She left him on the sofa when the phone rang, and was back in a few seconds.
"Who was it?" he asked.
"My husband," she replied.
"I better get going," he said. "Where was he?"
"Relax. He's downtown playing poker with you."
Atomic pileIn 1942, work began on an experimental atomic pile to investigate the world's first artificial nuclear chain reaction. In a makeshift lab underneath the University's football stands at Stagg Field, physicists and staffers, worked around the clock to built a lattice of 57 layers of uranium metal and uranium oxide embedded in graphite blocks. A wooden structure supported the graphite pile. The research would be an important contribution to the Manhattan Project, a secret wartime project to develop nuclear weapons, which initiated the modern nuclear age. Little more than two weeks later, on 2 Dec 1942, the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction was achieved by Enrico Fermi and his team.« |
