Boris Podolsky

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Boris Podolsky earned one of history's more remarkable endorsements in 1933. Albert Einstein called him "one of the most brilliant of the younger men" to have worked with Paul Dirac. Einstein made that observation in a letter to Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The letter was dated the 10th of November, 1933. By that point, Podolsky had already traveled from the Russian Empire to the United States. He had earned a doctorate from Caltech and spent time at research centers on two continents. Within two years, he and Einstein would co-author a paper, alongside Nathan Rosen, that provoked debate about the interpretation of quantum mechanics lasting for decades. That paper gave rise to the EPR paradox. Podolsky was born in 1896 into a poor Jewish family in Taganrog, in the Don Host Oblast of the Russian Empire. He moved to the United States in 1913. His career placed him alongside some of the most formidable names in twentieth-century physics. And decades after his death in 1966, documents from Soviet intelligence archives would surface. They suggested that during World War II, Podolsky's name had appeared in a very different kind of file.

• 2. The Making of a Physicist

  ›

  Podolsky attended the Taganrog Gymnasium before leaving Russia as a teenager. His first American degree had little to do with the theoretical work that would define his career. In 1918, he received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. He then served in the US Army, and afterward found work at the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light. Only in 1926 did he earn a master's degree in mathematics, again from USC. Two years later, in 1928, he completed a doctorate in theoretical physics at Caltech, working under Paul Sophus Epstein. A National Research Council Fellowship followed. He spent one year at the University of California, Berkeley, and then a year at Leipzig University. In 1930, he returned to Caltech for another year, working alongside Richard C. Tolman. His next move would take him east, to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

• 3. Among Giants

  ›

  The Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkiv, in the early 1930s, drew an unusual concentration of talent. Podolsky found there Vladimir Fock and Lev Landau, both central figures in Soviet theoretical physics. Paul Dirac, who was visiting, joined them. In 1932, Podolsky, Dirac, and Fock published together a seminal early paper on quantum electrodynamics. Quantum electrodynamics concerns how light and matter interact at the quantum level. The paper with Dirac and Fock placed Podolsky at the active frontier of the field. Conversations in Kharkiv ranged beyond that paper. Podolsky and Landau began mapping out a textbook on electromagnetism. Their approach would build the subject from special relativity and lean on theoretical postulates rather than the experimental laws most textbooks of the era relied on. Podolsky left Kharkiv in 1933, when a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study brought him back to Princeton. That unfinished textbook project, however, was not abandoned by everyone involved.

• 4. EPR and Cincinnati

  ›

  In 1935, Einstein and colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study wrote letters of recommendation on Podolsky's behalf. The letters were addressed to Louis T. More, Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Cincinnati. Einstein wrote that he was "happy to be able to tell you that I estimate Podolsky's abilities very highly." He described Podolsky as "an independent investigator of unquestionable talent." That same year, the EPR paper appeared. It examined entangled wave functions. Bell's theorem, formulated later, traced part of its origins to the questions the EPR paper had raised. Quantum information theory followed from that body of work. Podolsky accepted the Cincinnati professorship, joining the faculty as professor of mathematical physics. He would spend more than two decades in that city.

• 5. Teaching and Textbooks

  ›

  At the University of Cincinnati, Podolsky worked as both a teacher and a doctoral supervisor. Chihiro Kikuchi completed a master's degree under his guidance. Herman Branson and Alex Green both earned doctorates with Podolsky as their adviser. He continued in that role for more than two decades. In 1961, he moved to Xavier University, also in Cincinnati, working there until his death on the 28th of November, 1966. Lev Landau and E. Lifshitz built on an outline Podolsky had helped develop during his Kharkiv years. Together they produced The Classical Theory of Fields, published in 1951. Podolsky's own finished project, written with K. Kunz, appeared three years after his death. Marcel Dekker Press published Fundamentals of Electrodynamics in 1969. Podolsky's son, Robert, had written most of the questions closing each chapter. Three decades after Podolsky's death, the actor Gene Saks portrayed him in the 1994 Hollywood film I.Q.

• 6. Code Name QUANTUM

  ›

  A 2009 book by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev introduced a troubling possibility about Podolsky's wartime activities. The book was titled Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. It identified Podolsky with a Soviet intelligence contact known by the code name QUANTUM. Wartime intercepts called Venona cables describe a contact by that name who sought out Soviet agents in 1942. In those cables, QUANTUM is described as having requested placement in the USSR to work on uranium-235 processing. In 1943, a Venona cable recorded that QUANTUM had handed Soviet handlers equations describing Graham's law of gaseous diffusion. That law can be used to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. For that information, QUANTUM was paid $300. The Soviets concluded that QUANTUM was unreliable and made no further contact. The evidence connecting Podolsky to the QUANTUM code name rests on notes Alexander Vassiliev took from the KGB archive. Vassiliev gathered those notes after the fall of the Soviet Union. The authors of Spies acknowledged that the evidence was somewhat indirect. Whether Podolsky truly was QUANTUM has never been conclusively established. Whatever information may have changed hands, Graham's law of gaseous diffusion had been on the public scientific record since 1848.