3 ms·
"Einstein's greatest role in the invention of the atomic bomb was signing a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging that the bomb be built." http://hyper
by ithkuil 16y ago
"Einstein's greatest role in the invention of the atomic bomb was signing a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging that the bomb be built."
http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml
where he cites the work made by Fermi el al.
The first artificial nuclear reactor was built in 1942 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1)
Einstein's relativity theory and the equivalence of mass and energy is commonly cited has having laid the ground for the exploitation of the energy from nuclear decay, but I have the feeling that research in the nuclear energy field would have continued and yield some interesting results even without knowing that E=MC^2 beforehand.
- eru 16y agoAnd that letter wasn't very influential anyway, from all that I read.
- devmonk 16y agoAnyone could do almost anything without others' influence if given enough time, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate those that move things along faster and those that bring the science to the forefront. Einstein did a tremendous amount for related fields of research and the world in-general, not only through his work, but by becoming a superstar and elevating the role of science in our lives. If he could go from patent clerk to a world-renown scientist, then surely others could as well.