Professor David Wolfe
The Martians

Professor David Wolfe | The Martians | 07.15.21

- Good evening everyone, and welcome to a very important session. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Professor David Wolfe. I met David online because a few months ago I gave a lecture on Einstein and he wrote to me and he said, “It was a good lecture, but why don’t you talk about what he actually did?” And I wrote back and said, “Because I can’t.” And he wrote back and said, “But I can.” And he’s a Professor of Physics, he’s taught at Chicago, Washington, New Mexico and Cape Town.

Education is his real love, and he’s been involved with the UK Institute of Physics and the South African Institute of Physics, and he’s set up, he’s involved in teacher training programmes in South Africa, in Soweto, in the Eastern Cape, in Natal, Limpopo, and the plan is to expand them to all nine districts. So it’s extraordinary work working with younger students. And he’s also very passionate about the physicists that he talks about. Some turn to the light, some turn to the dark, and tonight he’s going to be talking about two of the Martians. They were a group of Hungarian Jewish physicists who were so smart that people said that they came from other planets.

And tonight he’s going to talk about Leo Szilard and Edmund Teller. So David, welcome. Thank you so much for doing this, and over to you.

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• Thank you very much indeed. There’s an old conundrum that says that either great people create great history, or rather that great history creates great people. The case of Napoleon is often quoted in this context. The word great does not mean good, of course, it means important, perhaps it means crucial, and we humans are faced with just such crucial questions right now and could really use some great people to help solve them. In particular, there are two vital questions, one, a long-term one and one, a very short-term one. The long-term one is the question of climate change.

We have seen just this past year temperatures in Western North America that greatly threaten human life. Temperatures in the mid 40s Celsius, or 120s Fahrenheit, are unheard of in these regions and extremely dangerous for human life. The temperature in Vancouver was hotter than that in Baghdad. Anyway, that’s the long-term problem. And it threatens, of course, as I’ve said, the very existence of human life.

But there is a short-term problem, one that has existed only for about 75 years, which is an infinitesimal fraction of a second in the lifetime of the Earth. This is the problem of nuclear weapons. There are enough of these horrible devices on Earth itself to kill every human being, not once but six or seven times. The fact that they have not been used for the lifetime of most people means that the danger is much less apparent to us, and this is a very foolish mistake.

In 1945, over 1,200 aeroplanes dropped approximately 4,000 tonnes of bombs on Dresden, and they killed about 25,000 people. Later that same year, one aeroplane dropped one bomb, and that killed 75,000 people immediately and about the same number within the next year. These devices were the direct result of scientists who were aware of the potential of nuclear weapons. They were however painfully aware of the enormous capabilities of the scientists in Nazi Germany and horribly aware of the huge energy available from such weapons. And I want to talk about just two of these men this evening, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller.

They worked hard to ensure that the United States would be the first to control such weapons, and to develop them well before the Nazis. But then, after the war, one of them worked hard to control such weapons to diffuse the possibilities of a war fought with these devices. And the other went in the very opposite direction, developing many more such weapons, and even worse, helping to create a weapon hugely more powerful than the ones used in Japan, sufficient to obliterate entire cities with a single bomb.

But they were part of an increasingly astonishing clever group of such men, so clever that it was thought that they could not honestly be human, that they must come from somewhere in space. And thus, we see Leo Szilard saying, “These extraterrestrials are already here. They just call themselves Hungarians.” Now, I want to do just a general introduction, very briefly of the political situation. And because most of this has been covered in much better detail by Trudy Gold, The year 1848 was a crucial one in Europe.

There were numerous rebellions in many European countries, all of which basically failed. Many of us will be familiar with scenes from the streets of Paris. Less familiar perhaps is the result of the Hungarians against the Austrian Empire. And this was initially successful as the Austrian Empire was weak, but the Emperor Franz Joseph I called upon Tsar Nicholas I in Russia who sent troops and the revolt was quelled. And it was perhaps this successful use of armed force by the Russians that gave the Tsar the impetus to start the war in Crimea only a few years later. Crushing the Hungarians resulted in great repression and really rather ruthless terror in Hungary.

But in 1867, an agreement was reached and the Austrian Empire, and the Austrian emperor and the Austria-Hungarian Empire was formed. And the Emperor is in the next slide, please. Yeah, I’m sorry, the next, the next one, yeah, thank you. This is a, let’s do the one before that, if I might. Yeah, that one, thank you. This is just the size of the Austria-Hungarian Empire overlaid on the modern map, so we can see how enormously many central and eastern European countries were taken in by it. In the next slide, you can see how much in the green was actually controlled by the Hungarians.

They could administer their large territory. But the compromise, the loss of independence, and the repression between 1849 and ‘67 was hugely unpopular with the Magyars population. Yet this agreement resulted in the end of conflict, and the period from 1867 until the start of the First World War in 1914 saw a boom in progress in Hungary. Budapest became one of the fastest growing cities in Europe and became one of the main destinations for Jewish immigration in the world, perhaps second only to New York.

The professional and intellectual trades became immensely popular with the recently emancipated Jews. There was, it seems, a lack of persecution, and so the numbers were swelling. By the beginning of the 20th century, 1/5 of the population was Jewish. Assimilation was not very difficult, and many prominent Jews became part of the hereditary nobility. Thus, there was Theodore von Karman and John von Neumann. All of the Martians who became important in physics came from a Budapest upper middle class Jewish background.

The Hungarian world changed dramatically because of the Great War and the destruction of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. After the armistice, there was a very short-lived Soviet Hungarian Soviet republic, but that was followed by a savage white terror in 1919 and 1920. There was a combination of severe anti-Semitism and a complete lack of opportunity in Hungary. Many men went therefore to Germany, which, of course, was suffering from extreme financial difficulties, but which was at least a flourishing democracy. Moreover, Germany was by far at the top of the world in science. Szilard, along with his colleagues, Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann went to Berlin. Teller joined the group of Werner Heisenberg, of whom I’ll talk a little bit later. They were all child prodigies with various talents.

The stories about child prodigies are always to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt, but these stories came to me from a serious Hungarian scientist, so I’m tempted to believe them even though they are pretty incredible. One of the cleverest of them, John von Neumann, could divide two six-digit numbers in his head when he was six years old. Paul Erdos, who grew up to be a famed mathematician, was equally amazing. And the story goes that if you told him your age, he could tell you how many seconds you had lived when he was four years old. Despite the fact that this was told me by a prestigious man, I find it astonishing.

All the Jewish men had to leave Germany due to the rise of the Nazis, and they all came to the United States. Szilard came first to London in 1932, following the discovery of the neutron in the nucleus of the atom. He then immediately realised the possibility of nuclear fission. This was six years before the discovery of nuclear fission, which is an astonishing intellectual feat. For those of us in London, there is a spot on Southampton Road near Russell Square where he stood for a long time in the rain in 1932, realising what the discovery of the neutron might mean.

Szilard later said, and I quote him, “Time cracked open for me, and I saw the way to the future death unto the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come.” A frightening statement indeed. He came to the US in 1937, and he played a crucial role in the creation of nuclear weapons and later in the struggle to control them. More of that later also. Both Szilard and Teller came from upper middle class well-to-do Jewish families. They were brought up in atmospheres conducive to learning, strongly encouraged to get educated and attended excellent secondary schools in Budapest. Their schools, gymnasium, of course, in Hungarian, were considered to be the largest influence on their development, outside of their families.

In 1867, as I’ve said, new legislation gave civil and legal equality to Jews in Hungary. And this opened up new possibilities for advancement. And this proved to be illusory after the First World War and the bloody right wing terror that came in 1919-20. Miklos Horthy became the regent in the 1920s, and he remained as the head of government until 1944. Legislation, which was the first example of anti-Semitic legislation in Europe after the war demonstrated a sense of helplessness for young Jews.

A bloodbath followed Horthy’s rise to power, with many Jews summarily executed merely because of being Jewish. One of the mass murderers was brought to trial, exonerated, and then congratulated by the judge. There was a sudden lack of opportunity, and this was, of course, a determining factor causing people to leave the country. Leo Szilard’s family came to Hungary from Galicia back in the 18th century.

At that time, of course, Jews had only given names, you know, Yitzhak Ben Avraham so that when they came to the Hungarian Empire, they took Germanic names. Szilard’s family took the name Spitze, summit in German. Leo’s grandfather died when they lived in Slovakia. His widow moved to Budapest with 14 children, one of whom was Leo’s father. He founded a bridge and railway construction company, married a medical doctor with a specialty in ophthalmology. They changed Spitze to Szilard, which means solid in Hungarian. They had three children, and Leo, who was born in 1898, finished his secondary school while the First World War was on, and he was drafted into officer’s school, but he avoided fighting, and he avoided the flu epidemic of 1918 and '19.

The study of physics was very rare at that time. Leo was interested in physics from school, but there seemed to be no career possibilities in Hungary, and so he planned to study chemistry, but his family urged him to study engineering. And one of the very few times in his life that Szilard actually paid attention to what other people suggested, he did so, but he managed only one year before being drafted. He continued his studies after the war, and he enjoyed the intellectual life of Budapest at the time until these dreadful repressive times started in 1919.

The waves of vicious anti-Semitism caused him to convert to Protestantism, but this conversion did not do much for the anti-Semitic students at the university who kicked him down the stairs. These dreadful times caused him to move to Germany to continue his education, and he enrolled in the Technical University in Berlin.

Edward Teller’s father was a successful lawyer in Budapest, and he married the daughter of a well-to-do banker. They had two children, a daughter, Emma, and a son, Edward. Born in 1908. Edward was the youngest of all the physicist Martians. By the time he was in secondary school, though, he had met Wigner, Szilard, and von Neumann all of whom were now studying and living in Germany. But Teller met them during summer holidays when they returned to Budapest to visit their families. In his last year at school, he won the Eotvos physics competition, and he shared first place with three others in mathematics.

He left Hungary to study in Germany in 1926. He too studied chemistry at university in Germany. His sister stayed in Hungary. She married a successful lawyer. Her husband was unfortunately murdered by the Nazis in 1945, but she and her parents survived the war. His mother and sister were finally allowed to emigrate in 1959, and his mother died in the US at 94 years of age. Edward himself lived to be 95. Excuse me. Now a few more specifics.

Szilard, born in 1898, left Budapest when he was 21 and went to Berlin to study. He wanted to study physics, as I’ve said, but the lack of job prospects back home meant that he started with engineering. But he quickly became dissatisfied with that, and he wandered to different universities where he discovered the physics colloquia at the University of Berlin. He started attending regularly and they marked a true turning point in his life. The people who attended were all of the incredible people who created one of the greatest intellectual revolutions in human history, that is, the discovery of quantum mechanics.

The names of Max Planck, Max von Laue, Walter Nance, Fritz Haber, Gustav Hertz, James Franck, and, of course, Albert Einstein are all people who attended these colloquia. These people sat in the first row, and I mention their names because they are enormously famous in science. And some of you, of course, I trust, will recognise many of them. And their work, their quantum mechanics, has given us so much of the technology we cherish today, including the computer from which I’m speaking, and our mobile phones, which we use every day, from MRI machines and x-ray machines, just an enormous amount of work.

Back farther in the colloquia were future superstars like Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg worked in Leipzig, but he also often came to Berlin. Now, Szilard had not yet started university, but he had no compunction whatsoever about sitting close to the giants up front. Just after he arrived, he spoke to Max Planck. Planck is the man who originated the idea of the quantum and had won the Nobel Prize for that in 1918. This young man, not yet really even an undergraduate, was quoted as saying to Planck, one of the most famous scientists in the world, “I only want to know the facts of physics. I’ll make up the theories myself.”

For me, honestly, that is unimaginable chutzpah. The one person he truly revered was Einstein, but even that did not prevent him from being quoted as saying during a colloquium that Einstein was giving, “But Herr Professor, what you have now said is just nonsense.” It also did not take him long to be sitting in the first row with the senior dignitaries. Now, in these seminars, he spoke to Einstein often, usually more politely, and asked him to give a course in the field called statistical mechanics. This deals with the properties of large collections of molecules and their interactions with heat and our outside forces.

This was not Szilard’s major field, but he did agree to teach such a course. And it was attended, of course, by Szilard, but also by the other Hungarians, Wigner, von Neumann, Dennis Gabor, lots of interesting people. Szilard developed a relationship with Einstein, walking him home, talking with him after classes, making suggestions, even visiting him at home. The German experience played an enormous, an extremely important role in the lives of all the Martians. Now, the discussion of heat in physics is called the science of thermodynamics, and there are three basic laws with mathematical formulations, of course, but these three laws also have an ordinary and commonplace formulation.

The first law says you can’t get something for nothing. The second law says you can’t even break even. And the third law says, the harder you try, the worse you do. Now, in reality, and more seriously, the second law is called the law of entropy, because entropy comes from the Greek word for a transformation. And it is a measure of the state of randomness or disorder in some systems. An example, as an example, would be the melting of ice. In ice, the molecules are rigidly tied to one another as they are in any solid. That’s why a solid is held together.

But in water, they are freer to move around, and they do so in random directions, hence an increase in randomness or disorder. So ice will turn into water if left alone, but water will not turn into ice without the use of a freezer, an external source of energy. Now, I want to do a short discussion of some real science here, and I regret the fact that people, very intelligent people, as I know all of you are, are afraid of science, say, tend to say, “Oh, I can’t understand that,” when you wouldn’t say that about historical difficulties or artistic difficulties. And so I claim science is just the same.

One of the inventors of the theory of thermodynamics was James Clerk Maxwell, and he spoke of a demon who could violate this law of this, of the increase of disorder. And here Szilard played a significant role, and a role that’s going to have consequences for us today. Maxwell imagined a box with two sides separated by a trap door. There’s a gas on both sides. In such a gas the molecules are moving. It’s a gas, some are fast, some slow, all sorts of of speeds in all sorts of random directions. The disorder is large.

A demon sits by that door and watches a fast molecule approach the door. He opens it and lets the fast molecule go to, say, the left side of the box. Every fast molecule gets moved to the left side. All the slow molecules stay on the right side. And this violates the second law, which says that things should be randomly arranged, not all fast on one side and slow on the other. Randomly mixed.

This was, for a few years, a puzzle. Szilard said, no, you have to consider the work done by this demon in opening and closing the door, and that information, and that is a crucial word, that information gets stored in the memory of this demon, and the effort of opening the trap door and the storage of the, that the storage of the information requires energy, takes some effort, all of which increases the heat in the system of gas plus demon, and that increases the overall disorder in the universe.

As an example, and this is not, the example is easier than those words. Every time we arrange things, we clean the house, for example, that takes heat energy from us, which we get from our food. But the order in our house is only temporary, and the eventual state of the house is a pile of rubble, sometime in the distant, one hope’s, future. Entropy, randomness always increases even if it takes a long time. And what Szilard has done is to relate this disorder principle to the use and storage of information.

And this is the beginning of what is called information theory of which another Martian, John von Neumann, was to use in the creation of computers. This work, Szilard’s PhD dissertation, was a seminal work in the beginning of the computing revolution. Moreover, he did this PhD dissertation only two years after, two years after he entered the university as an undergraduate. He was quite the man. Thinking, making order from disorder requires that the thinker has had to eat, and the growing of the food has generated enough heat, has created enough disorder in the universe to compensate.

Szilard had a very restless mind, and he did not follow up many of his ideas, but he was incredibly creative. In 1928, he conceived the idea of what is called the linear accelerator, a machine designed to accelerate protons or electrons to very high energies colliding with atoms and, or with nuclei to understand the structures. There is just such a machine, two miles long doing amazing science in Stanford, California.

In 1929, Szilard had the idea of creating a cyclotron, which is a circular machine for accelerating protons. This invention, which was created several years later by Ernest Lawrence, won him the Nobel Prize in 1939. It has done an amazing amount of wonderful physical research. Szilard did not marry until late in life. He lived with two small packed suitcases and moved his residence often. He had a very strong political sense, was one of the earliest predictors of the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

And although just as he said in 1930, had the very strong sense of the collapse of Germany into Nazism. He made plans to move to the United States. By 1931, another Martian, Eugene Wigner, was already at Princeton University and arranged an invitation for Szilard to do research there. Now, Szilard pointed out an interesting difference between the United States and Germany due to the Depression of the 1930s. The Americans elected Franklin Roosevelt as President. He initiated the New Deal with all of its reforms.

The Germans, on the other hand, elected the Nazis in great numbers to the Reichstag, and Hitler became Chancellor. Both Roosevelt and Hitler were in power for exactly the same time, 1933 to 1945. Szilard saw what was coming, understood what was coming, much better than almost anyone else, but even he could not have foreseen the horrors unfolding in just a few years to come. He did warn however everyone to leave Germany, even Europe.

He left Germany on the 30th of March in 1933, crossing into Czechoslovakia. The very next day, the 31st of March, Germany closed that border, making it much more difficult to flee. He went to Vienna and began helping academic refugees. Sorry, I’ve lost… Okay, I’m back. Help academic refugees finding work outside Germany. I have never understood what he did for monetary support during that time, but imagine he must have had some family money.

If I could have the next slide, please. Oh, no, that’s wrong. Oops, oops, oops, oops. Move forward. There we are, that’s the one I want.

The comment by Szilard, “I can be so useful I cannot afford to retire into private life.” “We have more noble causes than to do in science, when this knowledge has entered our blood, this knowledge cannot be distilled out of it.” And then Paul Ehrenfest, an equally brilliant scientist, said that he was a rare example of scientific acumen and ability to solve technical problems, but also great sensitivity and compassion for people in need.

But he was not financially independent totally, and eventually, he had to look for some sort of job that would give him enough free time to continue his outside work. In 1933, he had written that he was travelling a great deal, earning nothing and could not continue doing this for very long. From Vienna, he soon wound up in London, and as time passed in the 1930s and the Nazis gained increasing power and showed increasing belligerence, Szilard was extremely keen to get people to take seriously the possibility, the possibility of fission and its use as a weapon. But he faced a dilemma.

And the dilemma was that he very much wanted to get increased interest, but he was afraid that too much discussion would alert the Germans to the possibility. He was, of course, having worked there, extremely aware of the talent in that country and what they might achieve. He understood that considerable research was necessary to use, to see what the problems might be of such use. And one of the people with whom he discussed the problem was Lisa Meitner. She was at that time still in Germany, and so the idea of keeping such thoughts away from the Nazis was really not possible.

Szilard finally obtained a paid position and he used that to start to work on nuclear fission. The eventual real problem was that uranium is the element that fissions, and uranium has several isotopes. Isotopes are nuclei which have a given number of protons. It’s always 92 in the case of uranium. That’s what makes it uranium is the number of 92 protons. But the most common isotope is called uranium-238, which means besides the 92 protons, it has 146 neutrons. 92 plus 146 make up the 238 in the nucleus. And it was discovered quickly that this isotope did not fission.

But there is a rare isotope which has the same 92 protons, but has only 143 neutrons, three neutrons fewer, and is called U-235, 92 plus 143 making 235. This isotope forms only 7/10 of 1% of the natural uranium that is dug out of the ground and it fissions. The problem then is getting enough of that rare isotope to make use of the immense energy in nuclear fission. Separating isotopes required an enormous investment of time and money, which, of course, the United States certainly did during the early 1940s.

Finally, through a colleague, he was able to find a position at New York University. This was by now the late 1930s. And as he became increasingly aware, not only of the possibility of nuclear fission, but of its use as a weapon of war. He was moving often between the US and the UK. But when the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938, he stayed in the US and he applied for naturalisation. War broke out, of course, a year after that agreement.

These remarkable physicists were all in the United States in the 30s. They had all been in Germany before that. They had all seen the rise of Nazism and of Hitler, and they deeply understood the threat that posed, but even more so, they truly understood the capabilities, the brilliance of German science. These people who, as I said, created the greatest revolution in the history of science of course, quantum mechanics.

But of all these men, Leo Szilard was by far the most active and the most involved. It was late in 1938 when Otto Hahn, the German chemist, was working with pure uranium. He and his young assistant, Fritz Strazman, started with pure uranium, and they soon discovered barium in their sample. Barium is a far lighter element than uranium, and where had that come from? They were very careful chemists. They did not mix things like that. They had no idea and they were deeply puzzled.

They, of course, had previously worked with that brilliant young woman, Lisa Meitner, but she had had to flee Germany in March of 1938. As an Austrian Jew, she had been able to stay and work in Germany. Following the Anschluss in 1938, she was in great danger. By the end of that year, she was working in Sweden. but Han was still in contact with her and he wrote to her for help in explaining this problem. And as I said in an earlier lecture about Meitner, she and her nephew, Otto Frisch quickly understood that the uranium nucleus had split into two pieces, one of which was barium discovered in the sample.

The other element was, in fact, a gas, krypton, and that escaped. It actually is a real gas, not just a planet on which superheroes came from. They also understood that there was a huge amount of energy released when some of the mass was turned into energy using Einstein’s famous E equals mc squared formula. It was Frisch who had studied biology, who used the word fission, something that cells do, and now atomic nuclei do. The amount of energy was staggeringly huge.

It was quickly discovered that the splitting of the uranium nucleus, this fissioning, created the elements barium and krypton, but also allowed some neutrons to be freed as well. Many discoveries quickly followed. It was found that having a neutron enter a uranium-235 nucleus caused it to become uranium-236, one more neutron, too heavy for stability, and it then fissions. When it fissions, it emits other neutrons. And the question was, how many neutrons emitted?

Suppose it’s one, and this neutron might escape, or it might enter another uranium nucleus and cause that to fission. But suppose a fission gives off two neutrons, then each of these could enter a uranium nucleus and each of them would fission a nucleus that’s fissioning two nuclei. But each of those two nuclei would fission, making four neutrons, and four neutrons would be emitted. Would they be captured and create fissioning? Four nuclei, that would give off eight neutrons, fissioning eight nuclei. Always an ever growing of neutrons and fissions, each of which gave off huge amounts of energy.

This is what is called a chain reaction, and it happens in unbelievably short times, incredibly tiny fractions of a second, and suddenly an enormous amount of energy is released. A huge energy release in a very short time is called an explosion. Szilard realised this immediately when fissioning was announced. The question then quickly became how many neutrons released in the fission process. The answer is 2.3 release per fission, and that means a chain reaction is possible and it will occur. There are all kinds of problems, many problems, and I’ll leave more discussion of the problems of fission for maybe another time or another discussion.

The question of making a weapon was certainly now highly possible, and the fact that fission had been discovered in Germany badly frightened the Martians. They had, of course, all worked in Germany, and as I’ve said, were deeply aware of the capability of the scientists there. Excuse me. Something needed to be done. And what Szilard did was to approach Albert Einstein. Szilard drafted a letter to President Roosevelt, which Einstein read and signed. The letter began the Manhattan Project. The letter changed the world. And it has made humanity hostage to a power that can destroy us all. Szilard never held a permanent position, claiming that such would interfere with his ability to do political work or change the direction of his academic interest.

And this is not so unusual for some reason in some Hungarian scientists, the most recent example being the famous mathematician, Paul Erdos, whom I mentioned earlier. One of the things such freedom allowed was the the chance to change fields. And Szilard did this, eventually leaving physics and developing a deep interest in molecular biology. He worked at times with such famous people as James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, and with Jonas Sauk, the discoverer of the polio vaccine.

But during the 1950s, he was also involved with the formation of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and with the creation in the United States of the National Science Foundation. His most important work at that time was clearly on arms control. He was not a pacifist, only deeply interested in control of what is the only weapon ever developed which has the power to exterminate all of humanity on Earth. One of the comments from a Russian member of the Pugwash Group and a Nobel laureate in physics is Vitaly Ginzburg in the next slide. The next one, please. That one. “The luck of humankind that Stalin and Hitler did not possess atomic bombs first.”

Szilard married Gertrude Weiss in 1951. She was a physician 11 years younger than her husband. She had fled Vienna where she was born in 1937 and came to the United States. She survived him by some 17 years. It is not possible really to talk about the Martians without some talk about their work in the 40s, almost always on the nuclear bomb project. Szilard argued very strongly against using the nuclear bomb on Japan. He had urged its construction from his fear, his terror, really, of Hitler and what use he might make of it. And as I’ve tried to emphasise, he was hugely aware of the brilliance of German science.

He went on to help found the Federation of American Scientists, an organisation which still exists today, and which works powerfully to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. The estimates at the time were that the Japanese would defend their islands to the death as they had so often done in the island invasions that had taken place for the last three years. The estimates of deaths in invasion were in the hundreds of thousands on the American side and higher on the Japanese.

The famous American author, Paul Fussell, was a soldier during the war. He had been seriously wounded in France, but after recuperating had been shipped to the Pacific after VE Day to prepare for the invasion of Japan. Feeling sure he would be killed, he later wrote that the surrender of Japan after the two atomic bombs reduced him and the men around him to tears of relief. It is so difficult for us today to understand the feelings of 1945. If I may have the next slide, please.

Edward Teller, born in 1908, and he lived the longest, dying in 2003 at 95 years old. As soon as he turned 18, he graduated from secondary school. He went to Germany to study and he went to Karlsruhe, and he also began studying chemistry. So the need to find a field with job prospects must have been extremely strong. He got his undergraduate degree in two years and he went to Munich to study under Arnold Sommerfeld, who had made enormous contributions to the beginning of quantum theory.

One day, Teller leapt from a moving tram car. He fell and the tram cut off most of his right foot. He was taking painkillers, but found that they changed his ability to think, so he stopped. He dealt with pain entirely by willpower, pretending that he had taken a pain pill when he had just had a sip of water. A powerful will, of course, was to be characteristic of him all of his life. He had a prosthetic foot, but still always walked with a limp. He returned to Budapest to recuperate.

When he returned to Germany, he did not go to Munich, as he did not much like Sommerfeld, but he went to Leipzig where he studied under Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg, of course, was the head of the German atomic bomb project during the war. And his visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen provided the material for that famous play, “Copenhagen” by Michael Frayn. There was an astounding quality of scientists in Leipzig, but I’ll leave out all of them for now. It took Teller about a year to prepare his doctoral dissertation.

Following his graduation, he took a position in Gottingen in 1930 working under James Franck, who was also a Jew who also had to flee just a few years later. Most of Teller’s work during these years was concerned with the physics of molecules, those collections of atoms, the stuff from which most of us are made. He stayed until 1932, which was a very special year in physics because that was the year of the discovery of the neutron and the discovery of anti-matter. It was also just before January '33 when Hitler appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

A 25-year-old Teller discovered that the community of German physics was closed. Could I have the next slide, please? Hitler’s statement that we can do without science if we have to do without Jews. In the next slide, please, there are 18 names of people who emigrated because of the Nazis. 11 of these are all Jewish, with the exception, or part Jewish, with the exception of Schrodinger, who was not, but was disgusted by the Nazis, and Fermi who was married to a Jewish woman.

There were 11 of these people who had or eventually won the Nobel Prize in physics. I think I probably have overrun. I should stop probably here. There’s much more about Teller and some of the other of these people, but perhaps I shall have further chance to do this at some time. So I thank you very much for listening.

• Thank you, David, that was brilliant. And I think you’re completely correct. I think it’s much better to save Teller, who many (tech issues) people as Dr Strangelove. Let’s just save him for another time in more detail?

• [David] Sure, yeah, sure.

• And I think also there’s so many of the other characters. We have a few questions for you.

Q&A and Comments

You’ve got a lot of compliments, including one from Tommy Kamali whose uncle was in charge of the rescue committee. “Congratulations on your pronouncing of Hungarian names.” I think you’re the first, I think you’re the first of our lecturers, including me, who can get the names right, so congratulations.

And this is from Miriam, this is from Miriam Green.

Q: “Is it widely known that Szilard and Einstein cooperated to patent refrigerators in the late 20s? And she believes that Electrolux bought some of the rights. A: That is absolutely true. They invented it. It has not, I understand, ever actually been commercially produced, but it was a very good refrigerator.

• Okay.

Q: "Then both the first nuclear weapons didn’t go according to plan. The first one only used a small percentage of the fissile material, and the second was a mile off target. Can you comment on this?” A: That is, also. Also both. Both these things are true. The first one, in fact, used only a small percentage of the fissile material, because before all of the nuclei could fission, it blew up and it blew all this stuff apart. That is absolutely true. The first bomb was used in Hiroshima, of course, and it did, as I said, kill 75,000 people. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and it was very, very cloudy.

And it apparently, only there was a small break in the clouds that allowed the B29 to drop its weapons, and it was about a mile off of target. That is also true. Also, I think it did not kill the same number of people. The Hiroshima bomb destroyed virtually the whole city and killed, as I said, 75,000 people immediately. But Nagasaki was surrounded by hills and that apparently reflected some of the concussion waves. So I think that not that many people were killed. Still, the numbers are horrific.

• Yeah. You’re getting so many compliments. “What an amazing talk. I’ve learned so much. Thank you so much for this.” May I ask a question, please, David?

Q: Why were so many of these characters Hungarian? Why were they? Have you got any reasons for this? Was there something peculiar about that education at that gymnasium? A: No, I don’t know. I’m tempted to say God smiled, but.

• [Trudy] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• Who knows? I mean, there was just this incredible flood in the 20th century in Hungary of these astoundingly brilliant people. It’s just extraordinary, just extraordinary.

• You’re getting so many more compliments than questions, but there’s one, and this is from Martin Smuller. “As a nuclear physicist in my previous life, I would like to compliment you, prof. I look forward to meeting you one day.” And this is from Denise. “I know nothing about the subject. It’s a indeed fascinating to learn of these brilliant Hungarian scientists, and how much of technology can be introduced.” Oh, this is from who’s talking about Szilard. “My late husband, a mathematician, and I gave him a lift to the airport in Toronto after the talk. He always travelled with his mother.” That’s nice.

Q: “Did Szilard work at the Brookhaven Laboratories on Long Island?“ asked Myra. A: Ah, I did, but Szilard did not, as so far as I know. I did my PhD dissertation at the Brookhaven Laboratories.

• [Trudy] You’ve frozen, David.

• [David] Oh heavens. Am I back? Yeah. Okay.

• [Trudy] Now I’m frozen.

• Okay, the answer to that is, so to the best of my knowledge, Szilard did not work at Brookhaven. I did, I did my PhD dissertation at Brookhaven, the laboratories, in experimental high energy physics. So I’m very fond of that area, but I don’t think Szilard was there.

• And this is from Eva Waldman. "Yes, the Hungarian education was superior at that time. Read "The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World” by Kati Marton. That’s her recommendation. And this is from Denise.

Q: “The famous actress Hedy Lamar was just as brilliant. Was she Hungarian or Austrian?” A: She’s actually from Vienna, isn’t she?

• I thought she was Austrian, but I.

• Yes, she’s from Vienna. Yeah, I’m sure of that, yeah. Considered the most beautiful woman in the world.

• [David] Indeed. Indeed.

• But David, I think that’s all the questions. It was absolutely brilliant. Can I thank you so much for such an interesting talk? There’s obviously so much more to say on the Martians that we can talk offline and work out a date, if that’s all right with you.

• [David] It would be my pleasure.

• Thank you for making at least a little bit of physics understandable of the ignorant, because I totally empathise. I’m so scared of that side of the world. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the way it’s taught or maybe we’re doing this.

• Oh, I agree absolutely. It is badly taught, or has been badly taught, and my particular interest is why it is badly taught, particularly to young women. It is a sin to exclude young women from this brilliant science and-

• It is fascinating. That’s another issue, the role of women. And thanks. So David, thank you so much for giving up your time. The responses have been so complimentary, and you did it, you actually made it, you actually managed to explain ideas to us. So thank you and I’ll be in touch. Take care.

• The pleasure was all mine.

• And Lauren, thank you for putting everything together and we’ll see you on Saturday for Professor Pima. So thank you .

• [David] Good night.

• [Trudy] Bye.