Related papers: Fermi and Szilard
In 1943 fear that the German war machine might use atomic bombs was abating and among physicists another fear was taking its place - that of a postwar nuclear arms race with worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons. Manhattan Project…
We give a detailed account of the recent retrieval of a consistent amount (about 600 pages) of documents written by Enrico Fermi and/or his collaborators, coming from different sources previously unexplored. These documents include…
The atomic bomb American program known as Manhattan Project has been studied in detail. Historians argue that the beginning of this program is rooted in the letter Einstein sent to American President Roosevelt in the summer of 1939. This…
In this article, I trace the early historical developments that ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Even after the completion of weapons, many scientists continued to argue that nuclear armaments were indispensable for…
This paper deals with the Physics Institute of via Panisperna in Rome, getting ready for investigation on neutron physics before Fermi's discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity. The importance of nuclear research had been acknowledged in…
In the fall of 1924, Enrico Fermi visited Paul Ehrenfest at Leyden on a 3-month fellowship from the International Education Board (IEB). Fermi was 23 years old. In his trip report to the IEB, Fermi says he learned a lot about cryogenics and…
Naturally occurring nuclear reactors existed in uranium deposits on Earth long before Enrico Fermi built the first man-made nuclear reactor beneath Staggs Field in 1942. In the story of their discovery, there are important lessons to be…
A novel recovery of some important documents related to the Fermi course on neutron physics, held at Los Alamos in 1945, is announced. Its relevance for the effective launch of a British nuclear programme in the early postwar period,…
A personal account of work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago by one of the few remaining survivors of the war-time project is given, illustrating, among other things, how absurd things can happen at a time of great stress and concern.. As…
During the Manhattan project a simple formula was developed by Bethe and Feynman in 1943 to estimate the yield of a fission-only nuclear explosion of a uniformly-dense bare-sphere of supercritical fissile material. We have not found any…
Dawning neutron physics was more complex than one might expect. The chance that the neutron comprised a proton and an electron was diffusely taken into account after the discovery of the neutron. Moreover, uncertainties persisted about the…
The results of a careful analysis of all the available information on the activities of Heisenberg and of his talks during the years 1939 to 1945 can be summarized in the following way. Like several other German physicists Heisenberg was…
The atomic bomb uses fission of heavy elements to produce a large amount of energy. It was designed and deployed during World War II by the United States military. The first test of an atomic bomb occurred in July of 1945 in New Mexico and…
We recall the early theoretical speculations on the possible explosive uses of antimatter, from 1946 to the first production of antiprotons, at Berkeley in 1955, and until the first capture of cold antiprotons, at CERN on July 17-18, 1986,…
Nuclear physics advances in the US and Britain, from 1939-1945, are described. The Manhattan Project's work led to an explosion in our knowledge of nuclear science. A conference in April 1943 at Los Alamos provided a simple formula used to…
In order to check finite propagation speed Fermi, in 1932, had considered two atoms A and B separated by some distance R. At time t=0, A is in an excited state, B in its ground state, and no photons are present. Fermi's idea was to…
The September 11 terrorist attack against America has caused a lot of concern to the American public and the entire world, which is suspecting a new attack sooner or later. The most frightening scenario is the one involving the detonation…
The Super-bomb issue contained two problems: feasibility of physical engineering and political need to get H-bomb ASAP. And there were two radically different assessments of these problems by outstanding physicists Hans Bethe and Edward…
The Italian civil nuclear projects had a very early origin, with the first ideas originating as far back as 1945. The construction of the first three plants dated back to the period 1956-1964, and at that time Italy ranked third in the…
In the centennial of Ettore Majorana's birth (1906-1938?), we re-examine some aspects of his fundamental scientific production in atomic and molecular physics, including a not well known short communication. There, Majorana critically…