IN THIS PHOTO FROM A SUMMER PHYSICS SYMPOSIUM, TWO FUTURE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS APPEAR: MARIA GOEPPERT MAYER (LEFT) AND LARS ONSAGER (FAR RIGHT). THE OTHERS ARE JOSEPH MAYER, ROBERT ATKINSON AND PAUL EHRENFEST. (PHOTO COURTESY U-M BENTLEY HISTORICAL LIBRARY.)
In the late 1920s and ’30s, no collection of scientific minds sparkled more brightly than the Summer Symposia in Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan.
Geniuses sprawled on the sunlit grass of the Diag and wandered in and out of lecture halls and labs in the old West Physics building. A starstruck young graduate student might turn a corner and bump into the Danish Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, who, though in his 40s, was “like an extremely sensitive child who moves around the world in a sort of trance,” according to a colleague; he gave a two-week course on “The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” in 1933.
One might encounter the muscular Italian Enrico Fermi, who, as a 17-year-old in Pisa, had written an essay on the physics of sound that his examiner said would have qualified him for a doctorate; he lectured on “Quantum Electrodynamics” in 1930.
Or one might exchange a few words with American wunderkind J. Robert Oppenheimer, not long out of Harvard, where he had generally taken six courses a semester for credit and audited four others; he graduated summa cum laude in three years. He lectured on the “General Quantum Theory of Transitions” in 1931.
Bohr had plumbed the structure of the atom. Fermi had pioneered the theory of beta decay. Oppenheimer would become the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. These three were among the architects of a scientific revolution and, before long, of the atomic bomb. Every summer for 15 years between the world wars, they and their colleagues came to Ann Arbor to teach and talk.
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DURING THE 1920S AND ’30S, U-M’S SUMMER SYMPOSIA IN PHYSICS BROUGHT TOGETHER SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST OUTSTANDING THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS. THEIR COLLABORATIONS WERE A BOON TO AMERICAN AND U-M SCIENTISTS AND STUDENTS, AND ALSO ACCELERATED FINDINGS IN ATOMIC STUDIES AND QUANTUM MECHANICS. (PHOTO FROM MICHIGAN ALUMNUS, COURTESY OF U-M BENTLEY HISTORICAL LIBRARY.)
Until the 1920s, American physicists worked chiefly on practical problems using mechanical equipment in laboratories; this was experimental physics. But in Europe, physicists led by Albert Einstein were probing the nature of the universe by purely mathematical means — that is, as the Polish-born physicist Stanislaw Ulam would wryly put it, with “a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper.” With such scribbles, Einstein and his European colleagues were opening up epochal theories about time, space, and matter. This was theoretical physics.
Michigan’s physicists became aware of the new ideas in Europe earlier than most of their American colleagues. This was due largely to Harrison McAllister Randall (1870-1969), the longtime physics chairman who, with the aid of Professor Walter Colby, recruited key faculty with European training — at first Oskar Klein, later Otto LaPorte, Samuel Goudsmit, and George Uhlenbeck. He also recruited David M. Dennison, the son of a U-M classics professor who had earned his PhD at Michigan and gone on to postdoctoral work under Bohr at the University of Copenhagen. (U-M’s physics and astronomy building is named for Dennison, who was a member of the faculty for half a century.)
Excitement about the new ideas led Randall to convene summer sessions where professors and students could get up to date. From 1924-27, experimental physics was included. But Randall thought the talks in theoretical physics were so much more rewarding that he rededicated the summer sessions to theoretical physics alone. Armed with their European contacts, the young Michigan theoreticians succeeded in luring many of the best new thinkers to Ann Arbor — though never Einstein himself — and they taught their own summer courses, too. It was the only summer program in the U.S. where American physicists could learn about the new ideas from the founders of the field. So every year, some 100 professors and graduate students gathered for informal talks and official courses — some just two weeks long, some up to eight weeks in duration.
They were put up wherever rooms could be found, even in fraternities.”It was a place where you came to learn the modern approach to the theory of molecules, atoms, and nuclei,” said Professor Jens Zorn, who joined the physics department in 1962. “Quantum mechanics really got rolling in 1926 and nuclear physics made great advances in 1932. In those years the number of people who really knew quantum mechanics was fewer than 500, and a substantial fraction of those were participants in the Michigan Summer Symposia.”
Zorn said physicists who attended the symposia developed critically important friendships and collaborations: “One can track the origin of many significant publications to exchanges of personal letters and manuscripts between physicists who had become acquainted at the Summer Symposia. Those interactions, supplemented by the exchanging of reprints of journal articles, were important sources for students and researchers, since the handful of books on quantum mechanics and nuclear physics did not cover the latest advances.”
Bradford Orr, the current chair of physics, said: “These symposia … were critical to America’s achieving international status in theoretical physics.”
The summer school wound down with the coming of World War II. When Randall Laboratory was renovated in the 1980s, Jens Zorn asked the workmen to slice off the front of the main lecture bench. It was cut into sections to be given as gifts to recognize contributions to the department.
“This bench,” Zorn said, “had been touched by the greats.”
On December 11, in commemoration of the Summer Symposia in Theoretical Physics, the American Physical Society will dedicate U-M’s Randall Laboratory as one of 20 APS historic sites.
Sources for this article included Jens Zorn’s interview with Nicole Casal Moore of U-M’s College of Engineering and Thomas M. Kuhn’s 1964 oral history interview with David M. Dennison, sponsored by the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics.
Barbara Leeson - 1980
I’m Prof. Dave Leeson, writing the biography of W. W. Hansen of Stanford. Hansen attended the Michigan Summer Symposium in 1934. Any records or photos of that year would be greatly appreciated, to leeson@earthlink.net
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Larry Fink - '73;'78
Michigan Professor of Physics Samuel Abraham (Sam) Goudsmit was one of the unsung heroes of World War Two (WWII), and the Michigan Symposium in Theoretical Physics was the backdrop for his exploits. Here’s the rest of the story.
With WWII looming on the horizon in Europe, the last Michigan Symposium in Theoretical Physics attended by German physicists was held in the summer of 1939. There Michigan Professor Sam Goudsmit and the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi tried one last time to convince their colleague and friend, Werner Heisenberg, not to return to Nazi Germany, where he would surely be asked to apply his advanced theoretical physics to the German war effort. Heisenberg was offered appointments at the University of Chicago and Columbia University as inducements, but Heisenberg was unmoved. Heisenberg defended his decision by arguing that, as a patriotic German, his obligation was to return to his homeland and work from within to restore sanity to German science, society and polity and repair the damage to Germany after the inevitable war was over. Instead, as Goudsmit and Fermi had feared, Heisenberg was drafted to lead the Nazi atomic energy program, and, as a patriotic German, he worked to achieve success.
During WWII but working out of MIT, Goudsmit was the chief scientific adviser to the top-secret Alsos missions, the espionage operation of the Manhattan Project. Alsos was tasked with learning all it could about the German atomic energy effort and with capturing all of the atomic research facilities, materiel, and scientists in recently liberated portions of Europe. As World War II was coming to an end in the late winter of 1945, Sam Goudsmit volunteered to lead an Alsos III team deep into the heart of recently conquered German territory to locate and capture all of the German atomic bomb scientists for the Anglo-American alliance before they could be captured or killed by hostile military or espionage operations, including but not limited to those of the Soviet Union. Because of the personal relationships Goudsmit had developed with many of the German physicists, either as a student in Europe or at Michigan’s Summer Symposia, he was highly successful in this endeavor, depriving the Soviet Union of their services, voluntary or otherwise. The efforts to prevent the Nazi rocket scientists from falling into Soviet hands at that same time were not nearly as successful, perhaps because there was no equivalent to a Sam Goudsmit to convince them it was in their best interests to come over to the West. The history and successes of the Alsos missions are described in http://www.mphpa.org/classic/HISTORY/H-06f.htm.
That the Nazi atomic bomb program was poorly coordinated and woefully underfunded throughout WWII are not in dispute. However, history still disputes Heisenberg’s post-WWII claim that he intentionally sabotaged the German atomic bomb program by advancing theories and pursuing designs that he knew were flawed. In fact, it was Heisenberg’s understanding that was flawed, as evidenced by a secretly recorded lecture he delivered on atomic bomb design after the captured German atomic scientists were informed of the successful U.S. use of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. This occurred at a large estate called Farm Hall, at Godmanchester, England, where ten of the top German atomic scientists had been detained after their capture by Goudsmit’s team. The entire estate had been cleverly bugged in advance of their arrival by British intelligence. Edited versions of key transcripts are reproduced in http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Uranium-Club-Secret-Recordings/dp/0387950893.
Thus, in the end, neither the West nor the East would have benefitted immediately from the military services of the captured German atomic scientists. But the Soviets did not know this, so depriving them of this German intellectual booty was still a major coup for the West at the dawn of the Cold War.
Goudsmit’s critical contributions to U.S. success in WWII, long cloaked in secrecy, need to be brought to light for all Americans, but especially for those with University of Michigan roots. Hail to the Victors, then and now!
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