The Seven Measures of the World by Piero Martin;

Author:Piero Martin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300271645
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A mass of 10,000 tons, 10 million kilograms of TNT. Fermi’s estimate, done by dropping small pieces of paper, was not far off. The bomb released twice as much energy, equal to 22,000 tons of TNT. An enormous amount; just compare it to the energy released by one of the most powerful bombs dropped in World War II, the Grand Slam, which was less than the equivalent of 10 tons of TNT. Thanks to Einstein, nature had revealed to humanity that mass could be converted into energy. On that July 16, humanity had learned how to do it in a destructive way. Physics had lost its innocence. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” commented the director of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer.

Fortunately, since then, reason has prevailed, and we have used the conversion of mass into energy expressed by the equation E = mc2 only for peaceful purposes in fission power stations for the production of electricity. The future, furthermore, in a sort of positive counterpoise, could give us a new version of converting mass into energy that would contribute significantly to resolving the grave environmental crisis that we are now experiencing. Something that, as early as 1920, Arthur Eddington dreamed while studying the stars: “A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the sub-atomic energy which, it is known, exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service.”

Today, we know that that process is nuclear fusion and that it actually does fuel the Sun and the stars, as Eddington hypothesized. In fusion, two lightweight nuclei of hydrogen, or its isotopes, combine, and in the reaction, part of the mass of the reactants is converted into energy. Scientists all over the world are now trying to steal the secret of the Sun in order to reproduce this process in the laboratory. It is a rough road, but much has been done, and the hope is that in a few decades we will have at our disposal a source of clean, unlimited electric power, free of CO2 waste and ideal, therefore, for ensuring a sustainable future for our planet.

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