More on the Value of Ronald Richter’s Work

Abstract

Having been born and raised in Argentina and educated during the government of Juan Perón, I feel compelled to comment on Friedwardt Winterberg’s letter ( Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 56 8 2003 12 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1611335. August 2003, page 12 ), in which he gives his opinion of Ronald Richter. Winterberg seems to imply that Wolfgang Meckbach, his relative by marriage who was also one-time director of the Bariloche research center, helped him to get a better insight into Richter’s research in Argentina. Unfortunately, Meckbach died in 1998, so we cannot ask his opinion. I know of no written document he may have left on this topic; perhaps Winterberg does.I met Meckbach when he first arrived in Argentina in the early 1950s, while I was working on my doctoral thesis at the Institute of Physics at the National University of La Plata. Meckbach became an assistant to my thesis adviser, P. H. Brodersen, so he and I had many opportunities to get to know each other. At the time, he knew as much about the Richter affair as everyone else did—rumors. After 1955, Meckbach moved to Bariloche. Several decades later, long after the Richter affair was closed, Meckbach became director at Bariloche. I doubt that he had access to any classified information kept in the archives of the Argentine Atomic Energy Commission—information that may have led him to conclude that Richter’s research there showed some spark of genius.Another point Winterberg makes is that the Argentinean scientists who reported to the government on Richter’s research in Bariloche asked advice from the wrong German scientist, Karl Wirtz, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. Had they asked advice from the right German scientist, Fritz Houtermans, their report on Richter’s research would have been different. I have a few comments about that topic.On the Web, I found an interesting obituary note for Leopoldo M. Falicov, a brilliant Argentine scientist. 1 1. M. Cardona, M. M. Cohen, S. S. Louie, http://cabbib2.cnea.gov.ar/fali/Falicov1.pdf. It contains a tantalizing reference to the Richter research on Isla Huemul in Bariloche. Also mentioned are the spectacular declarations made in March 1951 by then President Juan Perón, who claimed that Richter had obtained the first experimental confirmation of controlled fusion at Huemul. Those experiments, shrouded in absolute secrecy, were never published, even partially.The obituary also says that in 1948, the young Richter gained access to Perón and offered him a scheme to achieve, rather simply, controlled nuclear fusion and thus obtain an inexhaustible source of inexpensive energy. Perón had an enormous inclination to believe that any project undertaken by a German scientist would be successful. Due to his political disagreement with true Argentinean scientists of the stature of, for example, Ricardo Gaviola, Perón was reluctant to ask their advice on Richter’s ideas. Instead, he gave Richter a blank check and appointed him as Perón’s personal representative in the Bariloche area. The young Richter burned no less than $300 million (mid-1950s value) in his “controlled fusion” project. 1 1. M. Cardona, M. M. Cohen, S. S. Louie, http://cabbib2.cnea.gov.ar/fali/Falicov1.pdf. After the fiasco became evident, Perón appointed a technical committee of five, including José Balseiro, a former faculty member at the La Plata Institute of Physics, to report directly to him whether the Richter project should be discontinued. The group worked very hard at the Huemul facilities to reproduce the results that Richter claimed. They analyzed Richter’s so-called “thermonuclear reaction” starting from basic phenomena and concluded that the actual temperature reached in those experiments was much lower than that required to produce a true thermonuclear reaction. They reported these findings to Perón in September 1952. Soon after, the Argentine government discontinued the project.The Richter affair caused considerable damage to the science and engineering sectors of Argentina’s higher education system. Not only was the cost enormous, but Richter never even contacted any university in Argentina or admitted a single student into his laboratory. His contribution to developing physics in Argentina was a rather negative one. That affair would never have occurred if the government had initially asked advice from qualified local scientists.While I was a physics student, I personally heard Richard Gans, director of the National University of La Plata Institute of Physics from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, say that Richter proposed a thesis, at the German University of Prague, to detect “delta rays” emitted from Earth. Professor Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg did not agree with the project. The “young genius” went to work somewhere else and graduated in a different field.REFERENCESSection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCES <<1. M. Cardona, M. M. Cohen, S. S. Louie, http://cabbib2.cnea.gov.ar/fali/Falicov1.pdf. Google Scholar© 2004 American Institute of Physics.