ScienceWeek

ON LEO SZILARD (1898-1964) AND THE DISPARAGEMENT OF INVENTIONS

A number of physicists have apparently disparaged the recent Nobel Prize 2000 in Physics as a reward for "an engineering feat, not a scientific one" and as having "little to do with fundamental science."

The Nobel Prize in Physics, however, was chartered by Alfred Nobel to be awarded to "the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics", so the awarding of the prize for an invention is certainly appropriate. In addition, any intelligent analysis of the history of science demonstrates the intimate link between invention/technology on the one hand and science on the other hand, the two mutually feeding each other in a progressive spiral of accomplishment.

The apparently disparaging remarks of certain physicists concerning the recent Nobel Prize physics award suggest that perhaps there are too many professional physicists with only an amateur understanding of the history of physics. In a letter to the New York Times of 16 October 2000 concerning this criticism of the recent Nobel Prize awards as awards for invention rather than fundamental science, James W. Cronin, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980, states: "My colleagues' comments do not well serve those of us who pursue fundamental physics. In most cases, it is the development of technology that permits the very experiments that advance fundamental science."

An excellent example of a personal linkage between fundamental science and invention can be found in the story of the physicist Leo Szilard (1898-1964), who conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1934, and who, to anyone who knew him, was an ambulatory intellectual tour de force.

The following points are made by Valentine L. Telegdi (Physics Today 2000 October):

1) After World War I, Szilard moved from Budapest to Berlin to study engineering, but he soon switched to physics. During his Berlin period (1920-1933), Szilard was granted 31 patents. In contrast, his published output as a physicist during this period consisted of two theoretical papers and two experimental papers. Hardly any of Szilard's inventions were realized in practice, and he evidently reaped no financial rewards from his German patents or their foreign equivalents. One exception was a patent on a "Discharge Tube to Be Used as an Electron Source", which he assigned to the Siemens-Schuckert Company in Berlin.

2) During Szilard's Berlin period, he became interested in improving refrigerators for household use. The commercially available refrigerators of that time were noisy and generally unreliable, and Szilard attempted to propose devices without moving parts. He obtained 16 patents involving refrigerators, 5 of which were filed jointly with Albert Einstein (1879-1955) (a former patent clerk).

3) The most famous of Szilard's patents was his 1934 patent for the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, although Szilard focused on beryllium (which turned out not to be practical). By this time Szilard was already a Jewish refugee in London, having fled Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. Szilard fully realized the military potential of this patent, and in order to keep the patent secret, he assigned the patent to the British Admiralty.

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Editor's note: Szilard emigrated to the US in 1937, and when uranium fission was discovered by Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and announced by Lise Meitner (1878-1968) in 1939, Szilard realized uranium fission would make his chain reaction idea practical. With Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) and Edward Teller, all Hungarian refugee physicists who had fled the Nazis, Szilard persuaded Einstein to send his famous letter to President Roosevelt, following which the Manhattan Project was set in motion to prepare an atomic bomb. Einstein's famous letter was actually written by Leo Szilard.