Leó Szilárd (February 11th 1898 with Budapest - May 30th 1964 with La Jolla in California) was a Physicien hungaro-American. He worked on the Projet Manhattan.

Personality

He was known his colleagues like a sharp and eccentric thinker, who seemed to like to disturb people with strange questions, sometimes incongruous, but often perspicacious.

He excelled in the political prediction. Child, it would have predicted the First World War with several years in advance. During the appearance of the Nazi S, he would have announced that they would control one day the whole Europe. In 1934, it would have envisaged the details of the Second world war. Later, it took the practice to live with the hotel with an always ready bag. According to its dires, " it is enough to take the train the good jour". Indeed, it left Germany to go to Vienna, the day of the fire of the Reichstag having a presentiment of the end of the democracy at that time.

Biography

Szilárd was born with Budapest at time from Austro-Hungarian monarchy. From 1908 to 1916 he is pupil with the Reáliskola of this city. He is allowed as student at the Technical University of Budapest in 1916 then enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1917. Like its compatriot and future school-fellow Edward Teller, it leaves Budapest because of the numérus clausus imposed to the Jewish students and gains the technical Université of Berlin in 1919. It will meet there Albert Einstein, max Planck and max von Laue. It obtains its doctorate of physics en1923 to the Université Humboldt of Berlin.

It is engaged as assistant of von Laue Institute of Theoretical physics of the university of Berlin in 1924

Specialist in thermodynamics, it works with Einstein with the development of a refrigerator with absorption (American patent 1781541 dated November 11th, 1930).

Via Vienna, Leo Szilard regains London in 1933 to escape persecutions Nazis. There, it reads an article of Rutherford in the Times which carries out it to conceive the idea of Chain nuclear reaction. The following year, it deposits a patent on this subject. It initially tried to create a chain reaction with Béryllium and Indium, without success.

In 1939, Leo Szilard, which fears the possibility that the Nazi Germany manufactures a nuclear bomb, takes the initiative to require of Albert Einstein to write a letter with the US president Franklin Roosevelt.

It is in 1942 with Enrico Fermi within the framework of the Projet Manhattan aiming at equipping America with an atomic bomb, that he manages to create the initial chain reaction with a using engine of the Graphite and the Uranium. One of the keys of success was to use pure graphite to control the reaction. Indeed, during its preceding experiments, it used carbon bricks, containing in small quantity of the Bore (this material absorbs the neutrons and is thus unfavourable with respect to a chain reaction), that modifying the crystallographic structure of material (it becomes less friable). Having a training of chemist, it had the idea to use graphite pure, very friable, and blackening very quickly their white blouses. Photographs testify some…

In 1943, he becomes citizen of the the United States of America. In 1946, it is at the origin of the emergency Comité of the scientists nuclear physicists with Albert Einstein.

The Project Manhattan

He is probably the first scientist to be seriously thought of the atomic bomb. The possibility of a nuclear Reaction chains some would have appeared on September 12th 1933 to him whereas it waited in a red light on Southampton Row with Bloomsbury. Apparently, this idea would have come to him after the virulent denial by Ernest Rutherford from any possibility of extracting from nuclear energy.

Szilárd deposited with Enrico Fermi the patent of the nuclear reactor. He is besides the instigator of the first letter of Einstein with Roosevelt, on August 2nd, 1939, concerning research of German on the nuclear bomb which led to the Manhattan project. He takes part in the beginnings of the project but he is excluded from the research team after multiple dissensions with the general Leslie Richard Groves in charge of the direction with the project.

After the war

In 1947, it is diverted physics to be interested in the Molecular biology and works with Aaron Novick. It spends the last years of its life to the Institute Salk de San Diego.

He was prize winner of the Atoms for Peace Award in 1959.

He also started in the United States a political career little known. He was however one of the instigators of the hot line.

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