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The Disappearing Spoon Chapter 6 Summary

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I read and broke down chapter 6 in The Disappearing Spoon,” Completing the Table…with a Bang.” In this chapter the main argument is how the United States’ nuclear science changed the entire world. This chapter was very intriguing for me not knowing the science and the atom structure of creating nuclear weapons that have won us a war, but will forever live in fear of it happening again. When the earth was created, and a supernova swallowed up planets creating a process distributing natural elements across the Earths’ soil. Scientist were just scratching the surface of the basic periodic table, but just before WWI a young scientist by the name of Henry Mosely grew enthusiastic about his element work. While others thought it was a waste of time he found “As we know today, when a beam of electrons strike an atom, the beam punches out the atom’s own electrons, leaving a hole, Electrons are attached to an atom’s nucleus because electrons and protons have opposite charges, and tearing electrons away from the nucleus is a violent deed” (Kean123). Mosely began to fine tune and hunt for the missing elements, creating the atomic number, determining …show more content…

The bomb would be created out of both plutonium and uranium. Scientist would take the daunting task to figure out the perfect reaction. With the help of “Computers” (women working on calculations) they were able to have a successful test in New Mexico in 1945. With the swift work on Nagasaki and a few days later over Hiroshima. Stanislaw Ulam, a polish refugee, took a new approach to bomb building. Ulam used the same approach as scientists but came up with a problem that would universalize and apply to other situations with multitudes of random variables. The Monte Carlo simulators drove the early development of computers, and forcing them to move faster and faster, this method pushed through the next generation of nuclear

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