ajor task was to build the huge industrial facilities needed to separate the small amounts of rare uranium-235, uranium-238 and plutonium needed for a bomb. He built the facilities on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The project employed nearly 129,000 people. But out of those couple of thousands of scientists, there were six scientists who contributed to the project the most: Neils Bohr, Joseph Carter, Glen Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein. (Wyden, 1984, pg. 113)Albert Einstein predicted that mass could be converted into energy early in the century. The idea of energy from atoms comes from Einstein's equation: E=mc2. Atoms consist of three sub-atomic particles. The particles are protons, neutrons, and electrons. The neutrons and protons are closely clustered to form the nucleus and the electrons orbit around the nucleus. The actual mass of a nucleus is always less than the sum of the neutrons and protons that make up the nucleus. The difference is the mass equivalent of the energy of formation of the nucleus from its constituents. The conversion of mass to energy follows Einstein's equation, E=mc2, where E is the energy equivalent to a mass, m, and c is the velocity of light. His theory was confirmed experimentally by John D. Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in 1932. In 1939, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission. (Lanouette, 1992, pg. 82)Fission is a process where certain nuclei of heavy atoms split up into two nearly equal parts when they are bombarded by neutrons. Neutrons are used to split the atom because they have no electrical charge. If scientist used a particle that has a positive charge, the uranium atom would repel the positive charge particle. (Taffel, 1992, pg. 790)Neils Bohr discovered that U-235 had the capability to create fission. To initiate fission, a nucleus from a heavy element is bombarded with neutrons. The nucleus breaks into two fragments, rel...
