Quotes About Szilard

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.

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.

Einstein preferred to review a letter to the President in person. Teller therefore delivered Szilard to Peconic, probably on Sunday, July 30, in his sturdy 1935 Plymouth.1183 "I entered history as Szilard's chauffeur," Teller aphorizes the experience.1184 They found the Princeton laureate in old clothes and slippers. Elsa Einstein served tea.

From the horrible weapon which they were about to urge the United States to develop, Szilard, Teller and Wigner—"the Hungarian conspiracy," Merle Tuve was amused to call them—hoped for more than deterrence against German aggression.1194 They also hoped for world government and world peace, conditions they imagined bombs made of uranium might enforce.

Szilard's good friend and fellow Hungarian, the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, who was studying chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule at the time of Szilard's conversion, watched him take the University of Berlin by storm.

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.

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.

The slow, careful checking continued through the morning. A crowd began to gather on the balcony. Szilard arrived, Wigner, Allison, Spedding whose metal eggs had flattened the pile. Twenty-five or thirty people accumulated on the balcony watching, most of them the young physicists who had done the work.

During the same period Szilard wrote Michael Polanyi he would "stay in England until one year before the war, at which time I would shift my residence to New York City."896 The letter provoked comment, Szilard enjoyed recalling; it was "very funny, because how can anyone say what he will do one year before the war?" As it turned out, his prognostication was off by only four months: he arrived in the United States on January 2, 1938.

Szilard encouraged me to apply for a postdoc position at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, though he knew I might work on nuclear weapons eventually. My job interview with Teller was both stimulating and unnerving; at the end of it, I suspected Teller understood my thesis better than I did. It was also terrifying; I had no warning who would interview me.

Leo Szilard was frantic. The peripatetic physicist knew time was running out. Atomic bombs would soon be ready, and he expected that they would be used on Japanese cities. Having been the first to urge President Roosevelt to initiate a program to build atomic weapons, he now made repeated attempts to prevent their use.

Echoing his discussion of the previous day with Szilard, Oppenheimer said, "If we were to offer to exchange information before the bomb was actually used, our moral position would be greatly strengthened.

I seem to be good at speaking the politicians' language," Szilard said. "Apparently there's an advantage around here to being mildly socially retarded, and that's the Special Forces for sure.

Szilard looked over at Robbins. "Is it true?" he said. "Which part, sir?" Robbins said. "That you don't like General Mattson," Szilard said. "He can take some getting used to, sir," Robbins said. "By which he means I'm an asshole