Word: wigner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...theater where the seats are carpeted rises. Hiroshima is never mentioned in this film, which for some reason begins with voices in prayer in church and the figure of Jesus covered with blood. Then the film proceeds to show the Chicago squash court and herky-jerky conversations among Szilard, Wigner, Edward Teller and the rest. A jalopy convertible winds up a mountain road in a scene that might have come from a Gene Autry western of the 1930s. There are sudden shots of the Statue of Liberty; sheep and golden flowers by a roadside; the Los Alamos Ranch School, which...
...Anglo-American atom bomb program sparked by the discovery of fission late in 1938 would have found itself shorthanded. Most Allied physicists had already been put to work developing radar and the proximity fuse, inventions of more immediate value. Fermi and his fellow emigres--Hungarians Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller, German Hans Bethe--formed the heart of the bomb squad. In 1939, still officially enemy aliens, Fermi and Szilard co-invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium slugs dropped into holes in black, greasy blocks of graphite...
...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 an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done...
...when Einstein's fellow refugees Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner learned that German scientists had managed to split the atom, they sought Einstein's help. Einstein himself may have had only the faintest idea of the recent progress in nuclear physics, but after a briefing by Szilard and Wigner he agreed to write a letter to President Roosevelt alerting him to the possibility that the Nazis might try to make an atomic bomb. That letter is popularly credited (though its precise effect is unclear) with helping to persuade Roosevelt to order up the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic...
...Mayer visualized the atomic nucleus as a series of onion-like layers of neutrons and protons. That insight was developed into the Jensen-Mayer "shell theory" of the nucleus, for which she shared the 1963 Nobel Prize with fellow physicists Hans Jensen of Heidelberg and Eugene Wigner of Princeton...