Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age

Aczel, Amir D.

ISBN 10: 0230613748 / ISBN 13: 9780230613744

Published by St. Martin's Press, 2009

About this Item

Stated first edition. Light scuffing to rear of jacket.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1763571942765

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0230613748
• ISBN 13: 9780230613744
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • War
  • Science & Technology

About this title

Synopsis

Uranium, 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 fierce competition among the day's top scientists to harness nuclear power. The intensely driven Marie Curie identified 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 daughter, Irčne Joliot-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 Werner 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 racquetball 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 of history is as thrilling and suspenseful as it is scientifically revelatory and newsworthy.

About the Author

Amir D. Aczel is the bestselling author of Fermat's Last Theorem, The Riddle of the Compass, and The Mystery of the Aleph, and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.