Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction, started the American bomb project, and then spent the rest of his life trying to stop what he had begun. Born in Budapest in 1898 to a Jewish family, he studied engineering, was wounded in the First World War, and moved to Berlin, where he took a doctorate under von Laue and worked with Einstein on a refrigerator with no moving parts. He left Germany the day after the Reichstag fire, having noticed that trains were empty and that a week later they would not be. In London in September 1933, crossing the road at Southampton Row, he conceived the idea of a neutron-induced chain reaction — a reaction that releases more neutrons than it consumes. He patented it in 1934 and assigned the patent to the British Admiralty to keep it secret. When fission was discovered in 1938 he understood immediately what it meant. He drafted the letter that Einstein signed to Roosevelt in August 1939, warning that Germany might build a bomb. He worked with Fermi on the first reactor at Chicago in 1942 and holds the reactor patent jointly with him. He then circulated the Szilard petition in 1945, signed by seventy scientists, urging that the bomb not be used on Japan without a demonstration and warning. It never reached Truman. He left physics for molecular biology after the war, founded the Council for a Livable World, and proposed the term deterrence in its modern sense. He died in 1964. He had, characteristically, kept a packed suitcase for years.
- Lived: 1898 CE – 1964 CE
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: physicist, scientist
