Albert Einstein's Discovery Of The Atomic Bomb

Albert Einstein was born in March 1879 in the German Empire and died nearly 80 years later in April 1955 at the age of 76. Einstein has been accredited with a lot of scientific discoveries over his many years as an active scientist, including the general theory of relativity and the now-famous equation E=mc2. Einstein also won The Noble Prize in Physics 1921 “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect” , which led to the creation of, among other things, digital cameras. Other people have called him the “father of modern physics” for his work beyond classical mechanics and into the study of the very small and the very fast like relativistic mechanics. But many people have

In the letter Einstein commented how the Germans were rapidly progressing towards the completion of their atomic bomb; and how they also had far greater knowledge of the possibilities that the bomb could bring them, as a result of their research. This was because in 1938, a German chemist called Otto Hahn, following on the research started by Enrico Fermi, discovered the process of nuclear fission in. Nuclear fission is where large amounts of energy can be released from a relatively small piece of a radioactive element, such as U-235 in a chain reaction of neutrons and daughter nuclei. Einstein encouraged Roosevelt to invest more into the possibility of building the bomb, in order to counter the increasing threat of Germany. The American’s had conducted no research up to that point in the subject and Roosevelt believed that he must do something about it, so in October 1939, a few weeks after receiving Einstein’s letter, he set up the Briggs Committee that was tasked to study and investigate the possibility of nuclear chain reactions. This committee eventually led to the formation of the Manhattan Project which developed the bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of

The Briggs Committee was getting nowhere in it’s research, it was moving very slowly and many people who worked on it thought that the chance of having a working atomic bomb was far off; they believed that their research would have no impact on the current conflict, World War II. It wasn’t until the British presented their work to Roosevelt and the Briggs Committee in the summer of 1941 that real progress was made. The British MAUD report found that gaseous diffusion of U-235 was the most effective, instead of thermal diffusion or the production of plutonium, which, among other things, were being investigated by the Americans. The research conducted by a very distinguished group of scientists in Britain on Uranium was of great help to the Americans, it brought forward the predicted finish date of the project and it greatly increased the chance of a working bomb being ready by the end of the war. The report gave detailed plans on how the bomb might work, particularly that a specified, pure, mass of U-235 may be able to fission even with fast moving neutrons, as previously it was thought that fission could only take place if the neutrons were moving quite slowly compared to the speed of light. It was this research, from the British and not Einstein that partly led to the bombs being ready for 1945. If the research into Uranium had not been