By Justin Isherwood

The Solvay Conference of 1933 is  where atomic physicists became nuclear physicists upon Joliot-Curie’s discovery of artificial radiation.  The irony being it was this high school class experiment as revealed the atom was not the smallest particle of creation, something smaller was inside.  Shortly after, these particles were given names: the electron, the proton, the neutron and curiously enough, a positively charged electron, known as the positron.  At this juncture radioactivity was known but not why.  What Irene and Frederic, daughter and son-in-law of Marie Curie discovered by targeting ordinary aluminum with alpha particles, then on removing the radioactive source, the aluminum continued to emit radioactivity. The target that had not been radioactive became radioactive.

Why?

These were the strange phenomenon rummaging through the close-knit community of those who now considered themselves nuclear physicists.  It was an open marriage of research, that did alternately inspire and spear each other as one hypothesis floated while another sank.

While the physics cabal was in this excited state, poised at the precipice of “the sparks of God”, the tribes of Europe were exposed to another kind of radioactivity.  Hitler and the Nazis were on the ascendency, the Pope of Physics had emigrated to England, on finding the English a touch stuffy, Einstein accepted a position at Princeton.  That this physics community was infused with those of Jewish ancestry is to wonder where we ought not.  The consequence was, this science, this Jewish science, was collectively targeted by the Nazi regime.  To the salvation of physics and perhaps the world, these prewar years came with a supportive scientific community.  They were, all of them, collectively in danger, on any day to be denounced, arrested, interned at a concentration camp, the Konzentrationslager.  The academic community felt hunted and responded with a secretive underground for scientists of all stripes, if particularly nuclear physicists.  Spirited out of the Fatherland to labs, teaching posts, research, government, lecturing … despite many could not speak street English.  This pre-war smuggling ring was to rescue hundreds of researchers and academics targeted by the German state.  Any list of these escapees is long, amongst them known as the Exodus, if a Scientific Exodus: Einstein, Teller, Bohr, Fermi, Lawrence, Wagner, Frisch, Hahn, Franck, Sailard, von Neumann, Bethe, Peiris, Rotblat, Fuchs, Segre, among many others, to include a dark haired woman named Lise Meitner, she too of Jewish extraction.

Lise was the first woman to become a professor of physics in Germany, a position she lost in 1939 as she fled for her life earlier that summer with German SS on her trail.  A movie-script escape as conspiring fellow scientists moved her across Germany’s police state, knowing she was “denounced”, an effective description, for Lise Meitner would have become a non-entity had the authorities captured this woman of “particular fission.”  Like a good spy thriller, her escape ended breathlessly as her liberators texted the cryptic telegram when she arrived intact in Sweden, “the baby is safely delivered.”

The newly liberated Lise Meitner’s brother-in-law was Otto Frisch, they along with Otto Hahn were the trio as was to discover that fission of the atom was possible.  That the tiny particles bound together by God and creation could be fissioned.  U-238, the most common form, when bombarded with a neutron caused something weird to happen, the uranium absorbed the neutron and the nucleus released nuclei and some energy.  “Some energy” the coy expression used.  A touch matter-of-fact considering “some energy” was to reshape history and its moral horizon.

Initially their experiment did not particularly excite the physics world.  Ernest Rutherford disbelieving said he doubted atomic energy could be released on a large scale. Fission as a significant energy was “moonshine” he said.  Niels Bohr expressed a similar sentiment, “such energies … are far beyond the reach of experiment.”  Einstein described the chance of this energy release like “a blind man in a dark night hunting ducks by firing a shotgun straight up in the air in a country where there are very few ducks.”