Home > Work > The Making of the Atomic Bomb
181 " When Groves called, Oppenheimer chatted happily about the Bethe results. The general interrupted: “What about the weather?” “The weather is whimsical,” the whimsical physicist said.2399 The Gulf air mass had stagnated over the test site. But change was coming. Jack Hubbard, the meteorologist, predicted light and variable winds the next day. "
― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb
182 " The pile as it waited in the dark cold of Chicago winter to be released to the breeding of neutrons and plutonium contained 771,000 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide and 12,400 pounds of uranium metal. It cost about $1 million to produce and build. Its only visible moving parts were its various control rods. "
183 " Whatever scientists of one warring nation could conceive, the scientists of another warring nation might also conceive—and keep secret. That early in 1939 and early 1940, the nuclear arms race began. "
184 " Planck solved the radiation problem by proposing that the vibrating particles can only radiate at certain energies. "
185 " Gamma rays could deflect electrons, a phenomenon known as the Compton effect after its discoverer, the American experimental physicist Arthur Holly Compton, but a proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron and not easily moved. "
186 " Planck, a thoroughgoing conservative, had no taste for pursuing the radical consequences of his radiation formula. Someone else did: Albert Einstein. In a paper in 1905 that eventually won for him the Nobel Prize, Einstein connected Planck’s idea of limited, discontinuous energy levels to the problem of the photoelectric effect. "
187 " But the energy of the electrons knocked free of the metal does not depend, as common sense would suggest, on the brightness of the light. It depends instead on the color of the light—on its frequency. "
188 " a Tennessee Eastman employee was moved to immortalize anonymously in verse: In order not to check in late,2236 I’ve had to lose a lot of weight, From swimming through a fair-sized flood And wading through the goddam mud. I’ve lost my rubbers and my shoes Perpetually I have the blues My spirits tumble with a thud Because of all this goddam mud. It’s in my system so that when I cut my finger now and then Instead of bleeding just plain blood Out pours a stream of goddam mud. "
189 " In every case the kicks increased on the oscilloscope; the powerful beryllium radiation knocked protons out of all the elements Chadwick tested. It knocked about the same number out of each element. And, most important for his conclusion, the energies of the recoiling protons were significantly greater than they could possibly be if the beryllium radiation consisted of gamma rays. "
190 " Fermi had scalers that counted off boron trifluoride readings with loud clicks and a cylindrical pen recorder that performed a similar function silently, graphing pile intensities in ink on a roll of slowly rotating graph paper. For calculations he relied on his own trusted six-inch slide rule, the pocket calculator of its day. "
191 " If we suppose that the radiation is not a [gamma] radiation, but consists of particles of mass very nearly equal to that of the proton, all the difficulties connected with the collisions disappear, both with regard to their frequency and to the energy transfer to different masses. In order to explain the great penetrating power of the radiation we must further assume that the particle has no net charge. . . . We may suppose it [to be] the ‘neutron’ discussed by Rutherford in his Bakerian Lecture of 1920. "
192 " Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden. "
193 " C. P. Snow, who was also present, remembers the performance as “one of the shortest accounts ever made about a major discovery.” When tall and birdlike Chadwick finished speaking he looked over the assembly and announced abruptly, “Now I want to be chloroformed and put to bed for a fortnight. "
194 " They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. "
195 " More than any other development, Chadwick’s neutron made practical the detailed examination of the nucleus. "
196 " The slow, careful checking continued through the morning. A crowd began to gather on the balcony. Szilard arrived, Wigner, Allison, Spedding whose metal eggs had flattened the pile. Twenty-five or thirty people accumulated on the balcony watching, most of them the young physicists who had done the work. "
197 " Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome. "
198 " he wrote in retirement: “Two magnitudes are complementary when the measurement of one of them prevents the accurate simultaneous measurement of the other. "
199 " This time,” he told Weil, “take the control rod out twelve inches.” Weil withdrew the cadmium rod. Fermi nodded and ZIP was winched out as well. “This is going to do it,” Fermi told Compton. The director of the plutonium project had found a place for himself at Fermi’s side. “Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace [on the recorder] will climb and continue to climb; it will not level off. "
200 " Conant in his 1943 secret history thought the “most important” reason the program changed direction in the autumn of 1941 was that “the all-out advocates of a head-on attack on the uranium problem had become more vocal and determined” and mentioned Oliphant’s influence first of all. "