Well, Teller, I think he has to be much commended for that. Later on we found out that it is very difficult to ignite deuterium by an atomic bomb, and liquid deuterium, which is much easier to ignite than the gas, but at the time in '42 we thought it might be very easy to ignite liquid deuterium. And I said so, and I think Teller was very quickly convinced and so was Oppenheimer when he'd returned from seeing Compton. Well, I sat down and looked at the problem, about whether two nitrogen nuclei could penetrate each other and make that nuclear reaction, and I found that it was just incredibly unlikely. Oppenheimer got quite excited and said, "That's a terrible possibility," and he went to his superior, who was Arthur Compton, the director of the Chicago Laboratory, and told him that. Couldn't that happen?" And that caused great excitement.īethe: '42. So Teller said, "Well, how about the air? There's nitrogen in the air, and you can have a nuclear reaction in which two nitrogen nuclei collide and become oxygen plus carbon, and in this process you set free a lot of energy. So one day at Berkeley - we were a very small group, maybe eight physicists or so - one day Teller came to the office and said, "Well, what would happen to the air if an atomic bomb were exploded in the air?" The original idea about the hydrogen bomb was that one would explode an atomic bomb and then simply the heat from the atomic bomb would ignite a large vessel of deuterium… and make it react. Horgan: I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the story of Teller's suggestion that the atomic bomb might ignite the atmosphere around the Earth.īethe: It is such absolute nonsense, and the public has been interested in it… And possibly it would be good to kill it once more. Here is an exact transcript of my interview with him, which took place at his home in Ithaca, New York. After considering Teller’s concerns, Bethe and others concluded… Well, I’ll let Bethe tell the story in his own words. (Ironically, Teller later helped create thermonuclear bombs, in which fission catalyzes a vastly more powerful fusion explosion.) Teller brought his concerns to other physicists, including Bethe, an authority on fusion (and pretty much everything else in nuclear physics). Teller reportedly did calculations suggesting that a fission explosion might generate heat so intense that it would trigger runaway fusion in the atmosphere. I heard about the incident in 1991 while preparing for an interview with Hans Bethe, who headed the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division. Learn more about the course for which this activity was developed.The 70 th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has reminded me of an extraordinary incident that occurred during the Manhattan Project, when Edward Teller and other physicists feared the fission bomb they were building might incinerate the planet. The student course pack activity and instructor notes are provided. For assessment, the instructor grades written student responses to questions in the student course pack. Comparisons are drawn between the human life timescale and geologic time. Finally, students investigate the geologic timescale and place eons and eras of geologic time on the same scale as earth events. Students then use classroom and Internet resources to place the same events in the proper order and at the correct locations along the timescale. Students are next given important events in the history of the earth and are invited to first develop a scaled representation of the earth's history based on their prior knowledge. Students use criteria of their choosing to divide the timescale into periods, then compare and contrast timescales among the class. In this classroom activity, students first use an interview with an older adult to construct a timescale. This page first made public: Mar 14, 2007 For information about the criteria used for this review, see. Workshop participants were provided with a set of criteria against which they evaluated each others' activities. This activity has benefited from input from faculty educators beyond the author through a review and suggestion process as a part of an activity development workshop. This activity has benefited from input from a review and suggestion process as a part of an activity development workshop.Completeness of the ActivitySheet web pageįor more information about the peer review process itself, please see.Robustness (usability and dependability of all components).Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments.The five categories included in the process are This activity has received positive reviews in a peer review process involving five review categories. This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Reviewed Teaching Collection
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