How Scientific Chance and a Little Luck Helped Usher in the Nuclear Age
Accidental experiments and chance encounters helped Enrico Fermi produce the first nuclear reactor
image:
https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/j_NETR8VcjyYzDLAdnFgib20BTM=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/65/b7/65b7a440-dc38-4907-b195-da74c6a569ad/10542564734_caf7581560_o.jpgEnrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi at the blackboard. (U.S. Department of Energy / Flickr)
By David N. Schwartz
January 17, 2019
The general public may view the scientific enterprise as rational and methodical, moving forward in an orderly, cohesive way. But science moves in fits and starts, sometimes forward and sometimes backward, sometimes methodically and sometimes quite by accident. The extraordinary role that chance and accident play in scientific discovery can be seen in the remarkable career of Enrico Fermi, one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists. Fermi is known primarily for his work on neutron physics, nuclear fission, and the experiments that led to the first atomic bomb.
In October 1934, Fermi was leading a small team in Rome to create radioactive elements by bombarding various elements with neutrons, the heavy neutral particles sitting in the nucleus of most atoms. In doing so he split the uranium atom. But for a variety of reasons, having to do mainly with the limitations of his team’s radiochemistry, he did not know this at the time. However, his colleagues did notice that bombarding an element while it was sitting on a wooden table, surprisingly, made that element more radioactive than when it was sitting on a marble table. It was not a result they anticipated, and they might not have noticed it but for their curiosity and powers of observation.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/enrico-fermi-scientific-chance-luck-nuclear-age-180971249/#C2H9pEutSstM1CxT.99
