Charles Seife - Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
Here you can read online Charles Seife - Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2008, publisher: Viking Adult, genre: Non-fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
- Author:
- Publisher:Viking Adult
- Genre:
- Year:2008
- Rating:3 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
The author of Zero looks at the messy history of the struggle to harness fusion energy . When weapons builders detonated the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, they tapped into the vastest source of energy in our solar system--the very same phenomenon that makes the sun shine. Nuclear fusion was a virtually unlimited source of power that became the center of a tragic and comic quest that has left scores of scientists battered and disgraced. For the past half-century, governments and research teams have tried to bottle the sun with lasers, magnets, sound waves, particle beams, and chunks of meta. (The latest venture, a giant, multi-billion-dollar, international fusion project called ITER, is just now getting underway.) Again and again, they have failed, disgracing generations of scientists. Throughout this fascinating journey Charles Seife introduces us to the daring geniuses, villains, and victims of fusion science: the brilliant and tortured Andrei Sakharov; the monomaniacal and Strangelovean Edward Teller; Ronald Richter, the secretive physicist whose lies embarrassed an entire country; and Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, the two chemists behind the greatest scientific fiasco of the past hundred years. Sun in a Bottle is the first major book to trace the story of fusion from its beginnings into the 21st century, of how scientists have gotten burned by trying to harness the power of the sun.
Charles Seife: author's other books
Who wrote Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Charles Seife
Charles Seife
Charles Seife
Sharon Ann Holgate
L. J. Reinders
McCracken Garry
Jason Parisi
Antony C. Sutton
Isaac Asimov
Nell Benton
Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Table of Contents
ALSO BY CHARLES SEIFE
Decoding the Universe
Alpha & Omega
Zero
INTRODUCTION
Circe warned me to shun the island of the blessed sun-god, for it was here, she said, that our worst danger would lie.
THE ODYSSEY, TRANSLATED BY SAMUEL BUTLER
The dream is as ancient as humanity: unlimited power. It has driven generation after generation of scientists to the brink of insanity.
In 1905, after centuries of attempts to build perpetual motion machines, scientists discovered an essentially limitless source of energy. With his famous equation, E = mc2, Albert Einstein discovered that a minuscule chunk of mass could, theoretically, be converted into an enormous amount of energy. Indeed, E = mc 2 is the equation that describes why the sun shines; at its core, the sun is constantly converting matter to energy in a reaction known as fusion. If scientists could do the same thing on Earthif they could convert matter into energy with a controlled fusion reactionscientists could satisfy humanitys energy needs until the end of time.
For the past half century, legions of physicists have been trying desperately to create a tiny sun in a bottle, trying to bring the stellar power of fusion to Earth. The quest for fusion is the story of scientists weaving an increasingly tangled web of secret, crazy, and brilliant schemes to harness the power of the sun. They are caught up in a complex tale that includes classified government experiments, billion-dollar scientific projects, and byzantine conspiracy theories. The quest for fusion is a tale of genius physicists who have changed the world foreverfor better and for worseand of secret-spilling whistleblowers, jealous researchers, brilliant tinkerers, and backstabbing politicians.
The stakes are enormousand they are getting higher by the day. The worlds supply of oil is no longer assured to meet humanitys energy needs; worse yet, the threat of global warming is forcing governments to find sources of power other than fossil fuels. In the long term, fusion is the only option. Humanity will suffer if researchers dont solve its problems.
Scientists have broken under the pressure. Others have been forced to make a heartwrenching decision to give up their dreams and disavow their work or to be driven from the fold of mainstream science. Over and over again, the dream of fusion energy has driven scientists to lie, to break their promises, and to deceive their peers. Fusion can bring even the best physicists to the brink of the abyss. Not all of them return.
CHAPTER 1
THE SWORD OF MICHAEL
He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people.
EXODUS 13:22
The fires were still burning over Hiroshima, the charred and faceless victims were still slouching toward Asano Park, when President Harry S. Truman told the world about a new weapon. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East, the announcement read. Mankind had unleashed unheard-of energy from deep within the atom and used it to destroy a city.
From the very beginning of the atomic age, Americans were enthralled and frightened by the prospect of this inconceivable power. By splitting uranium and plutonium atoms, scientists had made a weapon by using the very same principle that made the sun shine: E = mc 2.
The scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the super-secret program to build the first atom bomb, looked back on their achievement with a mix of awe and horror. To J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, the atom bomb represented a loss of innocence, a fall from grace that could mark the end of civilization. Others, however, such as the Manhattan Project physicist Edward Teller, saw that the atom bomb was just the beginning of a nuclear arms race. And just over the horizon, Teller realized, was a much greater weapon than even the atom bomb, one thousands of times more powerful.
This new weapon, the Super, would unleash a power not yet seen on Earth: fusion. Instead of breaking atoms apart to release energy (fission), the superbomb would stick them together ( fusion) and release even more. While this might seem to be a subtle difference, fusion, unlike fission, had the potential to produce weapons of truly unlimited power. A single Super would be able to wipe out even the largest citya task far beyond even the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A fusion bomb would be the ultimate weapon.
It would also split the scientific community in two and would drive humanity to the brink of ruin. The quest to unleash the power of the sun upon the Earth had an inauspicious start, to say the least.
The atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission, not fusion, weapons. Fission and fusion are siblings. Both get their power from converting the mass at the heart of the atom into energy.
Scientists got their first taste of that power in 1898, when the husband-and-wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie discovered a substance with a curious property. Radium, as they called it, seemed to produce energy from nothing. This was, of course, impossible. The most rigid laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, seemed to forbid the spontaneous creation of energy. But the Curies were quite certain of what they were observing. A hunk of radium constantly produced heat like a little oven; every hour, a chunk of radium generated enough heat to melt its own weight in ice. It would do this, hour after hour, day after day, and year after year. No chemical reaction could possibly sustain itself for so long and generate so much energy. Whenever the Curies cooled a piece of radium, it would heat itself back up. Indeed, the radium would always be hotter than its surroundings, even though there were no external sources of heat. Marie Curie herself was baffled. She suspected that some sort of change was happening at the center of the radium atom, but she didnt know what it could beor how such a tiny chunk of matter could produce so much energy.
The answer would come a few years later when the young Albert Einstein formulated his theory of relativity. The theory revolutionized the way scientists perceive space, time, and motion. One of the equations that came out of the theory was E = mc2, the most famous scientific equation of all time. E = mc2 showed that matter, m, could be converted into energy, E. This was the secret to the seemingly endless fountain of energy coming from radium.
If you put a gram of radium in a sealed ampule, over many, many years the radium (a whitish metal) will gradually disappear. In fact, the atoms of radium spontaneously split apart and vanish from view. But they dont disappear entirely. When an atom of radium breaks apart, it tends to split into two smaller pieces. The heavier of the two is a gas known as radon; the lighter is helium, and the Curies detected both helium and radon emanating from their radium sample.
Radiuma big heavy atombreaks up into helium and radon, and when scientists looked carefully at the weights of those atoms, they realized the source of the heat. Some of the mass of the radium was missing. If you add up the mass of one atom of radon and one atom of helium, they make up 99.997 percent of the mass of the radium atom from which both sprang. The other 0.003 percent simply vanishes. When radium breaks apart, the parts are lighter than the original atom.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking»
Look at similar books to Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Sharon Ann Holgate
L. J. Reinders
McCracken Garry
Jason Parisi
Antony C. Sutton
Isaac Asimov
Nell Benton
Reviews about «Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking»
Discussion, reviews of the book Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.