Word: physicist
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Snarled Threads. Seven months before the outbreak of World War 11, scientists in the U.S. learned with alarm that physicists in Germany had succeeded in bringing about atomic fission. Shortly afterward, the U.S. incurred the first major installment of its massive debt to Hungarian-born scientists. Physicist Leo Szilard, leaping in thought from laboratory fission to atomic bomb, set out to urge the U.S. Government to get an atomic-research project going. Reasoning that a letter to President Roosevelt would have maximum impact if signed by Einstein, Szilard recruited his fellow Hungarian Edward Teller to chauffeur him out to Peconic...
...repeating on earth the fusion that makes the stars glow. But at war's end he found most of his fellow scientists unwilling to work toward the "super." The deadly success of their A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had rocked the consciences of the atomic scientists. "The physicists have known sin," said Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos' wartime director, and most of his colleagues agreed with...
...Missing Idea. The behind-doors debate dragged on for half a year after the Russians exploded "Joe One." Then, in late January 1950, a shocking bit of intelligence decided the issue: German-born British Physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had passed atomic secrets to Communist agents. Fuchs had been present at Los Alamos when Teller & Co. reviewed all that was known about thermonuclear reactions. Four days after Fuchs's confession, Harry Truman directed AEC to go ahead with the H-bomb...
...Scientists," says a California physicist, "are this century's version of the explorers of earlier times" And yet, as a nuclear chemist says, "most scientists are rather revoltingly normal in their manners and their way of life." These nine leading lights of U.S. science prove both points by their composite beginnings, their curiosities and their achievements. They also prove why the nation's scientific resources are basically sound and promising...
...Robert Oppenheimer's refusal to speed development of the hydrogen bomb. Light-haired, blue-eyed, easygoing, he sports a yellow Lincoln convertible, shoots mid-80s golf (he sent President Eisenhower an electronic golf trainer that he had invented), once told his father: "I probably would be a better physicist if I turned longhair and stayed in the laboratory on Saturday nights and Sundays. But I prefer to be a man as well as a physicist...