Word: fermi
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...exactly 3:52 of a wintry Chicago afternoon in 1942, a scientist working in the University of Chicago's tightly guarded athletic field house dryly announced: "The curve is exponential." The speaker was Dr. Enrico Fermi; his four quiet words meant that a chain reaction had just been successfully brought about in the experimental uranium pile. Last week a TIME correspondent witnessed the unveiling of a plaque to mark the site...
Hutchins looked around. "Where's Fermi?" he called. Several underlings started yelling for Fermi. He was standing in the dirty snow talking about the atom. I asked him how it was five years ago. He said shyly: "Well, it was awfully cold, and there was a wind blowing." I asked him how he felt when the curve was "exponential." "I didn't think much of anything because I knew it was going to work," he said. And what did he feel this afternoon, five years later? He looked at the slush and shrugged his shoulders: "Well, for better...
Last week the President: ¶ Appointed nine of the nation's top scientists and engineers as an advisory board to the five-man Atomic Energy Commission. The board: Harvard President James Bryant Conant; Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, president of the California Institute of Technology; Nobel Prize Physicists Enrico Fermi (University of Chicago) and I. I. Rabi (Columbia University); ex-Los Alamos Director J. R. Oppenheimer (University of California); Hartley Rowe, chief engineer of the United Fruit Co. ; Chemistry Professor Glenn T. Seaborg (University of California), Cyril Stanley Smith, director of the University of Chicago's Institute of Metals...
...counters were clicking furiously. The physicists watched fascinated as the curve climbed steadily upward. Then, Wham! With a clang, the automatic control rod (which had been set for too low a neutron count) slammed back into the pile. "I'm hungry," said Fermi calmly. "Let's go to lunch." The other rods were inserted, the pile quieted down...
Neutrons Away. At 2 o'clock the physicists gathered again in the squash court. One by one, on Fermi's orders, the control rods were withdrawn, the counters clicked faster. The pile was alive with neutrons now; the giant was straining his bonds. But it was not quite a chain reaction. The neutron curve moved up, leveled...