Word: fermi
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Historians differ about which battles were really decisive and about which great men of history were really great. Few will differ about Italian-born Physicist Enrico Fermi, a great man of science who achieved the first nuclear chain reaction and thereby initiated the Atomic Age. This week in Chicago, Enrico Fermi, 53, died of cancer. If he had lived a few years longer, medical techniques growing out of his own discoveries might have rid him of his fatal disease...
Squash-Court Drama. The high point of Fermi's career is one of those rare events that will be described again and again as long as men are interested in the history of their species. It happened on Dec. 2, 1942, in a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago's football stadium. An international group of physicists watched with some apprehension a massive, dead-black structure of graphite bricks with uranium spotted through it. Fermi was in charge. His discoveries in Italy about neutron behavior (which won him the Nobel Prize...
Calmly and cautiously, Fermi gave the necessary orders. Inch by inch, a neutron-absorbing control rod was drawn out of the reactor. The instruments watching its behavior began to click louder. Fermi would not be rushed. At 11:35 a.m. he casually remarked, "Let's go to lunch," and the reactor was shut down...
Back from a long, unhurried lunch, Fermi reassembled his crew. The control rods were drawn out. The instruments clamored louder; the curve of the reaction climbed toward the critical level. At 3:25 p.m. the pile "went critical," i.e., a self-sustained chain reaction started. Its mass was still silent and motionless, but the physicists knew that a new kind of fire was burning inside...
...Atomic Energy Commission announced that the first award of its special $25,000 prize for "especially meritorious contributions" in nuclear physics will go to the University of Chicago's ailing Dr. Enrico Fermi, 54, Italian-born Nobel Prizewinner (1938), who presided over the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, thereby ushering in the Atomic...