Andrei Sakharov: Quarks And The Structure Of Matter

Quarks and the Structure of Matter

Harry J Lipkin

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9789814407410
• eBook ISBN: 9789814407434
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

In 1980, the Cold War was in full bloom. The Soviet father of the hydrogen bomb and Nobel Peace Laureate turned dissident physicist, Andrei Sakharov, had been exiled to Gorki by the Soviet authorities. Called “senile” and under heavy Soviet censorship, Sakharov had a hard time communicating his latest scientific results to readers outside of Gorki. Some smuggled results reached the author, Harry Lipkin, who then realized that he and Sakharov were both pioneers in a new revolution on our understanding the structure of matter. The particle physics community had resisted their revelation that the accepted building blocks of matter, neutrons and protons, were composed of tinier building blocks called “quarks”. What followed was a remarkable adventure in which both scientists fought the Soviet censors, smuggling postcards and manuscripts into and out of the Soviet Union while trying to further scientific progress.

Against a backdrop of politics, suppression, and genius, Andrei Sakharov, Quarks and the Structure of Matter details the search for the basic building blocks of matter, the path to understanding the forces that bind them together, and how scientific knowledge is learned, communicated and passed from one group of investigators to another.

Contents:

• Quarks and Smuggled Postcards from Andrei Sakharov
• Andrei Sakharov and the Weizmann Institute
• The Weizmann Institute and the Scientific History of Sakharov's Work
• How Scientists Study Nature — Pure and Applied Research
• The Building Blocks of Matter — What is a Quark?
• The Forces of Nature
• The Weak Force and the Discovery of the W Particle

Readership: General public interested in the quark model and its history.

1

Quarks and Smuggled Postcards from Andrei Sakharov

In November, 1980 Andrei Sakharov smuggled a postcard out of the Soviet Union from his exile in Gorky. The text of the card shown in Fig. 1 was a response to a reprint of a paper which I had mailed to him. Many people were very excited by this postcard.

It appeared in an editorial in the Washington Post and was copied in many newspapers, magazines and journals. Most recently it appeared in the book The Physicists by C.P. Snow. It showed that Sakharov was still alert and active in frontier physics despite his isolation, and exposed the rumors spread by the Russians that he was senile and needed to be isolated as completely false. The story behind this postcard is very fascinating.

In the spring of 1980 Professor Tom Ferbel from the University of Rochester Physics Department asked my opinion of a recent manuscript by Sakharov which had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a friend. Sakharov was having difficulty getting his work translated and published in the Soviet Union and his friend was investigating the possibility of getting it published in the U.S. He had translated it into English, but he was not an expert in the field of particle physics and did not know whether the work was sufficiently new and interesting to warrant a big fuss about publication. He was in Rochester and consulted Professor Ferbel whom he knew was working in particle physics.

I was at that time on sabbatical in the U.S. and was asked to read and referee the paper to be sure that its scientific value was adequate. The Americans wanted to avoid any charges that they had published the paper for purely political reasons. I was amazed to find that this paper was almost an exact duplicate of work that I had been doing during the past few years.

The history of my contacts with Andrei Sakharov and his association with the Weizmann Institute really begins in 1966, long before we actually met, when he and his Colleague Ya. B. Zeldovich published a paper which referred to four published Weizmann Institute papers: two by H. Harari and H. Lipkin, one by H. Lipkin and one by the Weizmann High Energy experimental group. We did not know of his work at that time, and there is an amusing note added in proof in the paper indicating that he did not know of our ongoing work. The note begins “In a discussion at the summer school in Balaton (Hungary), Bob Sokoloff (Berkeley, USA) developed the hypothesis on the additivity of total cross sections at high energies…” Sakharov did not know that Bob Socolow had come to Balaton after spending several months as a visitor at the Weizmann Institute. He reported at Balaton on the work of our group in Rehovot.

That Sakharov’s group and our group were doing very much the same work did not come to our attention until 1980, when Tom Ferbel showed me the smuggled paper from the Soviet Union.

I immediately began referring to Sakharov’s work in all my lectures and seminars and in invited lectures at conferences and summer schools. In discussions about my own work, I pointed out that the same results had been obtained by Sakharov in Gorky. The reaction of the audience was invariably one of amazement. Prof. Antonino Zichichi, the Director of the International School of Subnuclear Physics at Erice, Sicily was very excited by this. He said it was very important to let the world know that Sakharov was mentally alert and active and not senile. This work of Sakharov should be given maximum publicity. The Russians were circulating rumors that Sakharov was of course a great man, but now he was old and senile and was being isolated in Gorky for his own good. My evidence that this was not true would be crucial to counter this disinformation. The information that Sakharov was able to do any scientific work at all under his difficult conditions of isolation and harassment was very important and should be given the widest possible publicity.

Zichichi ashed me to write a popular article about this work, which he then translated into Italian and published in the Rome newspaper Il Tempo with a picture of Sakharov and a headline “An article by Andrei Sakharov from his exile in Gorky”. This newspaper was read by many important political figures including the President of the Republic and the Pope. They would see the picture and the headline and understand that the rumor was false. The article appeared in a space regularly devoted to science, whose readers were able to appreciate the scientific aspects of Sakharov’s work. But laymen and politicians who also read the paper and only saw the headlines got the message that Sakharov was alert and still making important scientific contributions.

Sakharov was confined to the city of Gorky with no access to scientific institutions nor libraries. The secret police followed him everywhere. They entered his apartment whenever he left and confiscated all papers that they could find. He carried all scientific papers that he needed for his work in his briefcase. Then, one day when he visited the dentist and left his briefcase in the waiting room, two men came in and took the briefcase. Yet he managed to work under these incredible conditions.

It then occurred to me to write Sakharov directly about our common scientific interests. I was assured by friends in contact with him that letters could not possibly do him any harm; he would probably never receive them. But any scientific material that did get through was important, because he felt so isolated in Gorky and appreciated all scientific contacts. Immediately after the Sicily summer school I sent Sakharov a letter and some reprints of my work. He never received the letter but did get the reprint, which duplicated much of his work. He answered with a postcard which he sent somehow to his stepdaughter Tatiana Yankelevich in Boston. She did not know that I was in America, because Sakharov never received my letter. Since the address on the reprint was Weizmann Institute, she naturally sent it to her husband Efrem’s brother Boris, who was at that time a doctoral student at the Weizmann Institute. She also enclosed a copy of the smuggled manuscript, not realizing that I had it already. But Boris was doing military service at the time and passed it on to Edward Trifonov, an Institute scientist who knew me, but had no idea what it was all about. He sent the material to me in Chicago with a covering letter about manuscripts from Sakharov. I thought at first that they had gone to a lot of trouble just to send me these manuscripts that I already had. Just as I was about to toss it all out the postcard fell out of the package and I knew that I had received something very important.

At the advice of Sakharov activist Kurt Gottfried, I sent a copy of the postcard with a note to Jessica Matthews of the Washington Post. She was then about to write an editorial about the arrest by the KGB of the Soviet “refusenik” scientist Viktor Brailovsky.

At this time many Soviet Jewish citizens had applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union and settle in Israel. When their applications had been refused they sere severely penalized by the Soviet authorities. They were called “refuseniks”, fired from their jobs and suffered all kinds of harassment. Refusenik scientists were not allowed to visit scientific institutions. A group of refusenik scientists created their own scientific seminars to enable them to communicate with colleagues and participate in scientific research. At the time that Jessica Matthews received my letter,she saw that it fit beautifully into her editorial.

A few days later my postcard from Sakharov appeared in the leading editorial in the Post with the headline “A Voice out of the Darkness”. Together with the news of the arrest of Brailovsky, this postcard showed that the KGB could not silence Sakharov and the refuseniks. The postcard was then copied and appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the International Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, New Scientist, Science News, and C. P. Snow’s book The Physicists. The story was broadcast by Voice of America in their Russian language broadcast and heard by friends of Sakharov in Moscow who told Elena Bonner who told Sakharov. He then sent me a second postcard, which again made the rounds of the media.

Publicity to Help Sakharov and Refuseniks

Keeping these issues alive and in the media was not easy. After a while the Soviet mistreatment of dissidents and refuseniks was no longer news, and the media were not interested.

Many people in many countries were then working hard to spread the latest news about individual refuseniks, about the harassment and imprisonment of Sakharov, Orlov and Sharansky (SOS) and about the breakup of the Moscow seminars. They also write letters to refuseniks to bolster their morale, to keep them informed of news from Israel and the rest of the world, and to show both the refuseniks and the police who censor their mail that the world had not forgotten their plight and was still actively interested in helping them.

After the arrest of Brailovsky and the breakup of the seminars, groups of concerned scientists in the U.S. organized special seminars similar to those in Moscow with the aim of showing solidarity with the refuseniks and giving publicity to their new troubles. These seminars were held in private homes in university communities throughout the U.S. with a format similar to the Moscow seminar. Outstanding scientists were asked to give talks about their work, and scientists who had attended Moscow seminars as foreign visitors also spoke. In addition there were reports on the present situation and discussions of possible action. Representatives of the press were informed and invited and later wrote articles in the local newspaper. I attended two such seminars, one at the University of Illinois in Urbana and one at the University of Chicago. In both I showed my postcards from Sakharov and told both the scientific and human story behind them.

After my first postcard appeared in the Washington Post, I sent the material to the Chicago newspapers, thinking that it might have some local interest. I never received any answer. However, when I sent it to Irv Kupcinet who writes for the Chicago Sun-Times and whom I had met at Chicago Weizmann Institute dinners, he was very interested and devoted considerable space to the story in his column. Immediately the competing paper, the Chicago Tribune, became interested and sent a photographer out to the laboratory where I was working to take my picture and get a story. But nothing came of this. Local small talk was more interesting for Chicagoans than the story of Sakharov. I also sent a copy of the card and the correspondence to the science editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. The San Francisco Chronicle published a full page in their weekly magazine, with the headline “Courage of an Exiled Scientist” and pictures of Sakharov and the postcard. The New York Times did nothing with the story.

In January, 1981 the American Physical Society held a special session on the scientific work of Andrei Sakharov at their annual New York meeting. Several talks summarized Sakharov’s contributions to plasma physics and fusion, particle physics, the cosmology of the early universe and the theory of gravitation. A number of these contributions were far ahead of their time and were originally ignored or scoffed at by the physics community. But some of these ideas were accepted over a decade later, when most physicists were unaware of Sakharov’s original contribution. Many physicists who had previously known of Sakharov only as the father of the Soviet H bomb and later for his human rights activities were amazed to learn that he had also made very significant contributions to basic research in physics in a wide variety of areas.

After the New York Physical Society meeting, a report on the Sakharov session appeared in the Chicago newspapers, with a picture of Sakharov’s step-daughter and a Chicago physicist who spoke there. But there was nothing in the New York Times. The story had come from an Associated Press report by their science writer who had been at the meeting. It had been picked up by a number of papers around the country, but not by the New York Times. The Associated Press did not report my talk at the press conference about the postcard, because the postcard story was two months old and no longer news. I called the Associated Press reporter after receiving the second postcard. He immediately wrote a story which appeared in many newspapers, with headlines like “Sakharov Finds Way to Beam His Idea” and “Notes from the underground: Soviet smuggles cards”. Voice of America was very interested in the story that Sakharov had heard of my interest in his work from VOA. They offered to broadcast a response to his second postcard which I dictated and they translated into Russian. But major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post did not carry the story. Sakharov’s difficulties were old hat and not considered news any more.

I attempted to get as much publicity as possible for Sakharov in the media by the use of the two postcards. By this time a story had unfolded that could be told in many different ways to many different audiences from scientific seminars to rotary club meetings. Different versions of the story appeared in a number of publications.

I followed up the appearance of my first card in the British magazine New Scientist by writing to the Editors expressing strong approval about their use of my postcard. But I was surprised that they had not informed me. Their response was an apology and a request that I write an article about Sakharov’s scientific work. By this time I had been impressed with the breadth and depth of his work and responded that he had done so much in so many different fields that no one person could adequately cover it all.

I agreed to write an article about my field and suggested that there be two other articles about his other contributions. The result was a special section of New Scientist on Sakharov’s work, timed to correspond with a meeting in New York celebrating Sakharov’s sixtieth birthday. It contained the three articles following the general outline of the New York Physical Society meeting, an editorial on Sakharov, entitled “An honorable dissident”, with a picture of Sakharov on the cover of the magazine.

This section appeared in the April 30 issue, just in time for the international meeting in May 1981 honoring Sakharov’s 60th birthday in New York. The program featured his contributions to Science, War and Peace and Human Rights. The reports by outstanding speakers in all these areas were very impressive. In all three areas Sakharov has been ahead of his time.

He had not been a lone naive voice in the wilderness fighting for hopeless causes. His contributions can be characterized as combining brilliant vision and analysis with a down-to-earth practical view of what will be realistically feasible ten years hence, and as recognizing the significance of new developments long before they were fully appreciated by others. He had already lived to see some of his early ideas which were ridiculed at the time accepted ten or fifteen years later.

The “Moscow Seminars in Exile” in Urbana and Chicago attracted the attention of the press. The Champaign-Urbana paper carried a big story, including material on Sakharov and the postcards. The two Chicago papers carried stories which mainly emphasized the presence of Sakharov's stepdaughter Tatyana Yankelevich who had come specially from Boston for the seminar. The plight of the refuseniks was also mentioned, and of course the fact that one of the speakers was a Nobel Prize-winner helped get attention from the press.

The story of my correspondence with Sakharov finally made the New York Times after the international symposium honoring his 60th birthday, as part of a report on the meeting. The meeting also provided an occasion for the story to appear in newspapers which had been sitting on it for some time, waiting for a suitable occasion.

The story of the postcards meandered through the media in unexpected ways. Direct efforts to send the story to editors usually were unsuccessful, unless the particular writer had a special interest or a special incentive to write about it. But the public affairs office of the Argonne Laboratory, which had done nothing to publicize the story, noted the article on my talk at the Urbana Moscow Seminar in the local paper and assigned a summer student working at Argonne to look into it. She interviewed me and wrote a very good article entitled “Sakharov Writes to Argonne Scientist — East meets West through smuggled postcard", which was published in the internal Argonne magazine, Argonne News. This story was then picked up by another student, working for a master’s degree in journalism at a local university, who called and asked for an interview. She thought the story would be suitable for the local Chicago papers. I was skeptical, since the direct contact with the editors and other reporters had led nowhere. But shortly afterwards she called, said that she was now working for the Chicago Sun-Times, and was ready to use the story. She sent a photographer to take shots of me with the postcard, and a full page article appeared shorly afterwards. Never underestimate the power of a student.

But by the fall of 1981, Sakharov was almost a forgotten man in Gorky. The Russians were succeeding in isolating him and keeping his views from reaching the Soviet people and the world. His letters received little attention when they were smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He sent a long letter on the suppression of human rights and on his own condition to a well-known physics professor in America. But no major newspaper nor magazine would publish it, because the standard suppression of human rights in the Soviet Union and the mistreatment of Sakharov was no longer news. The Soviet strategy was clear. Wait until the West gets tired of all this dissident and refusenik business. Then the KGB will be able to do as they please without notice or interference from abroad.

Sakharov found the way to get back into the media and the headlines. His wife’s two children by her former marriage had emigrated to the United States. They had originally not wanted to emigrate, but they had been harrassed so much by the KGB because their mother had married Sakharov that they finally applied for emigration. But Sakharov’s stepson’s fiancee, Lisa, was still in the Soviet Union and was not allowed to leave and join her fiance. Sakharov and his wife went on a hunger strike to force the authorities to let her go.

When Sakharov began his hunger strike, many of his friends in America were very critical. Why make all this fuss about one girl who couldn’t get out when so many refuseniks like Anatoly Sharansky are in much worse condition? Why is Sakharov going overboard for his own family? They did not appreciate Sakharov’s brilliant tactics in bringing the whole problem of Soviet dissidents and refuseniks very dramatically to the attention of the world.

Strong letters of protest against the treatment of Anatoly Sharansky or even a hunger strike for Sharansky would have received very little publicity at that time. The world and the media were bored with the problem of Soviet dissidents. But the media went wild about the human interest story of this poor girl who only wanted to join her fiance, and whose only crime had bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Quarks and Smuggled Postcards from Andrei Sakharov
• 2. Andrei Sakharov and the Weizmann Institute
• 3. The Weizmann Institute and the Scientific History of Sakharov's Work
• 4. How Scientists Study Nature — Pure and Applied Research
• 5. The Building Blocks of Matter — What is a Quark?
• 6. The Forces of Nature
• 7. The Weak Force and the Discovery of the W Particle
• Index