E=mc2 (34 page)

The best overall account of the U.S. and German projects is Richard Rhodes's
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), a deserved winner of the National Book Award. Eavesdropping is a guilty pleasure, and in
Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, ed.
and annotated by Jeremy Bernstein (Woodbury, N.Y: American Institute of Physics, 1996) we get to eavesdrop on Hahn, Heisenberg, and all the rest of them as the interned German scientists squabble their way through six long months in genteel captivity. Bernstein's background on the science and the personalities is extremely clear.
Alsos: The Failure in German Science,
by Samuel Goudsmit (London: Sigma Books, 1947; reissued Woodbury, N.Y: American Institute of Physics, 1995), although inaccurate in parts, is a poignant firsthand account by the head of the U.S. mission entering Europe before the war was over to collect information—and snatch scientists— from the German side.

Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1971) is Heisenberg's own account of his life and main intellectual branching points. David Cassidy's
Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg
(Basingstoke, England: Freeman, 1992) enriches the story. Out of fairness I should mention
Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb,
by Thomas Powers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), which takes a view very different to my own; his thesis is seriously questioned in the lengthy review by Richard Peierls, available in his
Atomic Histories
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997), pp. 108-16, as well as in Jeremy Bernstein, ed.
Hitler's Uranium Club,
the review in
Nature, 563 (May
27,1993), pp. 311-12, and especially the reviews in the
American Historical Review, 99
(1994), pp. 1715-17, and Paul Lawrence Rose's
Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

An excellent account of the Norway events is Knut Haukelid's own
Skis Against the Atom
(London: William Kimber, 1954, reissued), while the brief sections in Leo Marks's extremely readable
Between Cyanide and Silk: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945
(New York: HarperCollins, 1999) on the solidarity of the Norwegians as they trained in London adds to an understanding of their success. On the UK effort,
Operation Freshman: The Rjukan Heavy Water Raid 1942,
by Richard Wiggan (London: William Kimber, 1986) makes good use of transcripts from the war crime trials later held in Norway, and also captures the befuddlement of the tough London kids sent out to this lethal, wintry terrain.

The American decision to use the bomb is surveyed from a conventional military/strategic viewpoint in
Americans at War,
by Stephen E. Ambrose (New York: Berkeley Books, 1998), pp. 125-38; from an administrative viewpoint in
Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945,
by Margaret Gowing (London: Macmillan, 1964). Best of all, though, is J. Samuel Walker's
Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which emphasizes how much the ill-prepared Truman was pushed and led by his advisors, with their own bureaucratic, geopolitical, and domestic concerns; also how many of the key American military leaders then would have been startled by the later consensus that the bombing was inevitable.

Whether or not the decision was justified, the accounts in Chapter 19 of Richard Rhodes's
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
are a necessary reminder of what the decisions meant on the ground those two summer mornings in August; the almost aphasic resistance of many postwar researchers to discuss any aspect of the morality of their weapons work is a central topic in
The Genocidal Mentality: The Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat,
by Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen (London: Macmillan 1991).

The Universe (Chapters 14-16)

Payne

The richest source here is
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections, ed.
Katherine Haramundanis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1996). See also George Greenstein's reflective essay "The Ladies of Observatory Hill," in his
Portraits of Discovery
(New York: Wiley, 1998). An interesting comparison from a later generation is
Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters
by Vera Rubin (Woodbury, N.Y: American Institute of Physics, 1997), while George Gamow's dated though highly readable
The Birth and Death of the Sun: Stellar Evolution and Subatomic Energy
(London: Macmillan, 1941) gives a useful impression of solar physics in Payne's time.

Hoyle and Earth

Fred Hoyle is the best writer of any high-level scientist I'm aware of: his autobiography,
Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is a pleasure to read. One learns why his generation of youngsters suffered the wettest feet in Yorkshire (previous generations had clogs, which let water drain through, the next generation had boots, which kept water out, but his had cheap boots, which let water in and kept it there). One also learns about Dirac's lecturing style, Eddington's thinking style, the distortions produced by Cambridge's overdifficult exams, the achievements produced by Cambridge's intensely fair scholarships, as well as pointers on nucleosynthesis, RAF versus Royal Navy research styles, academic politics, and the surprising durability of cardboard cars.

For the wider context in which Hoyle worked, again Timothy Ferris's
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
(New York: William Morrow, 1988) is ideal.

Chandrasekhar

Kameshwar C. Wali's
Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) is an excellent biography, and the sixty pages of transcripts of Wali's conversations with Chandra in the Epilogue are especially recommended. When Chandra describes Fermi ("The fact, of course, was that Fermi was instantly able to bring to bear, on any physical problem . . . his profound and deep feeling for physical laws. . . . [The] motions of interstellar clouds with magnetic lines of force threading through them reminded him of the vibrations of a crystal lattice; and the gravitational instability of a spiral arm of a galaxy suggested to him the instability of a plasma and led him to consider its stabilization by [a] . . . magnetic field."), he's also describing himself: giving us a glimpse of what it might be like to view the world through such a powerful, interlinking mind. I'd also recommend Chandra's own book of essays,
Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

For further topics in astrophysics there are an abundance of fine texts.
The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity,
by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin (New York: Free Press, 1999), is especially good, covering the story from the earliest moments to a very, very distant future. Stephen Hawking's collection
Black Holes and Baby Universes
(New York: Bantam, 1993) is entertaining and wryly thoughtful; while for the reader who relishes popular science books on the universe but finds they're beginning to blur, I'd strongly suggest stepping back and working through a crisp introductory text such as
The Dynamic Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy,
by Theodore P. Snow (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, several editions).

General Relativity (Epilogue)

The best introduction I'm aware of is also one of the most concise. It's Robert M. Wald's
Space, Time, and Gravity: The Theory of the Big Bang and Black Holes.
To
go
along with that there's Robert Geroch's equally excellent
General Relativity From A to B.
Both Wald and Geroch take a clear geometrical approach, and have numerous picture diagrams carrying the story along through their texts, so the nonscientist will find them as easy as reading a book on architectural design—only here the design is that of our universe.

Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy,
by Kip Thorne (New York: Norton, 1994) is much longer, and sometimes loses the thread in its gushing biographical backgrounds. But much of it is vivid, and Thorne, as much as Wald and Geroch, has been a leader in the field of general relativity for decades. For a thoughtful account of the 1919 eclipse expeditions—and Eddington's true motivations— don't miss Chapter 6 of Chandrasekhar's
Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science.

Acknowledgments

I couldn't have written this book on my own. A lot of it developed out of the Intellectual Tool-Kit courses I taught at Oxford, which Roger Owen and Ralf Dahrendorf were central to getting started. Avi Shlaim helped nurture that series over the years, and Paul Klemperer made apt comments after one of the creativity lectures, which helped lay the idea for an expansion of the physics aspects of that course.

Once a first draft was done, several friends were kind enough to read the manuscript in its entirety: Betty Sue Flowers, Jonathan Rowson, Matt Hoffman, Tara Lemmey, Eric Grunwald, Peter Kramer, and Caroline Underwood. They gave excellent suggestions, a number of which I even adopted. George Gibson and Jackie Johnson at Walker & Company were even more valiant: repeatedly offering wise comments that improved the book no end. Readers who looked through particular chapters for accuracy, or answered specific questions, included Steven Shapin, Dan van der Vat, Shaun Jones, Bob Wald, Tom Settle, Malcolm Parkes, Ian Kogan, David Knight, Winston Scott, and Frank James. None of them, of course, are responsible for any errors that remain.

Two individuals gave especially important aid. In a series of long, flowing phone talks Doug Borden helped me see how the final visions of the "energy" and "mass" chapters could be best developed. Gabrielle Walker, the most eloquent of friends, talked me through all aspects of the book, opening up a world of honest writing in conversations that sparked across months of fine dinners. In one particularly memorable late-night stroll through St. James's Park, she explained how the quietly widening chorale of the St. Matthew's Passion showed the way to escape from strict chronology after the equation's story reached 1945. The book would have collapsed after chapter thirteen without that.

For a long time I was perplexed about what level of explanation would be best in the main chapters. Peter Kramer, especially, was persuasive in his observation that I needed to give the results of the equations, without slighting the explanation of why the equation holds true. To do this, I put an indispensable core of explanation in the main text, a little more in the notes at the end, then even more—and especially anything that involves mathematics—on the Web site, davidbodanis.com. I like the idea that a book is no longer a single defined object, limited by the technology of paper and glue and stitching. To keep the Web site from being only for technical types, I also included there some reminiscences of boyhood in Chicago (which with only a slight twist lead to an explanation of how space and time slosh into each other). There are also insights from William Blake, samples of Einstein's voice, links to the courses I offer on the equation, a look at why simple art forms such as equations are so often true, and other odds and ends.

The newly finished British Library was an excellent place to research all this: It's one of the great libraries of the world, and possibly the last, pyramid-like homage to the pre-Internet era. Many of the Library's
science
journals were still in the old Southampton Row reading rooms, where interior design and coffee facilities were not quite at the same level, but the photostats of original patent applications on the wall (Whittle's jet engine, the paperclip, the thermos flask, the Wright brothers' wing-warping) made up for a lot of that.

The University College
science
library in London was also useful, and even though the physical plant is now showing the effects of years of underfunding, the staff do an excellent job of trying to shore up the gaps. The London Library on St. James's Square doesn't suffer those funding problems and is a strong reason for living in this city. It's an early Victorian institution that still works: There are about a million books, on open shelves, including many early editions. I became used to reading texts that would refer to some earlier biographer's hard-to-obtain work, which could usually be conveniently found, albeit under a light sprinkling of dust, just an arm's length further along the shelf.

There was an added benefit there, since for Faraday and Maxwell and the like I could scoop up armfuls of their works or letters, and head outside to one of the benches under the oaks in the center of St. James's Square. It was a fitting location. To one side was the redbrick building which had housed Eisenhower's SHAEF headquarters in 1944, when the fears of a German atomic bomb were near their peak; behind me was the plaque to Ada, Countess Lovelace, the nineteenth-century predecessor of computer programmers, who experienced many of the ups and downs a woman's career in science was likely to take. Walking to a sushi bar for lunch took me past one of Newton's homes on Jermyn Street; when I finally settled for lunch I was right across from the great hall where the news confirming Einstein's general relativity predictions was released.

Most of the actual writing was done when my wife, Karen, was making a transition from being a distinguished historian, to being a distinguished business consultant. We'd always spent a lot of time with our children, but when she was off in Geneva or Washington or Berlin—although she later helped with draft after draft, giving kind, incisive support—I had even more of the day with them. This meant writing time was often broken up. But curiously the text proceeded faster than before.

What happened, I think, was that by really getting into the time with the kids, I was forced to have the breaks that authors rarely allow themselves. Strolling to school we'd get down on our bellies to observe ants in the grass, or we'd stop and chat with the men drilling the streets, who almost always had younger brothers and sisters, or kids of their own, and so were only too happy to rest and explain how their tools worked to the fascinated three and five year olds. There'd also be wall walking and "secret spy," long lunchtimes and afternoons. There were times when I was grumpily distracted (sorry guys), but mostly I looked forward to our hours together, and the wondrous refreshment that very young, very curious minds provide (thanks guys).

When it finally did get too late for more, and two exhausted youngsters were asleep in their bunk beds, I'd settle into a big chair in their room (it felt a lot friendlier there than being in my study), with notes and bound volumes spread out, and then I'd gladly return for hour after hour to this book, as the sky darkened and the London streets went quiet outside. A few times—the writing racing along; my coffee long since cold—I'd realize I'd gone the whole night through; most notably once while writing about the chemistry of the sun, as the roaring sphere of that star—powered by thermonuclear blasts in accord with E=mc
²
—began to lift from behind the Earth, somewhere far beyond the Thames estuary; lifting, rolling, to embrace our lives.

I loved writing this book.