질라드의 크리스마스
또 땜방 나갑니다. 내일은 반드시 번역놀이 결과를 올리겠습니다. (이건 완죤 마감시간에 쫓기는 느낌…)
질라드, 아주 특이한 사람이죠. 핵폭탄을 만든 뛰어난 과학자인데, 음모이론의 대가이기도 하고(어쩌면 잘나가는 과학자와 음모이론은 밀접한 관계가 있는 것 같기도 하고, 어쩌면 이게 사회현상을 너무 수학적으로 봐서 그런 것 아닌가 생각이 들기도 하고, 그런 점에서 보자면 플라톤의 철인정치야말로 수학적 음모이론의 아버지라는 느낌이 들기도 하고… 뭐 이건 나중에 다시 생각해 보기로 하죠), 원자탄의 위력 앞에서 아인시타인은 “정치에 회의를 느껴” 단식을 하지만 질라드는 “물리학에 회의를 느껴(?)” 분자생물학으로 전향… 나중에 암에 걸리자 자기가 발명한 기계로 자가치료… ㄷㄷㄷ
그가 죽자, 사람들이 한 말이 “밤에 죽음이 왔으니 그도 어쩔 수 없이 당했지 낮에 왔으면 도망갔을 것”이라고…ㄷㄷㄷ
During May 1964, Szilárd died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of sixty-six. At his memorial it was said that Death was required to come to him while asleep, or otherwise he would have outwitted it. (참고: 위키피디어 및 한글 위키피디어 )
그는 1921년 크리스마스 자기에게 교수가 내 준 재미 없는 박사학위 숙제를 집어치고, 충동적으로 자기가 하고싶은 것을 하겠다고 결심하고, 3주가 지나자 당시 물리학에서 가장 어려운 문제를 풀어버리고, 이걸로 박사학위를 받아버립니다. 이 이야기입니다.
Szilard had already given a year of his life to the Army and two years to engineering. He wasted no time advancing through physics. In the summer of 1921 he went to Max von Laue and asked for a thesis topic. Von Laue gave him an obscure problem in relativity theory. “I couldn’t make any headway with it. As a matter of fact, I was not even convinced that this was a problem that could be solved.” Szilard worked on it for six months, until the Christmas season, “and I thought Christmastime is not a time to work, it is a time to loaf, so I thought I would just think whatever comes to my mind.”
What he thought, in three weeks, was how to solve a baffling inconsistency in thermodynamics, the branch of physics that concerns relationships between heat and other forms of energy. There are two thermodynamic theories, both highly successful at predicting heat phenomena. One, the phenomenological, is more abstract and generalized (and therefore more useful); the other, the statistical, is based on an atomic model and corresponds more closely to physical reality. In particular, the statistical theory depicts thermal equilibrium as a state of random motion of atoms. Einstein, for example, had demonstrated in important papers in 1905 that Brownian motion – the continuous, random motion of particles such as pollen suspended in a liquid – was such a state. But the more useful phenomenological theory treated thermal equilibrium as if it were static, a state of no change. That was the inconsistency.
Szilard went for long walks – Berlin would have been cold and gray, the grayness sometimes relieved by days of brilliant sunshine – “and I saw something in the middle of the walk; when I came home I wrote it down; the next morning I woke up with a new idea and I went for another walk; this crystallized in my mind and in the evening I wrote it down.” It was, he thought, the most creative period of his life. “Within three weeks I had produced a manuscript of something which was really quite original. But I didn’t dare to take it do von Laue, because it was not what he had asked me to do.” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, pp. 19-20)
그래서 그 대신 그는 그 논문을 아인시타인에게 보여 줍니다. 아인시타인이 아주 좋아하자, 그는 용기를 내어 자기 지도교수에게도 보여줍니다. 그리고, 그 다음날 새벽 그는 박사학위논문이 통과되었다는 지도교수의 전화를 받습니다.
누구나 질라드가 될 수는 없겠죠. 크리스마스가 다가옵니다.
