Here is an interesting question. A man walked across a road in central London after a wait at the traffic lights, in 1933. Suddenly he had a interesting and potentially very frightening idea. Who was he and what was the idea? So here is the whole story, it’s quite interesting. The road being crossed was Southampton Row in central London, and the man was heading across the road to Russell Square, see the image. He was Leo Szilard, a Jewish refugee from Germany and Hungary. He was a Hungarian and had lived through the chaos of the first world war, when Austria-Hungary allied with the Kaiser, not the best move as it turned out. So after the war Austria and Hungary separated and Hungary got a communist government which didn’t go well, so they then got one of those right wing nationalist assholes who appear from time to time, in this case a dick head called Miklos Horthy who took over in 1920 as “Supreme Warlord of the Royal Hungarian Army”. So this turd introduced “numerus clausus” laws, quotas based on ethnicity which basically made it very difficult for Jews to keep jobs in Hungarian Universities. So Leo and many others (notably Edward Teller, John von Neuman, Eugene Wigner etc.) left Hungary. Most of them initially went to Germany, but of course that didn’t last too long as another asshole, you know who, took over there. So they dispersed to the US, England and other places taking their impressive brains with them. Leo was living in a suitcase near Southampton Row (he was a very small man) and was going to the numerous libraries around there reading all the new physics. In 1933 scientists knew from the work of Rutherford the little known fun fact that matter was mostly empty space surrounding tiny atomic nuclei. So the nucleus contained positively charged protons and orbiting them were negatively charged electrons with relatively vast spaces in between. It was clear that the atomic nucleus contained something else besides protons as, with the exception of that of Hydrogen, nuclei were twice or more times as heavy as predicted from their proton content. In 1932 James Chadwick produced the first evidence that a heavy, uncharged nuclear particle existed, published in a Nature paper entitled “Possible existence of a neutron”. (he was more confident in later papers). So the extra nuclear weight was neutrons, things about as heavy as protons but uncharged. So Leo suddenly saw that if you bombarded a nucleus with a neutron it would not be deflected away by the positive charge of the nucleus and so could do some serious damage, possibly causing the nucleus to split into smaller parts, releasing huge amounts of energy. From the work of the Curies it was clear that nuclei of large elements such as Polonium, Radium and Uranium would spontaneously degrade releasing large amounts of energy. Could you induce nuclear degradation by bombarding some of these elements or certain isotopes with neutrons? Seemed likely. If during the splitting the nucleus produced two or more neutrons these could go on and split more similar nuclei, producing a chain reaction. This could be controlled leading to heat to spin a turbine and generate electricity or more ominously to produce a very powerful bomb. Leo had no idea which elements or isotopes would produce two or more neutrons on being hit by one, if in fact any did, so he was being very speculative. But he saw the potential and actually filed a patent for the idea as “neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction”, which was subsequently awarded by the British patent office but kept secret, I wonder why. In the late 30s, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (and Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman) showed that neutron bombardment of Uranium in fact caused certain Uranium nuclei to split producing large amounts of energy and multiple neutrons to potentially split more Uranium nuclei. So the atomic age started and it was a scary time, what with the second world war about to start, as many very good nuclear physicists were Germans, think Werner Heisenberg. However Germany and Hungary had also lost some of their best, Szilard, Teller, Von Neuman, Wigner and many others, see how stupid these right wing assholes are? Horthy and Hitler had driven away the very people who might have given them the bomb, all of them later working on the Manhattan project. In fact Szilard arguably started the Manhattan project. In 1939 he visited his buddy Albert Einstein who was at the time the best known scientist in the world. They wrote a letter to FDR outlining the existential dangers if Germany got to the atom bomb first, which resulted in the Manhattan project, and the rest is history.
The Walk Across a Road With Global Consequences
