throopw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Wayne Throop) wrote in news:1208064817@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>: The Starmaker <starmaker@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>: Okay, ...he was responsible for the building of the Atomic bomb.
>
> No, not that either. Signing a letter stating that it was possible is
> not "responsibility for".
I'm sorry, but in this case, Starmaker is right. Of all the people
associated with the a-bomb, none is more "responsible" than Einstein.
You could make a case that that the Hungarian, Leo Szilard, is equally
responsible, because he wrote the letter for Roosevelt and convinced
Einstein to sign it. But it was Einstein's celebrity, and nothing else,
that turned the tide in favor of the device, which military leaders
uniformly ridiculed as preposterous.
However, for a forgotten "villain" of the era, my money's on the
Frenchman Frederic Joliot, who let the cat out of the bag by publi****ng
the first science paper on the chain reaction, even though his
colleagues in America, the platoon of Jewish atomic scientists who had
fled Naziism, begged him not to.
My second favorite person that nobody has ever heard of is Caltech's
Seth Neddermeyer (remember that name from "Animal House"?), who invented
the implosion method for getting the bomb to work. All these men, right
down to Richard Feynmann, who was a beginning scientist at Los Alamos
are "responsible," to greater or lesser degrees, but Einstein was the
greatest man of all the scientists involved. The only person who bears
more reponsibility was FDR himself. And then, of course, there's
Hitler. ;(
For anybody who wants to learn more about the events of that epoch, I
would vigorously recommend Brian VanDeMark's "Pandora's Keepers," from
2003, which is a rivetting page turner. His description of the Trinity
test, on pages 167-178, is an especially visceral ****tion of the
narrative, and if you don't feel like reading an entire 340 page
history, I'd encourage you to just read that part. You won't be sorry.
> And it had nothing to do with general
> relativity. Further, racdioactivity made clear there was great energy
> available, even before relativity existed. The discovery of fission
> to release the energy quickly is a matter of particle physics, not
> relavitiy theory.
>
> Einstein's participation was simply as a well known physicist, and
> had nothing to do with his actual work in physical theory.
>
>
> Wayne Throop throopw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://sheol.org/throopw
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