#Emilio Segrè

[denimbex1986]

'We are accustomed to hearing historians protest that biopics mangle the truth. And we are used to hearing screenwriters such as Aaron Sorkin and Peter Morgan respond that it is legitimate to scramble chronology, invent composite characters and fabricate incidents in order to tell a deeper truth. But there has been little controversy about the authenticity of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. For the most part, the writer-director has chosen the historian's responsibility over the dramatist's liberty.

It is testament to the inherent drama of Oppenheimer's life, and of the Manhattan Project's three-year effort to design and build an atomic bomb, that the vast majority of the film's most memorable scenes and lines are taken straight from Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin's book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, or from contemporary sources. Still, there are a few fabrications, including two pivotal scenes that elaborate on the same truth: the scientists who built the bomb were genuinely worried that it would accidentally bring about the end of the world.

The first of these scenes comes on the eve of the Trinity test, the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb, after Enrico Fermi (Danny Deferrari) takes bets on whether the blast will destroy the world. Lt Gen Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) asks Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) what Fermi meant, leading to a conversation about apocalyptic possibilities and the impossibility of absolute certainty in theoretical science.

In reality, as head of the Manhattan Project, Groves would have been well aware of the theory that inspired Fermi's dark joke. Back in July 1942, Edward Teller (played by Benny Safdie in the movie) had raised the possibility that the bomb might generate temperatures sufficiently intense to set off a thermonuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere – igniting atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen or both – and "encircle the globe in a sea of fire". When Oppenheimer informed Arthur Compton, who worked on chain reactions at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, Compton was willing to halt the whole project unless the doomsday scenario could be ruled out. "Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!" he theatrically recalled in 1959, making the incident public for the first time. The Americans had no way of knowing that in Germany, where Werner Heisenberg ran the Nazi bomb programme, Hitler was also concerned that his physicists might "set the globe on fire".

The physicist Hans Bethe soon revealed the flaws in Teller's theory and assured Oppenheimer that a chain reaction was "extremely unlikely, to say the least" – less than three in one million, according to Compton. Teller made his own calculations shortly before Trinity and found "no reason to believe that the test shot would touch off the destruction of the world".

When the bomb went off, however, some witnesses were suddenly unsure. The blast of white, silent light lasted for so long before the boom that the Italian physicist Emilio Segrè confessed to fearing that "the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the Earth, even though I knew that this was not possible".

Nolan uses this potent red herring to represent the almost supernatural dread inspired by the bomb. He picks it up again in another imagined scene which gives the movie its chilling finale: a lakeside conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) in Princeton in 1946. The two scientists suggest that the bomb really did threaten the end of the world, just not at Trinity.

A 'hideous power'

The film has been criticised for not depicting the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not challenging the claim that it was militarily necessary, but that is true to Oppenheimer's perspective. Although he told US President Truman that he felt like he had blood on his hands, his doomed post-war efforts towards international arms control and thwarting the development of the exponentially more destructive hydrogen bomb were less about atoning for what had happened than preventing something much worse.

"It was indeed the bizarre nature of the bomb, and the uncanny sort of future it suggested, rather than its actual results in the war, that impressed people," wrote Vannevar Bush, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, in 1949, observing that the firebombing of Japanese cities had been no less horrific but far less controversial. Even though an overwhelming majority of Americans supported the bombings, many were haunted by premonitions of an American Hiroshima, like the one Murphy's Oppenheimer hallucinates in the film.

The future was Oppenheimer's priority. While the use of the bomb was never his decision, he did seem to believe that, in the long run, it was the lesser of two evils. In 1939, he knew that the achievement of nuclear fission made a bomb inevitable. In 1945, he believed that the bomb made nuclear war inevitable, unless its hideous power could be demonstrated to the world before the current conflict ended. "They won't fear it until they understand it," he says in the film, "and they won't understand it until they've used it". Colleagues including Teller and Niels Bohr (played by Kenneth Branagh) agreed, although for them, this belief that using the bomb could avert future wars did not make it any less terrible.

Nolan's decision to tell the story of the bomb through Oppenheimer's eyes – not just his experiences but also his concerns – gives the film its contemporary urgency. What was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is history, but the existential threat of nuclear weapons is still with us, as Oppenheimer knew it would be.

This awareness is captured in his most famous quotation. The physicist later claimed that at Trinity he had thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita – "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds" – but nobody heard him say it on the day, so Nolan uses voiceover sleight of hand to acknowledge the ambiguity. Perhaps the line was a retrospective bid for gravitas, or a plea for forgiveness, and Oppenheimer was playing screenwriter with his own life. But it carries that deeper truth. Regardless of the globe-of-fire theory, or what Truman decided to do, Oppenheimer knew in that bright white moment that his work had radically changed the world, and might one day end it.'

[garadinervi]

Hendrik A. Lorentz, July 18, 1853 / 2022

(image: Hendrik Lorentz, n.d., AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Lande Collection)

[kvetchlandia]

Emilio Segrè Theoretical Physicist Steven Weinberg 1977

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." Steven Weinberg, "The First Three Minutes" 1977

[natureintheory]

Majorana

Portrait illustration for a AAAS Science article about the evasive Ettore Majorana (who disappeared without a trace in 1938) and his eponymous quasiparticle:

The Quantum Phantom – "A ghostly quasiparticle rooted in a century-old Italian mystery could unlock quantum computing’s potential—if only it could be pinned down."

Info, process & more:

P.S., from the article:

And 3 years ago, the researchers flew to UC Berkeley to visit the archive of Emilio Segrè, whose friendship with Majorana soured in the years before his disappearance. The researchers came across a folder that, per Segrè’s instructions, cannot be opened until the year 2057.

Excuse me?? I suppose I have to stick around until at least 2057 because I need to know wtf if in that folder.

[man-and-atom]

Described as “a commemorative two–record album on the life and times of Enrico Fermi”, this program was produced at Argonne National Laboratory, very likely in the early 1970s. It appears there may have been an accompanying film as well. In addition to familiar voices from other USAEC records, such as Herbert Anderson, Arthur Holly Compton, and Crawford Greenewalt, the great physicist’s wife Laura is heard from. Script by James Chimbidis, drawing heavily from Atoms in the Family by Laura Fermi, Enrico Fermi, Physicist by Emilio Segrè, and The First Pile by Corbin Allardice and Edward Trapnell ; narration by Jay Andre.

Recording of first two sides (MP3, 192 kbps, 80 MB)

Recording of second two sides (MP3, 192 kbps, 80 MB)

[cmp-geo-world]

Unveiling the Wonders of Technetium: A Comprehensive Exploration

Unveiling the Wonders of Technetium: A Comprehensive Exploration Technetium, a fascinating element nestled in the periodic table, holds secrets that intrigue scientists and captivate the curious minds of the inquisitive. The Discovery:Technetium, with its atomic number 43, occupies a unique position in the periodic table. Discovered in 1937 by Italian scientists Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè,…

[sakuraswordly]

Marie and Pierre Curie were a remarkable couple who made significant contributions to science and humanity. They met in Paris in 1894, when Marie was a student and Pierre was a researcher in physics. They shared a passion for science and a curiosity about the nature of matter. They married in 1895 and began to work together on the phenomenon of radioactivity, which was discovered by Henri Becquerel.

Radioactivity is the process by which some atoms spontaneously emit radiation, such as alpha, beta, or gamma rays. Marie and Pierre Curie studied the radioactive properties of uranium and its compounds, and found that the intensity of radiation depended only on the amount of uranium present, not on its chemical or physical state. They also discovered that some minerals, such as pitchblende, were more radioactive than pure uranium, which suggested that they contained other unknown elements that were also radioactive. In 1898, after months of painstaking work, they isolated two new elements from pitchblende: polonium and radium. Polonium was named after Marie’s native country, Poland, and radium was named after its intense radioactivity. They measured the atomic weights of these elements and determined their place in the periodic table. They also studied the properties and effects of these elements, such as their luminescence, their heat production, and their ability to ionize gases.

In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Henri Becquerel, for their joint research on radioactivity. Marie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in any field. She also became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes when she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her discovery of polonium and radium.

📷 AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection

[lonelinessfollowsme]

Albert Einstein and Marie Curie near a lake in 1929.

Photo Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

[sciencespies]

600 cubes of Nazi uranium went missing in the US. These scientists are on the hunt

https://sciencespies.com/humans/600-cubes-of-nazi-uranium-went-missing-in-the-us-these-scientists-are-on-the-hunt/

600 cubes of Nazi uranium went missing in the US. These scientists are on the hunt

On someone’s desk, one of the little gray cubes wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. To the untrained eye, they look like paperweights.

“Marie Curie‘s granddaughter has one. She uses it as a doorstop,” Miriam Hiebert, a historian and materials scientist, told Insider.

The weight of the 2-inch (5 cm) objects might be surprising, though – each is about 5 pounds (2 kg). That’s because they’re made of the heaviest element on Earth: uranium.

The cubes were once part of experimental nuclear reactors the Nazis designed during World War II. As far as researchers know, only 14 cubes remain in the world, out of more than 1,000 used in Nazi Germany’s experiments with nuclear weapons.

Over 600 were captured and brought back to the US in the 40s. But even after that, what happened to most of the cubes is still unclear.

Hiebert and Timothy Koeth, a professor of material science and engineering at the University of Maryland, are writing a book about the cubes. After years of research, they told Insider they think they know what happened.

Miriam Hiebert and Timothy Koeth. (John T. Consoli/UMD)

Small cubes with a long history

Koeth describes the cubes as “the only living relic” of Nazi Germany’s nuclear effort.

“They are the motivation for the entire Manhattan project,” he said.

Leading up to the war, Germany was a world leader in physics, and the science of nuclear energy was in its infancy. In 1938, German chemist Otto Hahn revealed that he’d created fission by blasting neutrons at a uranium core.

Scientists fleeing Europe, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, alerted the US that Germany could develop an atomic bomb. The arms race was on.

In its natural form, uranium is not very radioactive. So the cubes aren’t very dangerous. But apply a neutron to uranium, specifically the isotope U-235, and it cracks open “like a piñata,” as Koeth put it.

“You smash it open with a neutron, and new elements come out, and also more neutrons,” he said.

To create an explosion, this must happen in a chain reaction: The neutron gets captured by another uranium atom, which splits open, creating more neutrons, and so on. To make that possible, the neutrons need to get slowed down by a substance called a moderator.

The US used graphite for that, and it worked. Scientists with the Manhattan Project created a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in December 1942. But the leaders of Nazi Germany’s nuclear program, Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Diebner, picked heavy water as their moderator: water in which the hydrogen atoms are replaced with deuterium. Cubes of uranium would be dipped into the water.

The Nazis developed two prototype reactors, the larger of which had 664 uranium cubes strung from a plate and suspended over a pit of heavy water. The smaller reactor used about 400 cubes.

The “Alsos” mission

The Allied forces didn’t know how far along the Nazi nuclear program was. And they were nervous.

So in 1943, the Allies launched a secret mission – the codename was “Alsos” – to find out. A team of about a dozen people, including soldiers, scientists, and interpreters, traveled through Italy, France, and Germany searching for traces of the Nazis’ nuclear experiments. Then as the war neared its end, the mission’s objective shifted to making sure nuclear material (or scientists) wouldn’t make it into the hands of the Soviets.

In April 1945, Allied forces found and captured about 1.6 tons of uranium cubes in southern Germany. Heisenberg, his team, and the larger of Germany’s two reactors – neither of which ever worked – had previously been hiding there. Nearly all the cubes were sent back to the US. The Alsos mission never found the smaller reactor.

Alsos intelligence officers after locating German uranium cubes, Haigerloch, Germany. (Samuel Goudsmit/AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Cubes were picked off the pile

After the cubes arrived in the US, Hiebert said, their trail went cold. The US was highly secretive about its own nuclear program, so there aren’t many public records about the Nazi uranium.

“We currently know of 14, out of almost 1,000 that existed in total,” she said, “so most of them are still unaccounted for.”

But those 14 offer clues about what may have happened to the rest.

Koeth, who has been an avid collector of nuclear objects since his early teens, has two of the 14. Both were given to him by colleagues. The first was a birthday present about a decade ago, but the giver asked to remain anonymous and Koeth won’t reveal how they got the cube.

It came with a handwritten note that read: “Taken from Germany from nuclear reactor Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.”

The note that accompanied Koeth’s cube. (Timothy Koeth)

Robert D. Nininger, it turns out (his name has just one n), was a geologist for the US Atomic Energy Commission in the 50s. Koeth and Hiebert found documents that show he worked with the Manhattan Project. Geologists with the project had the difficult job of sourcing uranium.

“Just figuring out where to get it from was a huge task,” Hiebert said.

Koeth’s other cube came from a former faculty member at the University of Maryland, who in turn had gotten it from another faculty member, Dick Duffey. During the war, Duffey, a chemical engineer, had worked at a plant in Beverly, Massachusetts, that processed scrap uranium, Koeth said.

Based on these findings and others, Hiebert and Koeth think most of the Nazi cubes that made it to the US were repurposed and used in America’s own nuclear program. But some, they think, got “picked off the pile” and kept as souvenirs.

As for the 400 cubes from the second reactor, Hiebert and Koeth found some documents suggesting they were sold on the black market to what became the USSR.

From a nuclear reactor to counter-proliferation efforts

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory owns another one of the Nazi cubes but doesn’t have records documenting its history.

So two scientists there, Jon Schwantes and Brittany Robertson, recently figured out a new way to date the cube – and other uranium products – more precisely than was previously possible. To do so, they measured the levels of two atoms, protactinium and thorium, that accumulate over time as uranium decays.

In a presentation last month at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, Schwantes and Robertson revealed that when they applied the method to their lab’s cube, the results put it squarely in the expected age range – it dates back to the years Nazi Germany was developing nuclear weapons.

Today, though, the cube has a different function: “The primary purpose it is used for is training,” Schwantes told Insider.

The national laboratory teaches security personnel how to recognize nuclear and radioactive material on sight. So the cube offers a good training example.

“I find that really kind of an interesting storyline for this cube – that it was first produced for somebody’s nuclear program, and now it’s being used for nuclear nonproliferation,” Schwantes said.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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#Humans

[aiiaiiiyo]

Eleanor Margaret Burbidge (1919–2020), viewing astronomical slides, 1980. Observational Astronomer, Astrophysicist, shared in the discovery that almost all elements are fabricated from hydrogen within stars. Photo Emilio Segrè [800 x 600][OS] Check this blog!

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

RESEARCHERS FIND WAY TO SHOW HOW THE TINIEST PARTICLES IN OUR UNIVERSE SAVED US FROM COMPLETE ANNIHILATION Recently discovered ripples of spacetime called gravitational waves could contain evidence to prove the theory that life survived the Big Bang because of a phase transition that allowed neutrino particles to reshuffle matter and antimatter, explains a new study by an international team of researchers. How we were saved from a complete annihilation is not a question in science fiction or a Hollywood movie. According to the Big Bang theory of modern cosmology, matter was created with an equal amount of antimatter. If it had stayed that way, matter and antimatter should have eventually met and annihilated one to one, leading up to a complete annihilation. But our existence contradicts this theory. To overcome a complete annihilation, the universe must have turned a small amount of antimatter into matter creating an imbalance between them. The imbalance needed is only a part in a billion. But it has remained a complete mystery when and how the imbalance was created. “The universe becomes opaque to light once we look back to around a million years after its birth. This makes the fundamental question of ‘why are we here?’ difficult to answer,” says paper co-author Jeff Dror, postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and physics researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since matter and antimatter have the opposite electrical charges, they cannot turn into each other, unless they are electrical neutral. Neutrinos are the only electrical neutral matter particles we know, and they are the strongest contender to do this job. A theory many researchers support is that the universe went through a phase transition so that neutrinos could reshuffle matter and antimatter. “A phase transition is like boiling water to vapor, or cooling water to ice. The behavior of matter changes at specific temperatures called critical temperature. When a certain metal is cooled to a low temperature, it loses electrical resistance completely by a phase transition, becoming a superconductor. It is the basis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for cancer diagnosis or maglev technology that floats a train so that it can run at 300 miles an hour without causing dizziness. Just like a superconductor, the phase transition in the early universe may have created a very thin tube of magnetic fields called cosmic strings,” explains paper co-author Hitoshi Murayama, MacAdams Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Principal Investigator at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo, and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dror and Murayama are part of a team of researchers from Japan, US and Canada who believe the cosmic strings then try to simplify themselves, leading up to tiny wobbling of spacetime called gravitational waves. These could be detected by future space-borne observatories such as LISA, BBO (European Space Agency) or DECIGO (Japanese Astronautical Exploration Agency) for nearly all possible critical temperatures. “The recent discovery of gravitational waves opens up a new opportunity to look back further to a time, as the universe is transparent to gravity all the way back to the beginning. When the universe might have been a trillion to a quadrillion times hotter than the hottest place in the universe today, neutrinos are likely to have behaved in just the way we require to ensure our survival. We demonstrated that they probably also left behind a background of detectable gravitational ripples to let us know,” says paper co-author Graham White, a postdoctoral fellow at TRIUMF. “Cosmic strings used to be popular as a way of creating small variations in mass densities that eventually became stars and galaxies, but it died because recent data excluded this idea. Now with our work, the idea comes back for a different reason. This is exciting!” says Takashi Hiramatsu, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo, which runs Japan’s gravitational wave detector KAGRA and Hyper-Kamiokande experiments. “Gravitational wave from cosmic strings has a spectrum very different from astrophysical sources such as merger of black holes. It is quite plausible that we will be completely convinced the source is indeed cosmic strings,” says Kazunori Kohri, Associate Professor at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization Theory Center in Japan. “It would be really exciting to learn why we exist at all,” says Murayama. “This is the ultimate question in science.” Background Information - Antimatter was hypothesized by theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Paul Dirac, who came up with a theory of quantum mechanics that governs microscopic world of elementary particles, tried to combine his theory with Einstein’s theory of relativity that governs the macroscopic universe. The antimatter looks practically the same as matter, except that their electric charges are the opposite. If there is an ice cream cone made of antimatter, it would look exactly the same until you grab it. - The first antimatter, the counterpart of electron called positron because of its positive charge, was discovered by Anderson in 1932 in aftermaths of high-energy particles, spewed out from ancient stellar explosions hitting the atmosphere. - Researchers succeeded in creating an anti-proton in 1955 by bombarding accelerated proton hitting a target using a particle accelerator in Berkeley, led by Emilio Gino Segrè and Owen Chamberlain. To date, matter and antimatter particles are created from energy always one to one. - When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate back to energy one to one. If you grab an ice cream cone made of antimatter, a part of you annihilate with the ice cream cone in a huge explosion, releasing much bigger energy than an atomic bomb. - The idea that neutrinos are the best contender to tur a small amount of antimatter into matter, creating an imbalance between them, originally proposed by Masataka Fukugita and Tsutomu Yanagida, both former researchers at the Kavli IPMU. - Neutrinos are a very difficult particle to study, and the worldwide scientific community is on a race to see what it does and how it behaves. Billion-dollar projects called DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) and Hyper-Kamiokande (Kamioka Neutrino Detection Experiment) are in head-to-head competition to see how neutrinos and their antimatter counter parts anti-neutrinos may behave differently from each other. IMAGE....Inflation stretched the initial microscopic Universe to a macroscopic size and turned the cosmic energy into matter. However, it likely created an equal amount of matter and anti-matter predicting complete annihilation of our universe. The authors discuss the possibility that a phase transition after inflation led to a tiny imbalance between the amount of matter and anti-matter, so that some matter could survive a near-complete annihilation. Such a phase transition is likely to lead to a network of "rubber-band"-like objects called cosmic strings, that would produce ripples of space-time known as gravitational waves. These propagating waves can get through the hot and dense Universe and reach us today, 13.8 billion years after the phase transition. Such gravitational waves can most likely be discovered by current and future experiments. (Original credit: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL, NASA, and ESA Credit: Kavli IPMU - Kavli IPMU modified this figure based on the image credited by R.Hurt/Caltech-JPL, NASA, and ESA)

[garadinervi]

Max Born accompanied by Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Victor Weisskopf in Göttingen, ca. 1930 [AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection, Gift of Jost Lemmerich]; in G. V. R. Born, The Wide-Ranging Family History of Max Born, «Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London», Vol. 56, No. 2 (May, 2002), p. 246; article adapted from a lecture at Göttingen University on 24 November 2000

[kvetchlandia]

Emilio Segrè Theoretical Physicist Steven Weinberg, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA c.1977

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Steven Weinberg, Address at the "Conference on Cosmic Design," American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. April 1999

[pangeanews]

“Ho conosciuto Emily Dickinson a Oak Ridge, dove hanno costruito la bomba atomica”

Nel 1962 mi trovavo negli Stati Uniti in visita al centro di ricerca nucleare di Oak Ridge nel Tennessee. Alla fine del giro dei laboratori e delle relative discussioni, volendo fare quattro passi, capitai in un grosso paese anonimo e triste dove l’unica parvenza di vita si manifestava all’intorno di una grande piazza circolare dove si affacciavano case, negozi e qualche sparuto locale di ritrovo.

Tornai rapidamente in albergo, un motel malandato e impersonale come tutto il resto, e, dopo un vano tentativo di appassionarmi ad un incontro di baseball in televisione, ripiegai su un comodissimo letto “king size” di una piazza e mezzo abbondante. Come d’abitudine, aprii il cassetto del comodino per cercare qualche foglio di carta da scrivere.

C’era la solita Bibbia, praticamente intonsa, segno che i clienti dell’hotel avevano altro da pensare o, meglio, da fare, la sera, oppure che la conoscessero già integralmente. Accanto c’era un libretto sgualcito dal titolo “Selected Poems” ed il nome dell’autrice, Emily Dickinson.

Non conoscevo Emily per cui mi misi a leggere qualche riga con diffidenza e scarso entusiasmo temendo che si trattasse di una delle tante donne che si travestono da poetesse per scaricare su dei versi, sovente melensi e banali, i loro amori impossibili o il loro sentimentalismo.

*

Oak Ridge era nata praticamente nel 1942 quando la zona era stata scelta dal Governo Federale nel quadro del progetto Manhattan per la costruzione della bomba atomica. Nei suoi laboratori si doveva realizzare la separazione, con tecniche elettromagnetiche, dell’uranio 235 dall’uranio naturale composto quasi totalmente da uranio 238.

L’uranio 235 era il materiale fissile che con un opportuno innesco dava luogo alla reazione di fissione nucleare a catena ed alla conseguente esplosione della bomba con uno sviluppo enorme di energia fino ad allora impensabile. Mi raccontarono che durante la costruzione dei giganteschi magneti separatori si verificò che il rame che serviva per gli avvolgimenti dei magneti non era sufficiente e non ve ne era disponibilità nell’immediato. Furono chieste allora ed ottenute prontamente in prestito dal Ministero del Tesoro degli Stati Uniti, quasi 15.000 tonnellate di argento in lingotti! L’argento è un eccellente conduttore elettrico per cui non ci furono interruzioni nella messa in opera del sistema.

Fu necessario costruire una cittadina per alloggiare tutto il personale che operava nei laboratori, e le rispettive famiglie.

*

Al culmine del progetto Manhattan, cioè negli ultimi anni del conflitto, Oak Ridge contava circa settantamila abitanti, rispetto alle poche migliaia di prima della guerra. Tutto il centro di ricerca era circondato da una fitta cancellata e, negli anni di guerra, era sorvegliato giorno e notte, in quanto tutti gli studi e gli esperimenti che vi venivano condotti, dovevano restare rigorosamente segreti. Ricordo che la prima lirica che lessi, aiutandomi con un vocabolarietto tascabile, fu la seguente, datata 1863, qui riportata nella traduzione di Margherita Guidacci:

Come se il mare separandosi Svelasse un altro mare, Questo un altro, ed i tre Solo il presagio fossero

D’un infinito di mari Non visitati da riva – Il mare stesso al mare fosse riva – Questo è l’eternità

Fui sbalordito dalla modernità del contenuto e della scrittura di un testo di cento anni prima. Non aveva alcuna parentela con la lirica femminile di metà ottocento, era già poesia del novecento, ma forse non era neanche questo, era “Poesia” e basta.

Fui ancora più stupito quando seppi, tornato in Italia, che Emily aveva vissuto in una cittadina del Massachussets, volontariamente segregata nella casa paterna, con una educazione di rigida impostazione puritana senza contatti, se non forse libreschi, con i movimenti letterari europei. Lessi fino a tarda notte provando un coinvolgimento sempre più intenso e, alla fine, una fascinazione per questa poetessa che dura tuttora.

L’indomani, in mensa, ne parlai con i vari colleghi americani ma mi accorsi che non ne conoscevano neanche il nome. Un veterano del progetto Manhattan, che aveva lavorato a Los Alamos, il principale centro di ricerca per la progettazione e costruzione della bomba atomica, mi disse sorridendo che l’unica persona che mi avrebbe potuto illuminare su tutto, e quindi anche su Emily, era il fisico Robert Oppenheimer, il direttore del progetto, notissimo anche per la sua sterminata cultura.

*

Di famiglia ebrea tedesca ma nato negli Stati Uniti da madre americana, Oppenheimer, dopo gli studi ad Harward, era venuto in Europa, prima a Cambridge e poi, nel 1926, a Gottinga dove consegue il dottorato a ventitré anni e si trova in stretto contatto con i maggiori fisici dell’epoca, quelli che stavano rivoluzionando definitivamente la cosiddetta “fisica classica”. Dopo un periodo al Politecnico di Zurigo, torna negli U.S.A nel 1929 come professore all’università di Berkeley ed al Caltech (California Institute of Technology) a Pasadena. Nel 1942 sarà chiamato come direttore scientifico del progetto Manhattan.

Nelle parole del fisico italiano Emilio Segrè, premio Nobel nel 1959, che lo aveva conosciuto bene, Oppenheimer “era stato tra i primi ad introdurre la meccanica quantistica in America ed aveva fondato una fiorente scuola di fisica teorica da cui uscirono non pochi dei migliori fisici teorici americani. Si interessava di molte altre cose oltre che della fisica: filosofia, letteratura, conosceva più o meno bene varie lingue tra cui il sanscrito…”. Proprio la conoscenza e la passione per le religioni orientali gli fecero venire in mente, come raccontò in seguito, alcuni versetti della Bhagavad-Gita, il poema sacro degli Hindu, alla vista dell’immane esplosione e della luce accecante sprigionatasi durante il test “Trinity” della prima bomba atomica ad Alamogordo, nel deserto di Jornada del Muerto nel New Mexico, il 16 Luglio del 1945, venti giorni prima del lancio di “Little Boy” su Hiroshima: “Se la luce di mille soli divampasse nel cielo, sarebbe come lo splendore dell’Onnipotente” ed ancora “Io sono diventato Morte, il frantumatore dei mondi”.

A queste parole terribili e minacciose, che le circa settantamila vittime di Hiroshima morte sul colpo testimoniarono tragicamente profetiche col loro sacrificio (per gli effetti delle ferite e delle radiazioni ne moriranno altre sessantamila entro l’anno), credo sia consolante accostare la visione aggraziata e quasi seduttiva della morte in una delle più celebri poesie di Emily Dickinson nella traduzione di Silvio Raffo:

Poiché io non potevo fermarmi per la Morte Lei gentilmente si fermò per me. La carrozza bastava a contenere Noi due soltanto – e l’immortalità.

Piano andavamo – non aveva fretta ed io avevo tralasciato il mio Lavoro ed anche il mio riposo per la Sua Cortesia –

Passammo oltre la scuola, dove bimbi Giocavano in Cortile a Ricreazione – Passammo i campi d’Occhieggiante Grano, e passammo oltre il sole che moriva –

o piuttosto fu lui ad oltrepassarci – le Rugiade tremavano di freddo, di sola Garza era la mia Gonna, la mia Mantellina – di tulle –

E ci fermammo dinanzi a una Casa Che assomigliava a un’Onda della Terra – Il Tetto si vedeva a malapena – Per Cornicione solo poche zolle –

Da allora sono Secoli, ma sembrano più brevi di quel Giorno in cui mi accorsi – in un attimo – che all’Eternità Le Teste dei Cavalli eran protese

Francesco Cappellani

  L'articolo “Ho conosciuto Emily Dickinson a Oak Ridge, dove hanno costruito la bomba atomica” proviene da Pangea.

from pangea.news https://ift.tt/32EzwsU

[thoughtfullyblogger]

Η ΑΠΙΣΤΕΥΤΗ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ του Ενρίκο Φέρμι που το Νομπελ και η ΓΚΑΦΑ!

Η ΑΠΙΣΤΕΥΤΗ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ του Ενρίκο Φέρμι που το Νομπελ και η ΓΚΑΦΑ!

Oscar D’Agostino, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti και Enrico Fermi

Τα παιδιά της οδού Πανισπέρνα Τέσσερα ακόμη ονόματα ήρθαν πρόσφατα να προστεθούν στον περιοδικό πίνακα και η κούρσα για την αναζήτηση νέων στοιχείων συνεχίζεται. Ο μακρύς και επιτυχημένος αυτός αγώνας ξεκίνησε τον περασμένο αιώνα από μια ομάδα ιταλών επιστημόνων Βάρβογλης Χάρης

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[eclecticstarlightblogger]

Η ΑΠΙΣΤΕΥΤΗ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ του Ενρίκο Φέρμι που το Νομπελ και η ΓΚΑΦΑ!

Η ΑΠΙΣΤΕΥΤΗ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ του Ενρίκο Φέρμι που το Νομπελ και η ΓΚΑΦΑ!

Oscar D’Agostino, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti και Enrico Fermi

Τα παιδιά της οδού Πανισπέρνα Τέσσερα ακόμη ονόματα ήρθαν πρόσφατα να προστεθούν στον περιοδικό πίνακα και η κούρσα για την αναζήτηση νέων στοιχείων συνεχίζεται. Ο μακρύς και επιτυχημένος αυτός αγώνας ξεκίνησε τον περασμένο αιώνα από μια ομάδα ιταλών επιστημόνων Βάρβογλης Χάρης

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