Leo Szilard

Leo Szilard Online
Gene Dannen - gene@dannen.com
Welcome to the world of physicist, biophysicist, and "scientist of conscience" Leo Szilard (1898-1964). How do you say it? Say SIL-ahrd.
Szilard's ideas included the linear accelerator, cyclotron, electron microscope, and nuclear chain reaction. Equally important was his insistence that scientists accept moral responsibility for the consequences of their work.
In his classic 1929 paper on Maxwell's Demon, Szilard identified the unit or "bit" of information. The World Wide Web that you now travel, and the computers that make it possible, show the importance of his long-unappreciated idea.
http://www.dannen.com/szilard.html

Leo Szilard Papers: Biography/History
Leo Szilard is best known for his pioneering work in nuclear physics, his participation in the Manhattan Project during World War II, and his opposition to the nuclear arms race in the postwar era.
It was on a street corner in London, in October 1933, that Szilard first conceived of the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. The possibility of such a chain-reaction -- the process essential for the releasing of atomic energy -- had been dismissed by the eminent physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford. Szilard successfully proved Rutherford wrong.
On December 2, 1942, Szilard and his colleagues demonstrated the first nuclear chain reaction. This demonstration took place in the graphite block reactor built under the grandstand at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. This successful experiment was in part the result of Szilard's atomic theories.
Throughout the Manhattan project, Szilard was often frustrated by cumbersome government administration and security regulations. Szilard viewed the production of the atomic bomb as a necessary counter-measure to the possibility of German nuclear development anddeployment, but he foresaw the global consequences of the proliferation of this weapon. After Germany surrendered, Szilard organized his colleagues to press for limitations in the use of the atomic bomb. In July 1945 Szilard circulated a petition urging President Truman not to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
After the war Szilard began to focus on biology, a field he had long been interested in. After 1958, with the increasing threat of nuclear war, Szilard's political activities intensified.
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0032d.html

Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard, along with Enrico Fermi, was awarded a patent for the nuclear fission reactor in 1955. Throughout his lifetime, Szilard made significant contributions to the fields of statistical mechanics, nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, genetics, molecular biology, and political science. Szilard fully understood the implications of nuclear fission, and it was he who coordinated the letter sent to President Roosevelt from Einstein encouraging the establishment of the Manhattan Project.
http://www.invent.org/book/book-text/116.html

Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard (1898-1964), a native of Budapest and naturalized US citizen elected to Academy membership in 1961, was noted for his contributions to the fields of thermodynamics, biophysics, nuclear physics, and the development of atomic energy. Szilard, experimenting in collaboration with Fermi, Zinn, and Anderson, proved the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, but he may be best known for his role in the initiation of the Manhattan Project for developing an atomic bomb during World War II.
http://www.nas.edu/history/members/szilard.html

Leo Szilard (1898-1964) & Creative Quotations
"We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow."
Leo Szilard (1898-1964) born on Feb 11. Hungarian-USA scientist. He, with Enrico Fermi, conducted the first nuclear chain reaction, 1942; was instrumental in initiating the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.
http://www.bemorecreative.com/one/1350.htm

The Birth of the Bomb: Leo Szilard by Donald Williams, Jungian analyst
Donald Williams
In 1933, Leo Szilard was standing on a London streetcorner waiting for the light to change from red to green when he grasped the possibility of splitting the atom and creating a chain reaction. In 1934, he filed his patent and tried to leave the idea in secrecy with the British War Office, but they didn't take him seriously. In 1938, in the midst of Hitler's growing storm, Otto Hahn, a chemist, bombarded uranium with neutrons at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin; to his astonishment he split the atom. The news reached Neils Bohr in 1939 and spread with him when he fled Denmark to the United States to escape the Nazis. Szilard moved to New York in 1939, heard the news, and feared that the Germans would develop the atomic bomb and use it. There was reason for fear: the Germans had already banned the export of uranium from the Joachimsthal mines of now occupied Czechoslovakia. Szilard was soon collaborating with Eugene Wigner, Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Edward Teller and other physicists on the possibility of an atomic weapon. Later in 1939, these men sent an emissary to present their case to Roosevelt, and he got the point: "...what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up."
http://www.cgjung.com/articles/szilard.html

Szilárd Library - General Information
The main responsibility of the Szilárd Library is to offer the scientific literature covering the research areas of EMBL as comprehensively as possible.
The Szilárd Library offers various methods for researching and acquiring scientific information.
http://library.embl-heidelberg.de/allg.html

Leo Szilard: A Symposium in Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of his Birth.
Szilard as an Inventor: accelerators and more V.L. Telegdi (UCSD La Jolla and CERN)
Leo Szilard: Physics, Politics, and the Narrow Margin of Hope. William Lanouette
Beller Lecture: The Roots of Leo Szilard and his Interdisciplinarity George Marx (Eötvös University, Budapest, Hungary)
Leo Szilard. Toward A Livable World. Edward Gerjuoy (University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260)
http://www.aps.org/BAPSAPR98/abs/S395.html