Atom by Piers Bizony

Author:Piers Bizony
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785782169
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

PART FIVE

Blast Radius

How could people of conscience create weapons of mass destruction? We live in an age of localised terrorism, and sometimes we forget that the atom bomb was once the dominant threat to all life on earth. We also forget that the bomb is still here. It hasn’t gone away.

The most famous Jewish refugee scientist, of course, was Albert Einstein. He was already thoroughly accustomed to restless dislocations. In 1909 he had accepted a professorship in Zürich, then in 1911 he was appointed as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zürich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he became Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute, and also a professor at the University of Berlin, the very same organisations that had sponsored so much of Meitner and Hahn’s work. He took up German citizenship in 1914 and remained in Berlin until 1933, when it became clear that his ancestry put him at risk. It seems unimaginable today that someone of his stature could ever have been threatened, but the Nazi regime’s tame academics condemned his world-famous theories as ‘Jewish science’. He renounced his German citizenship (for the second time) and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, New Jersey. Here he adopted his new guise as a much-respected yet faintly out-of-date wise elder statesman of science. This is the period of the genial middle-aged man with the crazy shock of white hair so familiar to us from countless photographs of Einstein ‘the genius’. He continued to fight his losing battle against the Young Turks of quantum mechanics, but by now his energies were depleted by other calls on his time, his emotions and his moral sensibilities.

In mid-July 1939 he was enjoying a sailing holiday on the northern tip of Long Island, New York, when he was surprised by two visitors, a pair of Hungarian-Jewish refugee physicists, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner. Their car pulled up to Einstein’s holiday cabin early in the morning, and the great man answered the door to them half-dressed. Somewhat bemused, he showed them to his cabin’s large, screened-in porch, and listened to what they had to say. Szilard warned that the occupying German forces in Czechoslovakia had blocked all international exports of uranium from the Joachimsthal mines. It seemed reasonable to conclude that they must be trying to build a nuclear device, and almost certainly they would wish to develop a uranium bomb. Szilard asked if Einstein could warn the Belgian Queen Mother, whom he knew as a friend, to prevent the large stockpile of uranium ore in the Belgian Congo from falling into Nazi hands. Einstein agreed to the idea, and the three men decided that his name might carry some weight, if only they could find a suitably senior audience for their views. A few days later, Szilard discussed the problem with Alexander Sachs, an economics advisor to President Roosevelt. Sachs urged

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.