread, butter, and bacon. While serving in an anticommunist militia, he had seen a friend shoot himself in the stomach by accident and die in agony before his eyes. Disintegration, chaos, and civil war had awakened a desire to seek new certainties in a world untainted by politics—namely, the world of science. However, they had also left him with an enduring fear of communism and a patriotic recognition of the need for stronger government structures if Germany were to prosper once more.
Before the Fallout Page 8
