12/31/2023 0 Comments Einstein nuclear fission equationIn 1934 Leo Szilard filed for a patent on the liberation of nuclear energy for power production and other purposes through nuclear transmutation. He adapted this idea to the to the nuclear chain reaction. Szilard was a chemist by training and knew about the idea of a chemical chain reaction. This is the basic idea of a nuclear weapon - to generate energy from the chain reaction. Szilard realized that if you could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons in the process, then a chain reaction could be started. 1), a Hungarian physicist who took refuge in London from Nazi Germany, read a paper by Rutherford that ridiculed the idea of getting energy from nuclear transmutations. ![]() If you were a metallurgist for example it was unlikely that you would have anything to do with a physicist – that all changed in the 1940s. In that era science was highly specialized and compartmentalized. Science was practiced was very differently in the 1920s and 1930s than today. The intersection of scientific inevitability and war created the environment for the advent of nuclear weapons. The events of this drama engulfed the world in war and created a need on all sides for weaponry that could defeat the enemy by whatever means. So, it was time.īy the 1930s a human drama was unfolding in Europe and in the Pacific – the rise of fascism. ![]() Bethe was even publishing about fusion as the source of energy for the Sun. Einstein had discovered special relativity and the famous equation E=mc 2. ![]() The Curies and Becquerel had discovered radioactivity. By the 1930s it was time to discover fission.
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