ATOM BOMB | Tested, July 1945

On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 a.m., 77 years ago, the Manhattan Project tested the first atom bomb. It was in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the consensus was that it worked.

In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote to FDR supporting the idea that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction had potential as a weapon. Enrico Fermi had ideas how to do this. In February 1940, the federal government set aside $6,000 for research on it.

In early 1942, the United States was now at war with the Axis. Germany was believed to be working on a uranium bomb. The War Department took an interest in the U.S. project and limits on resources  were removed. Brigadier-General Leslie R. Groves, an engineer, was put in charge of the research effort, which was located initially in Manhattan and was therefore called the Manhattan Project.

The Project succeeded in the desert of New Mexico. In 1943, Robert J. Oppenheimer began directing Project Y at a laboratory at Los Alamos, along with Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, as well as  Fermi. My former headmaster, Rev. Leo van Winkle, a Yale Ph.D. in Physics, was working on the project.

The first atomic bomb was detonated as scientist observers watched from six miles away. The first mushroom cloud stretched up 40,000 feet. The explosion began with intense light and ended with had the destructive power of perhaps 20,000 tons of TNT, followed by radioactive fallout. The tower holding the bomb was vaporized.

Germany was the original target, but they had surrendered. The only belligerent remaining was Japan. Henry Kissinger said once:

"The greatest danger of war seems to me not to lie in the deliberate actions of wicked men, but in the inability of harassed men to manage events that have run away with them."

BIRTH | Mar. 14–Albert Einstein

This day was born in 1879 Albert Einstein, in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany.

Young Albert was a good student, but disrespectful of his teachers. He was also a  failure in his classics studies.

When he graduated from technical school in 1900, none of his instructors would write letters of recommendation for him to get a job in academia.

Consequently, he went to work for the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He evaluated patent applications to determine if they were likely to produce useful inventions. He was efficient in his work, leaving him time to work on his own theories.

Just 110 years ago, in 1905 — a year that is called his annus mirabilis — he earned his doctorate and published four important papers:

1. June 9, "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", addressing the photoelectric effect and the nature of light, applying Planck's quantum theory, which had been proposed five years earlier and had been quietly forgotten. The paper proposed the idea of energy quanta. This paper won him the Nobel Prize in physics 16 years later.

2. July 18, "On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat", offering a stochastic model of Brownian motion.

3. September 26, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, which had the most profound effect on modern physics, containing Einstein's revolutionary Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein proposed that it was meaningless to speak of one body moving and another body being still. Bodies can only be thought of as moving in relationship to each other. All motion is relative to some frame of reference, and the laws of nature apply unchanged, whatever that frame of reference. In particular, this means that the speed of electromagnetic radiation (such as light) is always the same, no matter the frame of reference. In subsequent years, results predicted on the basis of his theory were confirmed repeatedly, and the Special Theory of Relativity changed how scientists viewed matter, space, time and all the things that interact with them.

4. November 21, in Annalen der Physik "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?"), in which Einstein developed an argument for arguably the most famous equation in the field of physics: E=mc².

His massive productivity was not enough at first to get him an academic job, although the patent office gave him a promotion. But four years later, in 1909, at 30, he was given a professorship of theoretical physics in Zürich. Five years after that, he moved to Berlin, and began work on his General Theory of Relativity, which he published in 1916. He was given a specially created post as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin.

His General Theory recognizes that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin, leading to the famous formula E=mc². The new theory made bold predictions about the interaction of light and gravity that had not yet been observed and which were at variance with Newtonian physics.

After the First World War ended in 1919, scientists used a total eclipse of the sun to confirm that light from distant stars was indeed deflected as it passed through the influence of the sun's gravity, exactly as General Relativity predicted. Einstein became internationally renowned.

When Hitler took over as Germany's Chancellor in 1933, Einstein was in California working as a visiting professor. Einstein's apartment in Berlin and his summer cottage in the country were raided by the Nazis, his papers confiscated, and his bank accounts closed.

Einstein got the message right away that he was unwelcome. He returned to Europe and handed in his German passport. He considered offers from universities like Paris, Istanbul and Oxford, eventually deciding on Princeton, which offered him an attractive package teaching at its Institute for Advanced Study. He had hesitations about Princeton. It had a secret quota system allowing only a small percentage of the incoming class to be Jewish. The Institute's director, Abraham Flexner, was worried that Einstein would be too directly involved in Jewish refugee causes, so he micromanaged Einstein's public appearances, trying to keep him out of the public eye. He even declined an invitation for Einstein to see FDR at the White House without telling the scientist.

When Einstein found out, he personally called Eleanor Roosevelt and arranged for a visit anyway, and then complained about the incident in a letter to a rabbi friend of his, giving the return address as "Concentration Camp, Princeton."

In 1938, incoming freshmen at Princeton ranked Einstein as the second-greatest living person. First place went to Adolf Hitler.

My uncle Willem van Stockum was the first person to spell out the implications for Time Travel of Einstein's equations. Robert Wack, in Time Bomber, tells of Willem's time at Princeton.

October 17 - Einstein Moved to the USA

Einstein, 1921

In 1933 on this day, Albert Einstein officially moved to the USA to teach at Princeton University.

A German-Swiss physicist and Nobel laureate, Einstein is best known for his special and general theories of relativity and for his bold hypothesis concerning the particle nature of light. He is widely viewed as the most famous scientist of the 20th century. He was born in Ulm, Württemberg, in March 1879.

As a youth in Munich, he showed an intense curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts. In high school, he excelled in mathematics but failed utterly in the classics. At 16 Einstein moved away from his family to Switzerland, where his good performance in mathematics barely got him into a technical college in Zurich. He did not enjoy it and skipped most lectures, preferring to play his violin or to study physics in the library. He graduated in 1900 but his professors did not recommend him for a place in university. Instead, he secured a junior position in the patent office at Bern. In the year 1905 he published four papers, for which the year is named the "annus mirabilis":

1. The first paper, published June 9, dealt with the photoelectric effect and the nature of light; applying Planck's quantum theory, which had been proposed five years earlier and was quietly forgotten. The paper, "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", proposed the idea of energy quanta. This paper won him the Nobel Prize in physics 16 years later.

2. The second article, published July 18, "On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat", offered a stochastic model of Brownian motion.

3. His third paper, published September 26, was “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” and had the most profound effect on modern physics. It contained Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein proposed that it was meaningless to speak of one body moving and another body being still. Bodies can only be thought of as moving in relationship to each other. All motion is relative to some frame of reference, and the laws of nature apply unchanged, whatever that frame of reference. In particular, this means that the speed of electromagnetic radiation (such as light) is always the same, no matter the frame of reference. In subsequent years, results predicted on the basis of his theory were confirmed over and over again, and the Special Theory of Relativity eventually revolutionized how scientists viewed matter, space, time and all the things that interact with them. 

4.On November 21, 1905, Annalen der Physik published a fourth paper, ("Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?"), in which Einstein developed an argument for arguably the most famous equation in the field of physics: E = mc². 

In 1909 Einstein was given a chair in theoretical physics in Switzerland, but he returned to Germany five years later to take up a specially created post as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin, where he developed his General Theory of Relativity, recognizing that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin, leading to the famous formula E=mc2. The new theory made bold predictions about the interaction of light and gravity that had not yet been observed and which were at variance with Newtonian physics.

After the war ended, in 1919, scientists used a total eclipse of the sun to confirm that light from distant stars was indeed deflected as it passed through the influence of the sun's gravity, exactly as General Relativity predicted. Einstein became internationally renowned.

When Hitler took over as chancellor in 1933, he had been in California working as a visiting professor. Einstein's apartment in Berlin and his summer cottage in the country were raided, his papers confiscated, and his bank accounts closed.

Einstein was smart enough to get the message right away that he was unwelcome. He returned to Europe and handed in his German passport. He considered many offers, from places like Paris, Istanbul and Oxford, eventually deciding on Princeton, which offered him an attractive package teaching at its Institute for Advanced Study.

He had hesitations about Princeton. It had a secret quota system allowing only a small percentage of the incoming class to be Jewish. The Institute's director, Abraham Flexner, was worried that Einstein would be too directly involved in Jewish refugee causes, so he micromanaged Einstein's public appearances, trying to keep him out of the public eye. He even declined an invitation for Einstein to see FDR at the White House without telling the scientist. When Einstein found out, he personally called Eleanor Roosevelt and arranged for a visit anyway, and then complained about the incident in a letter to a rabbi friend of his, giving the return address as "Concentration Camp, Princeton."

In 1938, incoming freshmen at Princeton ranked Einstein as the second-greatest living person. First place went to Adolf Hitler.

(Thanks to Garrison Keillor and the Writer's Almanac, from which this is mostly adapted.)

VAN STOCKUM | Time Bomber by Robert Wack

Dr. Robert Wack and Alice Tepper Marlin. Photo by
JT Marlin. 

June 9, 2013–Time Bomber is a book about a bomber pilot who takes part in the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France.

Written by Robert Wack, it is about to be released by Boissevain Books. This is a story about love, regrets, destiny and redemption, during the decisive battles of the invasion of Normandy in 1944, 69 years ago.

The central character is Willem Jacob van Stockum, a brilliant University of Maryland mathematics professor. It is based on a true story about a man who abandoned a promising academic career and became an unlikely RAF bomber pilot in World War II. 

After surviving a merciless training program, he flew six missions before and after the D-Day invasion of Europe. When his plane is shot down on June 10 behind the lines over Normandy, Wack presents a sci-fi angle to make this the genre that he wants the book to be classified in.

While they fight for survival in the French countryside, they meet up with ruthless French Resistance fighters and two strangers who are not what they seem. Willem’s pioneering academic work on time travel and Einstein's Theory of Relativity pose intriguing “what if?” questions compelling him to face the implications of his work and the consequences of choices in a universe of infinite possibilities.

The author, Maj. Robert Wack, is a pediatrician in Maryland. He consulted closely with relatives of Willem van Stockum to get the historical parts of the book right. The book is faithful to the real life of Willem J. van Stockum, who was my mother's brother. Order in paperback or in Kindle version from Amazon.