Tanks for the memories...

[Dave Monroe]

Leo Szilard has, like Niels Bohr, become a bit of a
hero of mine, not only for his outspoken politics, but
also because, well, even more so than Bohr (who had
lab assistants accompany him to films to explain just
what was going on, as he apparently had no concept of
"story" or "plot"--a man after my own heart!), Szilard
was a goof.  Unfortunately, this isn't online ...

Lanouette, William.  "The Odd Couple and the Bomb."
   Scientific American (November 2000).

... but it's hilarious (Szilard, by the way, is, for
the most part, Oscar Madison).  This seems largely the
same article here, however, so ...

"Late in 1938, Enrico Fermi accepted a six-month
teaching appointment at Columbia ....  Szilard was at
Columbia too, but he had no actual post. He poked
around departments, including the lab of physicist
Isidor Rabi, one of the world's great physicists. 
Szilard suggested many new experiments for Rabi and
his colleagues. Rabi finally begged Szilard to stop.
'You are reinventing the field,' he said. "You have
too many  ideas. Please go away.'"

"Bernard T. Feld, who became Szilard's research
assistant at Columbia, put it this way: 'Fermi would
not go from point A to point B until he knew all that
he could about A and had reasonable assurances about
B. Szilard would jump from point A to point D, then
wonder why you were wasting your time with B and C.'"

"A methodical worker, Fermi often rose before dawn to
think and plan his calculations for the day's
experiments. Szilard often slept late, then soaked in
his bathtub for inspiration. Fermi had the status of a
group leader among his collaborators in Rome, and he
quickly attracted a circle of dedicated graduate
students and colleagues at Columbia. Szilard's
technique was to challenge every hierarchy he
encountered."

And here's where Szilard takes his Felixian (Ungerian?
 He was from Hungary ...) turn ...

"Even more annoying to Fermi was Szilard's refusal to
work with his hands. As graphite began to arrive at
Columbia in the spring of 1940, Fermi and his
colleagues ... unwrapped and stacked it in four-foot
square piles. Soon the physicists 'started looking
like coal miners from the graphite dust,' Fermi
recalled. Szilard often peered in ... suggested new
calculations and stacking methods, and then strolled
off. This angered Fermi at first, especially when
Szilard hired a burly undergraduate to do his share of
the graphite-brick stacking. But Fermi soon mellowed
and later admitted to colleagues that this was the
best arrangement. Because he lacked manual dexterity,
the last thing Szilard should be doing was stacking
graphite bricks."

http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1992/d92/d92.lanouette.html

Lanouette is also the author (with Bela Szilard) of
Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, The
Man Behind the Bomb (New York: Scribners, 1992).  And
here's an execllent Szilard site ...

http://www.dannen.com/szilard.html

Gene Dannen is the author of "The Einstein-Szilard
Refrigerators," which was in the Jan. 1997 SciAm, but,
unfortunately, is not online, either.  Here's
something that is, though ...

http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-10/p25.html

Always something to be learned on the ol' Pynchon
List, apparently.  Thanks for mentioning him, I didn't
know this stuff wa online ...

--- Richard Fiero <rfiero at pophost.com> wrote:

> Unrelated to this but somehow similar is the career
> of Leo Szilard.
> From  "President Truman Did Not Understand," U.S.
> News & World 
> Report, August 15, 1960, pages 68-71, we have: "In
> March, 1945, 
> I [Leo Szilard] prepared a memorandum which was
> meant to be 
> presented to President Roosevelt. This memorandum
> warned that 
> the use of the bomb against the cities of Japan
> would start an 
> atomic-arms race with Russia. . . Having read the
> memorandum, 
> the first thing that Byrnes told us was that General
> Groves 
> [head of the Manhattan District, which developed the
> A-bomb] 
> had informed him that Russia had no uranium . . ."
> From
>
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/3.1/coverweb/porush/Demon.html
> "There have been several brilliant refutations of
> Maxwell's 
> Demon. Leo Szilard in 1929 suggested that the Demon
> had to 
> process information in order to make his decisions,
> and 
> suggested, in order to preserve the first and second
> laws (of 
> conservation of energy and of entropy) that the
> energy 
> requirement for processing this information was
> always greater 
> than the energy stored up by sorting the molecules.
> It was this observation that inspired Shannon to
> posit his 
> formulation that all transmissions of information
> require a 
> phsyical channel, and later to equate (along with
> his co-worker 
> Warren Weaver, and in parallel to Norbert Wiener)
> the entropy 
> of energy with a certain amount of information
> (negentropy)."

And David Porush, of course, is the author of The Soft
Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985).
  Quod vide ...


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