Why Einstein Thought Nuclear Weapons Impossible?

In Today’s world, we have Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power Plants you might think that it was always inevitable that we would be able to harness the energy inside the nucleus of atoms. But, that was far from the case, in fact, serious scientists thought the idea was laughable like Nobel Laureate Robert Millikan who in 1928 said “there is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom”.

 

The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream or as Rutherford, put it anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine and now there was good reason for their pessimism when Becquerel first observed to radioactivity, he thought it was a phenomenon similar to phosphorescence. 

That's when you shine radiation like light onto an object and it absorbs that energy and later re-radiates it in a different part of the spectrum and now uranium ore was known to do this as I witnessed first-hand. Here, it's absorbing UV light and re-radiating & it as visible light in 1896 Becquerel performed experiments where he placed uranium ore in the sunshine on top of some wrapped up Photographic film he found that the film was exposed seemingly by invisible rays from the uranium ore that penetrated the paper when the uranium was excited by the sunlight.

But one day when he went to do his experiment the weather in Paris was lousy so he put the uranium and the photographic film inside a drawer and a few days later even though the uranium hadn't seen the sun, he decided to develop the film anyway and what he found was that, the photographic film had been exposed just as before even though the uranium was not excited by sunlight. So, this was not a phosphorescence phenomenon of some type of radiation and therefore energy was coming out of a rock unprovoked. 

• But how could a seemingly an inert object like a rock give off energy?

• Where is it getting that energy from it was a mystery that seemed to violate the law of conservation of energy?

That is until Einstein published his famous e equals 

mc-squared which suggested a source of energy. Might be the 

mass of the nucleus just a tiny bit of mass can give you a lot of 

energy and this premise was enough for science fiction writers to 

let their imaginations run wild like,

HG Wells who in 1914 published the book the world set free which includes the first mention of the words atomic bomb and he envisioned a uranium-based hand grenade that would continue to explode indefinitely. But no scientists were completely detached from reality as Einstein in 1933 put it there is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable it would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will and that's just the thing people could not make a nucleus do anything. All we were observing the natural process of radioactive decay atoms of a particular Unstable isotope decaying at random with some characteristic of half-life and the energy given off although immense on the scale of an atom is pretty insignificant on the scale of people and the world the fission of a single uranium atom releases.

20 times less energy than the amount required to raise a grain of sand the thickness of a piece of paper. Now, until 1932 the only known particle in the nucleus was the proton so if you wanted to alter the nucleus you could conceivably fire a proton, but since the nucleus and the proton are both positively charged they repel so you'd have to fire the proton in with such high speed and accuracy to get it to hit and stick to a target and Even then if you're successful you've only affected one nucleus which at best can't even lift a grain of sand so, you can see why the Nobel Prize winners were saying nuclear weapons not gone a happen. But when they come to the discovery of the neutron and the neutron changes everything because as an uncharged nuclear particle it can drift ghostly un-deflected through matter until it hits a nucleus transforming it into something else and this leads to the Epiphany of a man named Leo Szilard Now's lard read the world set free, so he's already imagined a future in which nuclear energy is harnessed by weaponry and he remembers the exact moment when he comes up with this idea as he is crossing the street in London.

 

He says it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one Neutron then such an element is assembled in sufficiently large mass could sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

In other words, the neutron Enables us to trigger nuclear

reactions at will and if there's a nucleus which when it splits in

this way releases two neutrons it could trigger more and more 

Fission's and an exponentially increasing rate the nucleus that 

has this property is Uranium-235.

In fact, on average it releases two and a half neutrons every the time it divides all of a sudden you have the possibility of splitting millions of nuclei simultaneously releasing incredible amounts of energy all at once, that's an atomic bomb.

Now, if you want more control over this release of energy as in a nuclear power plant well then, you have to absorb a few neutrons so that the fission of one nucleus only causes the fission of one other nucleus on average. Then, you have a steady chain reaction that emits the same amount of energy each instant the challenge is that like Balancing on a knife-edge absorb too many neutrons and the chain reaction quickly decays to nothing absorb too few and the rate of reactions increases exponentially and soon you're back to a bomb or Chernobyl so, if not for the existence of the neutron a neutral nuclear particle to trigger reactions that occurs in greater numbers relative to protons in the larger nuclei meaning. They're likely to be given off when a large nucleus splits well, then maybe as many brilliant scientists suspected.

 It would be impossible to harness "the energy in the nucleus but, as it is in our universe the neutron is the hero or the villain of nuclear physics".

 

I would recommend to you that I've been reading the book to the making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes (this is the definitive account with such exquisite detail about how the bomb was Constructed how all the scientists made it work and really how it transformed the world). 

If you have any queries and recommendation 

regarding this topic 

Let me know in a comment!