John Johnson Jr. - Zwicky: The Outcast Genius Who Unmasked the Universe

IN THE LATE NINETEENTH century, America was fast becoming an industrial colossus. The last spike completing the transcontinental railroad was driven home. Andrew Carnegies mighty mills in Pennsylvania spat fire, and skyscrapers rose in New York. Innovations in transportationthe automobile and the airplanelay just around the corner.

In one area, however, the United States remained decidedly provincial: the physical sciences. Americans proud of their nation-building were startled by a sudden flow of discoveries from Europe describing invisible forces and unseen particles that zipped around at dizzying speeds. In 1895, while working in his lab in Germany, Wilhelm Roentgen noticed a strange glow coming from a glass tube in which he had installed electrodes. His accidental discovery of X-rays set the stage for the detection of radioactivity. Then came the electron, the dancing, shapeless particle that stands at the gateway to the atom, the power of which would transform and nearly destroy civilization in the next century.

Newspaper readers in America were amazed by these discoveries, even if they didnt quite understand what it all meant. Scientists, on the other hand, considered them disturbing proof of Americas slow-footedness when it came to plumbing the new, unseen regions of the universe. The nations first physics professors were appointed only in the 1870s. These early pioneers often had to use their own funds to equip their laboratories. But by 1899, there were enough of them to assemble for a meeting in New York, from which emerged the American Physical Society.

The societys founders all came from elite eastern academies. Traditionally, that was where the deepest thinking went on. People only moved out west for their health, to paint Native Americans, or to break into movies. By the 1930s, however, the center of gravity for scientific research in the United States was beginning to shift westward.

In Southern California, Robert Millikan won a Nobel Prize for measuring the charge of the electron. By the third decade of the twentieth century, he was transforming a former teachers college into a premier physical sciences institution called the California Institute of Technology.

Something similar was happening in Northern California, where the University of California at Berkeley scored a major coup by outbidding Yale for the services of Ernest O. Lawrence, the brilliant South Dakotan who would construct the worlds first particle accelerator. Made of glass, sealing wax, and bronze, with a kitchen chair and a clothes tree for support, the Rube Goldberglike device proved that the best way to pierce the atoms inner sanctum was to whirl particles around and around and send them storming into an atomic nucleus. Lawrences eleven-inch cyclotron, built in 1931, was the forerunner of Europes giant, the Large Hadron Collider, seventeen miles in circumference.

Given all this activity on the West Coast, it was only natural that the Physical Society would begin to hold regular meetings there. The site of the December 1933 meeting was Stanford University, an institution that was already building a reputation for excellence that rivaled some of the best eastern institutions. Founded by Leland Stanford, a former governor of California who made his fortune in railroads, the university had been a stock farm. The small town that grew up around it was called Palo Alto, or tall tree in Spanish, after a single giant redwood that grew along San Francisquito Creek.

By 1933, the university had assembled a respected faculty, but there was little expectation that anything important would occur at the Physical Society meeting, which began on December 15 in the main lecture room of the Physics Department. Forty papers were presented to an audience of only sixty, an indication of how modest the session was expected to be. Similar meetings in New York at that time drew hundreds of onlookers and physicists. All of the papers were produced by western scientists, the subjects ranging from the physics of crystals to the radium content of lava flows in Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California.

The subject that produced the most research was cosmic radiation, now called cosmic rays. It was one of the deeper mysteries to trouble the scientific world at the time. The fact that invisible forces shape our world was still something of a novel concept, so the idea of cosmic radiation flitting around Earth, pushing its way into buildings and penetrating bodies, seemed simply weird. The radiationwhich we now know as the emission of energy from subatomic particles, mostly free-range protonsfirst appeared in electroscopes, one of the first scientific instruments to chart the effects of electricity. An electroscope consists of a metal rod from which are suspended two gold leaves; when the rod is exposed to a source of electricity, the two leaves repel each other because both leaves have the same charge. But after a time, an unaccountable thing happens: the leaves spontaneously discharge. Each leaf falls back to its original position. Scientists realized some form of radiation was penetrating the chamber and robbing the leaves of their charges. But what was it? And where did it come from?

Some believed the strange radiation came from somewhere far off in space. Others thought there had to be a local source, maybe under the sea, maybe in the still uncharted wilderness of the solar system. Caltechs Paul Epstein, a Russian-born immigrant who made important contributions to quantum theory, presented a paper at the conference coming down squarely on the side of locality. He argued that the rays can travel only a finite distance before completely losing their energy. So they had to be local. As support for this idea, he cited a theory by a young colleague named Fritz Zwicky. Zwicky, who had come to America only a few years earlier, was the brashly brilliant son of a Swiss factory owner. He argued that photons of light lose energy as they travel vast, cosmological distances.

Zwicky proposed his tired light theory to challenge the recent discovery that the universe was expanding, or blowing up, as the newspaper people put it. Unafraid of assailing majority opinion, Zwicky called those who believed in the expanding universe horses asses. That was one of the milder epithets the 35-year-old physicist employed against those who disagreed with him.