28/07/2020

Claudio Landim 'takes over' Guga Chacra's blog on Globo.

IMPA's deputy director, Claudio Landim, published an article on Friday (24) on the blog of international politics journalist Guga Chacra, in the newspaper O Globo . Written for the #CientistaTrabalhando campaign, the text addresses the trajectory of Leo Szilard (1898-1964), a Hungarian physicist who made important contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. The mathematician recalled the fateful meeting between Szilard and Albert Einstein in 1939, which gave rise to the Manhattan Project, a research and development program led by the United States that produced the first atomic bombs during the Second World War.

“It wasn’t easy to convince the government to adopt the project, and everyone knows the rest of the story,” Landim recalled. The deputy director of IMPA points out that the Hungarian physicist’s career transformed society’s perception of science. “Recognizing the role of scientists in the victory in World War II, the United States profoundly altered research funding.”

The #ScientistAtWork campaign is promoted by the Serrapilheira Institute in celebration of National Science Day, July 8th. The goal is to gain visibility in the press to discuss the scientific process and the time involved in science.

In addition to "occupying" Guga Chacra's column, Landim is participating in the campaign with the blog Ciência & Matemática (Science & Mathematics ), which he coordinates at Globo. Physicist Marcia Barbosa and biologist Fábio Hepp have already published articles. And others are planned for this week.

In Folha de S.Paulo, the director-general of IMPA, Marcelo Viana, also participated in the action with the column "The Value of Science" published on July 8th.

Check out the full article by Claudio Landim, published on Guga Chacra's blog:

The role of science: The fabulous destiny of Leo Szilard

On August 2, 1939, Leo Szilard, a physics professor at Columbia University in New York, left Harlem for Long Island to visit his colleague Albert Einstein. This meeting would change the destiny of nations.

Szilard was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1898, the son of a middle-class Jewish family. From an early age, he demonstrated an interest in science, winning the Eötvös Prize in 1916, a mathematics competition for high school seniors.

His studies and the Spanish flu, which he contracted in September 1918, preserved him from the First World War. In 1919, he was admitted to the physics course at Humboldt University of Berlin, where he took classes with Planck, Einstein, and Nernst, three Nobel laureates, defending a thesis on Maxwell's demon in 1922. His subsequent work gave rise to information theory, the electron microscope, and the cyclotron.

Although he obtained German citizenship in 1930, with Hitler's rise to the chancellorship, three years later Szilard decided to emigrate to England. It was there that he conceived the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, the basic principle of the atomic bomb. He registered the idea. The patent was granted in 1936 and kept secret until 1949.

While in Columbia, Szilard began his first experiments with various materials to produce a nuclear chain reaction. After several failures, he had already achieved promising results when we return to the encounter described at the beginning of this column.

Realizing the potential implications of mastering this technology and aware of the progress made by German physicists in the field, on August 2, 1939, Szilard approached Einstein, a colleague from his Berlin days and already famous, to convince him to write to President Roosevelt and obtain his support for what would become the Manhattan Project.

It wasn't easy to convince the government to adopt the project, and everyone knows the rest of the story. As I write these lines, I can't resist imagining what would have happened if the president of the United States had been Trump or Bolsonaro.

Throughout his life, Szilard maintained a constant commitment to activism. In his youth, he founded a socialist party in Hungary in opposition to the Soviet Union. In England, he helped create an association to support refugee researchers. After the war, he became an ardent advocate for disarmament, participating in the founding of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which, among other things, coordinates the famous Doomsday Clock [we have never, in fact, been so close to the end of the world]. He suggested to Khrushchev the creation of the red telephone, a direct line between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Szilard's career transformed society's perception of science. Recognizing the role of scientists in the victory in World War II, the United States profoundly altered research funding. While previously sponsored by universities and philanthropic associations, after the war the state assumed a predominant role. In Brazil, this understanding resulted in the founding of the National Research Council (CNPq) by Admiral Álvaro Alberto (it is necessary to remember that the CNPq's budget has been practically halved since 2016).

The American prosperity of the 1950s-1970s is attributed to investment in science and technology, financed by the military budget, a legacy of the Manhattan Project and the Roosevelt administration.

In defense of basic research, let's remember that the first works on nuclear fission were purely theoretical. In 1933, in an article in the British newspaper The Times about the first results on the subject, Lord Rutherford stated that there was no hope of a practical application ("anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine"), but that the experiments shed new light on atoms.

If Brazil aspires to possess nuclear submarines, satellite launchers, vaccines, pharmaceutical industries, and high-tech companies, it cannot continue to turn its back on its scientists and basic research.

For the interested reader:

Richard Rhodes, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", Simon & Schuster 1986

William Lanouette with Bela Silrad, "Genius in the Shadows, A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb", Skyhorse Publishing, 2013