ATLANTA -- The downtown Georgia World Congress Center, adjacent to the Georgia Dome and Olympic Centennial Park, is one of the largest convention facilities in the country. Inside, it houses hundreds of meeting room, including Ballroom IV, big enough to host several high school proms.
But for the throng of physicists wanting to hear Cornell physicist Hans Bethe on Wednesday, Ballroom IV wasn't big enough. Bethe was at the American Physical Society's centennial convention to talk about the Manhattan Project. Every seat was taken, and the overflow crowd either stood or sat on the floor.
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| At a time somewhere between the Manhattan Project and today, Hans Bethe rides a bike through the underground tunnel of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, accomanied by Boyce McDaniel, then director of the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory. Cornell University photo by Sol Goldberg. |
Bethe, the living embodiment of 20th century physics research, outlined the roles played by physicists in developing the atomic bomb. In doing so he explained the work of Italian-born U.S. physicist Enrico Fermi in understanding fission, and Fermi's choice of researching reactions in purified graphite because the option of heavy water (deuterium oxide) was too expensive.
Bethe noted that before World War II German researchers also were working on fission, but opted to perform the research with heavy water. "The Germans never had enough heavy water. That doomed the German project," he said.
With World War II descending on Europe, allied research moved from Britain to the U.S., and the jurisdiction of the U.S. Bureau of Standards. The bureau, Bethe quipped, were "masters at doing things as slowly as possible."
By late 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved funding for the research, and by December 1942, Fermi had achieved the first controlled atomic chain reaction, paving the way for the development of the first plutonium bomb.
Earlier in the day, Bethe gave a talk honoring the memory of physicist I. I. Rabi, who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and whose work on magnetic resonance made him one of the century's major physicists. Bethe recounted that following World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University, called Rabi into his office to congratulate the physicist on winning the Nobel Prize. "Eisenhower said he liked to congratulate the university employees on their success. Rabi replied he wasn't an employee: As a faculty member, he was the university," Bethe recalled.
This led to a long friendship between the Rabi and Eisenhower, and the scientist later served on the newly created Presidential Scientific Advisory Committee.
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