The Man Who Stalked Einstein (25 page)

For a while, Born held out hope that his return to Germany might be possible, but
by 1934 he became convinced that he would have to find a new home and a place to work.
They spent the winter of 1935–1936 in Bangalore, India, where Born was a visiting
lecturer. He then spent several months lecturing in Moscow. “We were, of course, not
very keen on going to Russia,” he wrote, “Which would mean learning a new, very complicated
language, uprooting the children a second time, and starting an entirely new life.”
Unable or unwilling to continue their peripatetic existence, and with no other choices
available to them, the Borns applied for Russian visas and began the long process
of officially becoming Russian émigrés.

In the end, Born’s perseverance, his diligence in pursuing every possible opportunity,
paid off. The family’s wanderings ended with his recruitment to the University of
Edinburgh, where Born assumed the Tait Chair of Natural Philosophy. While the post
had an impressive ring to its title, there was little going on in Edinburgh in the
world of theoretical physics. With little equipment and few colleagues, Born’s involvement
at the top level of theoretical physics came to an abrupt halt. Given the opportunities
for innovative research proffered by the war effort, it was the least propitious possible
time to be stuck in Edinburgh.

Seeing no way forward with his chosen career, Born reinvented himself as a scientific
philosopher, an epistomologist. He cut a fresh path through the morass of conflicting
arguments that had long sustained the vicious battles between Lenard’s experimentalism
and Einstein’s theory. “A single-crystal can be clear. Nevertheless a mass of fragments
of this crystal is opaque,” Born noted on one occasion. “Even the theoretical physicist
must be guided by the ideal of the closest possible contact with the world of facts.
Only then do the formulas live and beget new life.” Once stolidly aligned in the theoretical
camp, Born now tried to square up the relationship between theory and observation,
writing, “My advice to those who wish to learn the art of scientific prophesy is not
to rely on abstract reasoning, but to decipher the secret language of Nature from
Nature’s documents, the facts of experience.”

Born became a British citizen in 1939, the day before England entered the war against
Germany. He retired to Germany in 1952. Surprisingly, his colleagues had never stopped
nominating Born for a Nobel Prize, which he was awarded in 1954. The Swedish Academy
of Sciences cited Born’s early work on quantum mechanics, and especially his mathematical
expression of the wave function. For his Nobel lecture, Born turned to the echoes
of the conflict between experimental and theoretical physics. After all, he had been
in the thick of it. In his view, it was time for détente:

I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth,
etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of
science. On the other hand, any assertion of probability is either right or wrong
from the standpoint of the theory on which it is based. This loosening of thinking
seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For
the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause
of all evil in the world.

Although Born personally did not contribute importantly to the Allies’ war effort,
some of the students and assistants he trained at Goettingen resided in the front
rank of wartime scientists. Among his doctoral students and research assistants who
immigrated to the United States and participated in the Manhattan Project were Robert
Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner. Perhaps his most brilliant
assistant, Werner Heisenberg, led the grossly underfunded and unsuccessful German
effort to develop a nuclear weapon for the Third Reich. Historian Nancy Thorndike
Greenspan noted that Born “let his superstars stretch past him; to those less gifted,
he patiently handed out respectable but doable assignments.”

The passing down of knowledge imprints something on the lineage of scholars that
is as unique as the genetic imprint of families. A philosophy. A construct. A way
of looking at things. Now and again, though, mutations occur. As mentioned, Born’s
student, Edward Teller, remains shrouded in controversy to this day. Raised in Budapest
by a wealthy lawyer father and a talented pianist mother, the family was only nominally
Jewish and well assimilated into Hungarian life. Teller’s desire to become a mathematician
clashed with his father’s wish that he become an engineer. In 1926, Teller left Hungary
for Karlsruhe to begin his education as a chemist. There, however, he received his
first exposure to theoretical physics, a watershed in Teller’s life. He loved the
purity of the mathematics and the large palette of the cosmos, the backdrop on which
the theorists worked. He sought and received his father’s blessing to pursue his interest,
but only after the elder Teller had traveled to Karlsruhe and was assured by his son’s
professors that Edward had the talent to succeed.

Shortly thereafter, Teller moved to Munich to work with Sommerfeld. It was in Munich
that Teller was involved in a streetcar accident that severed his left foot. The accident
would require him to wear a brace and walk with a pronounced limp for the rest of
his life. After Munich, he was on to Leipzig and finally to Goettingen, where he attached
himself to the exceptional group gathered around James Franck and Max Born.

Even though his status as a foreigner exempted Teller from the 1933 civil service
law, the young man foresaw where things were headed. Germany would become a poor place
for a deformed, ambitious Hungarian Jew wishing to build a career in theoretical physics.
His education, training, and apprenticeships took him to London, then to Copenhagen
to work for a year with Niels Bohr. By 1935, he had moved to the United States, to
Washington, D.C. In 1939, he learned of experiments in Germany that showed the feasibility
of a nuclear chain reaction that, if it could be controlled, would release enough
energy to power a city or destroy one.

By this time, it was quite clear to all that Teller was an exceptional talent. Fermi
and Szilárd brought him on to work with them on the construction of a nuclear reactor
for purposes of peacetime energy. The emphasis of their work changed, however, as
it began to look more likely that the United States might have to enter the war in
Europe. Teller became involved in the Manhattan Project, participating at the highest
level in developing a nuclear weapon.

It was when he joined the Manhattan Project that Teller became embroiled in controversy.
While most of his colleagues backed the development of a fission, or so-called atomic,
bomb that would make use of the German experiments, Teller felt strongly that there
was an advantage in pursuing a potentially much more powerful fusion weapon, what
would become better known as a hydrogen bomb. The debate brought out the darker side
of Edward Teller’s personality, which began to dominate his relationships with other
Manhattan Project scientists. In a passive-aggressive mood, Teller was frequently
late in fulfilling his responsibilities. Worse, in some cases, he simply refused to
perform his assigned tasks. Teller’s actions led to tensions with the other scientists,
who already were irritated by his disruptive habit of playing the piano late into
the night.

Teller might well have become just a footnote to the history of the development of
the atomic bomb. However, in 1950, when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic
device, President Harry Truman announced that the United States would respond with
an even more powerful weapon. The Cold War was on. The United States would embark
on the development of a fusion bomb. The work of designing a successful hydrogen bomb
fell to Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. Again, controversy erupted around Teller’s
role in the project, in particular his calculations concerning the amount of hard-to-get
tritium needed to conduct the chain reaction. Some of the scientists involved in the
project believed that Teller intentionally misled supervisors by underestimating the
amount of tritium needed for fear that a true assessment of the expense would terminate
the project in its early stages.

Further disagreement occurred when it was time to parcel out the credit for success.
“I contributed. Ulam did not,” the ninety-one-year-old Teller claimed in a 1999 interview.
“I’m sorry I had to answer you in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with
the old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked
out and had difficulty getting people to listen to. . . . When it then came to defending
that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, ‘I don’t believe
in it.’”

Teller was not present for the detonation of “Ivy Mike,” the first successful hydrogen
bomb, on November 1, 1952. He told the press that he felt unwelcome. Nonetheless,
he took much of the credit for the proj-
ect’s success. To correct what his colleagues felt was a serious public misapprehension,
Fermi convinced Teller to write an article for the journal
Science
about the development of the hydrogen bomb, entitled “The Work of Many People,” which
appeared in February 1955. Teller later claimed that the article had been “a white
lie.”

Teller was a conservative “hawk” who believed the communist threat could best be
addressed by the continued development of advanced weaponry. He was suspicious of
colleagues who he felt were soft on Communism or who held more liberal political views.
Perhaps most telling, he provoked the outrage of his colleagues by testifying against
Robert Oppenheimer during the McCarthy hearings of 1954 that ultimately denied Oppenheimer
further security clearance to work on government projects:

In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer
acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed
with him on numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated.
To this extent, I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country
in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited
sense I would like to express the feeling that I would feel personally more secure
if public matters would rest in other hands. . . . If it is a question of wisdom and
judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser
not to grant clearance.

Enrico Fermi said of Teller that he was the only monomaniac ever to have several manias.
In the end, Teller’s difficulties in getting along with his colleagues, his quirks,
and his rants led to him becoming something of a caricature of a mad scientist. Many
believe that Teller was Stanley Kubrick’s model for the crazed nuclear scientist portrayed
in his 1964 satirical film,
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
. In naming Teller the 1979 “honoree” of the Ig-Nobel Prizes, the sponsors of the
award cited Teller’s “lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.”

Edward Teller was a brilliant mind who doubtlessly believed wholeheartedly in the
strength-through-power philosophy of Ronald Reagan, whom he greatly admired. Nonetheless,
his relationships with colleagues suffered through innumerable incidents, and many
did not forget. Upon his death in 2003, a fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Nobel
laureate, Isidor Rabi, whose family had immigrated to the United States when he was
a child, said, “I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller.”

The secretary knocked softly and waited until he heard a response before opening the
door. He leaned forward just enough to insert his head past the jam to tell SS Reichsfuehrer
Heinrich Himmler that his mother was in the outer office. Should he escort her in?
Himmler’s impatience sent the young man scurrying back to his desk. But by the time
Himmler greeted his “Mutti,” his attitude had changed dramatically. In less than a
minute, he had regressed forty years, back to his childhood when pleasing “Mutti”
had dominated his thoughts.

Growing up in Bavaria, Himmler’s nondescript, nebbish appearance, social awkwardness,
lack of athletic ability, and rigid obedience had earned him plaudits from his teachers
and the scorn of his schoolmates. As an adult, these same qualities had brought him
political power far beyond even his mother’s fevered imaginings. At home in the Munich
headquarters of the SS, he was admired for his cool efficiency and feared for the
absence of any hint of human compassion. In the presence of his staunchly devout Roman
Catholic mother, though, he was a different man. With a desperation he’d never managed
to resolve in childhood, an empty place in his heart still sought her approval of
his accomplishments and attention to her desires.

Despite how close he was to his mother, it was unusual for Mutti to visit him at
work. He considered asking her outright why she had stopped by but thought better
of it. There was a ritual order to their conversations as inalterable as High Mass.
He listened as she fussed over his health. Was he getting enough sleep? Eating properly?
Even the state of his bowels was a matter of motherly interest. He was used to this.
He courteously submitted to her interrogation and waited.

Quite nonchalantly, several minutes into their conversation, his mother mentioned
that she had received an unexpected visit from a distant friend of the family. Did
he remember Annie Heisenberg. No? Well, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps they had never met.
Annie was the wife of August Heisenberg. Mr. Heisenberg and Mutti’s father, Grandpapa
Heyder, had both been teachers, rectors of their schools, and knew each other from
their hiking club. Annie’s son, Werner, was in some kind of trouble. She wouldn’t
ordinarily have bothered her Heinrich except that, as a mother, she could identify
with her friend’s concerns.