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WikiProject Biography Assessment
Barely a B. It has a "Miscellany" section, that really needs to be merged into the main body, and only a couple citations.
The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Yamara 04:42, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
Leo Szilard is due much more credit than you giving him. He was the one person who persevered despite all odds to see that allies get the ultimate weapon before Hitler. User:68.100.107.145
Which was, of course going to happen anyway even if we waited until the war was over before starting the Manhattan Project.
Delete "Los Alamos" as Szilard worked only in Chicago's Met Lab during the Manhattan Project. General Groves, the project's military director, distrusted and disliked Szilard and saw to it that Szilard stayed in Chicago for the duration of the war. William Lanouette, author of "Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb." (Scribners 1992, University of Chicago Press 1994) lanouettew@gao.gov User:161.203.16.1
Didn't Szilard and Einstein patent a household refrigerator, later manufactured and marketed by Electrolux?
The constant pressure refrigerator was patented with Einstein and is more properly known as the Einstein-Szilárd refrigerator: Dannen, Geene (1997), "The Einstein-Szilard Refrigerators", Scientific American, 276 (1): 90–95 Tachyon 21:51, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
"...while he was waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury."
Surely he would have been waiting for a green light while stopped at a red light. Or is this one of those quirky transatlantic language differences? MrWeeble 09:36, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
It's the process. This leads to that. It's not hard to grasp this concept.
It might be nice to have a phonetic spelling of his name, I keep wanting to say Slizard.
It is similar to the pronounciation of "sea lard".
Probably not the right page to debate this, but I am restoring the line deleted by anon 132.204.25.73 that removed the crucial effect of the atomic bombs - the near-immediate Japanese surrender. That was the intent of the bombings, and it was a successful one. If we are going to include the passages castigating Truman for his decision "simply to use the weapons," (a phrase I will delete for the second time, as there is abundant evidence that the decision to kill so many thousands of civilians was hardly a "simple" and casual one, then we must also include mention of the practical impact of the bombing on the course of the war. Kaisershatner 15:07, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
I failed the attempted 0.5 nom on Leó Szilárd because there are no refs. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 02:55, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
The infobox has been removed. Please discuss for & against to reach a consensus. To remind you what it looked like, here is a sample:
bunix 12:49, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, it has been two weeks since it was intially removed. This has now allowed adequate time for free discussion. So far the discussion has supported the box and there have been no arguments against posted here. Therefore I am now reinstating the box. In future, please can removers of large chunks of info always go to the discussion page first before removal, as per wiki policy. Immediate removal without discussion is only justified for vandalism and wiki violations. bunix 13:17, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I support the inclusion of this info box. Could the persons advocating its removal clarify their rationale? Addhoc 14:01, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I have made two changes. Firstly I have completely removed the sections concerning the effects of the atomic bombings and the reasons for the decision to use the bombs. It is a highly contentious issue and is being debated at length on the WP page about the bombing ( Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). There is no point to having a stunted rehash of that article here too, and any interested reader would do MUCH better to refer to the article - which, luckily, is already cited in the text itself. Secondly, I have changed the sentence "...protestations of Szilárd and many of the other top scientists in the project" to " ...protestations of Szilárd and other scientists" because I saw no citations to validate the statement "many top scientists at the (Manhattan) Project." If the original reading is to be retained it must have valid citations. In fact, even this weakened statement might still be an overstatement of the true situation; I will be interested to see the sources cited for it. Possibly it needs to be even further weakened if no sourcing is forthcoming Hi There 23:15, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Now look: (cur) (last) 11:43, 10 August 2006 Will314159 (Talk | contribs) (Quit it Hil There you are trivializing man's lilfe) Will314159 has added back what Hi There removed. I still agree with Hi There generally, but the material re-added by Will314159 is not 100% accurate. Regarding "On the other hand, author James Carroll in his book The House of War maintains the obstacle in ending the war was the insistence on unconditional surrender. He writes that Japan was ready to surrender in July, 1945, on the condition that it could keep its Emperor, a condition that was later accepted. He writes the true purpose of the nuclear bombing was to intimidate Stalin," I do not see that one man's opinion gets such prominent appearance on the Leo Szilard page.
But worse, directly regarding Leo Szilard, the following is incorrect and internally inconsistent with other content: "Although Szilárd, before the war, had considered the U.S. the one truly humane government in the world, (that being the reason why he chose to assist the U.S. in developing the atomic bomb,) he abandoned this view after the weapons' use." Not true. Earlier the article says, correctly, "In 1927 he finished his habilitation and became a Privatdozent (instructor) in Physics at University of Berlin. .... In 1933 Szilárd fled to London to escape Nazi persecution." So not "choosing" to work for Germany was "choosen" for him by the Germans. It is incorrect to say, in parenthesis no less, "(that being the reason why he chose to assist the U.S. in developing the atomic bomb.)"
If this is true, I want to see documentation. -- SafeLibraries 12:15, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I am removing the section about the effects of and decision to drop the atomic bombs again. My previous remarks and reasons for removing the section are still valid; if you think otherwise please explain why. If you think that James Carroll's opinion is final and definitive, please support such a contention, which you could do, by, let's say, going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Debate_over_the_decision_to_drop_the_bombs and citing Carroll there - and if all the participants in the discussions THERE accept Carroll's opinion as final and definitive and if all further debates therewith cease in deference to his opinion, then perhaps it will accepted here too; but if not, not. Hi There 13:31, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
SafeLibraries: I have no personal stake in the sentence "Although Szilárd, before the war, had considered the U.S. the one truly humane government in the world, (that being the reason why he chose to assist the U.S. in developing the atomic bomb,) he abandoned this view after the weapons' use." If the statement is not true, it should be gotten rid of. It was in the article when I first saw it and I kept it because I assumed that it was accurate. If it isn't, it needs to be gotten rid of. However, I do not quite see your reasons for saying the statement is incorrect, as you seem to tie together his non-participation in the German project and participation in the American project. These two things would seem to be independent, and the statement in the article about his participation in the American project can be true irrespective of the reasons for his non-participation in the German project. So a clarification of your objection might be in order Hi There 13:42, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I see a new thread was opened. It doesn't have to be James Carrol that validated Leo's view. It can be Curtis Lemay or McArthur. I used James Carrol because I heard him on NPR talking about the evolution of the desentitivity to the horrors of bombing and the loss of morals. It is important to state in the article to state that Scilard's views have been validated by experts in the field. The Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs were totally superflous. You would think that Gen Curtis LeMay and Gen McArthur would know. the cite to LeMay and McArthur is in the original thread I started when I made the original Carrol addition. Best Wishes Will314159 21:23, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I looked into the history of the article, and it appears we do have a serious issue with all of the reversions. Communication is of paramount importance. An edit war is not needed here, if the concerns are verifiable.
Cheers,
We also appear to have attracted anti-semitic vandalism of this site and (surprise surprise) just as it was featured on today's Wiki Main Page.
I was actually CITING this article on a forum when I spotted the sabotage. It made me look like a fool and Wikipedia once again was made to look unreliable and also insulting to Jews!!!???. I was totally incensed. ALL articles on the main page should be LOCKED or only allowed to be edited after peer revue. This situation stinks.-- Phil Wardle 08:33, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Torinir ( Ding my phone My support calls E-Support Options ) 19:27, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
To me this reads more like a piece of journalism than a scholarly article, notably: "The entire history of the world could have been changed..." and "and the rest is history". I believe the tone, but not necessarily the meat, of this paragraph should be changed to reflect the scientific nature of the subject matter. Pretender 19:59, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I spotted that as well and agree with you.-- Phil Wardle 01:12, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
The last section begins with two sentances:
"In 1947, Szilárd switched fields of study because of his horror of atomic weapons, moving from physics to molecular biology, working extensively with Aaron Novick. He proposed, in February of 1950, a new kind of nuclear weapon using cobalt as a tamper, a cobalt bomb, which he said might wipe out all life on the planet."
These sentences seem to contradict each other. On the one hand he abandoned physics because of the horror it had unleashed. Yet he comes up for the design for an even more horrific weapon. If both of these sentences are indeed true (they should be cited) there should be an explanation concerning these actions. Harley peters 20:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
There are two reasons that this seems contradictory. First because Szilard was of a somewhat contradictory nature and could, while campaigning for peace also make suggestions such as this on national radio (personally I think it was supposed to be a scare tactic but that is purely conjecture) and second because it is not strictly accurate. In fact Szilard had been seriously considering going into biology in 1933 before striking upon the chain reaction idea that would take over his life for well over a decade. In truth he maintained an interest in Atomic developments but was forced out of working in this field by General Groves. See the excellent "Genius In The Shadows" Chapter 20 p305 Arachniddave ( talk) 00:02, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
Fame is a strong motivator sometimes. Better be the first to come up with it lest someone else get credit for it in history or through patents. Angry bee ( talk) 20:42, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
Does anyone know whether Szilard read H. G. Wells's book The World Set Free or not? See The World Set Free. -- Cbdorsett 08:36, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
There are 3 reasons why to mention Leo Szilard Jewish origins in the third paragraph ( i.e early life ):
1.Being a Jew, He escaped Europe and settle in the USA ,where he worked at Los Alamos.
2.Its written in the paragrph that:"...Szilárd's family had Jewish, German, Hungarian, and Slovak Cultural Influences , however, his father's primary language was German..." .One's can get confused and think that Szilard was of multiple ancestries.
3.having informative value.-- Gilisa 17:11, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
What kind of "slovak cultural influences" had his family?
You are right, there is no indication for "Slovak cultural influences", nor did his father language make any difference for him since it wasn't his own primary language. I deleted any reminding for him as a "German", I really cant understand how he can be considerd as one-culturally or ethnically.-- Gilisa 18:36, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
The phrasing in the previous version was odd. However,
(1) His being in danger of being classified as a Jew was presumably only one of several reasons for emigrating from Hungary. There are two points here, really: (a) he was politically active; (b) strictly speaking, nobody can be persecuted for "being a Jew"; somebody can be persecuted for being classified as a "Jew" by somebody else - in this case, by the Hungarian fascist government or the Nazis, according to racial laws. We have to be careful here: the fact that we acknowledge that X classified Y by blood does not mean that we should classify Y by blood, or that X's classification is somehow objective or valid.
(2) Exactly who does not have multiple ancestries (what scandal!)?
(3) What informative value?
Szilard family was from an Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, that's mean that almost all of the chances were that they would have a German surname-that's is true for the vast majority of the Jewish people from all over Europe back then (and so is for the Jewish people of the USA, Canada,Australia,South Africa, China and etc)-it have nothing to do with being German or even having German roots (Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of Jews that immigrate to Germany at the 10th and then spread all over Europe).The same is true about Yiddish which was spoken by most of the Jews, from Romania to Germany, and was 90% made from German language. Even people like Steven Spielberg, Milton Friedman and many other famous Jews that had, in a sense, family german history and had German surname but didn't came out of Germany, at least not in a way that affect their own lifes . So, I find it only just to delete the note about Szilard surname (Jews changed there surname according to the place and culture when they were given with emancipation or even when they just start talking the language or from many other reasons) which have only a misleading value.-- Gilisa 18:14, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
During the war his brother was working in the prison laboratory under Andrei Tupolev developing planes. Source: Leonid Kerber's memoirs. Will have a look around to fix the quote and edit to the effect. 212.188.108.216 ( talk) 22:28, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps Szilard's work in biology deserves its own heading, as his career was devoted to biology after 1947. As it is now, details relating to this work are scattered throughout the article with no mention of the fact that he was appointed a professor of biology at the University of Chicago in 1948, running a lab with Aaron Novick. Also missing is mention of Szilard's assistance of Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob's work on gene regulation in e. coli for which they won the Nobel Prize in 1965. Inoculatedcities ( talk) 17:39, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
I think that it might be a bit more fitting if we were to switch the section about the Manhantan project with the one directly after it that talks about his views on nuclear weaponry. It might make for a smoother and more orderly read. Soloman212 (And my pet tortoise.) ( talk) 03:35, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
Hi fellow wikipedians! I changed these sentences During 1932, Szilárd had read about the fictional "atomic bombs" described in H. G. Wells's science fiction novel The World Set Free. This inspired him to be the first scientist to examine seriously the science of the creation of nuclear weapons.
to
In 1932, Szilárd read the science fiction novel The World Set Free by H. G. Wells, a book which he said made a great impression on him.
(And I referenced it). There are no clear accounts I know of how Szilárd was inspired by the book. These are the quite interesting parts in The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes, 1987):
page 24: "Just then, in 1932, Szilard found or took up for the first time that appealing orphan among H. G. Wells' books that he had failed to discover before: The World Set Free."
page 24: "Yet The World Set Free influenced Szilard less than its subject matter might suggest. "This book made a very great impression on me, but I didn't regard it as anything but fiction. It didn't start me thinking of whether or not such things could in fact happen. I had not been working in nuclear physics up to that time"."
page 266: "After Bohr's arrival Szilard traveled down from New York to visit his sick friend and won a long-overdue surprise: "Wigner told me of Hahn's discovery. Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron.... When I heard this I immediately saw that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted ... then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.""
page 331: "Something other than Briggs' penurious methodology triggered a new burst of activity from Szilard. He had spent the winter preparing a thorough theoretical study, "Divergent chain reactions in systems composed of uranium and carbon" - divergent in this case meaning chain reactions that continue to multiply once begun (the document's first footnote, numbered zero, cited "H. G. Wells, The World Set Free [1913]")."
Regards, -- Dna-Dennis ( talk) 05:49, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
Wha...? There must be at least a couple sentences missing here. It's gone from encyclopedic to cryptic! Shenme ( talk) 02:49, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
Promoted to GA status
29 May 2015
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Reviewing |
Reviewer: Ian Rose ( talk · contribs) 00:09, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
I'd assumed this particular mad scientist had been to GAN and beyond long ago, so happy to help him on his way now... Cheers,
Ian Rose (
talk)
00:09, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Toolbox checks
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Cheers, Ian Rose ( talk) 10:18, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Legobot ( talk • contribs) 00:20, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: move. Cas Liber ( talk · contribs) 09:47, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
Leó Szilárd →
Leo Szilard – Szilard himself never used the acute accents in his name after leaving Hungary. He always spelled it Leo Szilard. Since that was his clear choice, I think that his choice should be honored.
Hawkeye7 (
talk) 03:17, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
--Relisted.
George Ho (
talk)
01:31, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
*Support. We give him an English-language name because this is an English-language encyclopedia. His passport has nothing to do with it. See
Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
Atomic Archive,
Britannica, and
Columbia. As you can see
here and
here, these sources are perfectly capable of including Hungarian diacritics when the need for them arises.
Too hip to be cool (
talk) 12:44, 2 June 2015 (UTC) Striking comment by sock puppet of banned user.
Dohn joe (
talk)
13:28, 4 June 2015 (UTC)
*Oppose, English-language media rarely uses punctuation marks and accents, which are not part of the English language (e.g.
"Lech Walesa",
"Francois Hollande" or
"Nicolas Maduro"). However WP is a reliable encyclopedia (I hope...) and I think it should not be used that kinds of primitive journalistic methods. --
94.21.211.65 (
talk)
17:26, 4 June 2015 (UTC)
There are alot of redirects. If someone can do this I can close some more RMs... Cas Liber ( talk · contribs) 10:05, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
I am confused by the language in this article. It gives the clear impression that Leo Szilard was the original inventor of the idea of the nuclear chain reaction. However, in 1944, the Nobel Foundation awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Otto Hahn "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei". The Nobel Foundation got part of the matter wrong because Lisa Meitner was a key part of the team, and should have shared the 1944 Prize with Hahn. §Heavy nuclei are inherently neutron-rich so that even when a heavy nucleus splits and creates isotopes that are rich in neutrons, there is almost never a fission path available which can accommodate all of the neutrons into the fission products - i. e., there are almost always extra fast-moving neutrons left over to lead, upon their sufficient cooling, to further neutron-activation of heavy nuclei and a resultant chain reaction. So did the Nobel Foundation get it totally wrong? Or was the Hahn-Meitner team the first to discover just the fission of heavy nuclei without noticing the release of a surfeit of free neutrons? Then Szilard came along later (1933? was it) to note that along with the fission of heavy nuclei, there was also the release of neutrons, setting in motion the possibility of a chair reaction? Please someone, research this issue and clear up the discrepancy. ColgatorBob ( talk) 01:54, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Leo Szilard/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
==
Biography assessment rating comment ==
WikiProject Biography Assessment Barely a B. It has a "Miscellany" section, that really needs to be merged into the main body, and only a couple citations. The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Yamara 04:42, 26 May 2007 (UTC) |
Substituted at 21:49, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
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Under "Further Reading", the short-story collection "The Voice of the Dolphins" is listed, and a link given to an on-line copy at Stanford University (it's an archive.org copy of it). But when you go there, it does not seem to be possible to access the full text. Immediately available is only a limited preview of a few pages, most without significant content. It seems full access requires membership - or if there is a way of finding the full text, it is certainly not easily apparent when you visit the page.
As a result, I am wondering whether the item should be removed from the "Further Reading" list. What is the policy of Wikipedia about giving links like this to items which depend on membership of an organization, or are behind a pay-wall? I had an idea (but am not sure) that the usual policy is to exclude such links.
The book is freely available at fadedpage.com, but it is not the expanded edition like the Stanford University one is. I will add a link to that in a minute. M.J.E. ( talk) 09:34, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
I take back my original comment (top of this thread), and might even be tempted to delete it, but I think you don't do that on Talk pages. The reason is that I have just realized the link in question was a reference to a printed edition of a book, to which an on-line link was also given, and I seemed to overlook that and focused on the on-line aspect. Clearly a reference to a print book is always acceptable. So never mind what I said above. M.J.E. ( talk) 09:44, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
There is some ambiguity between reáliskola and gymnasium. I entered Föreáliskola as the high school that Szilard attended, according to reference provided by Gene Dannen. The Wikipedia article Minta Gymnasium claims that both Szilard and Teller attend this school. An authority on Hungarian and schools in Hungary needs to speak out. Tachyon ( talk) 13:18, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Leo Szilard article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | Leo Szilard has been listed as one of the Warfare good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | |||||||||
| ||||||||||
![]() | A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
June 10, 2015. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that
Leó Szilárd teamed up with
Albert Einstein to build
a refrigerator? | |||||||||
![]() | Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the " On this day..." column on September 12, 2004, September 12, 2005, September 12, 2006, September 12, 2007, September 12, 2012, September 12, 2013, September 12, 2016, and September 12, 2023. |
![]() | This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
WikiProject Biography Assessment
Barely a B. It has a "Miscellany" section, that really needs to be merged into the main body, and only a couple citations.
The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Yamara 04:42, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
Leo Szilard is due much more credit than you giving him. He was the one person who persevered despite all odds to see that allies get the ultimate weapon before Hitler. User:68.100.107.145
Which was, of course going to happen anyway even if we waited until the war was over before starting the Manhattan Project.
Delete "Los Alamos" as Szilard worked only in Chicago's Met Lab during the Manhattan Project. General Groves, the project's military director, distrusted and disliked Szilard and saw to it that Szilard stayed in Chicago for the duration of the war. William Lanouette, author of "Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb." (Scribners 1992, University of Chicago Press 1994) lanouettew@gao.gov User:161.203.16.1
Didn't Szilard and Einstein patent a household refrigerator, later manufactured and marketed by Electrolux?
The constant pressure refrigerator was patented with Einstein and is more properly known as the Einstein-Szilárd refrigerator: Dannen, Geene (1997), "The Einstein-Szilard Refrigerators", Scientific American, 276 (1): 90–95 Tachyon 21:51, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
"...while he was waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury."
Surely he would have been waiting for a green light while stopped at a red light. Or is this one of those quirky transatlantic language differences? MrWeeble 09:36, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
It's the process. This leads to that. It's not hard to grasp this concept.
It might be nice to have a phonetic spelling of his name, I keep wanting to say Slizard.
It is similar to the pronounciation of "sea lard".
Probably not the right page to debate this, but I am restoring the line deleted by anon 132.204.25.73 that removed the crucial effect of the atomic bombs - the near-immediate Japanese surrender. That was the intent of the bombings, and it was a successful one. If we are going to include the passages castigating Truman for his decision "simply to use the weapons," (a phrase I will delete for the second time, as there is abundant evidence that the decision to kill so many thousands of civilians was hardly a "simple" and casual one, then we must also include mention of the practical impact of the bombing on the course of the war. Kaisershatner 15:07, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
I failed the attempted 0.5 nom on Leó Szilárd because there are no refs. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 02:55, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
The infobox has been removed. Please discuss for & against to reach a consensus. To remind you what it looked like, here is a sample:
bunix 12:49, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, it has been two weeks since it was intially removed. This has now allowed adequate time for free discussion. So far the discussion has supported the box and there have been no arguments against posted here. Therefore I am now reinstating the box. In future, please can removers of large chunks of info always go to the discussion page first before removal, as per wiki policy. Immediate removal without discussion is only justified for vandalism and wiki violations. bunix 13:17, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I support the inclusion of this info box. Could the persons advocating its removal clarify their rationale? Addhoc 14:01, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I have made two changes. Firstly I have completely removed the sections concerning the effects of the atomic bombings and the reasons for the decision to use the bombs. It is a highly contentious issue and is being debated at length on the WP page about the bombing ( Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). There is no point to having a stunted rehash of that article here too, and any interested reader would do MUCH better to refer to the article - which, luckily, is already cited in the text itself. Secondly, I have changed the sentence "...protestations of Szilárd and many of the other top scientists in the project" to " ...protestations of Szilárd and other scientists" because I saw no citations to validate the statement "many top scientists at the (Manhattan) Project." If the original reading is to be retained it must have valid citations. In fact, even this weakened statement might still be an overstatement of the true situation; I will be interested to see the sources cited for it. Possibly it needs to be even further weakened if no sourcing is forthcoming Hi There 23:15, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Now look: (cur) (last) 11:43, 10 August 2006 Will314159 (Talk | contribs) (Quit it Hil There you are trivializing man's lilfe) Will314159 has added back what Hi There removed. I still agree with Hi There generally, but the material re-added by Will314159 is not 100% accurate. Regarding "On the other hand, author James Carroll in his book The House of War maintains the obstacle in ending the war was the insistence on unconditional surrender. He writes that Japan was ready to surrender in July, 1945, on the condition that it could keep its Emperor, a condition that was later accepted. He writes the true purpose of the nuclear bombing was to intimidate Stalin," I do not see that one man's opinion gets such prominent appearance on the Leo Szilard page.
But worse, directly regarding Leo Szilard, the following is incorrect and internally inconsistent with other content: "Although Szilárd, before the war, had considered the U.S. the one truly humane government in the world, (that being the reason why he chose to assist the U.S. in developing the atomic bomb,) he abandoned this view after the weapons' use." Not true. Earlier the article says, correctly, "In 1927 he finished his habilitation and became a Privatdozent (instructor) in Physics at University of Berlin. .... In 1933 Szilárd fled to London to escape Nazi persecution." So not "choosing" to work for Germany was "choosen" for him by the Germans. It is incorrect to say, in parenthesis no less, "(that being the reason why he chose to assist the U.S. in developing the atomic bomb.)"
If this is true, I want to see documentation. -- SafeLibraries 12:15, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I am removing the section about the effects of and decision to drop the atomic bombs again. My previous remarks and reasons for removing the section are still valid; if you think otherwise please explain why. If you think that James Carroll's opinion is final and definitive, please support such a contention, which you could do, by, let's say, going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Debate_over_the_decision_to_drop_the_bombs and citing Carroll there - and if all the participants in the discussions THERE accept Carroll's opinion as final and definitive and if all further debates therewith cease in deference to his opinion, then perhaps it will accepted here too; but if not, not. Hi There 13:31, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
SafeLibraries: I have no personal stake in the sentence "Although Szilárd, before the war, had considered the U.S. the one truly humane government in the world, (that being the reason why he chose to assist the U.S. in developing the atomic bomb,) he abandoned this view after the weapons' use." If the statement is not true, it should be gotten rid of. It was in the article when I first saw it and I kept it because I assumed that it was accurate. If it isn't, it needs to be gotten rid of. However, I do not quite see your reasons for saying the statement is incorrect, as you seem to tie together his non-participation in the German project and participation in the American project. These two things would seem to be independent, and the statement in the article about his participation in the American project can be true irrespective of the reasons for his non-participation in the German project. So a clarification of your objection might be in order Hi There 13:42, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I see a new thread was opened. It doesn't have to be James Carrol that validated Leo's view. It can be Curtis Lemay or McArthur. I used James Carrol because I heard him on NPR talking about the evolution of the desentitivity to the horrors of bombing and the loss of morals. It is important to state in the article to state that Scilard's views have been validated by experts in the field. The Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs were totally superflous. You would think that Gen Curtis LeMay and Gen McArthur would know. the cite to LeMay and McArthur is in the original thread I started when I made the original Carrol addition. Best Wishes Will314159 21:23, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I looked into the history of the article, and it appears we do have a serious issue with all of the reversions. Communication is of paramount importance. An edit war is not needed here, if the concerns are verifiable.
Cheers,
We also appear to have attracted anti-semitic vandalism of this site and (surprise surprise) just as it was featured on today's Wiki Main Page.
I was actually CITING this article on a forum when I spotted the sabotage. It made me look like a fool and Wikipedia once again was made to look unreliable and also insulting to Jews!!!???. I was totally incensed. ALL articles on the main page should be LOCKED or only allowed to be edited after peer revue. This situation stinks.-- Phil Wardle 08:33, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Torinir ( Ding my phone My support calls E-Support Options ) 19:27, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
To me this reads more like a piece of journalism than a scholarly article, notably: "The entire history of the world could have been changed..." and "and the rest is history". I believe the tone, but not necessarily the meat, of this paragraph should be changed to reflect the scientific nature of the subject matter. Pretender 19:59, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I spotted that as well and agree with you.-- Phil Wardle 01:12, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
The last section begins with two sentances:
"In 1947, Szilárd switched fields of study because of his horror of atomic weapons, moving from physics to molecular biology, working extensively with Aaron Novick. He proposed, in February of 1950, a new kind of nuclear weapon using cobalt as a tamper, a cobalt bomb, which he said might wipe out all life on the planet."
These sentences seem to contradict each other. On the one hand he abandoned physics because of the horror it had unleashed. Yet he comes up for the design for an even more horrific weapon. If both of these sentences are indeed true (they should be cited) there should be an explanation concerning these actions. Harley peters 20:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
There are two reasons that this seems contradictory. First because Szilard was of a somewhat contradictory nature and could, while campaigning for peace also make suggestions such as this on national radio (personally I think it was supposed to be a scare tactic but that is purely conjecture) and second because it is not strictly accurate. In fact Szilard had been seriously considering going into biology in 1933 before striking upon the chain reaction idea that would take over his life for well over a decade. In truth he maintained an interest in Atomic developments but was forced out of working in this field by General Groves. See the excellent "Genius In The Shadows" Chapter 20 p305 Arachniddave ( talk) 00:02, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
Fame is a strong motivator sometimes. Better be the first to come up with it lest someone else get credit for it in history or through patents. Angry bee ( talk) 20:42, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
Does anyone know whether Szilard read H. G. Wells's book The World Set Free or not? See The World Set Free. -- Cbdorsett 08:36, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
There are 3 reasons why to mention Leo Szilard Jewish origins in the third paragraph ( i.e early life ):
1.Being a Jew, He escaped Europe and settle in the USA ,where he worked at Los Alamos.
2.Its written in the paragrph that:"...Szilárd's family had Jewish, German, Hungarian, and Slovak Cultural Influences , however, his father's primary language was German..." .One's can get confused and think that Szilard was of multiple ancestries.
3.having informative value.-- Gilisa 17:11, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
What kind of "slovak cultural influences" had his family?
You are right, there is no indication for "Slovak cultural influences", nor did his father language make any difference for him since it wasn't his own primary language. I deleted any reminding for him as a "German", I really cant understand how he can be considerd as one-culturally or ethnically.-- Gilisa 18:36, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
The phrasing in the previous version was odd. However,
(1) His being in danger of being classified as a Jew was presumably only one of several reasons for emigrating from Hungary. There are two points here, really: (a) he was politically active; (b) strictly speaking, nobody can be persecuted for "being a Jew"; somebody can be persecuted for being classified as a "Jew" by somebody else - in this case, by the Hungarian fascist government or the Nazis, according to racial laws. We have to be careful here: the fact that we acknowledge that X classified Y by blood does not mean that we should classify Y by blood, or that X's classification is somehow objective or valid.
(2) Exactly who does not have multiple ancestries (what scandal!)?
(3) What informative value?
Szilard family was from an Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, that's mean that almost all of the chances were that they would have a German surname-that's is true for the vast majority of the Jewish people from all over Europe back then (and so is for the Jewish people of the USA, Canada,Australia,South Africa, China and etc)-it have nothing to do with being German or even having German roots (Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of Jews that immigrate to Germany at the 10th and then spread all over Europe).The same is true about Yiddish which was spoken by most of the Jews, from Romania to Germany, and was 90% made from German language. Even people like Steven Spielberg, Milton Friedman and many other famous Jews that had, in a sense, family german history and had German surname but didn't came out of Germany, at least not in a way that affect their own lifes . So, I find it only just to delete the note about Szilard surname (Jews changed there surname according to the place and culture when they were given with emancipation or even when they just start talking the language or from many other reasons) which have only a misleading value.-- Gilisa 18:14, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
During the war his brother was working in the prison laboratory under Andrei Tupolev developing planes. Source: Leonid Kerber's memoirs. Will have a look around to fix the quote and edit to the effect. 212.188.108.216 ( talk) 22:28, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps Szilard's work in biology deserves its own heading, as his career was devoted to biology after 1947. As it is now, details relating to this work are scattered throughout the article with no mention of the fact that he was appointed a professor of biology at the University of Chicago in 1948, running a lab with Aaron Novick. Also missing is mention of Szilard's assistance of Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob's work on gene regulation in e. coli for which they won the Nobel Prize in 1965. Inoculatedcities ( talk) 17:39, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
I think that it might be a bit more fitting if we were to switch the section about the Manhantan project with the one directly after it that talks about his views on nuclear weaponry. It might make for a smoother and more orderly read. Soloman212 (And my pet tortoise.) ( talk) 03:35, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
Hi fellow wikipedians! I changed these sentences During 1932, Szilárd had read about the fictional "atomic bombs" described in H. G. Wells's science fiction novel The World Set Free. This inspired him to be the first scientist to examine seriously the science of the creation of nuclear weapons.
to
In 1932, Szilárd read the science fiction novel The World Set Free by H. G. Wells, a book which he said made a great impression on him.
(And I referenced it). There are no clear accounts I know of how Szilárd was inspired by the book. These are the quite interesting parts in The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes, 1987):
page 24: "Just then, in 1932, Szilard found or took up for the first time that appealing orphan among H. G. Wells' books that he had failed to discover before: The World Set Free."
page 24: "Yet The World Set Free influenced Szilard less than its subject matter might suggest. "This book made a very great impression on me, but I didn't regard it as anything but fiction. It didn't start me thinking of whether or not such things could in fact happen. I had not been working in nuclear physics up to that time"."
page 266: "After Bohr's arrival Szilard traveled down from New York to visit his sick friend and won a long-overdue surprise: "Wigner told me of Hahn's discovery. Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron.... When I heard this I immediately saw that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted ... then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.""
page 331: "Something other than Briggs' penurious methodology triggered a new burst of activity from Szilard. He had spent the winter preparing a thorough theoretical study, "Divergent chain reactions in systems composed of uranium and carbon" - divergent in this case meaning chain reactions that continue to multiply once begun (the document's first footnote, numbered zero, cited "H. G. Wells, The World Set Free [1913]")."
Regards, -- Dna-Dennis ( talk) 05:49, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
Wha...? There must be at least a couple sentences missing here. It's gone from encyclopedic to cryptic! Shenme ( talk) 02:49, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
Promoted to GA status
29 May 2015
GA toolbox |
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Reviewing |
Reviewer: Ian Rose ( talk · contribs) 00:09, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
I'd assumed this particular mad scientist had been to GAN and beyond long ago, so happy to help him on his way now... Cheers,
Ian Rose (
talk)
00:09, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Toolbox checks
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Referencing
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Cheers, Ian Rose ( talk) 10:18, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Legobot ( talk • contribs) 00:20, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: move. Cas Liber ( talk · contribs) 09:47, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
Leó Szilárd →
Leo Szilard – Szilard himself never used the acute accents in his name after leaving Hungary. He always spelled it Leo Szilard. Since that was his clear choice, I think that his choice should be honored.
Hawkeye7 (
talk) 03:17, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
--Relisted.
George Ho (
talk)
01:31, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
*Support. We give him an English-language name because this is an English-language encyclopedia. His passport has nothing to do with it. See
Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
Atomic Archive,
Britannica, and
Columbia. As you can see
here and
here, these sources are perfectly capable of including Hungarian diacritics when the need for them arises.
Too hip to be cool (
talk) 12:44, 2 June 2015 (UTC) Striking comment by sock puppet of banned user.
Dohn joe (
talk)
13:28, 4 June 2015 (UTC)
*Oppose, English-language media rarely uses punctuation marks and accents, which are not part of the English language (e.g.
"Lech Walesa",
"Francois Hollande" or
"Nicolas Maduro"). However WP is a reliable encyclopedia (I hope...) and I think it should not be used that kinds of primitive journalistic methods. --
94.21.211.65 (
talk)
17:26, 4 June 2015 (UTC)
There are alot of redirects. If someone can do this I can close some more RMs... Cas Liber ( talk · contribs) 10:05, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
I am confused by the language in this article. It gives the clear impression that Leo Szilard was the original inventor of the idea of the nuclear chain reaction. However, in 1944, the Nobel Foundation awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Otto Hahn "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei". The Nobel Foundation got part of the matter wrong because Lisa Meitner was a key part of the team, and should have shared the 1944 Prize with Hahn. §Heavy nuclei are inherently neutron-rich so that even when a heavy nucleus splits and creates isotopes that are rich in neutrons, there is almost never a fission path available which can accommodate all of the neutrons into the fission products - i. e., there are almost always extra fast-moving neutrons left over to lead, upon their sufficient cooling, to further neutron-activation of heavy nuclei and a resultant chain reaction. So did the Nobel Foundation get it totally wrong? Or was the Hahn-Meitner team the first to discover just the fission of heavy nuclei without noticing the release of a surfeit of free neutrons? Then Szilard came along later (1933? was it) to note that along with the fission of heavy nuclei, there was also the release of neutrons, setting in motion the possibility of a chair reaction? Please someone, research this issue and clear up the discrepancy. ColgatorBob ( talk) 01:54, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Leo Szilard/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
==
Biography assessment rating comment ==
WikiProject Biography Assessment Barely a B. It has a "Miscellany" section, that really needs to be merged into the main body, and only a couple citations. The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Yamara 04:42, 26 May 2007 (UTC) |
Substituted at 21:49, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
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Under "Further Reading", the short-story collection "The Voice of the Dolphins" is listed, and a link given to an on-line copy at Stanford University (it's an archive.org copy of it). But when you go there, it does not seem to be possible to access the full text. Immediately available is only a limited preview of a few pages, most without significant content. It seems full access requires membership - or if there is a way of finding the full text, it is certainly not easily apparent when you visit the page.
As a result, I am wondering whether the item should be removed from the "Further Reading" list. What is the policy of Wikipedia about giving links like this to items which depend on membership of an organization, or are behind a pay-wall? I had an idea (but am not sure) that the usual policy is to exclude such links.
The book is freely available at fadedpage.com, but it is not the expanded edition like the Stanford University one is. I will add a link to that in a minute. M.J.E. ( talk) 09:34, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
I take back my original comment (top of this thread), and might even be tempted to delete it, but I think you don't do that on Talk pages. The reason is that I have just realized the link in question was a reference to a printed edition of a book, to which an on-line link was also given, and I seemed to overlook that and focused on the on-line aspect. Clearly a reference to a print book is always acceptable. So never mind what I said above. M.J.E. ( talk) 09:44, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
There is some ambiguity between reáliskola and gymnasium. I entered Föreáliskola as the high school that Szilard attended, according to reference provided by Gene Dannen. The Wikipedia article Minta Gymnasium claims that both Szilard and Teller attend this school. An authority on Hungarian and schools in Hungary needs to speak out. Tachyon ( talk) 13:18, 8 May 2024 (UTC)