Free Einstein's Genius Club by Katherine Williams Burton Feldman Page A

secret that not even Vice President Harry S. Truman was told about it until he took the oath as president after Roosevelt died. The entire project was set up under control of the Army, with then Brigadier General Leslie Groves in charge. Army security did theobvious things: It surrounded Los Alamos with barbed wire, had sentries patrol the outskirts, set up censorship of mail. But all this was futile unless the physicists were themselves loyal and remained so. How much could these scientists be trusted? Neither security officials nor the scientists were prepared for the complexities involved.
    The most valuable physicists were very much a foreign colony of savants. Fermi came from Italy; Wigner, von Neumann, and Teller from Hungary; Bethe from Germany, and Rudolf Peierls from Germany by way of England; Chadwick from England; Bohr from Denmark; Frisch from Austria by way of Denmark; Stanislaw Ulam from Poland; Vera Kistiakowsky from Russia. Their political views could be as puzzling to American security as their accents.
    General Groves worried about having to deal with prima donnas, but except for Teller, there were few of those. Nor were there many troublesome political radicals. The Europeans had a closer experience with the extremist left and right and were apt to be politically conservative in the United States—Hungarians like Wigner or von Neumann, for example. Fermi left Italy because its anti-Semitism threatened his Jewish wife; in the United States, he did not bother much with politics. But two important scientists stood on the left. One was Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré to Britain, thereafter assigned to Los Alamos, with access to all secrets. The other was Robert Oppenheimer. The irony was that the Army and the FBI never suspected Fuchs of being a spy, though he passed secrets to the USSR from 1942 to 1949 and gave the Soviets all they needed to know about American know-how and progress; but they continually suspected and hounded Oppenheimer, who in fact did not pass any secrets. A further irony is that without Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos, it is entirely possible that the atom bomb would never have been built, at least not so soon.

EPILOGUE
The Projects of Science
    T HE PATHOS OF SCIENCE LIES IN ITS DOUBLE NATURE : The scientist is at once free and strictly confined, individual but ultimately subsumed. This double role begins when the apprentice scientist starts the long and exacting effort to master the findings of that formidable (and always growing) army of predecessors. The energy of the young scientist, the intense interest, busy labor, and excitement of possible discovery naturally block off presentiments of eventually being an old lion in winter—and fortunately so, for the sake of science. Trying to make any sort of advance is strenuous enough without also contemplating being ultimately dislodged. Physics sees itself as a self-erasing discipline, concerned only with the leading edge of research.
    Those no longer on the leading edge—whether a few years behind, or centuries—no longer have an independent existence, as, say, Shakespeare and Rembrandt continue to have. Einstein was at the leading edge until 1926, but thereafter became like those he himself had once helped supplant. One might say that scientists have two careers, the living one of progress and discovery, and the posthumous one—and in certain ways, the posthumous career can begin before death occurs.
    Needless to say, science never advances very neatly. The time-lines of discovery move at very different speeds, and often in odd directions. While Einstein brought relativity to consummation in 1905, clarity about the atom progressed in fits and starts. The electron was discovered inside the atom in 1897; radioactive matter in 1896; the quantum in 1900. In 1911, Rutherford found the atomic nucleus; in 1913, Bohr showed that the stability of the atom required a quantum explanation. Quantum mechanics arrived in