
Leó Szilárd: A Forgotten Father of the Atomic Bomb - ryan_j_naughton
http://priceonomics.com/leo-szilard-a-forgotten-father-of-the-atomic-bomb/
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gjkood
Read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Leo Szilard plays a
very prominent part in the history of the bomb.

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krampian
One of my favorite texts back in my college days was The Ascent of Man by
Jacob Bronowski. USA folks may not be familiar with this. It was actually more
of a polished transcript of his TV series, which had aired in the UK and some
other countries (including Malta, where it was required reading for getting
into college in fact). Leo Szilard is a familiar name from that text - he
certainly gets plenty of airtime in there.

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rootbear
The Ascent of Man series was shown in the US on public television and I was a
huge fan. I had forgotten that Szilard was featured in it. I'd really like to
go back and re-watch that series.

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krampian
I believe it's all on Youtube these days...

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bediger4000
It looks like Szilard always had moral qualms about atomic bombs
([http://www.dannen.com/chronbio.html](http://www.dannen.com/chronbio.html)).

The "military head" of the Manhattan Project, General Groves appeared to have
really disliked Szilard: _Groves wanted to have Szilard "interned for the
duration of the war" as "an enemy alien"_ ([http://www.doug-
long.com/szilard.htm](http://www.doug-long.com/szilard.htm))

I'll bet that Szilard's iconoclasm and reaction to authority means that his
contributions get downplayed. Can't have a non-team-player elevated to hero
status, now can we?

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cafard
Forgotten by whom?

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andy_wrote
I was going to say - I believe historians regard "The Making of the Atomic
Bomb" as the definitive work on the subject, and Szilárd appears in the first
sentence of that book. (I've only read the first chapter or two, been meaning
to get around to this someday...)

Like this article, the book opens with a description of Szilárd thinking about
a nuclear chain reaction while walking about London.

~~~
gjkood
One of the very best non-fiction books that I have ever read.

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elektromekatron
One of the original Martians.

 _\- The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars, many of them not
unlike our Sun. Many of these stars are likely to have planets circling around
them. A fair fraction of these planets will have liquid water on their surface
and a gaseous atmosphere. The energy pouring down from a star will cause the
synthesis of organic compounds, turning the ocean into a thin, warm soup.
These chemicals will join each other to produce a self-reproducing system. The
simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become
more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge.
Civilization, science, and technology will follow. Then, yearning for fresh
worlds, they will travel to neighboring planets, and later to planets of
nearby stars. Eventually they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These
highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful
place as our Earth. - "And so, " \- Fermi came to his overwhelming question, -
"if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so
where are they? " \- It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor,
who supplied the perfect reply to Fermi's rethoric: - "They are among us," \-
he said, - "but they call themselves Hungarians."_

[http://mek.oszk.hu/03200/03286/html/tudos1/martians.html](http://mek.oszk.hu/03200/03286/html/tudos1/martians.html)

The bit in there about Hollywood is also amusing:

 _The American word "movie" probably derived from the Hungarian "mozi. "
Cynics says that Hungarians created America's Hollywood before other
Hungarians less destructively created America's A-bomb._

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hehaho
Surely the American word "movie" is simply an abbreviation of "moving
picture"?

It's true that Hungarian "mozi" (meaning "movie theater" or "the movies", not
"[a] movie") is itself short for "mozgóképszínház" = "moving-picture theater"
but I don't think there's any a priori reason to assume that the two
derivations are correlated.

