Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [13]
The year before he died, Cardano wrote an autobiography entitled The Book of My Life. It is an electrifying read and details his sexual conquests, his illnesses, his tragedies and – perhaps most enlightening of all – his modus operandi for scientific discovery. Cardano seems to have taken great delight in the assumption that his breakthroughs came from rational sources. ‘This form of knowledge is pleasing to the erudite, for they think it proceeds from great learning and practice, and on this account very many have judged me to be deeply devoted to study and possessed of a good memory when nothing is less true,’ he wrote.
The truth – in Cardano’s eyes, at least – is that his source was ‘the ministrations of my attendant spirit’. He was visited by familiar spirits, angels and demons, and took advice from them: ‘I have less rarely arrived at comprehension by a skilful treatment than I have been aided on many occasions by spiritual insight.’ Cardano’s father, son and cousin were all certified lunatics. Cardano called himself a lunatic. Perhaps we too would question his sanity. But the fact is that invisible, intangible, irrational sources can be an incredibly powerful source of discovery.
The strange story of the genesis of the electric motor, as hallucinated by the twenty-two-year-old Nikola Tesla, provides further proof. One afternoon in 1881, Tesla was out walking with some student friends in Budapest Park. They were walking west, towards the setting sun. Tesla, entranced by the spectacle, was reciting a poem by Goethe:
The glow retreats, done is our day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from this soil,
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring …
He stopped mid-stanza. In front of him was a vision of a fiery magnetic field being made to rotate by a ring of electromagnets. The magnets were powered by a current that varied in the pattern of a sine wave, with a delay between the phase of current supplied to each magnet, so that the field moved in a circle – just as a ring of lights turned on one after the other give the appearance of a light rushing around the loop. Inside the ring of magnets, Tesla saw a hulk of iron that could be connected to the electromagnets in one way to start it spinning in one direction, and in another way to reverse its motion. He had a moment of catatonic immobility, then blurted out, ‘See my motor here … watch me reverse it.’ His friends grabbed him and shook him until he came back into their world.
When Tesla returned to the laboratory and built what he had seen – what is now known as the self-starting alternating current motor – it worked first time.
The resolution of the Second World War also owes a debt to an unbidden hallucination. To make an atomic bomb requires weapons-grade plutonium. This can be produced in a nuclear reactor, but only when you have worked out how to protect the reactor’s uranium from the corrosive effects of the water it heats. Somehow, the uranium has to be encased in a shell thick enough to make it submersible, waterproof and gas-tight, but not so thick that it absorbs all the heat. Nor can it absorb the neutrons emitted by the uranium, because that would kill the chain reaction so essential to the process.
According to the official report of the Manhattan Project, the US effort to build an atomic bomb, this ‘canning’ of the uranium was one of the most difficult problems they faced. It had been holding up the development of the bomb for months. There were just a few weeks remaining before uranium was scheduled to be loaded into the reactor, and tempers at the Project were becoming more frayed by the day. This was 1943, and everyone knew that Hitler’s scientists were also chasing the bomb. The outcome of the war was likely to depend on who got there first.
Then one day, ‘one pace past the water cooler’, as he recalled, physicist Omar Snyder saw the can and how to make it. ‘The entire process for the manufacture … flashed in my mind instantaneously,’