People’s hands smell very different—that’s why dogs can identify people; you have to try it! All hands have a sort of moist smell, and a person who smokes has a very different smell on his hands from a person who doesn’t; ladies often have different kinds of perfumes, and so on. If somebody happened to have some coins in his pocket and happened to be handling them, you can smell that.
Los Alamos from Below[1]
When I say “Los Alamos from below,” I mean that. Although in my field at the present time I’m a slightly famous man, at that time I was not anybody famous at all. I didn’t even have a degree when I started to work with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos—people in higher echelons—worried about some big decisions. I worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath.
I was working in my room at Princeton one day when Bob Wilson came in and said that he had been funded to do a job that was a secret, and he wasn’t supposed to tell anybody but he was going to tell me because he knew that as soon as I knew what he was going to do, I’d see that I had to go along with it. So he told me about the problem of separating different isotopes of uranium to ultimately make a bomb. He had a process for separating the isotopes of uranium (different from the one which was ultimately used) that he wanted to try to develop. He told me about it, and he said, “There’s a meeting.”
I said I didn’t want to do it.
He said, “All right, there’s a meeting at three o’clock. I’ll see you there.”
I said, “It’s all right that you told me the secret because I’m not going to tell anybody but I’m not going to do it.”
So I went back to work on my thesis—for about three minutes. Then I began to pace the floor and think about this thing. The Germans had Hitler and the possibility of developing an atomic bomb was obvious, and the possibility that they would develop it before we did was very much of a fright. So I decided to go to the meeting at three o’clock.
By four o’clock I already had a desk in a room and was trying to calculate whether this particular method was limited by the total amount of current that you get in an ion beam, and so on. I won’t go into the details. But I had a desk, and I had paper, and I was working as hard as I could and as fast as I could, so the fellas who were building the apparatus could do the experiment right there.
It was like those moving pictures where you see a piece of equipment go bruuuuup, bruuuuup, bruuuuup. Every time I’d look up, the thing was getting bigger. What was happening, of course, was that all the boys had decided to work on this and to stop their research in science. All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that was not much science; it was mostly engineering.
All the equipment from different research projects was being put together to make the new apparatus to do the experiment—to try to separate the isotopes of uranium. I stopped my own work for the same reason, though I did take a six-week vacation after a while and finished writing my thesis. And I did get my degree just before I got to Los Alamos—so I wasn’t quite as far down the scale as I led you to believe.
One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they’d ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it.
So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead.”
It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best—summing it all up—without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.
It was ultimately decided that this project was not to be the one they were going to use to separate uranium. We were told then that we were going to stop, because in Los Alamos, New Mexico, they would be starting the project that would actually make the bomb. We would all go out there to make it. There would be experiments that we would have to do, and theoretical work to do. I was in the theoretical work. All the rest of the fellas were in experimental work.
The question was—What to do now? Los Alamos wasn’t ready yet. Bob Wilson tried to make use of this time by among other things, sending me to Chicago to find out all that we could find out about the bomb and the problems. Then, in our laboratories, we could start to build equipment, counters of various kinds, and so on, that would be useful when we got to Los Alamos. So no time was wasted.
I was sent to Chicago with the instructions to go to each group, tell them I was going to work with them, and have them tell me about a problem in enough detail that I could actually sit down and start to work on it. As soon as I got that far, I was to go to another guy and ask for another problem. That way I would understand the details of everything.
It was a very good idea, but my conscience bothered me a little bit because they would all work so hard to explain things to me, and I’d go away without helping them. But I was very lucky. When one of the guys was explaining a problem, I said, “Why don’t you do it by differentiating under the integral sign?” In half an hour he had it solved, and they’d been working on it for three months. So, I did something, using my “different box of tools.” Then I came back from Chicago, and I described the situation—how much energy was released, what the bomb was going to be like, and so forth.
I remember a friend of mine who worked with me, Paul Olum, a mathematician, came up to me afterwards and said, “When they make a moving picture about this, they’ll have the guy coming back from Chicago to make his report to the Princeton men about the bomb. He’ll be wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase and so on—and here you’re in dirty shirtsleeves and just telling us all about it, in spite of its being such a serious and dramatic thing.”
There still seemed to be a delay and Wilson went to Los Alamos to find out what was holding things up. When he got there, he found that the construction company was working very hard and had finished the theater, and a few other buildings that they understood, but they hadn’t gotten instructions clear on how to build a laboratory—how many pipes for gas, how much for water. So Wilson simply stood around and decided, then and there, how much water, how much gas, and so on, and told them to start building the laboratories.
When he came back to us, we were all ready to go and we were getting impatient. So they all got together and decided we’d go out there anyway even though it wasn’t ready.
1
Adapted from a talk given in the First Annual Santa Barbara Lectures on Science and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1975. “Los Alamos from Below” was one of nine lectures in a series published as Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943—1945, edited by L. Badash et al., pp. 105—132. Copyright C 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland.