The President gave the impression of a "jovial, laughing youth," an American trait, she supposed. They talked about the bomb, both expressing the hope that it would never be used again. Then Truman gave a speech that began with a few jokes - another Americanism, she told Eva - and ended with a very serious appeal to Americans to give food to starving Europe...
...Everywhere she left an indelible impression: a small figure, a gentle voice, and an unmistakable air of authority when the subject was physics.
Early on Lise held a press conference, hoping to be spared private interviews with their "idiotic questions." It didn't help. The press pursued her every step; her face was everywhere, from the New York Times to the center of a crossword puzzle in the San Francisco News to article to article in newspapers and magazines. She was even the subject of a sonnet - quite a good one - published in American Scholar. "I see you hate publicity as before," James Franck wrote during her stay. "It is a sign of respect, a childishness of this young nation..."
-Lise Meitner, A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime, pg 331, University of California Press, 1996.
"Her face was everywhere..."
I don't know about you, but I don't even see the faces that are everywhere any more. If you're like me, you stand on line at the supermarket and there is a kind of generic face that is everywhere, Britney/Jessica/Lindsay/Ashlee/Angelina's face, so generic in the end that it is hard to tell who is who. We are beseeched to care about luxuriant, lurid, and lascivious lives, recorded by the tiresome ticking of a sad little rhythm of rehabs and recidivism, and to be so encouraged to remove ourselves from the realities represented by far more prosaic cans of tomato soup and bags of rice laying on the conveyer belt.
I can't recall that I have ever seen someone buy one of these celeb magazines. Of course, though, they do sell. My perception that no one buys these magazines therefore probably arises not from what is actually happening, but from the kind of visual numbing that causes me to not see much of what is actually happening. Maybe everyone buys one of those magazines, and my impression that no one buys them is nothing more than a failure to notice anything at all about my fellow human beings, what they are, what they do, what they find important.
I feel like I am no longer seeing things.
With this in mind, I set out to find a certain kind of video. Here it is:
Something in the rain.
Until tracking down this bit of video, mostly I had forgotten my father's friend - a man clearly much better educated than my father ever was - who used to invite my father and me to come to his church on Friday nights to watch films. I must have been about 13 at the time. What I recall of being 13 is how I was expected to make my parent's church the center of my life: There were confirmation classes, and services, and Sunday school, and church socials, and long and serious and hopeful discussions among members of my family as to whether or not I might become some day a member of the clergy. And then there was my father's friend and his church, Friday night films.
I took no notes as a child. I wrote nothing down. My memory, frankly, is somewhat unreliable, I think. My parents are dead, and I am estranged, more or less, from my only sibling. Thus any impression I may have of my home while growing up is subjective and without reference.
I recall that always all around me, people were praying but if you asked me whether I was ten years old or fifteen years old when I stopped praying myself, I'd have to confess plainly that I have no idea. I could have been ten. I could have been fifteen. I just don't know. All I know is that at some point I started to hate going to church, and finally there came a point where praying and reading tales about Jesus and various Josephs and Johns became tedious. This by the way, was no fault of either my parents or of the particular church my family attended. My parents were gentle people and there was nothing about the people in that church that was particularly odious or unkind or imposing in any way. Mostly everyone was kind and everyone was supportive and everybody wished the best for everyone else. I can't recall ever being threatened with hell or fire or brimstone if I didn't behave a certain way. Religion, if I recall correctly, was more about celebration than about suffering. Nevertheless, something seems to have happened to me. One day I believed, and another day I didn't. Somehow I took the path from there to here, but the details are obscure.
Whatever the case might be, a point came at which I found attendance at church functions to be, at best, dull and boring.
It seems strange therefore that, upon looking at the video I have referenced above, a video of drops dripping off branches in a rain, that I am inclined to remember the visits to my father's friend's church, if not my own church as magnificent. It wasn't because my father's friend's church had a particularly exciting brand of God. Their God, I think, was pretty generic, just like the face of Misha Barton, whoever the hell she is. My father's friend was a Lutheran or something like that, I think. They had a different spin on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus than my father's church, but if you asked me, I wouldn't be able to put a finger on what, precisely, those differences were.
My father and his friend came to know one another, if I recall correctly, because they were Scoutmasters in my Boy Scout Troop. Both men, of course, took their religion seriously, even if they were of differing denominations, but other than that, they couldn't have been more different. My father wore workman's shoes, and his friend wore polished wingtips. My father was gregarious, and warm and effusive, always gushing, constantly spinning yarns and tales. His friend was reserved, measured, more than a little cold and formal. My father poured out words in a heavily accented common street vernacular that was grammatically twisted, and punctuated with laughter. My father's friend, mostly a reticent man, when he spoke, spoke the kind of English that most often derives from serious education. He seldom smiled, and if he did, the smile was forced and evanescent. Frankly, my father's friend was not my kind of guy. He was way too serious.
What I liked about the visits to my father's friend's church was the films. What were the films about? They were about the glory of God. And how did the films depict the glory of God? In slow motion, that's how. The glory of God in those films, was all about seeing things. The films included a little description of their own engineering, and there was a part all about the camera that they used quite often to film the glory of God. The film in the camera went so fast that often friction with the air would cause the film to catch fire. At the time, this was all very high tech and quite impressive. Of course, when you played the films back at ordinary speeds, what you saw was that the glory of God is filled with instants of magnificence that go so fast that you cannot see them. Until then, until I was invited to my father's friend's church, I had never seen anything quite so fascinating, and man, did I love those films!
Of course, right now, one can call up these types of images in a few minutes of poking around the internet. That's what I've done. It's amazing and a little sad I think, that I'm so visually and intellectually numb these days that I seldom pause to do things like this, to ponder what exactly happens when a drop falls.
I invite you to call up the 24 second video again and look at it, if you are interested. Some remarkable things are going on. Let me describe them to you.
First off, there are four drops pictured in this film, each of them dribbling off a woody branch. The film is not a loop, and, although the first time watches the clip they may seem the same, the drops are different. It is difficult to see this at first, but one way to determine it is to look at the number of vibrations each drop goes through before it falls. The first drop, possibly caught somewhere in the middle of it's formation, vibrates once and falls, the second drop vibrates five times and falls, the third, six times, and the last four times.
The vibrations themselves are interesting, because they are rhythmic, or in physicist language, periodic. They are crude examples of what we call spherical harmonics. The drops can be described as "harmonic oscillators," the conception of which is one of the most important topics in physics and chemistry. How the drops quiver is a function of many things, the rate at which the water flows into them, the interaction with the surrounding air, the chemistry of the drop and most importantly, surface tension. Surface tension, the effect that causes water to bead up when, for instance, on glass, is a physical phenomenon that on the level of atomic scale results from the fact that a molecule on the surface of a substance experiences much different forces than all of the molecules in the interior. The vibrations of the drops is fairly regular and the drop is, in effect, is a three dimensional wave.
Put another way, the drops are like music.
If you look closely at what is happening as these drops fall, there is another distinctive feature. As they begin to form, the drops are each approximately spherical, but as they gain weight from the water flowing into them, they begin to become increasingly elongated, less reminiscent of a basketball, and more like an American football. Mathematically structures with football shapes are called "prolate spheroids." They are the type of shapes that are obtained by rotating an ellipse around either its long or short axes. (A sphere is, of course, the shape one obtains by rotating a circle around its diameter.) With each vibration the stretching becomes more profound until finally the drop becomes detached from the water remaining on the branch.
Note that the drop that falls is slightly larger than the drop that remains attached to the branch. Thus the distribution of mass between the falling drop and the drop which still adheres is asymmetric. Note also that each of the falling drops reverts once it is detached to a shape that is more or less purely spherical, losing the "prolate" quality.
And now for the really, really, really, really cool thing: In each case note that there are two falling drops, not one. There is the larger drop that draws the eye, but in each case the larger drop is followed by a much smaller drop that is almost perfectly spherical. What is really remarkable too, is that in the four cases shown, each of the small drops is about the same size. Remarkably moreover, the smaller drops seem to do a "Wile E. Coyote" hanging in space for a moment before they begin to fall. If you look really carefully, I think you can actually see that the tiny drop initially isn't falling at all. For a brief moment it actually rises and then runs out of steam and falls.
This is a diary about nuclear energy, like most of my diaries (except when I try to talk about rivers - a conversation that turns "nuclear" whether I intend it or not), and it now behooves me to point out, in case you haven't already figured it out, that what you are looking at in this tiny film clip is nuclear fission. Well, of course, I'm stretching things a little. That drop is not a nucleus of uranium or plutonium, but, as it happens, it is an excellent model of an atom of a fissioning nucleus.
The fact that an atomic nucleus behaves, more or less, like a drop was the idea of the remarkable scientist George Gamow and Neils Bohr working in collaboration.
Gamow is an interesting fellow who among other things, once tried to escape the Soviet Union by kayaking with his wife across the Black Sea. (Both were nearly killed by the effort.) Gamow did escape (although not by kayak), came to the United States, worked on the Manhattan project, wrote popular books and children's books, and probably is one of the few nuclear scientists to have his "nuclear" designation be a pun. After a long career in which he fundamentally described the atom, constructing the first "liquid drop" model of the atomic nucleus, Gamow made some fundamental discoveries about the nature of DNA.
Bohr, meanwhile, is beyond doubt one of the most important people to have lived in the 20th century or any century. In some sense, Albert Einstein is more famous than Bohr, since in common parlance calling someone "a real Einstein" is to say that the person is a so called "genius," while the phrase "a real Bohr" would be interpreted in a less flattering way. Nonetheless, Bohr was Einstein's peer - probably Einstein's only peer in the scientifically transcendent 20th century - and Einstein's personal friend, and the arguments and disagreements between these two men - over physics - represent some of the most critical conversations ever held by two human beings. In fact, the general consensus these days is that in the majority of conversations, Bohr was right and Einstein was mistaken.
The video of the falling drop shows some of the fundamental correspondence between drops and nuclear fission. The video drops exist in an energy field, specifically the gravitational field with which we are all familiar, so much so that we don't actually notice it, much like I don't notice Lindsay Lohan. The gravitational field may be viewed as analogous to the electric (or coloumbic) force field in which an atomic nucleus exists, and which tends to make the nucleus fly apart. The smaller drop that does the "Wile E. Coyote" act, can be compared to either of two things: Alpha decay or the release of a neutron during a fission event. The drop seems to rise momentarily because it has acquired energy that derives from the internal energy (the surface tension) that characterizes the drop. This is similar to how particles behave during nuclear fission. An alpha particle - alpha decay is the effect that Gamow and Bohr were attempting to explain when they proposed the "liquid drop" model - carries with it, a considerable amount of energy. Since an alpha particle is a helium nucleus, alpha decay - which is a regular feature in atoms distributed all throughout the earth and which, for instance, powers all of the world's volcanoes - is nuclear fission occurring in a controlled and regular way.
But let me return to the comparison between Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein. A lot of their scientific disagreements centered around the theoretical work of Bohr's student, Werner Heisenberg.
But there was something more troubling than Heisenberg's (then) controversial science. Heisenberg, I argue, is in some sense "the father of the atomic bomb" not because Heisenberg built an atomic bomb - it is a matter of significant controversy as to whether he actually tried to build one - but because most physicists thought he could build an atomic bomb. All of the nuclear physicists escaping from Europe in the 1930's knew Heisenberg, his brilliance and his attitudes, and combined these things terrified the world physics community.
It is a matter of some significance to point out that from the beginning decisions about what to do with nuclear science have been more informed about what could happen rather than what is happening. In this context, I cannot avoid pointing out that even today, in 2007, when I argue for a massive building of nuclear power plants to minimize the effects of global climate change, I am often confronted with bizarre little stories about how some event somewhere involving a failed valve or a computer glitch in a nuclear power plant "could" have been a disaster. This takes place even as people around the world drop dead in vast numbers in the on going and immediately obvious disaster associated with the dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere.
The reason that people worried incessantly about what Werner Heisenberg "could" do, of course, was that in spite of many entreaties from scientists all over the world to do otherwise, he and another important nuclear scientist, Otto Hahn, chose to remain in Nazi Germany after nearly everyone else important in physics had either left on their own volition or had been forced to leave.
In any case, Heisenberg was - depending on whose version you believe - either incompetent to build a nuclear weapon or unwilling to build a nuclear weapon. Recent evidence - including papers released by the Bohr family - suggests the former, although there have been many famous accounts, including Michael Frayn's fabulous play Copenhagen, (a film version exists) that have attempted to flesh out a case for the latter.
Whatever the nature of Heisenberg's activities during the Second World War, the fact remains that, largely during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, nuclear weapons were constructed for the first time and the motivation for constructing them was purely fear.
The fear was generated by an experiment that was conducted on a table top using amounts of material that were, in fact, invisible. The experiment was conducted by the same Otto Hahn who was one of the few nuclear scientists to remain in Nazi Germany after the 1930's and through what remained of the Nazi era in the 1940's.
What happened? Otto Hahn was trying to make a new previously unknown element in the periodic table, the element we now know as neptunium. Hahn was a chemist and his professional partner for most of his career was a woman, Lise Meitner, who for a long time wasn't even allowed to set foot in his lab, although she was allowed to work in the basement of the building in which his lab was located in an abandoned woodshop.
Why wasn't she allowed to set foot in his lab? Because she was a woman. Why were women not allowed to set foot in laboratories? Well, for one thing, because one of the world's greatest organic chemists of the time, Emil Fischer, was afraid that if women were allowed in laboratories they would set their hair on fire even as he hung his own long beard over Bunsen burners. (cf. Sime, referenced above, pg 29.) So when Hahn wanted to confer with his partner, Meitner, he had to hike down to the basement. Together they made a series of important discoveries about nuclear chemistry and nuclear physics, many of which have proved to be basic to the ultimate understanding of matter. (Later on Meitner, having become one of the world's most respected scientists - because many people reading her papers assumed she was a man - was finally allowed to come upstairs and set foot in Hahn's lab.) If you want my opinion - and maybe you don't - in many ways Hahn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize, was Meitner's junior partner. He was an excellent experimentalist, but he wasn't particularly skilled at interpreting his scientific results. In particular, he wasn't particularly skilled in mathematics or mathematical physics at the beginning of his career, and so he worked with Meitner, who did exhibit this skill set.
Whatever his limitations in physics, Hahn was an extremely skilled chemist. In trying Hahn was trying to make invisible (but detectable) amounts of neptunium, he anticipated, based on its (then supposed) place in the periodic table, that the new element might be expected to behave like the element rhenium. However when he did his experiments, the compounds he found behaved more like radium (an element with which he was very familiar and on which he worked for decades). He was baffled and so he wrote to Lise Meitner, who, as it happened, was once again not allowed to set foot in his lab. No she didn't go back to the basement wood shop. Dr. Meitner was not allowed to set foot in Hahn's country.
Like my father's friend, Lise Meitner belonged to a protestant church. She was baptized in her twenties, around the time of setting out on her scientific career. It was a problem for her though that she hadn't been born Protestant, nor was she descended from a long line of Austrian Protestants. You see Meitner's parents were non-practicing Jews and she was descended from Jews. In religious terms, she probably knew as much about being Jewish as I do about being a Druid, even if I am descended from a Scotsman. This made no difference whatsoever to the Nazis. Because Dr. Meitner was an Austrian citizen, she was not subject to the same racial laws in Nazi Germany that led to the expulsion from Germany of people like Albert Einstein. Formally she was not a "German Jew" but rather a "foreign Jew." She was thus allowed to stay at her job, albeit uncomfortably. Her status changed in 1938, when Austria became the first foreign country to be absorbed into the Third Reich. At this point, she immediately lost her job. Hahn did little, if anything, to protest this injustice to his colleague of nearly 30 years. He certainly didn't quit his job in protest. He stayed right where he was until allied teams scouring the conquered German nation arrested him, hauled him off to England where they recorded every single word he said while interned with other Nazi era German nuclear scientists, including Heisenberg.
However, in 1938, arrest by the allies was the last thing on Hahn's mind. What was on his mind was the meaning of his experiment in which he was looking for neptunium and kept finding "radium." So he wrote Meitner, who was living a Spartan life, just this side of homelessness, in Sweden, after having been able to slip out of Germany with dubious papers. Hahn also noted that his results indicated the experiment indicated that the material produced seemed to contain a close chemical analog of radium, barium. He wrote Lise Meitner who was staying with her nephew Otto Frisch, who like his aunt, was an important physicist.
Trudging through the Swedish forest in the snow, Frisch and his aunt, Meitner, reflected on their great respect for Hahn, realized that he was too good to be making a mistake. As Frisch later described it, before they came in out of the cold the two of them had worked out the physical theory of nuclear fission, using Gamow and Bohr's "liquid drop" theory of the nucleus.
The important discovery called forth immediate comment from Neils Bohr himself. Bohr, exercising his well known humanity and decency, had earlier that same year worked tirelessly to arrange a way to spirit Lise Meitner out of Germany and into Sweden, literally hours before her arrest by the Gestapo - she would have certainly perished in a concentration camp without the desperate efforts of the world's non-German scientific community.
Later a fanciful story was invented by the American Press describing how Meitner, a "brave Jewess," armed with the secrets of nuclear fission, secreted herself out of Germany to alert the waiting allies with the technical insight to make nuclear weapons. In fact, Meitner did no such thing. As one of the world's most prominent nuclear scientists, she was, of course, offered a position working in the Manhattan project at a senior level. Although she was desperately impoverished, having escaped from Germany with no more than what she could stuff in one hour's time into two suitcases, she refused to join the Manhattan project because its intention was to build a bomb, a bomb that could be used against her homeland.
In 1944, Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the discovery of nuclear fission," a prize he accepted after being released from Allied confinement after the war. For the rest of his life, he minimized the contribution made by his scientific partner of 30 years, Lise Meitner. German nuclear scientists - including Hahn - attempted to claim after the war that they failed to build an atomic bomb because they were morally opposed to nuclear weapons. An alternate explanation evoked by many scientists and historians is simply that the Germans wanted to build a bomb, but were incompetent to do so, and in any case could not rely on much support from the Nazi government with its well known contempt for "Jewish physics." Hahn was secretly recorded as saying to his fellow German nuclear scientists during their confinement at Farm Hall in England that they were all "second raters" because they had failed to make a bomb.
In 1945, Lise Meitner and her nephew were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics by none other than Neils Bohr, but didn't receive it. She had nonetheless become very famous - more famous than Jennifer Aniston - and was assigned, at least in the public imagination, an important role in the triumphalist interpretation of nuclear weapons that existed in the period between 1945 and 1948 when the Soviets matched the American technology.
Afterwards marginalized in the discovery of fission, she conducted the rest of her life with grace and dignity that had characterized her selfless dedication to science and to humanity. Meitner always believed that she, and not the Americans, had been the first to discover neptunium, the first artificial transuranium element to have been identified. She didn't press the point however. Mostly she was unconcerned with praise and honors. Her bailiwick was science, and again, humanity.
Although the Germans had deprived her of all she knew and everything she loved for cruel and arbitrary reasons, she used her fame to plead for aid to postwar Germany, and she privately gave some of what little she had to buy things like sugar, shoes, and razor blades for her former German colleagues, including Hahn.
Unlike my father and unlike my father's friend, I am not a Christian. I am not qualified to speak on Christianity really, but it would seem to me, from what I have learned of that religion, that Dr. Meitner, in contrast to many others, lived as close to the spirit of that faith as any other. She forgave. She turned the other cheek. She did so out of selfless love.
The source for much of this diary is Ruth Sime's book, referenced earlier here. For those interested in the fascinating human history of nuclear science, I cannot recommend this book more. It is written from a feminist perspective, and it is an outstanding tribute to this outstanding scientist and this outstanding human being. The book represents a needed corrective for the self serving revisionism constructed by the German nuclear scientists during their confinement at Farm Hall. This revisionism has been accepted and advanced in many works about that period including Thomas Power's Heisenberg's War, Jungk's A Thousand Suns and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. As conceded by Frayn himself, evidence from Bohr's private papers only recently made available to historians shows that Heisenberg's ethics - and as Sime argues, Hahn's as well - were hardly esteemable.
Neptunium, available only in invisible amounts in the time of Lise Meitner's most important scientific work, is now available in multi-metric ton quantities. It is often considered an element of so called "dangerous nuclear waste." As it happens, the chemical properties of neptunium make it somewhat problematic as an element of spent nuclear fuel, where theoretically, if nuclear fuel were subject to disposal rather than use, it would tend to dominate long term toxicity. As usual, I will discuss this case in future diaries, arguing that, like other constituents of so called "nuclear waste" that I have discussed, that neptunium is valuable.
I close this long insufferable article with a bit of irony. Since 1938, the year of Meitner's exile, 21 new elements have been discovered and named. Twelve of these elements were named for famous scientists. Of these twelve elements, only three were named for scientists who did not win the Nobel Prize. One is Mendelevium, named for the Russian chemist - discoverer of the periodic table - who died before the Nobel Prize was created. Another element, Nobelium, is named for the Swedish chemist, Nobel, who invented dynamite and who, of course, founded and funded the system of prizes that bear his name. The last element is Meitnerium, element 109, one of the rarest elements known, an element that is evanescent and whose properties will never fully be understood.
In 1945, there was a brief discussion, among the members Swedish committee that had selected Hahn for Nobel honors, of withdrawing the prize, but the idea was rejected, in part because such a reversal was unprecedented. (Interestingly it is said that Meitner, by the way, did not receive the prize because of her presence in Sweden.) Element 105 in the periodic table was named Hahnium, in honor of Otto Hahn. (The same name had been proposed by American scientists for element 108.) After much controversy, the name Hahnium was quietly dropped, and element 105 was renamed for the former Soviet nuclear research institute at Dubna, and element 105 is now and forever known as Dubnium.
Meitner's element, like her humanity, will remain forever.