Page 107 - (DK) Danger! Open with Extreme Caution!

a hard core with a positive charge that contains almost all of its
mass (you haven’t forgotten mass from my equation...). And
that a cloud of tiny electrons with a small amount of mass
and a negative charge orbit the core. Smart stuff.

1932
Dear diary, old friend, can you ever forgive me for being
so long out of touch? These are such exciting times.
Rutherford’s colleague James Chadwick has discovered
that the nucleus (that’s the name for an atom’s core)
Nucleus
contains particles with no charge, called neutrons.

1933 Electron
Diary! We’re on the brink of something… Hungarian physicist

Leo Szilard had a brain wave while waiting for a red light to change: if
the nucleus of an atom contains mass, would it be possible to split it
to get energy from it? If so, and we had a number of atoms, and
the energy from each nucleus was released in a chain reaction (a process
they’ve called nuclear fission), would a huge, devastating amount of
energy be released…? That would certainly be a traffic stopper!

1939
Oh dear, diary. Szilard’s been in touch. Some German scientists worked
on a fission experiment last year (they bombarded a uranium atom with
neutrons until the atom split), and, just as he’d predicted, mighty amounts
of energy were released in an explosion. Szilard’s writing a letter here in
the States to President Roosevelt to explain how devastating nuclear
(named after the nucleus) bombs might be. He wants me to sign
the letter, as it needs to get the attention it deserves (and I’m
quite a big deal these days, what with a Nobel Prize in physics under

my belt an’ all). I do hope the president heeds the warning.
It was only an equation, after all. I didn’t mean it
to lead to something so dangerous.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt

The White House
Washington, D.C.

U.S.A.

EINSTEIN’S FAMOUS EQUATION 107
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