On 2 December 1942, in a squash court beneath the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field football field, the world’s first man-made nuclear reaction took place in a nuclear reactor built by Szilard and Fermi, now a Nobel laureate, using, thanks to Szilard’s insight, a newly developed, highly purified graphite.
The goal of this post is to try that Leo Szilard would have the public reconnition that he deserves. Oppenheimer has a film, Fermi has a Nobel prize, Einstein is almost a rock star... but Szilard was the ideologist of the Manhattan Proyect, as it is explained in this novel.
Talking about the relationship between science and literarure, Szilard had the idea, the vision of all the posibilities inside nuclear energy by reading the H.G Wells novel The World Set Free. Leo Szilard, a clever central european jewish was the first of being aware of the dangers in case Nazi German dicovered nuclear bomb. He conviced Einstein to write to Roosevelt in this sense. Lately, Einstein, regretting for Hiroshima said he ‘really only acted as a mailbox’ for his former student.
