Joseph Rotblat - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Józef Rotblat was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, on November 4, 1908, as one of seven children (two not surviving childbirth). His father Zygmunt built up and ran a nationwide horse-drawn carriage business, owned land and bred horses. Józef's early years were spent in what was a prosperous household but circumstances changed at the outbreak of World War I. Borders were closed and horses requisitioned, leading to the failure of the business and poverty of their family. Despite having a religious background, he later on became an agnostic.

After the end of WWI, he worked as a domestic electrician in Warsaw and had a growing ambition to become a physicist. Without formal education he won a place in the physics department of the Free University of Poland, gaining an MA in 1932 and Doctor of Physics, University of Warsaw in 1938. He held the position of Research Fellow in the Radiation Laboratory of the Scientific Society of Warsaw and became assistant Director of the Atomic Physics Institute of the Free University of Poland in 1937. During this period, he married a literature student, Tola Gryn, whom he had met in 1930.

Before the outbreak of World War II, he had conducted experiments which showed that in the fission process, neutrons were emitted. In early 1939 he envisaged that a large number of fissions could occur and if this happened within a sufficiently short time, then considerable amounts of energy could be released. He went on to calculate that this process could occur in less than a microsecond, and as a consequence would result in an explosion.

Also in 1939, he was invited to study in Paris (through Polish connections with Marie Curie) and under James Chadwick at Liverpool University, winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the neutron. Chadwick was building a particle accelerator called a ‘cyclotron’ to study fundamental nuclear reactions, and Rotblat wanted to build a similar machine in Warsaw, so he decided to join Chadwick in Liverpool. He travelled to England alone because he could not afford to support his wife there.

Before long, Chadwick gave Rotblat a fellowship (the Oliver Lodge Fellowship), doubling his income, and in that summer of 1939 the young Pole returned home, intending to bring Tola back with him. When the time came to leave Warsaw in late August, however, she was ill and remained behind, expecting to follow within days, and so once again the outbreak of war brought calamity. Tola was trapped, and all Joseph's desperate efforts in the ensuing months to bring her out through Belgium, Denmark or Italy came to nothing, as each country in turn was closed off by the war. She later perished in the Holocaust in Majdanek concentration camp and Rotblat never saw her again. This affected him deeply for the rest of his life and he never remarried.