SUNGLASESS AND ROCKETS Part 2: The Machine

THE STORY OF THE OTHER PHYSICS

"The one about the bomb?" I wanted to know.

"Exactly," he confirmed. "The project which involved the construction of the first atomic bomb in 1942. The project was conducted by the brilliant physicist Robert Oppenheimer, whose team, except for the Nobel Prize Werner Heisenberg, consisted of the elite of physicists of the time: Enrico Fermi, Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr, Otto Frisch, Leo Szilard, Richard Feynman among others, almost all of them Nobel Prize winners." He turned his head toward the surface of the wall, turning his back to us as well. "Although it's true that the objective of the investigations performed by that bunch of geniuses would lead to the making of a nuclear weapon; it is undeniable that they delved deeply into nuclear physics as no one had ever dreamed of...new and disconcerting properties of the elemental particles were discovered..."

"Disintegrations?" I dared to ask.

"Not at all," he answered shaking his head. "I'm not talking about beta disintegration, nor fission or nuclear fusion. That's the usual, what everybody knows."

Everybody? I wondered.

"I'm talking about the real key to the subatomic world," the doctor emphasized, "about the properties that can lead to the real domain of matter and radiation..."

He shifted to the right, with agility like a space spider. After stopping at a new nook, always near the ceiling, the doctor continued on.

"The finding of such properties was merely accidental and it didn't happen in Los Alamos, but in Oak Ridge, at the plant designated to obtain the explosive uranium 235. It turns out that during the first days, when only infinitesimal amounts of said isotope could be obtained, the plant barely had any safety standards, so relaxed, that a few milligrams of uranium 235 ended up in a flask."

"A flask?" Darwin was surprised.

"A glass flask," the doctor confirmed, "which was, in addition, labeled and placed on a random shelf as if it contained another ordinary chemical. But that wasn't all; the isotope disappeared."

"Was it stolen?" I became interested.

The doctor made a full turn.

"A meticulous investigation of the staff indicated that it wasn't. Actually, neither the flask nor the element left the plant ever. The weird thing was that in the flask there were no traces of the more stable elements that result from the decaying of uranium 235 such as polonium 211 or lead 207. The only thing that was left in the vessel was a thin black stain in the bottom, very much like ashes."

The doctor interrupted the fascinating narration for a moment, pushing himself up towards the ceiling. He held on a protuberance and with little effort continued his inspection of the spaceship. An instant later and without interfering in his meticulous labor, he went on with his story.

"Oppenheimer assigned a group of scientists to analyze the bizarre case and the results that they got were even more bizarre. They wrecked everything that up to that date was known about the atom: uranium 235 had not decayed, it had 'crumbled.' Protons and electrons had simply detached from the atoms, liberating an extremely small amount of energy."

"That means that the protons and electrons had reacted to something?" Darwin broke in.

The doctor denied it emphatically.

"They came off because they lost their electrical charges. They were no longer electrons or protons; in the vessel there were only traces of neutral particles and it turned out that not all of the traces were from neutrons..."

Our foreheads wrinkled again.

"And that's what happened, believe it or not," the narrator assured us, "and there was nothing in quantum mechanics during that time or from any other theory, that could explain the phenomenon. Then, a new property for protons and electrons was proposed: the shield."