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“But it’s impossible,” Frisch remembers them saying in their collective effort to understand. “You couldn’t chip a hundred particles off a nucleus in one blow.983 You couldn’t even cut it across. If you tried to estimate the nuclear forces, all the bonds you’d have to cut all at once—it’s fantastic. It’s quite impossible that a nucleus could do that.” Thirty years afterward Frisch summarized their thinking in more formal terms: But how could barium be formed from uranium? No larger fragments than protons or helium nuclei (alpha particles) had ever been chipped away from nuclei, and the thought that a large number of them should be chipped off at once could be dismissed; not enough energy was available to do that. Nor was it possible that the uranium nucleus could have been cleaved right across. Indeed a nucleus was not like a brittle solid that could be cleaved or broken; Bohr had stressed that a nucleus was much more like a liquid drop.984 The liquid-drop model made a division of the nucleus seem possible. They sat down on a log. Meitner found a scrap of paper and a pencil in her purse. She drew circles. “Couldn’t it be this sort of thing?”985 Frisch: “Now, she always rather suffered from an inability to visualize things in three dimensions, whereas I had that ability quite well. I had, in fact, apparently come around to the same idea, and I drew a shape like a circle squashed in at two opposite points.”986 “Well, yes,” Meitner said, “that is what I mean.”987 She had meant to draw what Frisch had drawn, a liquid drop elongated like a dumbbell, but had drawn it end-on, indicating with a smaller dashed circle inside a larger solid circle the dumbbell’s waist.
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
I want to touch on one more core value I learned from my family. In terms of earning self-respect, it might be the most important of them all, and I am especially indebted to my father for leading me to see its importance. I’m referring to the development of a personal work ethic.
Life Is What You Make It
Peter Buffett
After Morgan had installed the Edison lighting plant in his redecorated house on Madison Avenue, in the autumn of 1883, he held a big reception for four hundred guests. One of them, Darius Ogden Mills, the famous gold mine operator and stock market plunger, was so impressed with all those brilliant new lights that on the following morning he walked into the office of Drexel, Morgan & Company and ordered the purchase of a thousand Edison shares. “Pierpont heard of this at once,” and before Mills could go out the door, caught him and asked him what he knew about the Edison light. “I know all about it,” answered Mills. “All right, we will take your order,” said Pierpont, “and any other orders of the same kind, but I am going to put a condition on my partners with respect to such orders... that for every share of Edison stock they buy for you they buy one for me.”458 This incident has been cited as showing Morgan’s enthusiasm for the Edison venture. What it suggests rather is that Morgan was serving notice that he would allow no one else to take control over this promising industry; and he was a most determined and formidable man. By the end of 1883, the meetings of the directors of the Edison Electric Light and of its two non-manufacturing subsidiaries, the Edison Illuminating of New York and Isolated Lighting, were regularly held in Morgan’s office.
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