Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age by Amir D Aczel, Palgrave Macmillan. Hardback ISBN 9780230613744, £18.99 ($27). Paperback ISBN 9780230103351, £10.99. Digital Audio ISBN 9781427209320, $20.99. Online version ISBN 9780230100992, $12.99.
The discovery of nuclear fission and the race to develop the atomic bomb brought a new age both of history and of science. It is not surprising that it has produced, and continues to produce, its own copious literature. The classic is Richard Rhodes' 900-page The Making of the Atomic Bomb, "an epic worthy of Milton", according to 1944 Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi.
The many nuclear threads, whether scientific, political or anecdotal, are closely interwoven by Rhodes, making it indeed a Miltonesque epic. It is a wonderful book, but at the same time a difficult one to consult, with its various themes fragmented and scattered. In addition, new material has been revealed since Rhodes' book first appeared, but which now forms an integral part of Aczel's more succinct story.
One such ingredient was the publication in 1992 of the Farm Hall transcripts, from when German nuclear scientists were secretly brought together in the UK in 1945 and their conversations bugged. This disclosure produced its own ripple of literature.
Another new ingredient was the explosion of speculation surrounding what could have been said at the meeting in 1941 between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, highlighted by the unexpected success of Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen (CERN Courier June 2007 p25). This created a controversy out of all proportion to the importance of this meeting for history. Other nuclear events and turning points – the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, which showed that a uranium-235 bomb would be easily transportable; whether to use uranium-235 or plutonium; gun-barrel versus implosion techniques; and above all the decision to use the bomb, twice – all affected history far more. The inconsequential Bohr-Heisenberg meeting became grossly inflated.
Bohr's private papers in Copenhagen were supposed to remain closed for 50 years after his death in 1962 but the controversy resulting from Frayn's play made the authorities change their mind in 2002. Aczel has drawn on this material, which includes a number of letters to Heisenberg drafted by Bohr, but never sent. Aczel reports "[Bohr's] damning words contradict everything that Heisenberg had said about his meetings with Bohr, the interpretations of the events in Copenhagen as portrayed in books…, as well as the Frayn play".
Other recently released material used by Aczel includes wartime papers that reveal the extent to which Japanese diplomatic communications were monitored by the Allies. The book is a useful survey of the history of nuclear physics and nuclear weapons, with the advantage of being succinct and up to date, from Einstein to Iran. Its revelations from the Bohr papers are important.
Gordon Fraser is editor of The New Physics for the 21st Century, recently reissued by Cambridge University Press in paperback.
How Physics Confronts Reality: Einstein was Correct but Bohr Won the Game by Roger G Newton, World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 9789814277020, £41 ($54). Paperback ISBN 9789814277037, £22 ($29.95). Online version ISBN 9789814277044, $70.
In the mid-1960s, when the study of elastic scattering looked promising as a means to understand nuclear forces, I became acquainted with Roger Newton's textbook Scattering Theory of Waves and Particles (McGraw-Hill 1966). I found it to be of great help, even if life and physics turned out to be more complex than elastic scattering.
More recently, he addressed a wider, non-specialized audience, about the making of modern physics. The aim was to help "thinking about physics rather than simply doing it" (Thinking about Physics, Princeton University Press 2000). He achieves that in this latest book within nine chapters embedded in an introduction (plus preface) and an epilogue, followed by a list of references and further reading, in a total of 150 pages. Physics and reality in a terse mode!
The reader finds an account of particles and fields with Faraday and Maxwell and J J Thomson's electron; the origin of quantum theory and wave-particle duality; the uncertainty principle and new mathematical tools. But what is the significance of all of these? Bohr talked of the measurement problem and Schrödinger of entanglement. The whole of chapter 3 takes over these points to describe Einstein's "defection" from quantum theory – but typical of this book's style we also find an aside on Bose-Einstein statistics and Bose-Einstein condensation, just to show that Einstein was not getting out of touch at the time of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper.
The book then develops along twin threads: how, from the ancient intuition, the reality of atoms was visibly established without doubt (chapter 4); and how in the description of the laws of motion the distance increased between the foundations of the theory and everyday experience thanks to Einstein (chapter 5). A few pages about fields lead to new particles and their quantum origin, and then to the need for accelerators, from Lawrence's cyclotron to CERN's LHC. This is followed by an attempt to explain how the particles go together to form different kinds of matter.
The last chapter casts light on "methods and underpinnings" to bring order to the crowd of particles discovered from the 1950s onwards. The experimental methods are reduced to two examples, without reference to current experiments in particle physics. The theoretical methods cover symmetries, the Standard Model, Higgs particles, strings and superstrings.
The epilogue stresses that while nowadays we visualize the ultimate constituents of matter at an unprecedented level, the laws of dynamics have become awkward and distant from our intuition. This is indeed the leitmotif of the whole book, but the melody becomes inaudible. Where it emerges it does not help the flow of the text.
The tale is pleasant, intertwined by anecdotes, but it proceeds by alighting on topics, which are not always in a logical sequence. What is assessed is accurate and well thought out, but I am not sure that without some previous in-depth knowledge the reader will get to the point. Unfortunately, half of the further reading is out of print, and some I suppose is also out of date.
Maria Fidecaro, CERN.