Frederick (1979)

Boredom Creates Friction

Count Rumford (1753-1814)

Benjamin Thompson (born in Woburn, MA) was the American anti-Franklin. He was a prolific inventor and scientist but sided with Britain during the Revolution and left America after the War and lived abroad thereafter. He eventually settled in Bavaria where he changed his name to Count Rumford and then changed our understanding of the science of heat. And he did all this in the service of practical pursuits.

Rumford oversaw the boring of iron cannon from iron cylinders using a horse-driven drill. He was impressed by how much heat the drilling friction gave off and he designed experiments to measure this. With insulated cannons and submerged drilling experiments, he carefully measured temperature increases. He found that sustained drilling could heat and boil cold water! Collecting and weighing the iron filings, he established that the metal shavings had the same weight and properties as the unbored metal, so nothing had been "given off" as was then currently thought. Rumford concluded that the mechanical work by the horses was converted into heat. Rumford showed that mechanical action can generate indefinitely large amounts of heat, thus directly challenging the caloric theory of the great Frenchman, Lavoisier. 

Lavoisier, a contemporary, didn't live to appreciate Rumford's work--he was guillotined in the French Revolution--ironically for Royalist sympathies. Rumford wound up marrying his widow, Marie-Anne Paulze who was an unappreciated chemist in her own right.

The Frightening News First Heard In German...

Lise Meitner with Otto Hahn. Leitner, who was born Jewish, had fled Berlin that July 1938. She first spread the news of fission to the rest of the physics community.

Splitting the atom in 1938 was something wholly different than what had gone on with radiation since its discovery in 1896. To my mind, the news must have been like expanding the notion of arithmetic from simple addition and subtraction to suddenly include the concept of division. It really blew people's minds at the time. Soddy had explained how elements incrementally transmuted downwards in atomic number (subtraction) by shedding alpha particles and how they transmuted upwards (addition) in number by losing beta particles, but nobody was looking for this:*

original

In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and fished out the products. Neutrons were all the rage after their discovery in 1932 and physicists wanted to know what they did to all types of matter. Enrico Fermi had started this sort of work in Italy, but had been interrupted. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out what was going on. Hahn and Straßmann had expected to observe slightly lighter atoms like radium, actinium, and thorium; instead they observed the much lighter elements barium, lanthanum, and cerium:

Als Chemiker müssen wir aus den kurz dargelegten Versuchen das obengebrachte Schema eigentlich umbenennen und statt Ra, Ac, Th die Symbole Ba, La und Ce einsetzen. Als der Physik in gewisser Weise nahestehende Kernchemiker können wir uns zu diesem, allen bisherigen Erfahrungen der Kernphysik widersprechenden Sprung noch nicht entschließen. Es könnte doch noch vielleicht eine Reihe seltsamer Zufälle unsere Ergebnisse vorgetäuscht haben.

As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics. A series of strange coincidences could still prove our results false.

This was the first published account of nuclear fission. Smart people realized that the exact chemical products required that more neutrons were coming out than were going in--this was soon verified and led physicists to realize that Leo Szilárd's chain reaction was now feasable. The news spread like fallout. And because it came from 1938 Berlin, the entire rest of the physics community panicked...and then they organized.**

Read more about the discovery of fission here.

__________________________
*A German chemist, Ida Noddack, had suggested as early as 1934 that "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbors of the irradiated element"---but no one took her seriously.  link

**Another frightening fact was that the Austrians had cut off everyone else's supply of uranium from the original Czech mine--the same place Marie Curie had obtained her original samples in 1896.

Titanic Centennial: The Unsinkable Maggie Brown

Margaret "Molly" Brown (1867-1932)

Margaret Brown (nobody actually called her Molly) played herself that night on board Titanic's lifeboat No. 6. The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters recorded her story, but left out some interesting details. One reason I think this book is important is that it was rushed to print in 1912 before the sensation grew cold. Some facts in the book have been challenged--others have been altered during the subsequent 100 years. Here is Maggie Brown's story from the book, with my footnotes added from facts gleaned from the Wikipedia link above:

The boat in which Mrs. J.J. Brown, of Denver, Col., was saved contained only three men in all, and only one rowed. He was a half-frozen seaman who was tumbled into the boat at the last minute.[1] The women wrapped him in blankets and set him at an oar to start his blood. The second man was too old to be of any use.[2] The third was a coward.[3]

Strange to say, there was room in this boat for ten other people. Ten brave men would have received the warmest welcome of their lives if they had been there. The coward, being a quartermaster and the assigned head of the boat, sat in the stern and steered. He was terrified, and the women had to fight against his pessimism while they tugged at the oars.

The women sat two at each oar. One held the oar in place, the other did the pulling. Mrs. Brown coached them and cheered them on. She told them that the exercise would keep the chill out of their veins, and she spoke hopefully of the likelihood that some vessel would answer the wireless calls. Over the frightful danger of the situation the spirit of this woman soared.

And the coward sat in his stern seat, terrified, his tongue loosened with fright. He assured them there was no chance in the world. He had fourteen years' experience, and he knew. First, they would have to row one and a half miles at least to get out of the sphere of suction, if they did not want to go down. They would be lost, and nobody would ever find them.

'Oh, we shall be picked up sooner or later,' said some of the braver ones. 'No,' said the man, there was no bread in the boat, no water; they would starve--all that big boatload wandering the high seas with nothing to eat, perhaps for days.
'Don't,' cried Mrs. Brown. 'Keep that to yourself, if you feel that way. For the sake of these women and children, be a man. We have a smooth sea and a fighting chance. Be a man.'

But the coward only knew that there was no compass and no chart aboard. They sighted what they thought was a fishing smack on the horizon, showing dimming in the early dawn.[4] The man at the rudder steered toward it, and the women bent to their oars again. They covered several miles in this way--but the smack faded into the distance. They could not see it any longer. And the coward said everything was over.

They rowed back nine weary miles. Then the coward thought they must stop rowing, and lie in the trough of the waves until the Carpathia should appear.[5] The women tried it for a few moments, and then felt the cold creeping into their bodies. Though exhausted from the hard physical labor they thought work was better than freezing.

'Row again!' commanded Mrs. Brown.
'No, no, don't,' said the coward.
'We shall freeze,' cried several of the women together. 'We must row. We have rowed all this time. We must keep on or freeze.'

When the coward still demurred, they told him plainly and once for all that if he persisted in wanting them to stop rowing, they were going to throw him overboard and be done with him for good. Something about the look in the eye of that Mississippi-bred oarswoman,[6] who seemed such a force among her fellows, told him that he had better capitulate. And he did.

_________________
[1] Fredrick Fleet, then aged 24. Fleet was the lookout in the crow's nest who first spotted the iceberg and alerted the bridge. Depressed the rest of his life, Fleet committed suicide at age 78, distraught over the death of his wife.
[2] Arthur Peuchen then aged 52. Forever afterwards branded a coward, Peuchen died in 1929 after losing his fortune in the stock market.
[3] Quartermaster Robert Hichens, then aged 29. Hichens was manning the helm of the Titanic when she struck the iceberg. Hichens denied all of Brown's cowardice claims (but never sued) as well as later allegations that he had mistakenly exacerbated the collision at the helm. He died in 1940, aged 58.

Both Fleet (lookout) and Hichens (helmsman) are portrayed in this snippet of James Cameron's (1997) Titanic:

H/T: EBL

[4] This could have been the SS Californian which was only 10 miles distant from the wreck site. There were no small fishing boats that far out at sea.

[5] This must have been hindsight. Neither Mrs Brown nor Hichens would have likely been aware of the rescuing vessel's name until the next morning.

[6] Brown was a native Missourian, not a Mississippian.

Here is more information on Maggie Brown: link

Doing the aftermath of Becquerel's discovery

[continuation in part from here]

Becquerel's discovery of uranium's radioactivity led to several immediate questions:

(1) Were other elements besides uranium radioactive?
(2) What is radioactivity? Was it it like X-rays?
(3) How to square radioactivity with the Law Of Conservation of Energy.

In the mid 1890's the Periodic Table looked like this:

Original

Note that the noble gases (which had just been discovered--were absent). Also, nickel and cobalt were incorrectly ordered under group VIII as I mentioned here.

Marie Curie found that thorium (an element known since 1828) was radioactive in 1898.  There was a priority dispute with a German chemist, Gerhard Carl Schmidt which I'm still reading about. Thorium's importance briefly eclipsed uranium's, because the latter was in short supply until more sources could be found. Curie, along with her husband Pierre, began extracting uranium from samples of impure Czech pitchblende. They discovered that the purer they got the uranium, the stronger the radioactivity was in the concentrated waste left behind. This told them that something else was in there. They discovered polonium in July and radium in December of 1898, adding two new elements to the chart shown above.  In this way, radioactivity became a tool for discovering new elements.

The Restless Conscience

I found this movie on Netflix and watched it last weekend.  I wanted to see and hear Freya von Moltke, whom I wrote about here. She appears briefly in the linked trailer at the 1 min 14 sec mark. She is interviewed throughout the movie which tells the story of her husband, Helmuth James von Moltke, whom I wrote about here. The movie isn't about him per se but does an excellent job of fitting him into the larger picture of German anti-War resistance at the time.

If you're into that sort of history, give the movie a watch.  The Restless Conscience (1992)

Everybody Wants To Rue The World

Patti Smith is a long time favorite recording artist--warts and all. She's a much better role model than say, Madonna and that ilk. I like her cover of the Tears For Fears song better than the original version--though I do like their video.

I read once that she heard it in coffee shop or a mall somewhere in suburban Detroit and that it helped to inspire her to restart her career. Here's hoping.

Conversations with Henry

[Continued from here]

At Henry's suggestion, I wrote to Jacob Bigeleisen. He replied:*

[Salutation]:

How did I get into isotope chemistry? In 1943 I worked at SAM Laboratory at Columbia U (Manhattan Project). My initial assignment was to look for isotope shifts in the electronic spectra of uranium compounds (principally uranyl ion). The purpose of this research was to examine the feasibility of a photochemical separation of the uranium isotopes for military purposes. It was a small project. It was here that I became acquainted with Maria Mayer. She worked on the theory of the spectra. I did experiments and consulted with her regularly about my results and her results. The project was reviewed in July 1943 by James B. Conant and Richard C. Tolman, two high officials in the war time science effort. They brought along as an advisor E.B. Wilson, Jr., the outstanding spectroscopist and quantum chemist from Harvard. The Committee found our work very interesting, but recommended that it be discontinued. The time schedule for any practical application of a photochemical process was inconsistent with the plans for the production of a weapon. People like Urey favored a small scale continuing effort as part of scientific intelligence. Was this a path the Germans could be following?

The dozen or so people working on the project were reassigned in September. I was assigned to write up the work of the project as a final report, which was issued under the name of H.C. Urey. Maria Mayer went to the hospital in October 1943 for gall bladder surgery. In late November an assistant of Urey's (one of his former graduate students) Isidor Kirschenbaum came to see me. He said 'you know all about spectra of uranium compounds.' I said I didn't know everything; what was known, I knew. He said: 'Here is this formula. Put in the information about all uranium compounds and give me the results. We are interested in the possible chemical separation of the uranium isotopes. What we would be particularly interested in would be a volatile compound, which dissociates in the vapor. We have reason to believe that this would be very favorable.'  I asked: 'How do you know this?'  He said he could not tell me. I looked at the formula he gave me. It was the Urey-Greiff equation. I told him that I was not familiar with that whole field and I would have to study it out before I put numbers into the equation. He then said: 'Don't you know there is a war on?' He reported to Urey that I was not a very cooperative person.

Well I studied out the Urey-Greiff equation. There are a lot of factors. For uranium compounds, I could see that we did not know some of the factors; for some of the factors the number was of the order +1.001; for some of the factors the number was -1.001. With the computing facilities available then (desktop mechanical calculators) one could get any final answer from +1.00x to -1.00x from the Urey-Greiff equation. So, I decided I would look into a different approach. In chemistry and most of physics, one does not measure absolute quantities. One measures differences. Would it be possible to calculate differences directly instead of absolute quantities and then subtract the two to get the isotope effect? I started on this approach and I completed the zero point energy and the Boltzmann excitation terms.

On Monday after Thanksgiving 1943 Maria Mayer returned to work. She asked me how I was coming along with the final report. I told her I was not working on it. 'What was I doing?' she asked. I explained the problem to her and showed her my progress. This was a general type of problem she was thoroughly familiar with. In collaboration with George E. Kimball and Walter Stockmayer, she had calculated the isotope effect in the reaction HD + H₂O = H₂ + HDO. This reaction was used to produce heavy water at a plant in Trail B.C. and in Norway.) She was also familiar with the general subject since she and her husband, Joe Mayer, had just written a book on statistical mechanics. I had studied this book as a graduate student. She found my approach very interesting, very sensible and very promising. She then volunteered by asking me whether she could join me in working on this project. I said sure, that would be great. So she did and by the end of the day we completed the derivation of the Bigeleisen-Mayer equation. [1] We then made a number of predictions of systems that would be hopeless for uranium isotope separation and pointed to potential interesting avenues. An experimental program was then organized under Clyde Hutchinson. I worked on that for about a half a year.

Urey was too occupied to look into what we had done. His deputies either did not understand or did not believe that a green Ph.D. new to the field could simplify the Urey-Greiff equation to the point where meaningful calculations could be made. There was a lot of secrecy and people were not told everything they needed to know to make the best progress. In April I became involved in determining the structure of UF₆ by spectroscopic means. I did the experiments at American Cyanamid in Stamford, Conn., where they had outstanding spectroscopic equipment. I worked on the analysis of the the spectra with Maria Mayer, who had tried two years earlier in collaboration with Edward Teller to predict the vibrational structure of UF₆ from first principles! I told Maria Mayer when I started on that project that it was an experimental project, not one for calculation. She asked me whether I could do it (determine the Raman spectrum). She took out of her drawer the infra-red spectrum which had been measured by John Turkevich at Princeton. Neither she, Turkevich nor Edward Teller were able to decipher the infra-red spectrum of UF₆. While Maria Mayer and I worked on the analysis of the spectra, from which we deduced unequivocally the regular octahedral structure, in contrast to the electron diffraction results of Simon Bauer, she told me that she had written a summary report of our work on the theory of isotope effects in equilibria and our calculations relevant to uranium isotope separation.

She prepared this report at the request of Martin Kilpatrick, Urey's deputy to whom we reported. The reason for this was that Edward Teller was to make one of his regular consulting visits from Los Alamos. Kilpatrick showed Teller Maria Mayer's report of our work. Teller had also worked on this problem (there is a 1938 paper by Herzfeld and Teller). He told Kilpatrick that the work was correct and first class. Kilpatrick reported to Maria Mayer that Teller approved of the work. Fine. That made her furious. She said to me: 'They trust Edward Teller and not me.'

Regards to Henry. Pass this message on to him.

Jacob Bigeleisen

__________________________________
* Bigeleisen wrote to me in longhand. I transcribed it here. I supplied the links as well in case anyone was interested.

[1] Bigeleisen later retold a reporter about this amazing moment when he was briefly overwhelmed by Maria Mayer's brilliance:

She looked at my work and asked 'why don't you finish it up by taking out the classical part?'  Without a pause, she wrote the simplified equation, saying 'Now you have it; it's all done.' I didn't immediately understand what she meant when she said to cut out the classical part. I went home. I worked on it, and eventually I got the same result.

Conversations with Henry: She Was A Piece Of Work

[continued from back here]


Henry: Jake didn't really discover kinetic isotope effects -- he just explained them first. Plus I think he had some help.


Me: From whom?

Henry: Maria Mayer. Boy she was piece of work. Smart as a whip. She was the poster girl for how badly science used to treat women.

Me: Really?


Henry: Yes. She won the Nobel Prize eventually. Not in Chemistry though, but Physics. She developed the shell structure model of atomic nuclei. She ended up down by you you know.


Me: You mean UCSD?


Henry: Yep. But she started out in Germany -- as Maria Goeppert. She was friends with all the big time physicists back then. You should look her up. Interesting story. But if you're interested in isotope effects, why don't you just write Jake -- he's a nice guy.  


Me: Thanks, I will. Can I mention you?


Henry: Please do and give him my regards.

I look at my cards and frown. I discard two and ask for two more.

[story continued here]

The Wrecking Crew (2008)

Those boots were made for walkin'. Carol Kaye behind the scenes.

Imagine if every hit song of the late 50s, 60s, 70s, and even into the 80s was performed by one band. Ridiculous, huh? Well, guess what? It's closer to reality than you may think.

That quote was taken from a review for the film The Wrecking Crew (2008).  I haven't seen the movie yet but I'd like to--but Netflix doesn't carry it and I'm too cheap to buy it at Amazon.

There is a fair bit about the Wrecking Crew over at Wiki.  Back in the day, big label record companies didn't trust all the members of a band to go into a recording studio without screwing things up.  Only the indispensable stars of a recording act would sit for a recording session. The rest of the musicians were professional session musicians like bassist Carol Kaye (above) at Capitol Records in L.A.

Detroit had its own "wrecking crew" and there's a film called Standing In The Shadows of Motown (2002) that tells their story.

Freya von Moltke Never Went Back To Poland

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Freya von Moltke (1911-2010)

Freya von Moltke passed away almost unnoticed early this year.  I was twittering around late one night last spring and came across her book, Memories of Kreisau and the German Resistance. I was interested in her husband, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, after having watched Sophie Scholl: Die Letzten Tage. 

Memories of Kreisau & The German Resistance is a slim volume which I read through in a weekend. I marked a couple passages with yellow stickies that I thought might be worth remembering.  Here she writes about what motivated her husband and his friends:

However, questions of faith were also, or became, personally vital for almost all the members of the group.  Even if they were not churchgoing Christians, it was their faith in divine work, and, in fact, the faith rooted in Christian heritage, that gave them their foundation and their courage.  Their faith also imposed upon them the duty to act against the destruction of fundamental humanity (evolved from Christianity) by National Socialism and to risk their lives for this. However, for them it was not only a matter of great heritage, out of which our western treasures had grown, in spite of all atrocities committed by the church and by Christians throughout the centuries; rather, they also believed in the future of Christianity.  Christianity has a way--just when it appears bankrupt--of becoming alive again in a new and different manner. They believed that. Faith is tested by one's actions. People attach themselves to many gods and are always in danger of being led astray by false gods--as was the case then with the false gods of National Socialism.

Her husband, Helmuth James von Moltke, was one of Germany's best legal minds of his generation.  He was arrested, charged with conspiracy, and executed just months before the end of the war.  Freya said of her husband:

Whoever wants to become acquainted with Helmuth, must read his letters. He is not easy to describe, especially not for me. 

Helmuth James von Moltke's  Letters To Freya (1939-45) is over 400 pages long and set in extremely small type font. He details in an unbroken series of letters to his wife the minutia of his thoughts on all matters as seen from someone inside the Third Reich on the other side.  The diarist narrative gets a bit bogged down in places and I admit that I skipped around, unlike Memories of Kreisau.

Imprisoned for a year, then tried and summarily executed, von Moltke wrote to his sons from prison (then aged just 3 and 6) calling their mother by her name and choosing words which they could not possibly have understood then:

...Ever since National Socialism came to power, I have done my best to mitigate the consequences for its victims and to prepare for a change. I was driven to it by my conscience, and, after all, it is a task for a man. From 1933 on, I have therefore had to make material sacrifices and to run personal risks. In all these years Freya, who was the one who suffered most from these sacrifices and who always had to be concerned that I would be arrested, imprisoned, or killed, never hindered me in what I considered necessary, or made it harder in any way. She was always ready to accept everything; she was always ready to make sacrifices if it was necessary. And I tell you: that is much more than I did. For running risks oneself, which one knows, is nothing compared with the readiness to let the person with whom one's life is joined run risks one cannot gauge. And it is much more, too, than the wife of a warrior accepts, for she has no choice; one word from Freya might have held me back from many an undertaking.

The very last two letters in Letters To Freya (written after he had been condemned and just days before his execution) are particularly moving and read in part like lyrics--as if written by a man graced with resolve and contentment.   Freya wrote in her book:

I carried Helmuth's commitment with him from the beginning, and therefore, I wanted him to continue....I never advised him to stop, but rather encouraged him, because I was convinced that that was the right way for him to fulfill his life.

It sounds to me like they had a perfect marriage.