Science Books: Amir D. Aczel

Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age, by Amir D. Aczel
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
223 pages plus notes, references, index and 8 pages of b&w photos
Library: 539.7 ACZ

Description
Ueanium, a nondescript element when found in nature, in the past century has become more sought after than gold. Its nucleus is so heavy that it is highly unstable and radioactive. If broken apart, it unleashes the tremendous power within the atom-the most controversial type of energy ever discovered.

Set against the darkening shadow of World War II, Amir D. Aczel's suspenseful account tells the story of the feirce competition among the day's top scientists to harness nuclear power.

The intensely driven Marie Curie discovered radioactivity. The University of Berlin team of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner - he an upright, politically conservative German chemist and she a soft-spoken Austrian Jewish theoretical physicist-achieved the most spectacular discoveries in fission.

Curie's daugghter, Irene Joliet-Curie, raced against Meitner and Hahn to break the secret of the splitting of the atom.

As the war raged, Niels Bohr, a founder of modern physics, had a dramatic meeting with Wrner Heisenberg, the German physicist in charge of the Nazi project to beat the Allies to the bomb.

And finally, in 1942, Enrico Fermi, a prodigy from Rome who had fled the war to the United States, unleashed the first nuclear chain reaction in a raquetball court at the University of Chicago.

At a time when the world is again confronted with the perils of nuclear armament, Amir D. Aczel's absorbing story of a rivalry that changed the course off history is as thrilling and suspenseful as it is scientifically revelatory and newsworthy.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Cast of Characters
A Note on Nomenclature
Glossary of Atomic Terms
Introduction: The Blinding Light
1. Physics and Uranium
2. On the trail of the nucleus
3. Lise Meitner
4. The Meitner-Hahn Discovery
5. Enrico Fermi
6. The Rome Experiments
7. The Events of 1938
8. Christmas 1938
9. The Heisenberg Menace
10. Chain Reaction
11. The Nazi Nuclear Machine
12. Copenhagen
13. The Moments of Truth
14. Building the Bomb
15. The Decision to use the Bomb
16. Evidence from a Spying Operation
17. The Cold War
18. Uranium's Future
Notes
References
Index

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