The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Nelson Craig

Author:Nelson, Craig [Nelson, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Atomic Bomb, Modern, Politics, Science, War, Nonfiction, Biography, History, Retail
ISBN: 9781451660432
Amazon: 145166043X
Barnesnoble: 145166043X
Goodreads: 18144088
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-03-25T07:00:00+00:00

9

How Do You Keep a Cold War Cold?

BEFORE they left Los Alamos, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Lawrence, Groves, Chadwick, and Compton had dinner to discuss the future. Some were hopeful about fission-generated nuclear energy; Groves fretted about a decline in American military power with the end of the war. “And Fermi,” Oppenheimer remembered, “said, thoughtfully, ‘I think it would be nice if we could find a cure for the common cold.’ ”

Enrico and Laura went home on New Year’s Eve 1945, to the University of Chicago’s newly created Institute for Nuclear Studies, where Fermi hoped to re-create the intellectual paradise of Weimar Germany with eleven laureates and future laureates—including Urey, Franck, Mayer, Anderson, Segrè, Teller, Dyson, Garwin, and Agnew. As Valentine Telegdi said, “It was a place where you could be proud to be the dumbest one.”

Harold Agnew: “Just to show you what a straight shooter and a modest individual Fermi was: When Laura came back from Italy [after the war], she said she’d really like to have a dishwasher and a washing machine. Now, she had a Bendix washing machine, screwed to the floor, and it rotated parallel to the floor, and when it ran—there was no automatic balancing—the whole house sort of shook. It was quite a thing. But she wanted a new one. We were at dinner, and Enrico had just come back from Hanford, I guess. I asked him, wasn’t he working for General Electric? Didn’t he know the boss? And Laura said before that, that she had gone down to the local hardware store and put her name on a list to get a washing machine and a dishwasher, which was what you did after the war—it wasn’t like today, you had to get on a list and wait. And I said, ‘Enrico, gosh, you could call your friend, the president of General Electric, and they’d bring it by helicopter, and you’d get it for free, I bet!’ Laura was intrigued with this idea. Enrico would have no part of it. No way. He would not use his influence, or whatever you want to call it, to get ahead in line.”

Believing nuclear physics had become a mature field with little left to discover, Enrico turned his attention to subatomic particles composed of quarks and antiquarks—mesons. He explained this dramatic change by quoting Mussolini: “Either renew oneself, or perish.” Though a complete novice in the high-energy field, Fermi became so engrossed with it for the remaining years of his life that he coined the terms pion and muon.

In 1951, Chicago’s new cyclotron was inaugurated, and as at Oak Ridge, the lab workers had to be careful. One day, Herb Anderson picked up a piece of reinforced concrete, forgetting about the metal in its innards. The cyclotron’s magnet yanked it so hard that his hand was crushed.

Valentine Telegdi: “At the yearly Christmas parties, the physics students would compete with the faculty in various tests (always loaded in favor of the students!) and put on theatrical sketches. In some of

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