![]() ![]() Einstein, who like Lise Meitner had abandoned his professorship in Germany as anti-Semitic sentiment was taking hold, endorsed the grave message, ensuring that it would leave a deep impression on the president. In August of 1939, this concern prompted Einstein and Szilárd to meet and draft a letter to Roosevelt, alerting him to the danger of Germany creating a nuclear bomb and exhorting him to begin a program of intensive domestic research in the U.S. Particularly frightening was the possibility of stringing together a chain of fission reactions to generate enough energy to bring about real destruction. “They knew Adolf Hitler. And with their colleagues and their peers here in America, they very quickly realized that now that we had fission, it would certainly be possible to use that energy in nefarious ways.” “Scientists, some of whom were refugees from fascist Europe, knew what was possible,” says University of Chicago physics professor Eric Isaacs. The bulky reactor was erected beneath the stands at Staggs Field.įor some chemists and physicists, the situation felt even more dire. In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt was growing increasingly concerned with the ascent of charismatic tyrants overseas. The world itself resembled an unstable atom on the brink of self-destruction. Given the fraught geopolitical climate of the time, the rush to capitalize on this new technology took on tremendous significance. What’s more, the cleft atoms spat out stray neutrons which were themselves capable of triggering fission in other nearby nuclei.Īfter an American team at Columbia University promptly replicated the Berlin result, it was clear that the power of atom-splitting was no joke. As heavy uranium nuclei burst, transitioning from unstable high-energy states to stable low-energy states, they released enormous amounts of energy. Theoretical work undertaken by Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch quickly expanded on this initial finding-a paper published in Nature in January 1939 outlined not only the mechanics of fission but also its astonishing energy output. Yet at the time, they had only an inkling of the many scientific and cultural revolutions their discovery would spark. Changing the very identity of an element was once the fancy of alchemists: now, it was scientific reality. The trio of researchers knew instantly that they were onto something major. ![]() This revealed that it was possible to split the uranium nuclei into less massive, chemically distinct components. To their surprise, they found that the process could produce barium, an element much lighter than uranium. In remote collaboration with Meitner, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who had settled in Stockholm, Sweden, Hahn and Strassman bombarded large, unstable uranium atoms with tiny neutrons at the University of Berlin. The story begins in late 1938, when the work of chemists Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman and Lise Meitner led to the discovery that the atom-whose very name derives from the Greek for “indivisible”-could in fact be split apart. From medicine to art, the awesome and terrible potential of splitting the atom has left few aspects of our lives untouched. Later, precisely the same technique would spur construction of the nuclear power plants that today supply 20 percent of America’s energy. Their research initiated the Atomic Age, and kicked off in earnest the Manhattan Project’s race toward a weapon of unimaginable might. It was 75 years ago, beneath the bleachers of a University of Chicago football field, that scientists took the first step toward harnessing the power of the nuclear fission chain reaction. ![]()
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