More stories from my dad

focus on Los Alamos.

With troops deployed in domestic streets and war looming, I’m inexcusably indulging in escapism.

My father, Sam, led an interesting life, about which he told many jokes and stories. I should pass some of those along while I’m able. Here, I’ll just give some from his scientific life, saving the best South Chicago slum stories for another round.

Sam’s memories of his undergrad teacher, Arthur C. Lunn, have a unique historical importance because Lunn was the first to formulate modern quantum mechanics, preceding both deBroglie and Schroedinger. Lunn’s paper, which Sam saw, was rejected by Physical Review, with Fulcher as referee. Fortunately this story has already been written up by a pair of wonderful Bulgarian chemists, so I won’t repeat more of it here. (M.B. Weissman , V.V. Iliev, I . Gutman. A pioneer remembered: biographical notes about Arthur Constant Lunn. Communications in Mathematical and in Computer Chemistry, 59 (3), 687-708 (2008))

Many of Sam’s stories are recounted in some reminiscences in the Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry. I won’t repeat those here, and hope that the journal won’t mind my posting this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ELbY7duqEm44KXxS3KQH7UA6jRSgwVg4/view?usp=sharing
Sam was particularly proud to be the first known author to get the word “fucking” in a major journal of the physical sciences. It’s part of an important philosophical anecdote on Operationalism. As the paper went to press the Annual Reviews editor called him to say “I bet you thought we would take that out.”

Those Annual Review reminiscences skip Los Alamos (https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/samuel-isaac-weissman/) , so I’ll focus on some from there.

Here’s one story that’s relevant to the belief I’ve seen in institutions from a library board to scientific groups that organizations need proper hierarchy, professionalism, and deference to authority to be effective. The first meeting of the Chemistry and Metallurgy group at Los Alamos was held outdoors under the leadership of Joe Kennedy. A grad student, Prestwood, brought his dog, who started squirming around in the Los Alamos dust. Kennedy interrupted the meeting to say “Prestwood, your dog has worms.” Prestwood replied “Goddamn it Kennedy, do I say you have worms every time you scratch your ass?”

Sam generally hated pulling rank on anybody, but there was one exception. He was sent urgently somewhere by plane, when seats were scarce and carefully prioritized. There was a full-chicken colonel beating a swagger-stick on his leg waiting at the plane to see what big shot had bumped him when he arrived at the plane in his usual state — unshaven and wearing sneakers, blue jeans, and a tee shirt.

The military police at Los Alamos had volunteered to participate in important hazardous duty, not to baby-sit a bunch of neurotic scientists and their families. One, a Sergeant Bolnick, was being shown around on his first day. He happened to be brought by the lab where Sam and Dave Lipkin and Morrie Pearlman were working just after they’d spilled some plutonium. Sam said the three of them were running around and squawking like chickens just as Bolnick came by. Bolnick asked his guide “Them’s the guys that’s gonna win this fucking war.?”

Still, the M.P.s hung out in town to make sure that nothing leaked. One unfortunate janitor was arrested in a bar where he got a little drunk and waved around what he said was the secret to winning the war, an electrical resistor.

Security may not have been quite as tight as intended. Once, hitching back from Santa Fe, Sam was picked up by a hayseed driving a beat-up pickup truck chewing on a straw. The hayseed asked “How’s Oppie?”.

On security again, Sam remembered a guy who had been assigned to write up the key procedures sitting on a stool as they (mostly Dave) briefed him on how to build an initiator. Apparently they did a good job, since Sam claimed that Klaus Fuch’s award from the East German government specifically mentioned his excellent work on the initiator.

Sam and Dave and Morrie made some whimsical plans for ethnically passing, I forget whether they were nominally for dealing with a Nazi victory or with a somewhat anti-semitic job market. Sam was to become “Sanford I. Witherow”, Dave was to be “Davis J. Lipincott, Jr.”, and Morrie was to be “M. Llewellyn Pierpont, III”.

There were the usual squabbles over resources. Sam grabbed a piece of apparatus that he needed from the delivery room although it technically was addressed to someone else. A few days later its owner, Emilio Segré, stormed in to the lab: “You, you- I have a chicken to pick with you.”

Sam remembered hearing a heavily accented new voice at the end of a hallway and wondering if that was a cab driver who’d just driven someone from Brooklyn. It was, of course, Feynman.

Somebody had found some unexpected emission from an irradiated uranium sample, IIRC. It looked like a thorium emission. A theorist was arguing that the emission proved that there was thorium contamination but Sam had developed a sensitive chemical thorium assay and had ruled that out. The theorist kept arguing anyway. Feynman overheard and laughed so hard he ended up on the floor.

Sam remembered an incident that he saw as the start of Teller’s antagonism to Oppenheimer. Teller was useless on the project because he was obsessed with the future fusion bomb. He gave a little talk about how easy it would be to build one, using rough calculations that (as physicists like to do) “ignored factors of order unity.” Teller dropped a factor of c², the square of the speed of light. Oppenheimer asked “ Is c² of order unity?” The calculation was in some standard units, S.I. or cgs, in which c is 3*10⁸ or 3* 10¹⁰. Teller sat down glaring at Oppenheimer.

Off-topic, but I met Teller once, when I was maybe 9 years old. My sister and I were having lunch with Ed Condon and his wife at a beautiful restaurant up on a mountainside, I guess near Boulder. I was looking forward to some chocolate cake for dessert. The scariest-looking man I’d ever seen came in and made a beeline for our table. He started berating Condon with phrases like “pacifists like you would have sold us down the river in World War 2.” We left without touching dessert.

Sam didn’t share the adulation of Oppenheimer that some young physicists felt. He was amused that they took to scratching the palms of their hands in imitation of Oppie. He was irritated that they repeated his claim that Schubert was childish.

Especially after the defeat of the Nazis many at Los Alamos became concerned about the use of the bomb, as it became clear that one could be built. James Franck began circulating a petition that it not be used on civilian targets. It’s no secret that the government had no interest in their views. Oppenheimer’s role was not what one might guess from the roles he played after the war. As Sam told it, Phil Morrison came back from a meeting in D.C. and reported “Oppie says forget about that petition. We ain’t killed a single Jap yet.”

(Off topic again, but Franck was the first person to tell me, in 1965, that I’d become a physicist, based on my incorrect but intuitive attempt to answer a question he asked about sunlight.)

Six months before his death, Sam had a stroke that destroyed his short-term memory and damaged his long-term memory. He believed at least at one point in that period that the bomb had been dropped on the Nazis. I didn’t have the heart to correct him.

After the war, Joe Kennedy brought Sam and Dave and three other chemists from Los Alamos to Washington U. in St. Louis to essentially form a new chemistry department. The university promised to desegregate and did although one of the trustees tried to back out on the grounds that putting in a second set of bathrooms would be too expensive.

At WUSTL Sam started work on magnetic resonance spectroscopy. He arranged to go to the national lab at Brookhaven for the summer for work on a non-military project. He couldn’t go because his security clearance was pulled. How that was supposed to stop the Soviets from finding out how to build an atom bomb was unclear, since they’d already tested one. The government made seven charges in the case. I remember two —that grandma had given $5 to the Spanish Republican government‘s defense against the fascists and that my mother’s roommate in Berkeley had subscribed to The Daily World. The Brookhaven visits were delayed for a couple of years until Sam found a lawyer from a firm with Sen. Symington. The lawyer made the case that “Seven times zero is zero” and we spent the summers of 1954 and 1955 at Brookhaven.

I’ll probably think of some more stories to add to this at some point. But it’s the South Chicago stories, set in a stew of religious nuts, crooks, cops… that are more vivid if less historically special. Here’s just one preview that overlaps the scientific stories. A fellow chemistry grad student had simultaneously been a rabbinical student, but had been expelled. The rabbis told him why: “We saw you coming out of the whorehouse on Saturday. And we know they only take cash.”