one afternoon and if he passed he was duly awarded a doctorate.
Szilard had already given a year of his life to the Army and two years to engineering. He wasted no time advancing through physics. In the summer of 1921 he went to Max von Laue and asked for a thesis topic. Von Laue apparently decided to challenge Szilard — the challenge may have been friendly or it may have been an attempt to put him in his place — and gave him an obscure problem in relativity theory. “I couldn't make any headway with it. As a matter of fact, I was not even convinced that this was a problem that could be solved.” Szilard worked on it for six months, until the Christmas season, “and I thought Christmastime is not a time to work, it is a time to loaf, so I thought I would just think whatever comes to my mind.”
What he thought, in three weeks, was how to solve a baffling inconsistency in thermodynamics, the branch of physics that concerns relationships between heat and other forms of energy. There are two thermodynamic theories, both highly successful at predicting heat phenomena. One, the phenomenological, is more abstract and generalized (and therefore more useful); the other, the statistical, is based on an atomic model and corresponds more closely to physical reality. In particular, the statistical theory depicts thermal equilibrium as a state of random motion of atoms. Einstein, for example, had demonstrated in important papers in 1905 that Brown-ian motion — the continuous, random motion of particles such as pollen suspended in a liquid — was such a state. But the more useful phenomenological theory treated thermal equilibrium as if it were static, a state of no change. That was the inconsistency.
Szilard went for long walks — Berlin would have been cold and gray, the grayness sometimes relieved by days of brilliant sunshine — “and I saw something in the middle of the walk; when I came home I wrote it down; next morning I woke up with a new idea and I went for another walk; this crystallized in my mind and in the evening I wrote it down.” It was, he thought, the most creative period of his life. “Within three weeks I had produced a manuscript of something which was really quite original. But I didn't dare to take it to von Laue, because it was not what he had asked me to do.”
He took it instead to Einstein after a seminar, buttonholed him and said he would like to tell him about something he had been doing.
“Well, what have you been doing?” Szilard remembers Einstein saying.
Szilard reported his “quite original” idea.
“That's impossible,” Einstein said. “This is something that cannot be done.”
“Well, yes, but I did it.”
“How did you do it?”
Szilard began explaining. “Five or ten minutes” later, he says, Einstein understood. After only a year of university physics, Szilard had worked out a rigorous mathematical proof that the random motion of thermal equilibrium could be fitted within the framework of the phenomenological theory in its original, classical form, without reference to a limiting atomic model — “and [Einstein] liked this very much.”
Thus emboldened, Szilard took his paper — its title would be “On the extension of phenomenological thermodynamics to fluctuation phenomena” — to von Laue, who received it quizzically and took it home. “And next morning, early in the morning, the telephone rang. It was von Laue. He said, ‘Your manuscript has been accepted as your thesis for the Ph.D. degree.’”
Six months later Szilard wrote another paper in thermodynamics, “On the decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings,” that eventually would be recognized as one of the important foundation documents of modern information theory. By then he had his advanced degree; he was Dr. Leo Szilard now. He experimented with X-ray effects in crystals, von Laue's field, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Dahlem until 1925; that year the University of Berlin accepted his entropy paper as his
One of Szilard's sidelines, then and later, was invention. Between 1924 and 1934 he applied to the German patent office individually or jointly with his partner Albert Einstein for twenty-nine patents. Most of the joint applications dealt with home refrigeration. “A sad newspaper story… caught the attention of Einstein and Szilard one morning,” writes one of Szilard's later American proteges: “It was reported in a Berlin newspaper that an entire family, including a number of young children, had been found asphyxiated in their apartment as a result of their inhalation of the noxious fumes of the [chemical] that was used as the refrigerant in their primitive refrigerator and that had escaped in the night through a leaky pump valve.” Whereupon the two physicists devised a method of pumping metallicized refrigerant by electromagnetism, a method that required no moving parts (and therefore no valve seals that might leak) except the refrigerant itself. A.E.G., the German General Electric, signed Szilard on as a paid consultant and actually built one of the Einstein-Szilard refrigerators, but the magnetic pump was so noisy compared to even the noisy conventional compressors of the day that it never left the engineering lab.
Another, oddly similar invention, also patented, might have won Szilard world acclaim if he had taken it beyond the patent stage. Independently of the American experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and at least three months earlier, Szilard worked out the basic principle and general design of what came to be called, as Lawrence's invention, the cyclotron, a device for accelerating nuclear particles in a circular magnetic field, a sort of nuclear pump. Szilard applied for a patent on his device on January 5, 1929; Lawrence first thought of the cyclotron on about April 1, 1929, producing a small working model a year later — for which he won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Szilard's originality stopped at no waterline. Somewhere along the way from sixteen-year-old prophet of the fate of nations to thirty-one-year-old open conspirer negotiating publishing rights with H. G. Wells, he conceived an Open Conspiracy of his own. He dated his social invention from “the mid-twenties in Germany.” If so, then he went to see Wells in 1929 as much from enthusiasm for the Englishman's perspicacity as for his vision. C. P. Snow, the British physicist and novelist, writes of Leo Szilard that he “had a temperament uncommon anywhere, maybe a little less uncommon among major scientists. He had a powerful ego and invulnerable egocentricity: but he projected the force of that personality outward, with beneficent intention toward his fellow creatures. In that sense, he had a family resemblance to Einstein on a reduced scale.” Beneficent intention in this instance is a document proposing a new organization:
The Bund, Szilard writes, would be “a closely knit group of people whose inner bond is pervaded by a religious and scientific spirit”:
If we possessed a magical spell with which to recognize the “best” individuals of the rising generation at an early age… then we would be able to train them to independent thinking, and through education in close association we could create a spiritual leadership class with inner cohesion which would renew itself on its own.
Members of this class would not be awarded wealth or personal glory. To the contrary, they would be required to take on exceptional responsibilities, “burdens” that might “demonstrate their devotion.” It seemed to Szilard that such a group stood a good chance of influencing public affairs even if it had no formal structure or constitutional position. But there was also the possibility that it might “take over a more direct influence on public affairs as part of the political system, next to government and parliament, or in the place of government and parliament.”
“The Order,” Szilard wrote at a different time, “was not supposed to be something like a political party… but rather it was supposed to represent the state.” He saw representative democracy working itself out somehow within the cells of thirty to forty people that would form the mature political structure of the Bund. “Because of the method of selection [and education]… there would be a good chance that decisions at the top level would be reached by fair majorities.”
Szilard pursued one version or another of his Bund throughout his life. It appears as late as 1961, by then suitably disguised, in his popular story “The Voice of the Dolphins”: a tankful of dolphins at a “Vienna Institute” begin to impart their compelling wisdom to the world through their keepers and interpreters, who are U.S. and Russian scientists; the narrator slyly implies that the keepers may be the real source of wisdom, exploiting mankind's fascination with superhuman saviors to save it.
A wild burst of optimism — or opportunism — energized Szilard in 1930 to organize a group of acquaintances, most of them young physicists, to begin the work of banding together. He was convinced in the mid-1920s that “the parliamentary form of democracy would not have a very long life in Germany” but he “thought
