As a young student, Szilard wins Hungary’s national math prize but opts to study electrical engineering in Budapest. World War I interrupts school; Szilard, drafted, becomes an officer but musters out after suffering one of the first cases in Central Europe of the devastating Spanish Flu. After the war, Szilard finds his way to the University of Berlin, where Einstein, Max Planck, and other greats teach; Szilard switches majors to physics. In a city reeling from a lost war but besotted with jazz and creative energy, Szilard focuses on his studies, solves a major problem in thermodynamics, receives his doctorate, publishes a paper that helps launch the science of information theory, and in 1925 becomes a visiting lecturer at the university.

By the late 1920s, Szilard has worked with Einstein on several inventions and has patented a preliminary design for a cyclotron, a machine that would use magnets to smash atoms into each other and reveal their inner workings. Szilard also is intrigued by HG Wells’ idea of an “open conspiracy” by science-minded leaders to create a world government that might save humans from war. In 1932, he concludes that atomic energy might power space ships that replace war in the heroic imagination of humans.