The Pope of Physics

by Gino Segrè

  In early October, after Fermi felt assured the process would work and had convinced his colleagues this was so, he left for Los Alamos. He was now ready to work on helping the laboratory develop the detonation mechanism.

  Fermi’s arrival in Los Alamos was heralded by a half dozen scientific luminaries meeting for lunch one day. Edward Teller had announced, “It is quite certain now that Enrico will arrive next week.” Stan Ulam, an outstanding mathematician who had left Poland, had heard Fermi referred to as the Pope and immediately intoned in perfect Latin the classic announcement of the election of a new Pope made by the Vatican’s senior cardinal from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Once the group of scientists understood the reference, they broke into applause.

  When Fermi arrived on the Hill, Oppenheimer appointed him the laboratory’s associate director and also created Division F, where the F stood for Fermi, the universal consultant. He was probably the only person with expertise in every aspect of the physics problems being faced in the laboratory. Preparation of samples, theory, electronics, computing, optics, chemistry, and hydrodynamics were all in his repertoire. And of course Fermi was also known to be a marvelously clear and patient expositor.

  Though acting as an informal adviser to every division, Fermi was not a significant contributor to developing the implosion mechanism. But he helped in many other ways. One was by assisting Oppenheimer in resolving administrative difficulties that arose from the lab’s reorganization. At Oppenheimer’s request, Fermi had met with a leading scientist to try to convince him to move into a new administrative role. As a lure, Fermi agreed to meet him every Friday after lunch to discuss physics. At that point, the reluctant scientist confessed, “I was ready to sell my soul.” Bob Wilson subsequently became an excellent administrator.

  Meanwhile, Edward Teller was a frustrating obstacle for the Theory Division’s head, Hans Bethe, by having, as Bethe said with displeasure, “declined to take charge of the group which would perform the detailed calculations on the implosion.” Calculations needed to be done, with or without Teller, for the mission to have a chance of success. Oppenheimer handled the volatile situation with the touchy Teller by appointing the proficient and cooperative Peierls to replace him. At the same time, Oppenheimer urged Teller to stay on at the laboratory rather than resigning, as he was threatening to do. With Fermi in agreement, Teller was appointed as head of a new group in Division F. One by one, every thorny situation was being handled.

  As predicted by Fermi, the Hanford reactor began producing plutonium in November 1944. By early 1945, confidence was growing that the implosion mechanism would work. It had taken an organizational overhaul of the laboratory and the dedicated labor of many extraordinarily talented individuals; enormous impediments had been overcome. But still, the laboratory felt a definitive test of the plutonium bomb was key. Although draining resources and consuming a large fraction of the lab’s precious plutonium, it would quell nagging doubts. A test was scheduled for mid-July, only weeks before the bomb would be used against the enemy, assuming all went well.

  The specter of Hitler reigning over the destruction of the world was fading. If there were to be a Götterdämmerung, at least it would not be in the hands of a maniac. It would be in the hands of a novice president from America’s Midwest, a man known for his modesty and honesty. Harry Truman had only experienced the vastness of the Southwest from the inside of a train car and regarded it as “mighty pretty country.” On July 16, less than three months after he took office, a blinding flash lit the New Mexico desert at 5:29 in the early morning. The “Twilight of the Gods,” as Wagner’s opera is translated, had been introduced by Los Alamos’s best and brightest.

  31

  THE HILL

  When Fermi came to settle in Los Alamos in October 1944, he traveled under his usual guise as Mr. Farmer and was accompanied by his trusted bodyguard, John Baudino. Only needed when Fermi went outside the confines of the secret city, Baudino lived with his wife and baby daughter in Los Alamos while he worked at the security office there.

  There was little time for Fermi to enjoy being reunited with Laura and the children. He was instantly immersed in lab work, true to his reputation among colleagues as a man “totally absorbed, taking little notice of his family.” This observation was shared by Laura, who wrote with no obvious resentment, “It was typical of Enrico to be engrossed in his work and to pay no attention to what was going on around him.”

  Fermi was aware, and relieved, that Laura had adapted well to life on what was affectionately called the Hill. She had connected, or rather reconnected, with families whose friendships dated back from days in Rome such as the Segrès, Bethes, Peierlses, Rossis, and Tellers—all Jewish refugees.

  The Fermi children had settled into school, Nella somewhat miffed because two different high school grades had been combined into the same classroom. Inevitably, as is almost always the case with children, Nella found her way to mischief. The high wire fence surrounding the town was a magnet for daring; childhood pranks included sneaking out and venturing briefly into surrounding canyons. It was Los Alamos kids, not spies or saboteurs, who knew where the holes in the enclosure were. In playing games with other peers, Giulio decided it was time to adopt a more American name; from now on, he declared he should be called Judd.

  Although Laura had warned him, Fermi began to appreciate over time that life in Los Alamos was on the primitive side. Accommodations were minimal, electricity was sometimes iffy, the houses had no telephones, there were frequent water shortages, and the mud in the streets was often so thick that cars got stuck. A newcomer shared her first impressions: “The rickety houses looked like the tenements of a metropolitan slum area; washing hung everywhere and the garbage cans were overflowing.” But there were compensations. Laura wrote to a friend, “Through the three contiguous windows of our living room I could see the round green tops of the Jemez hills slanting against the sky, as in a three-panel picture by an old master.”

  The wife of one of the scientists wrote an amusing essay entitled “Not Quite Eden”; as she noted, “We managed to adjust ourselves to the oddest conditions under which a community has ever been maintained and within these limits to lead reasonably normal, happy lives.” Sirens marked the beginning and end of the workday and signaled a lunchtime break from noon to one. Guards at the main gate, controlling access to the community, scrupulously checked resident passes. Except for official business, traveling much farther away than Santa Fe was not permitted. Nor were outsiders allowed to enter, other than those employees who commuted there or a group, such as cleaning personnel from nearby pueblos. There was no mailman or milkman, no unexpected knocks at the door from traveling salesmen.

  The Hill was a unique combination of democracy and hierarchy. All of its citizens shared a common mission, had experienced the upheaval of moving, and weathered the town’s hardships. Nonetheless it was a stratified society: “Lines were drawn principally not on wealth, family or even age, but on the position one’s husband held in the Laboratory.” There was a distinct pecking order throughout the war years that continued to some extent after the war. Physicists—especially theoretical ones—were on top, followed by chemists, technicians, and computing specialists. And the split between military and scientific personnel was pervasive, with a few exceptions. The divisions were ethnic as well. As a teenager, Nella Fermi took note that maintenance personnel were mainly Spanish Americans and that they lived in largely segregated neighborhoods in the Atomic City.

  A notable exception cutting through these barriers was regular community square dances. They were a fun pastime for all backgrounds and ages. Fermi particularly came to enjoy the dances, as they suited his dual predilections for informality and for being American. It was also an occasion the elder Fermis attended with Nella, who typically brought her Spanish American best friend. Fermi’s introduction to square dancing was somewhat inauspicious, though characteristic of him. He sat on the sidelines until he was sure he co
mpletely understood the calls, the patterns, and the sequences. He then asked one of the experts to dance with him. She recounted that he had successfully mastered the steps but “danced with his brain instead of his feet.” The feet would come later.

  The seclusion of the town led to an exuberant social life on the Hill. There was little to do for entertainment. In the town’s theater, movies could be viewed from hard seats for fifteen cents; the theater doubled as a gymnasium, dance hall, or overall performance center. Parties of every size and shape became the amusement of choice. As one wife noted, “Saturday nights the mesa rocked with a number of dances and parties.” Since residents could not talk about work, they could let off steam from the strain of the heavily cloaked project. The parties were often raucous, with liquor flowing liberally and spirits high.

  Los Alamos was a community composed largely of young couples. The average age of the scientific employees was twenty-nine, and almost none were over forty. Many of them started families. During the first year of its existence, reportedly eighty babies were born on the Hill. Their birth certificates read that they were born at Post Office Box 1663, Santa Fe. It is not altogether surprising that years later Nella Fermi wrote her dissertation on patterns of fertility. The imprint of Los Alamos asserted itself in unexpected ways.

  With the population of Los Alamos doubling every ninety days, it was almost impossible to provide adequate housing and services for residents whose numbers had reached 5,700 by the end of the war. The buzz was that Groves had even ordered Oppenheimer to see to it that fewer babies were born in order not to overwhelm the limited medical resources available. The story was made more piquant because not only had Oppenheimer refused to carry out the directive, but he and his wife, Kitty, had a baby girl, born on December 7, 1944.

  Rumors about what was happening on the mesa flew. Santa Fe, a mix of Anglo, Native American, and Hispanic ethnicities, added a new breed to its multiculturalism: “Hillers.” Although Hillers tried to blend in, they invariably stood out on their excursions to the delightful city of light, whether because of their European accents, city dress, or general quirkiness. Santa Fe gossip about Los Alamos included speculation that it was a home for pregnant WACs (Women’s Army Corps) or, more facetiously, a building site for a submarine. As a ploy, Oppenheimer encouraged the Hillers to talk loudly about preparing an electric rocket. Noise from explosions made the latter somewhat more plausible.

  The countryside surrounding the Hill was magnificent. There was fabulous hiking, abundant fishing in trout-filled streams, horseback riding opportunities, and mushroom hunting in the pine forests. Winter ice skating on a frozen pond was at Fermi’s doorstep. A roughly shorn ski slope, rigged with a simple rope tow, had been forged by physicists with the help of GIs.

  Fermi was happy at Los Alamos because he felt in his element, both because of the physical surroundings and the intellectual stimulation. It felt youthful and pioneering, mirroring the days of Dolomite excursions and the bonds formed with the Via Panisperna Boys. Emilio Segrè, one of the Boys and an avid fisherman, tried to convince his fellow emigrant of the pleasures of this sport. It would be an excellent way for the two of them to relax over the weekend after intense days of working at the lab. Fermi, after a few attempts, displayed neither any interest in fishing nor any luck with it. Segrè, waxing eloquent about the intellectual challenges of fishing, proclaimed, “You see, Enrico, it’s not so simple. The fish are not stupid, they know how to hide. One has to learn their tricks.” Fermi grinned. “I see, matching wits!” Clearly, Fermi’s wits did not match the fish’s; he never managed to catch one.

  Fermi’s preferences were hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. While wives and children sometimes joined weekend outings, the company was most often all male. Otto Frisch, part of the British team working at Los Alamos, described what it was like being with Fermi on weekends when “he was usually out walking with a group of young people who felt entirely at ease with him, though he was obviously the master. I have never met anyone who in such a relaxed and unpretentious way could be so dominant.”

  During the rest of the week Fermi played the role of internal consultant to the lab and “never appeared to be in a hurry, yet he got a great deal done because he was so organized.” His routine would be to be available mornings in his office for questions and work afternoons in the laboratory, wearing his lab coat to signal his own research priorities.

  Fermi enjoyed sparring with young physicists, with a smile on his face and his eyes darting quickly about. This is illustrated by a story the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman told of an early meeting with him. Feynman’s braininess was promptly recognized at Los Alamos, and at age twenty-six he became a group leader, but in 1943 he was still a new laboratory recruit who had just finished his Ph.D. One day, while he was having difficulties understanding some results he had obtained, Fermi stopped by.

  Feynman described what followed: “I told Fermi I was doing this problem, and I started to describe the results. He said ‘Wait, before you tell me the result, let me think. It’s going to come out like this (he was right), and it’s going to come out like this because of so and so. And there’s a perfectly obvious explanation for this’—He was doing what I was supposed to be good at, ten times better. That was quite a lesson for me.”

  Fermi had obviously not resisted the chance to show off a little, but someone of Feynman’s intelligence was not threatened. A symbiotic friendship between the two men, with similar views about informality and problem solving, flourished in Los Alamos and would continue afterward.

  After ten years of intense work on neutron physics, Fermi was thrilled to be exposed to wide-ranging ideas. He was freer to explore fields related to other aspects of bomb research. One that particularly caught his fancy was the possibility of using new tools to perform the complicated calculations necessary to achieve implosion.

  Richard Feynman and John von Neumann, known respectively as Dick and Johnny, shared a fascination with machine computations, an embryonic forerunner to what became the computer revolution. They quickly folded Fermi into their web of curiosity. Johnny knew of exciting research being conducted at Bell Laboratories, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. An expert in explosives and hydrodynamics, the rotund and immaculately dressed Hungarian moved easily and with alacrity from field to field. This latter trait was shared by Dick and Enrico, and the three geniuses pursued the complexities of mechanical mathematics with mutual humor and virtuosity.

  While Fermi naturally gravitated toward his young colleagues, he also was pleased to see Niels Bohr make prolonged visits to Los Alamos. Bohr had escaped Nazi-occupied Denmark after being warned that the Third Reich considered his mother, and accordingly him, to be Jewish. A towering figure in international physics, the almost-sixty-year-old had been left a man without a country, traveling extensively in America and England. Under the alias of Mr. Nicholas Baker on his Los Alamos visits, Bohr relished the natural beauty and quietude of the New Mexico landscape, enjoyed hikes and skiing and especially the opportunity to speak physics on a one-to-one basis with the Los Alamos scientists.

  Bohr was treated as a wise elder, particularly by those who had been under his tutelage in Copenhagen. At a time when morale in Los Alamos was low, Bohr bolstered spirits by urging them onward. As the eminent physicist Victor Weisskopf wrote, “Bohr immediately involved us in private discussions of the significance of what we were doing … his idealism, foresight and hope for peace helped us see sense in all these terrible things. He inspired many of us engaged in the work of war to think about the future and to prepare our minds for the task of peace that lay ahead.” Fermi, always the rationalist and wary of inspirational messages, was less taken by Bohr’s vision, commenting once to Ulam that when “Bohr talked he sometimes gave the impression of a Catholic priest celebrating mass.”

  The retrospective lens of history highlights extraordinary aspects of the Hill. Many are admirable, several of them controversial. Whether the sci
entists should have focused more on the moral implications of their work will be debated in perpetuity. But there is one lens that is absolutely clear. Los Alamos was a male-dominated society, reflecting the norms of the times and certainly characteristic of the physics world. Physics came first even on weekends. Domestic life was a distant second. The lives of the women resembled those of war wives; arguably, their husbands were more physically present, but not emotionally so, a situation exacerbated by the oppressive air of secrecy.

  In historical accounts of the project, women tend to be barely acknowledged. As only one example, the computational functions so necessary to the project’s success were staffed overwhelmingly by women. Their job description was listed as “computers.” Yet one rarely hears about them. A division leader was reported to have said that for the exacting and exhausting calculations, “we hire girls because they work better and they’re cheaper.”

  The title of a compilation of essays written by the women of wartime Los Alamos speaks for itself: Standing By and Making Do. And in another book, a chapter called “The Cult of Masculinity” documents that the expectation of Los Alamos women was to be primarily supportive of their husbands’ work.

  Still another book casts a negative shadow on Los Alamos wives, describing them as becoming “depressed, quarrelsome and gossipy” while at the same time acknowledging their loneliness and sense of omission from the secret work of their husbands. Purportedly Oppenheimer was concerned enough to consult a psychiatrist, who advised him to “keep the women busy and to pay them so that they would have tangible proof of their usefulness.”

  Whether jobs were viewed as therapeutic release or a way for women to contribute to the overall war effort, the wives of Los Alamos scientists were encouraged to become teachers, librarians, medical technicians, clerks and—as already noted—computers. Even Laura, the privileged child of well-to-do Italians, took a position. Never employed before, she worked part-time in the Los Alamos hospital for the doctor in charge of health for the Technical Area, the ultra-guarded laboratory area that required a special white badge for entrance.