E=mc^2 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-11-22T01:45:34+00:00

Fred Hoyle

AIP EMILIO SEGRè VISUAL ARCHIVES, PHYSICS TODAY COLLECTION

His mother pretty much agreed, and so did his father, who had survived two years as a machine gunner on the Western Front by disobeying the less than brilliant orders from his upper-class officers to test-fire his guns at ten-minute intervals (which would have given his squad's exact location to German assault teams). Fred Hoyle got yet another year off. "Each morning, I ate breakfast and started off from home, just as if I were going to school. But it was to the factories and workshops of Bingley that I went. There were mills with clacking and thundering looms. There were blacksmiths and carpenters... Everybody seemed amused to answer my questions."

In time he was railroaded back to school, where a few kind teachers saw his talent, and helped with scholarships. He ended up studying mathematics and then astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, and he did so well that the intensely private Paul Dirac took him on as a student, which was unheard of, and he even had tea with Payne's old supervisor Eddington— though as there were rumors of some sort of intellectual "disgrace" she had run into at Harvard, Payne's name was now barely mentioned. (History had been rewritten: Henry Norris Russell and the others now implied they'd "always" known that plenty of hydrogen was available in the sun.)

The problem of how stars manage to use helium as a further fuel in the giant E=mc² pumps, however, hadn't gone much further than where Payne's work and the direct follow-ups had left it in the 1920s. The heat of over 10-million-degrees at the center of our sun was able, barely, to squeeze the positive charges of four hydrogen nuclei together to make helium. To squeeze together those helium nuclei in a burning process to get larger elements, you'd need to get higher temperatures. But the universe was well surveyed.

Where could you find something hotter than the center of a star?

Hoyle's habit of putting things together in his own way now came to the fore. At the start of World War II he was sent to a radar research group, and in December 1944, after an information-sharing mission to the United States, he ended up waiting in Montreal for a rare flight back across the Atlantic.

He wandered around the city and beyond, and also picked up information about the British research group at Chalk River (about 100 miles from Ottawa). Although nobody told him anything official about the Manhattan Project, from the names he heard there— including several whose work he'd known at Cambridge before the war— he gradually deduced the basic stages of the top-secret project still going on at Los Alamos.

The easiest way to accumulate the raw material for a bomb, he already knew from reading accounts published before the war, was by cooking up plutonium in a reactor. He also knew that Britain had not tried building reactors. That meant, he concluded, that the specialists must have found some

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