“I was never a cold person, Benjamin,” she says tonight: like many old people who live alone, she doesn’t realize that she’s thinking out loud. “But my passions were too intense for you. I thought you shared my longing for the harmonies. I thought with you I might find the place where the music is so pure that the sound itself could ravage you, if it didn’t first shatter your mind. These bodies, yes, we live inside these bodies and must tend to them, but I wanted to be inside the numbers, inside the function where it approaches the limit. I long for the stars. I know their red shift and their spectral lines, but I don’t want to describe them: I want to be inside the light.”
She’s weeping now, her tears turning to ice crystals on her lashes. And then, because it seems the most natural thing in the world, she unbuttons her jacket and her shirt and lies on the deck, opening her arms to the heavens.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Some years ago, while thumbing through my husband’s copies of Physics Today, I came on an article I actually could understand: a tribute to the Austrian physicist Marietta Blau. I had never heard of her, but she did groundbreaking research in cosmic ray physics in the 1930s. She was a member of the Institut für Radiumforschung (IRF) in Vienna.
The IRF, which still exists in the original building under the name Stefan-Meyer-Institut, was unique in the era between the world wars for its aggressive hiring and support of women scientists. It was the first research facility in the world to hire a janitorial staff, instead of demanding that women researchers also clean the labs. They were also the first, and perhaps remain the only institute to require the same number of toilets for women as for men. Before the Anschluss, thirty-eight percent of the research staff were women. With Nazis in power, the Jewish staff and the women were fired within relatively short order, and the IRF lost its cutting edge in research. Blau’s work was so highly regarded by Erwin Schr?dinger (Nobel Prize, 1933) that he kept nominating her for the prize, which she never won. As war closed in on Europe, Einstein tried to get an American university to find a place for Blau. He was unsuccessful, but at the last possible second, he found her a position in a high school in Mexico City. Her enforced exile from the heart of physics meant that at war’s end, Blau had lost her edge as a researcher. She worked briefly at the Brookings Institution in Long Island, and died in obscurity in Austria.
Blau’s story haunted me for years. Critical Mass has its origins in Blau’s life, but the physicist I created, Martina Saginor, is a work of fiction. None of Martina’s biography is based on Blau, except for her position as a researcher at the Institut für Radiumforschung. It’s also true that one of Blau’s students, Hertha Wambacher, was a secret member of the Nazi Party when the party was outlawed in Austria. However, Wambacher was not involved in weapons work or in torturing prisoners.
The Technische Hochschule für M?dchen, which Martina attends as a student and where she later works as a teacher, is my own invention. Despite the IRF’s welcoming policy toward women, the University of Vienna did not pay them a stipend. The IRF director, Dr. Stefan Meyer, paid women out of his own pocket, but many had to augment that stipend with other paying jobs.
The German effort to release enough energy from the atom to create a weapon of mass destruction took place through an institution called the Uranverein, or Uranium Club. There were a number of sites in Germany where scientists and technicians tried to create reactors that could produce a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. I created a fictitious site near Innsbruck, Austria, Uranverein 7, but to the best of my knowledge, there were no actual reactor installations in Austria.
At the end of World War II, when U.S. policy concerns shifted from Fascism to Communism, the American government brought in many Nazi weapons and rocket researchers. Under the name “Operation Paperclip,” the United States did a perfunctory investigation, or none at all, into the background of Nazis it brought into U.S. weapons labs. Some of the people had engaged personally in horrific acts of torture.
For the background and history of the IRF, I used Maria Rentetzi’s Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, as well as Brigitte Strohmaier and Robert Rosner, Marietta Blau, Stars of Disintegration, Riverside, California: Ariadne Press, 2006.
Dr. Johann Marton, deputy director of the Stefan-Meyer-Institut, took a day from a busy schedule to show me through the Institute building on Boltzmannstrasse, and to give me a personal history of the Institute, and the way in which it was affected by the Nazi era.
For details about Operation Paperclip, I read Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945–1990, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
For background on physics and on the race for the atomic bomb, I read Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986; Steven Weinberg, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, New York: Scientific American Press, 1983; and Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.