Word: bombe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rule. At 11:30 a.m., as was his custom, he stopped for lunch. The pile went critical in midafternoon with the full withdrawal of the control rods, and Fermi allowed himself a grin. He had proved the science of a chain reaction in uranium; from then on, building a bomb was mere engineering. He shut the pile down after 28 minutes of operation. Wigner had thought to buy a celebratory fiasco of Chianti, which supplied a toast. "For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant," Wigner would write. "Still, we could not escape...
Fermi died prematurely of stomach cancer in Chicago in 1954. He had argued against U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb when that project was debated in 1949, calling it "a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide." His counsel went unheeded, and the U.S.-Soviet arms race that ensued put the world at mortal risk. But the discovery of how to release nuclear energy, in which he played so crucial a part, had long-term beneficial results: the development of an essentially unlimited new source of energy and the forestalling, perhaps permanently, of world-scale...
Richard Rhodes is the Pulitzer-prizewinning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb...
...Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., observed that when electrical signals were applied to contacts on a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input. Shockley was not present at that first observation. And though he fathered the discovery in the same way Einstein fathered the atom bomb, by advancing the idea and pointing the way, he felt left out of the momentous occasion...
...last thing. Like the millions of American veterans who have never ceased thanking Harry Truman for dropping the Bomb and ending World War II, the folks who got their polio shot between the first Salk vaccine and the Sabin model have never had any quarrel with Salk's high place in history. (The two vaccines are now given in alternating booster shots.) There are times when even genius has to give way to the old Yankee virtues of know-how and can do. And if in this instance these happened to be embodied in the son of a couple...