Science: The Philosophers’ Stone

The Philosophers’ Stone (See Cover)

One day in 1928, at a boarding house near the University of California at Berkeley, a strapping, reddish-haired sophomore named Willard Frank Libby met two graduate students. Their talk about chemical research was so exciting that Libby forgot his yearning to be a mining engineer, and switched to chemistry. Because of that chance meeting, Willard Libby, 46, sat in Geneva’s stately Palace of Nations this week as the ranking U.S. scientist and the chief U.S. spokesman at man’s first international effort to release the unplumbed benefits of peaceful atomic energy.

It is an appropriate setting for Scientist Libby. As a nuclear scientist on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, he is the man who unwrapped the stark facts about nuclear war. A “thermonuclear weapon” of the type that was exploded by the U.S. in the Pacific last year, said Scientist Libby in his famous “fallout speech” last June, can sprinkle death-dealing radioactive dust over an area of 100,000 square miles. “An area so large,” he added dryly, “;that evacuation may be a bit impractical.” As the AEC’s “vice president in charge of atoms for peace,” Libby is the American responsible for charting the tricky path away from national preoccupation with the destructive atom to international cooperation for harnessing the atom’s untold goodness. “We have only begun to scratch the surface,” says he. “We can advance in every direction.” Old Story, New Story. The story of the warlike atom is not new—the dark but necessary secrecy, the uncounted billions spent for uncounted numbers of atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, atomic cannon, nuclear submarines and still-secret devices which may exceed them all in power for ruination. Now the story of the peaceful atom has begun to unfold. Some of the benign works of atomic energy already under way:

¶In medicine, it can cure some kinds of cancer and promises to cure others.

¶In agriculture, it can produce better plant varieties, kill grain insects.

¶In industry, it speeds up chemical processes, measures the thickness of speeding sheets of paper or steel, forms better plastics and rubber, measures tobacco in cigarettes and traces the flow of oil in pipelines.

¶In laboratories, radioactive tracers have revolutionized research techniques, make it possible to follow the delicate chemical reactions within single living cells.

¶In power production, potentially the most promising avenue of all, current-producing reactors are already running in the U.S., Britain and Russia. At West Milton, N.Y., a reactor is feeding the first power—a token amount—into commercial use. The day is not distant when atomic power will be cheap enough and abundant enough to heat whole cities.

Beakers of Death. It is to measure this beginning, and explore the vast promise beyond, that the unprecedented Geneva conference convened this week. In a marble palace where, only days before, the world’s political leaders had floated the hope of a calmer, friendlier world, the world’s scientific leaders contemplated the means to make it a better world as well.

Convened by the United Nations as an outgrowth of President Eisenhower’s dramatic atoms-for-peace proposal of 1953, the International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy has brought together 1,200 scientists from 72 nations, collected for all to see and hear just about everything mankind knows about non-military aspects of nuclear energy.

There are mathematicians and theoretical physicists who think in strange abstractions, practical physicists who deal in billions of volts of energy and hundred-millionths of seconds, chemists who juggle beakers of death-dealing radiation, engineers who work to microscopic tolerances in strange new metals, biologists who use the atom in delicate life experiments, physicians who enlist the atom as a strong new ally against disease and death.

There are hundreds of unofficial delegates who came to watch and listen: far-sighted industrialists who see an enormous business potential and want to get in on the ground floor, financiers who smell big money, 500 journalists, swarms of plain tourists. They packed Geneva to the alleys, forced even some official delegates to live outside the city (e.g., some U.S. delegates are sleeping 20 miles away across the Swiss border in France). There are Indians and Czechs. Japanese and Hollanders, Pakistani and Lichtensteiners. The Russians arrived in force with 30 chainsmoking technicians to set up their exhibits and 150 other members in their delegation. The British, highly skilled in atomics, flooded down from London. Besides U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss and four other chief delegates (Dr. Libby. Nobel Prizewinner I. I. Rabi of Columbia, Detlev Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Shields Warren, director of the Cancer Research Institute at the New England Deaconess Hospital), the U.S. sent a Government delegation of 319 scientists and technicians, plus an unofficial drove of scientists, business men and industrialists.

Treasure Trove. Almost from the day the atom was split and its energy harnessed, scientists around the world have been longing for such an opportunity to climb over national fences to talk, teach, speculate and dream about the atom’s future. By the end of World War II, they knew that they had found a treasure of incredible value. They stood like the openmouthed shepherd boys in an ancient tale who stumbled on the entrance of a cave heaped high with jew els. The deeper they looked the more treasure they saw — and the cave went on for ever. What the scientists had found, they told one another with growing excitement, was the modern counterpart of the Philosophers’ Stone, which medieval alchemists searched for in vain as the tool to transmute gold from base metals. The atom has turned the medieval dream into 20th century reality. Modern atomic science can actually transmute metals —plutonium is a transmuted metal, and gold could be made from other elements if it were worth the expense and effort.

During the ten years of the cold war and atomic arms stockpiling, the knowledge grew, but it grew in compartments, with each group of scientists forced to parallel the work of colleagues in other nations.

New information was seldom released, even if it had little to do with weapons.

It remained, for instance, impossible for ”uncleared” persons of any nationality to design an efficient nuclear reactor.

Change of Climate. The secrecy and restrictions began to fade, however, on the day in December 1953 when President Eisenhower stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations and said: “The United States would seek more than the mere reduction or elimination of atomic materials for military purposes. It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip it of its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. The United States knows that if the fearful trend of atomic military buildup can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon for the benefit of all mankind.” Eisenhower proposed an international body to share atomic materials and knowledge. The project inched ahead only slowly; from Moscow came no encouragement.

Then in December 1954, the U.N.’s Gen eral Assembly voted unanimously to hold a technical conference under U.N. auspices “to explore means of developing the peace ful uses of atomic energy through inter national cooperation,” and this time the Russians agreed to cooperate. Geneva was the result.

Though no specific promises were made, the world’s scientists and atom-minded industrialists sensed from the beginning that the conference would be a general freeing of information. “It will be a declassification fair,” said a highly placed U.S. official. To 84 nations went invitations to send papers and exhibits dealing with atoms for peace. An American, Professor Walter Whitman of M.I.T., and a Russian, Viktor Vavilov, headed the spadework job of screening the material. They got along fine together; there were plenty of arguments, says Whitman, but they were based on scientific, not nationalistic, differences.

As the papers streamed in, they got scientifically more exciting. Far from concealing information, the nations were competing with one another to tell what they have accomplished in peaceful atomics. When Dr. Whitman began his work, he confesses now, he feared that the conference would be a dull formality, but soon he became sure that it would be a success. In country after country, the delegations were made up of top men. The U.S. team includes such important scientists as Walter Zinn, Hans Bethe. Official historian for the U.S. is Laura Fermi, wife of the late Enrico Fermi, who put in operation the world’s first nuclear chain reaction.

Peaceful Atom-Man. The top scientist and chief planner for the U.S. group, diligent, quiet Willard Libby, is just the sort of man to command the respect of such distinguished scientific company. He is a famed scientist, not merely a scientific administrator or politician.

The son of a Colorado farmer who moved his family to a California fruit ranch in 1913, Libby went to the Sebastopol (Calif.) high school, where he played tackle on the football team before going on to the University of California. To pay his way, he worked summers on a fruit ranch, nailing boxes together at i¢ a box. Libby, a strapping 6 ft. 2| ¼ in., nailed enough of them to earn as much as $100 a week. “It was good money,” he says, “if you could stand the pressure.”

Pressure never bothered Willard Libby.

The University of California was an exciting place in the ’30s, with new atomic theory and discoveries tumbling off the line as fast as fruit boxes. After his switch from mining engineering to chemistry, Libby quickly got his B.A., his M.A., his Ph.D., and stayed on as an instructor. But his interest was always research, not teaching. In his laboratory experiments in radioactive chemistry, he became one of the first to realize that atomic techniques had abolished the traditional distinction between chemistry and physics. Because of his daring, energetic research methods, he acquired, and still wears, the sobriquet “Wild Bill.”

Clean Shirts. In 1940 Libby married Leonor Hickey, a young teacher of physical education who first heard about Libby from a friend’s maid (“He’s not terribly exciting,” said the maid, “but he always wears clean shirts”), and still regards him as a goodhearted country boy who wears unsophisticated clothes. “He thinks he’s a wonderful bridge player,” confides Mrs. Libby, “but he’s really lousy.” Libby got a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved to Princeton, but a few months later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and he offered his services to Nobel Prizewinner Harold Urey. Urey arranged for Libby’s transfer to Columbia University, and he plunged into the historic Manhattan (atom bomb) Project, working through the war with great effect on the key problem of separating the isotopes of uranium. Not until news of the Hiroshima bomb came out did Libby mention his work at home. On that day he came home with a tall stack of newspapers and said triumphantly: “This is what I’ve been doing.” Libby did not stay with the atom bomb after the war—not because he was opposed to working on weapons, but because, like many other scientists, he wanted to get back to independent research. He was taken on by the newly formed Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago, where he became fascinated by the faint natural radioactivity that pervades the atmosphere. A significant part of this activity comes from carbon 14, an unstable carbon isotope formed when cosmic rays hit nitrogen high in the atmosphere.

It was hard to detect with the instruments that existed then, but Libby charged at the problem with his peculiar combination of creative abandon and meticulous care, and soon plucked a great prize. Since carbon 14 is mixed in the atmosphere, it is taken up by living plants, supplying a small part of the carbon in all living organisms. Its half-life is about 5,000 years, i.e., half its atoms disintegrate in that time. So when a plant or animal dies and ceases to take up fresh carbon 14, the radioactivity of its substance should decline with the passage of time. If the decline can be measured accurately, it will tell the age of the carbon-bearing object, whether it is an Egyptian mummy or an Ice-Age peat bed.

Libby and a group of devoted associates worked for three years to perfect an “atomic calendar,” ultimately achieved an accurate method of measuring the past with carbon 14. Refined and put into worldwide use, the method has strongly affected sciences as far apart as archaeology, geology and climatology. Once a New York newspaper misconstrued some remarks in a Libby speech to mean that he had accidentally come across the carbon 14 discovery, came out next day with a story headlined. SCIENTIST STUMBLES ON NEW METHOD. Back in the Chicago lab, Libby’s assistants hit the ceiling, but regained their good humor and hung a plaque saying: “On this spot W. F. Libby, 40, stumbled (for three years) on the carbon 14 dating method.” Age of Bison. Libby is a solemn, slow-spoken and serious man, and in his office at the AEC he seems weighed down, even a little awed, by the burdens of his position, where a single slip of the tongue may betray a national secret. But when carbon 14 is mentioned, he lights up like a Roman candle. He remembers with special pleasure his dealings with the archaeologists. “They are all as poor as church mice,” he says, “but such enthusiasm!” They brought him unimpressive things —fragments of charcoal from ancient hearths, or bones of extinct bison—and when he measured the age of the objects, the archaeologists made him feel that he had done something priceless and wonderful for them.

Libby entered the inner circle of the AEC in 1950, when Chairman Gordon Dean appointed him to the General Advisory Committee. From his inside vantage point he could watch and play a role in the measured march of the nuclear weapons: first the Abomb; then better A-bombs; then the Russian Abomb; then the H-bomb; then the Russian H-bomb; then the fission-fusion-fission bomb. Libby saw why AECommissioners were rarely lighthearted and gay. Then in 1954 he became a commissioner himself, by appointment of President Eisenhower on the recommendation of AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss. When he moved to Washington with Leonor and their ten-year-old twin daughters, Libby brought along a truckload of scientific apparatus and set up a laboratory in the Carnegie Institution, where he works furiously on personal projects (his current interest: amino acids) whenever his work on the commission gives a moment of respite. “Science is like art,” Libby explains. “You have to work at it or you go stale fast.”

Inconceivable War. Libby’s politics, on the rare occasions when he shows them, are stoutly conservative, and he is known to disagree with the highly vocal school of nuclear scientists (e.g., Chicago’s Harold Urey) which insists that the only guarantees against nuclear war are political projects, such as world government. On atomic policy he has shown strong opinions, stood as one of the minority of atomic scientists who sided with Edward Teller and other advocates of the H-bomb “crash program” in opposition to the group headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

While shunning broad political philosophies about atomic policy, Libby, according to things he has told some intimates, has worked his way around to a philosophy anyway. The philosophy in a nutshell: bigger bombs and more bombs. As bigger and bigger ones have become a reality, Libby has come to the conclusion that their very bigness may be the principal protection against an outburst of nuclear war. “Let’s build them as big as we can,” he has in effect told his friends, “and build all we can. Then war will become inconceivable.”

Scientist Libby. for all his years at work inside the secrets of atomic energy, has never seen an atomic explosion, and does not want to. His main concern has long been not the atomic boom, but the atomic boon. It was because of his interest in the peaceful atom that he fell so naturally into his key role at Geneva’s revolutionary conclave.

Indigestible Feast. Packed into twelve days is a program covering some 90 basic topics, more than 400 scientific papers. It is one of those indigestible feasts that only scientists can enjoy. Few of their technical papers will enchant the lay public; even among the scientists they will separate the men from the boys. Some of the titles alone, e.g., “Remarks About the Milne Problem with Cylindrical Symmetry,” are brain strainers. The contents bristle with symbols, charts and jawbreaking terminology, the hard stuff of which the Philosophers’ Stone is made.

High Proficiency. According to Whitman, the scientific interest of the material is above all expectation. The U.S. has told a surprising lot. An interesting U.S. paper tells how scientists at Oak Ridge wanted to know what would happen if a nuclear reactor should get out of control. They built two, of different kinds, and let them rip. They blew up with clouds of steam, but not with anything like the violence of a true atomic explosion. Russia and Britain have told a lot, too, and the smaller nations have made manful contributions.

When the conference is over, says Whitman, any nation with a high technology, such as West Germany, will know enough to build an efficient power reactor. “The Russian papers are good,” said one U.S. scientist. “The Russians are well abreast of reactor developments, and in some cases they have tried a few tricks of their own.” Said another man: “U.S. scientists sorting through these papers have actually sent a few whistles up and down AEC corridors.” Probably the papers most useful to the scientists will be of no public interest at all. They will be minute details about obscure matters. One British paper, for instance, tells about the troublesome chemistry of ruthenium, a rare element that had almost no importance before atomic science was born. But it is a fission product formed in nuclear reactors, and it has to be dealt with during the purification of reactor fuels. The information in the U.S. paper probably represents hundreds of man-years of scientific labor.

At the least, it will save that amount of effort for nations that have not yet gotten that far with the atom. Another example is “cross sections.” the term that nuclear physicists use to describe how strongly an element absorbs neutrons of different energies. Cross sections are difficult to measure, and there are thousands of them. The U.S. has been lavish with cross-section figures and curves. Russia’s Vavilov has confided that they will help his country enormously in its peaceful atom work.

Atomic Fair. Besides its main function as an exchange post of information, the Geneva Conference is an impressive “atomic fair”—the first that the world has seen. Many of the great, marble-crusted spaces in the Palace of Nations are crowded with the exhibits of the participating governments. They range from tiny instruments to large-scale models of reactors, all the weird and wonderful trappings of the atomic age. Most are eerily silent, with no whining of gears or throb of engines; atomic energy is a quiet business, and radioactivity is, of course, both invisible and silent.

The French erected a scale model of their “Atomic City” at Marcoule. Britain exhibited models of two heavy-water reactors and photographs of its Calder Hall power reactor, which is nearing completion. The Russians showed a model of their own rather small (5,000 kw.) power reactor which is in operation, and an exhibit dealing with uranium geology, biology and medicine.

The U.S. exhibit, attended by spotlessly uniformed “men in white” from Oak Ridge, covers the nonmilitary atom in every aspect—&”fuel elements,” the tricky shapes of uranium that are the hearts of reactors, models that can be worked by pushbuttons, tubes of rare earths and strange metals glittering on the walls.

Main feature of the U.S. exhibit and hit of the show is the “swimming-pool reactor,” a working research reactor set up on the lawn outside the palace. It is housed in a building that looks like a large, windowless Swiss chalet. Inside, from a black ceiling, beams of light slant down. On a red linoleum platform stands the reactor, a pool of crystal-clear water, faintly blue and 21 ft. deep, with control rods reaching into it. At the bottom, enveloped in blue luminescence, are the reacting uranium plates. Visitors can look down with perfect safety, and sense the atom’s power.

Trade Fair. The atom’s potential as a business was not overlooked. In downtown Geneva, private concerns from nine countries staged their own unofficial “Trade Fair” of atomic products. The largest exhibit is from Britain, which is striving to become the world’s atomic workshop. Its firms show the flow meters, leak detectors, radiation monitors, flux meters, etc. which are the simple, indispensable tools of the new technology. The French show a replica of a uranium mine entrance. The U.S. exhibit, with contributions mostly from big firms such as General Electric and Union Carbide, suggested the industrial look of tomorrow: privately designed power and research reactors; such strange gadgets as electromagnetic pumps that have no moving parts except a stream of molten sodium pushed through them by magnetism, purified graphite blocks widely used in reactors, silicone resins for high-temperature insulation. Absent from the industrial exhibit: the Soviet Union.

New Future. The assembling of such an array of facts, brains and machines dedicated to a peaceful atomic age was an event to excite the imagination. It suggested to the world, even the poorest, most desperate parts of it, that in the atom lies not just menace but hope, a new start, a new future. Nuclear reactors already promise cheap energy to power-starved countries. “Just ten years from now,” predicts one U.S. delegate, “no one will ever consider building a non-nuclear power generating plant.” The magic of radio isotopes is already enhancing medicine, industry, agriculture, food storage.

No possibility is too small or too big.

The atom can ultimately move mountain ranges, drain seas, irrigate entire deserts, transmute poverty into plenty, misery into mercy.

Such are the offerings of the Philosophers’ Stone if man, having found its secret, can find the trust and will to use it well.