Ronald Richter, Genius or Nut?

I remember Juan Roederer (see his article in Physics Today, January 2003, page 32), his wife, and newborn child quite well from their 1953 visit to the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen, where I was working toward my PhD under Werner Heisenberg. Even though I had heard the sensational news that Argentine scientist Ronald Richter had achieved controlled fusion, I never asked Roederer what he knew about the project. Through Wolfgang Meckbach, who later became the director of the Bariloche research center and who married my cousin, I got a much better insight into Richter's work. My understanding differs substantially from Roederer's account. Putting together the different pieces, I got the following picture.

Primarily through the work done in Germany on electric arcs, Richter likely had known that, with the water-vortex-confined arcs (Gerdien arcs), temperatures of ~50 000 K had been achieved, still much too low for thermonuclear reactions to take place. But he also must have known that with plasma resistivity dropping rapidly as temperature rose, resistive heating alone was insufficient to reach the necessary high temperatures. To overcome that problem, he proposed--for the first time, I believe—using ion-acoustic heating by surrounding an arc with many powerful loudspeakers that focused intense sound waves on the arc. To reduce the heat conduction losses into the surrounding medium, he placed the arc in a strong axial magnetic field. That temperatures of 100 000 K can be reached by that technique was later rediscovered by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Munich. So what went wrong with Richter's project?

First, although he was apparently quite familiar with electrical discharge physics, Richter must have been unfamiliar with nuclear physics. Second, he did not, or was not permitted to, publish his research. Had he published, the US likely would have declassified its controlled fusion research much earlier. Richter's work was not far off from what was done in the US, and some of his ideas—like ion-acoustic plasma heating—were actually new. Third, Roederer says that the Argentine scientists sought the opinion of Karl Wirtz, a codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Physics, rather than asking such outstanding physicists as Fritz Houtermans, who reportedly had left the institute because Wirtz was difficult to get along with and knew little about plasma physics.

Roederer replies: Friedwardt Winterberg gives Ronald Richter too much scientific credit. He seems unfamiliar with the literature that is available—unfortunately only in Spanish—particularly Mario Mariscotti's meticulously documented book,¹ and reports available on the Internet; for example, see ref. 2 for a succinct answer to "what went wrong."

Richter wanted to do his thesis at Prague University on "Earth rays" but was persuaded to choose another subject. His only research jobs before going to Argentina were a six-month stint working on explosives and a few postwar commercial contracts. Richter never published a scientific article or technical report because there just was nothing to publish. And according to José Balseiro, founder of the Bariloche research center, Richter showed "a surprising lack of knowledge of the physics relevant to his own project" (ref. 2, p. 9).

True, Richter was interested in certain types of electric discharges and what he called "self-confining balls of plasma excited with sound waves" (ref. 1, p. 146), which was indeed the subject of an early stage of his "experiments" on Isla Huemul. As for Karl Wirtz, I stated that it was not scientists, but doubters among Juan Perón's entourage, who sought Wirtz's opinion (Heisenberg was contacted first, but he deferred the task to Wirtz.)

It is difficult to determine whether Richter was a clever impostor or a scientific nut. A 1956 quote from Edward Teller (ref. 1, p. 278) says it all: "Reading one line [of Richter's ideas] one has to think that he's a genius. Reading the next line one realizes that he's crazy."

1. 1. M. A. J. Mariscotti, El Secreto Atómico de Huemul, Sudamericana-Planeta, Buenos Aires, Argentina (1985).
2. 2. J. A. Balseiro, Report on the September 1952 Inspection of the Isla Huemul Project, Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica, Buenos Aires, Argentina (1988). Available online, in Spanish, at http://168.96.72.2/IB/Cnea493/Cnea493.htm.