Beneath the church in a cliff there was a disused beer cellar. In it the Americans had found a nuclear reactor. An experiment on the brink of criticality. When these cubes of Uranium were immersed in heavy water a chain reaction would begin. A storm of neutrons would sweep through the reactor. Slowly the uranium would be transformed into Plutonium, the raw material of atomic bombs. ibid.
What made fission so dangerous was that as each uranium atoms splits it releases not only a huge amount of energy but it also liberates more neutrons. These can collide with further nuclei creating a hugely energetic chain reaction. ibid.
It is one of the great ironies of the war that just as the Wehrmacht was rejecting atom weapons, fear of a Nazi bomb was pushing America into is own massive nuclear project. ibid.
French engineers and scientists are building a great scientific machine. It’s a nuclear accelerator called the Vivitron. It’s cost eight billion pounds. And part of it has come from Britain. Horizon: An Expensive Theology, BBC 1992
They’re working with the nucleus of the magnesium atom. The magnesium atoms are accelerated down this huge tower ... The nuclei are fired into a target also of magnesium. ibid.
The funding was established by treaty. ibid.
The first Cyclotron was a giant of its day. ibid.
The collision creates a tiny fireball getting close to the Big Bang at the start of our universe. ibid.
Quarks: five have been detected. ibid.
Cern costs three hundred and fifty million pounds a year ... Cern is governed by international treaty. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher even visited Cern to enthuse over the experiments. ibid.
The particle physicists are asking for funds for the next stage of their research. ibid.
The Americans are planning an even bigger rival. Here in Texas they’ve started construction on the Superconducting Super Collider. ibid.
In 1939 on the eve of the Second World War Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the American president Franklin Roosevelt. The letter was about an application of Einstein’s famous equation: E=MC². And his fear that the Nazis could use it to build an atomic bomb. Horizon: Einstein’s Equation of Life and Death, BBC 2005
Albert Einstein would later describe … the one mistake of his life. This is the story of his famous equation. ibid.
[Leo] Szilard was fearful it was only a matter of time before someone would find a way of harnessing the power of E=MC² and make a bomb ... What made Leo Szilard’s idea so brilliant was that here for the first time was a way of getting energy out of the atom without having to pump in vast amounts of power. All you had to do was set off one tiny neutron to trigger an unstoppable chain reaction. Leo Szilard had potentially found a way to unleash the power of E=MC² on Earth. But it was a discovery that terrified him. ibid.
In the wilderness of New Mexico the US government set up a top secret project codenamed Manhattan. From Einstein’s letter grew the biggest and most remarkable collaboration between science and the military the world has ever seen. ibid.
On a bright morning in August 1945 the first atomic bomb was dropped. It fell through the air for forty-three seconds, and then a single neutron started Szilard’s chain reaction. The energy released as the first atom of Uranium split was only enough to make a grain of sand jump. And then the chain reaction became unstoppable ... Just 0.6 of a gram of mass converted into energy laid waste the city. ibid.
Einstein felt he had to bear some responsibility for the development of the atomic bomb. ibid.
For the last fifty years we’ve lived with the fear of radiation ... A growing number of scientists are asking whether it’s time to think again about the dangers of radiation. Horizon: Nuclear Nightmares, BBC 2006
Back in the 1920s and 30s devices were sold that deliberately increased our radiation exposure ... In fact radiation became so fashionable it was used as a brand name to sell ordinary household items. ibid.
In the mid-1950s Britain opened the world’s first nuclear power station. Other countries raced to catch up. Nuclear power stations spread across the industrialised world. ibid.
Then in 1979 came America’s worst nuclear accident. Three Mile Island shook America’s confidence in nuclear power. Though there was no significant release of radiation. ibid.
Tatiana lived in the town of Pripyat within sight of the power station. Driving down the main street memories of the evacuation flood back ... Some 200,000 abortions are thought to have been performed. Tatiana was one of the few to resist, and Aliona was born healthy six months later. But the family has lived in fear ever since of what her exposure to radiation might mean. ibid.
The accident sent a radioactive plume of fear across Europe. If Three Mile Island had been bad for nuclear power, Chernobyl was a catastrophe. The expansion of the nuclear power programme came to a halt. It had become environmentally and politically too controversial. ibid.
47 deaths among liquidators, 9 deaths from childhood thyroid cancer ... That makes a maximum of 56 deaths that can be directly attributed to the effects of radiation. ibid.
In Chernobyl today thanks to the clean-up operation radiation levels are no higher than normal background in many parts of the world. Yet people’s lives are still being scarred by the fear of it. ibid.
It sounds totally improbable but it appears radiation may actually help the body resist genetic damage. What could be going on? ... Low level radiation may be beneficial. ibid.
Some scientists now believe the impact of this same radio-phobia could be very damaging. ibid.
At the Three-Mile Island Power Station in Pennsylvania a series of human and mechanical errors caused the nuclear reactor to overheat. As the temperature increased so too did the risk that the radioactive fuel would escape its casing. For forty-eight hours the station stood on the brink of total meltdown. Eventually the reactor cooled. And the fuel was contained. Deep inside lay ten million litres of contaminated water. And a further one hundred tons of uranium. It would take over a decade to dispose of it. Horizon: The President’s Guide to Science, BBC 2008
You have to look into the world of the atom to tell the time. Horizon: Do You Know What Time It Is? BBC 2008
The Big Bang: the most violent explosion there has ever been brought everything into existence. This early universe was hot – so hot it contained only raging energy. After just one second some energy was transformed into the seeds of matter, and the universe filled with a dense fog. 400,000 years passed as the universe grew, and eventually the fog settled to form atoms. Horizon: Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong? BBC 2010
What goes on beneath these fields in the Tevitron are some of the most violent collisions in the universe. Deep underground in a four-mile vacuum pipe, encased by super-conducting magnets, they smash together two sub-atomic particles at close to the speed of life. Horizon: What is Reality? 2011
Working out which of these are elementary is a problem that has defined particle physics for over sixty years ... When experimenters first broke into them [atoms] they discovered ever smaller bits inside. ibid.
The particle zoo – a whole new level of reality had been discovered. ibid.
With the discovery of the Top Quark, physicists are close to understanding one of the greatest mysteries of reality: what it’s all made of. ibid.
Welcome to the weird world of quantum reality: where nothing is quite what is seems ... A remarkable experiment that puts the very existence of reality into question: known to physicists as the Double Slit experiment its remarkable because it reveals two astonishing paradoxes about the nature of reality no-one can fully explain. ibid.
Single photons ... What you get is something completely different: even though only single photons of light are being fired through the slits they don’t create two lines, they mysteriously create three. ibid.
If you put detectors by the slits, the mysterious behaviour stops. The photons behave just like bullets. Take the detectors away – the multiple stripes mysteriously re-appear. So what is going on? Rather astonishingly it seems we can change the way reality behaves just by looking at it. But this means reality has a secret life of its own. ibid.
The quantumness of reality is apparently very sensitive. ibid.
According to this theory the photon of light faces two slits; it doesn’t split in two – it splits the world in two. Every photon in the double slit experiment creates a new parallel world. ibid.
Quantum reality is just about the strangest discovery Physics has ever made. But it is also fantastically powerful. ibid.
The most important particle of all – the Higgs Boson ... The Higgs is now Fermilab’s Number One priority. But they aren’t the only ones looking for it. They have competition. From the biggest particle accelerator of them all – the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. It is more than three times as powerful. ibid.
Quantum mechanics: weird: ‘With a single atom … where anything is starts to break down … Things can be in many places at the same time.’ Horizon: Defeating the Hackers ***** narrated Rupert Penry-Jones, Dr Franco Wong et al, BBC 2013
The only thing that keeps people from walking through walls or falling through the floor is magnetism. Molecules and atoms are extremely small, and the space between atoms is extremely large. At an atomic level almost everything is made up of empty space. It’s not the atoms themselves but the magnetic field that makes matter solid, that keeps a person from walking through walls. The Universe s5e3: Magnetic Storms, History 2010
The atom bomb: code name Little Boy. Target: Hiroshima, Japan ... The bomb kills more than 60,000 instantly. Mankind: The Story of All of Us XII, History 2012
J J Thomson in Cambridge discovers the electron. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 10/13: World Within World, BBC 1973
The notion that there is an underlying structure – a world within the world of the atom – captures the imagination of artists at once. ibid.
Niels Bohr ... what he questioned was the structure of the world. ibid.
Ernest Rutherford who round about 1910 was the outstanding experimental physicist in the world. Rutherford was then at Manchester. And in 1911 he proposed a new model for the atom. ibid.
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason for supposing that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. J B S Haldane, Possible Worlds, 1927
The Manhattan Project: Robert Oppenheimer leads the team that develops the atomic bomb. The original weapon of mass destruction. America: The Story of the US: Superpower, History 2010