But if it was imaginable – just – that a slow dribble of energy such as uranium emitted might come from an outside source, such a notion became harder to believe when faced with radium, which (as Pierre Curie and Albert Laborde would show, in 1903) was capable of raising its own weight of water from freezing to boiling in an hour.[64] It was harder still when faced with even more intensely radioactive substances, such as pure polonium (a small piece of which would spontaneously become red-hot) or radon, which was 200,000 times more radioactive than radium itself – so radioactive that a pint of it would instantly vaporize any vessel in which it was contained. Such a power to heat was unintelligible with any etheric or cosmic hypothesis.
With no plausible external source of energy, the Curies were forced to return to their original thought that the energy of radium had to have an internal origin, to be an ‘atomic property’ – although a basis for this was hardly imaginable. As early as 1898, Marie Curie added a bolder, even outrageous thought, that radioactivity might come from the disintegration of atoms, that it could be ‘an emission of matter accompanied by a loss of weight of the radioactive substances’ – a hypothesis even more bizarre, it might have seemed, than its alternatives, for it had been axiomatic in science, a fundamental assumption, that atoms were indestructible, immutable, unsplittable – the whole of chemistry and classical physics was built on this faith. In Maxwell’s words:
Though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the [atoms] out of which these systems are built – the foundation stones of the material universe – remain unbroken and unworn. They continue to this day as they were created – perfect in number and measure and weight.
All scientific tradition, from Democritus to Dalton, from Lucretius to Maxwell, insisted upon this principle, and one can readily understand how, after her first bold thoughts about atomic disintegration, Marie Curie withdrew from the idea, and (using unusually poetic language) ended her thesis on radium by saying, ‘the cause of this spontaneous radiation remains a mystery… a profound and wonderful enigma.’
22. Cannery Row
The summer after the war, we went to Switzerland, because this was the only country on the Continent that had not been ravaged by war, and we longed for normality, after six years of bombing and rationing and austerity and constriction. The transformation was evident as soon as we crossed the border – the uniforms of the Swiss customs officers were new and shining, unlike the shabby uniforms on the French side. The train itself seemed to become cleaner and brighter, to move with a new efficiency and speed. Arriving in Lucerne, we were met by an electric brougham. Tall, upright, with huge plate-glass windows, a vehicle such as my parents had seen, but never ridden, in their own childhood, the ancient brougham conveyed us noiselessly to the Schweizerhof Hotel, a hotel vaster, more splendid, than anything I had ever imagined. My parents would generally choose relatively modest lodgings, but this time their instincts led them in the opposite direction, to the most sumptuous, most luxurious, most opulent hotel in Lucerne – an extravagance permitted, they felt, after six years of war.
The Schweizerhof stays in my mind for another reason, because it was here that I gave the first (and last) concert of my life. It had been a little over a year since Mrs. Silver, my piano teacher, had died, a year in which I had not touched a piano, but now something sunny, something liberating, brought me out, made me want to play again, all of a sudden, and for other people. Though I had been brought up on Bach and Scarlatti, I had grown (under Mrs. Silver’s influence) to love the Romantics – especially Schumann and the propulsive, exuberant Chopin mazurkas. Many of these were technically beyond me, but I knew them, nonetheless, all fifty-odd of them, by heart, and could at least (I flattered myself) give a sense of their feel and vitality. They were miniatures, but each seemed to contain an entire world.
Somehow my parents persuaded the hotel to arrange a concert in its salon, to let me use the grand piano (it was bigger than any I had ever seen, a Bosendorfer with some extra keys our Bechstein did not have), and to announce that, on the coming Thursday night, there would be a recital by ‘the young English pianist Oliver Sacks.’ This terrified me, and I grew more and more nervous as the day approached. But when the evening came, I donned my best suit (it had been made for my bar mitzvah the month before), entered the salon, bowed, arranged my features into a smile, and (almost incontinent with terror) sat down at the piano. After the opening bars of the first mazurka, I got swept away by it, and carried it to a flamboyant conclusion. There was clapping, there were smiles, there was forgiveness of my blunders, so I charged on to the next, and the next, finishing up finally with a posthumous opus (which I vaguely imagined had somehow been completed after Chopin’s death).
There was a special, rare pleasure about this performance. My chemistry and mineralogy and science were all private, shared with my uncles but with nobody else. The recital, in contrast, was open and public, with appreciation, exchange, giving and receiving. It was the opening of something new, the start of an intercourse.
We gloried shamelessly in the luxury of the Schweizerhof, lying for hours, it seemed, in the enormous marble baths, eating ourselves sick in the opulent restaurant. But eventually we grew tired of overindulgence and started to wander through the old city with its crooked streets and its sudden views of mountain and lake. We took the funicular train up its cogwheel track to the summit of Mount Rigi – my first time on a funicular, or a mountain. And then we moved to the alpine village of Arosa, where the air was cool and dry, and I saw edelweiss and gentian for the first time, and tiny churches of painted wood, and heard the alpenhorn resound from valley to valley. It was in Arosa, I think, even more than Lucerne, that a sudden sense of joyousness finally overcame me, a feeling of liberation and release, a sense of the sweetness of life, of a future, of promise. I was thirteen – thirteen! – did not life stand before me?
On the return journey, we stopped in Zurich (the town, Uncle Abe once told me, where Euler the mathematician had been born). And this stay, while otherwise unremarkable, remains in my memory for a very special reason. My father, who always sought out a swimming pool wherever he stayed, located a large municipal pool in the city. He immediately started lapping the pool, with the powerful overarm of which he was a master, but I, in a lazier mood, found a corkboard, hoisted myself upon it, and decided, for once, to let it buoy me, and just float. I lost all sense of time as I floated, lying still on the board, or paddling very gently. A strange ease, a sort of rapture came upon me – a feeling I had sometimes known in dreams. I had floated on corkboards, or rubber rings, or waterwings before, but this time something magical was happening, a slowly swelling, enormous wave of joy that lifted me higher and higher, seemed to go on and on, forever, and then finally subsided in a languorous bliss. It was the most beautiful, peaceful feeling I had ever had.
64
After reading about this, I wondered whether any radioactive substances actually felt warm to the touch. I had small bars of uranium and thorium, but they felt as cool as any other metal bars. I once held Uncle Abe’s little tube, with its ten milligrams of radium bromide, in my hand, but the radium was no bigger than a grain of salt, and I felt no warmth through the glass.
I was fascinated to learn from Jeremy Bernstein that he once held a sphere of plutonium in his hands – the core of an atomic bomb, no less – and found it uncannily warm to the touch.