The Nuclear Blog

The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars...likely to have planets circling around them.... The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge.... Yearning for fresh worlds...they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. – "And so," Fermi came to his overwhelming question, "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?" – It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to the Fermi Paradox: "They are among us," he said, "but they call themselves Hungarians."                     - György Marx (2001) in 'The Voice of the Martians' In a curious twist of fate Hungary a not particularly big country and not particularly well known for producing top tier

For example, if I throw a ball at a glass window one square foot in area, there may be one chance in ten that the window will break, and nine chances in ten that the ball will just bounce. In the physicists’ language this particular window, for a ball thrown in this particular way, has a “disintegration cross-section” of 1/10’th square foot and an “elastic cross-section” of 9/10’ths square foot.                        - Rudolf Peierls explaining cross sections. In our story so far we have atoms, proven to exist with a known size, established by none other than Einstein himself. We have sub-atomic particles, electrons, orbiting at a considerable distance from the protons and neutrons that comprise a densely packed atomic nucleus. We also know that if we hurl neutrons at Uranium the Uranium may split or fission. We also have a good many European, Jewish, scientists who have reason not only to flee in terror but to fear that nowhere is truly safe for them if those who they flee develop

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.                      - Albert Einstein By the time Frank Delano Roosevelt said we have nothing to fear except fear itself at his first inaugural address the structure of the atom was well understood and just six months later the brilliant young Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard had conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction driven by a catalyst of neutrons. Outside the English speaking world alarming developments were occurring with a ferocity that accelerated as the decade elapsed. In Germany of 1938, and it’s important to remember NAZI controlled Germany, besides Kristallnacht (the only state sponsored pogrome of destruction of all things Jewish outside Czarist Russia) the Uranium atom, bombarded by neutrons, was first split by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. To understand why Hahn and Strassmann were shooting neutrons at Uranium we have to go back a little, in 193

Fear it is said “comes from the lack of knowledge and a state of ignorance.“                         -Debasish Mridha In 1897 J. J. Thomson discovered electrons and, in 1904, proposed a ‘plum pudding’ model, where electrons were negative charged particles (plumbs) embedded in a uniform sphere of positive charge (pudding). Now I would like to consider events that transpired just days later, a little more than a year after the Wright Brother’s flight at Kitty Hawk NC. In America Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, was inaugurated for his second term, moving further west over one hundred thousand would die in the Russo-Japanese war and (further west still) this would lead to the Russian Revolution. And even further west a young German born, Swiss patent inspector, all of 26 years of age would write four papers on physics, these papers would be of such astounding brilliance and insight that more than a century later we call these four 1905 papers the 'annus mirabilis papers' (miracle y