Word: chaining
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Tightrope. Headlines in Paris papers had trumpeted: "Tomorrow the world is going to blow up," and Scientist Robert Esnault-Pelterie had warned that Crossroads might well start a fatal chain reaction. On the appointed Day of Wrath, a load of wooden wine caskets broke loose from a truck in Casablanca, French Morocco, and hollowly thundered on the cobbled street. That touched off riots: thousands of Arabs were sure that the Angel Israfil was summoning them to their doomsday tightrope, whence (so said the Prophet) the damned would fall into hell...
Fishing Probabilities. Swaggering little Enrico Fermi, who put the match to history's first atomic chain reaction, led off with a circumstantial account of how a chain-reacting pile works...
...typical pile is a 20-foot block of graphite (pure carbon) interlarded with lumps of fissionable uranium. The chain begins with the capture of a neutron by a uranium atom. When the atom "fishes" (splits by fission), neutrons released by the reaction fly off at more than 6,000 miles a second. To give the neutrons a maximum chance of being captured by other uranium atoms, they are slowed to "thermal" speed-roughly 3 m.p.s. Normally a neutron slows down to that speed after about 110 collisions with carbon atoms...
...nuclear physicists' big problem was to calculate the probability that a given atom would capture a neutron traveling at a given speed. They found that in a certain type of pile the critical size at which a lump of enriched uranium begins to cook in a nonexplosive chain reaction is 1.5 kilograms (about 3⅓ Ibs.). Theoretically, a pile might heat up to the temperature of the sun (over 6,000°), but no known container can withstand more than 1,500°. The physicists discovered that the simplest way to throttle down a pile was to thrust into...
...true lawyer style. . . . From his own showing, you perceive that his heart and hand were at my disposal; and I suppose that my feelings were not sufficiently enlisted to have the matter consummated. . . . I thought Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman's happiness. . . . The last message I ever received from him was about a year after we parted. . . . He said to my sister, 'Tell your sister that I think she was a great fool, because she did not stay here, and marry me.' Characteristic...