Albert Einstein is the one who got everybody thinking about the invisible energy locked away inside the atom, says Professor Gareth Williams <\/p>
The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity<\/em><\/p>\n The first thing to consider is Albert Einstein<\/a>\u2019s equation: E = mc2. You could argue that fission [the process behind the atomic bomb] is an exceptional case, but Einstein\u2019s equation gives you an idea of just how much energy is locked away in objects.<\/p>\n C is the speed of light. If you square that \u2013 multiply it by itself \u2013 you end up with an astronomically vast, incomprehensible number. If you then multiply how much an object weighs \u2013\u00a0its mass \u2013 by this huge number, then you get an idea of the amount of energy that\u2019s potentially locked away in the object.<\/p>\n In this sense, Einstein is the one who got everybody thinking about the invisible energy locked away inside the atom.<\/p>\n In terms of the development of the weapon itself, Einstein was persuaded by a group of Hungarian refugee physicists who had moved to America. They were all manoeuvred out of Nazi Germany by a very bizarre movement called the German Physics Movement, which was set up in the 1920s by a couple of disaffected Nobel Prize winners. They were quite bright people, but they were twisted in their interpretation of what physics and science was all about. They decided that anything to do with \u2018abstract mathematical Jewish physics\u2019 this is a quote had to be got rid of. Einstein was one of the more conspicuous scientists to go.<\/p>\n Less conspicuous characters include many of the those who ended up at the Manhattan Project<\/a> in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Einstein was persuaded by this group to write a supposedly pivotal letter to President Franklin Roosevelt<\/a> \u2013 which he did in August 1939. oops! see ealier email about how this might be covered up. Sorry! Rather than simply putting the letter in the post or delivering it themselves, it was decided that the letter would be given to a personal friend of the President to deliver by hand. Unfortunately, the aide they chose was an economist \u00ad\u2013 Alexander Sachs \u00ad\u2013\u00a0who was completely ignorant about nuclear physics. The letter was very plainly written, and Roosevelt was no dummy \u2013 he would have understood exactly what Einstein, one of the world\u2019s greatest thinkers, was talking about. But Sachs decided he\u2019d rewrite the whole thing and then deliver it to Roosevelt as a monologue. It took him weeks to do this, so it wasn\u2019t until early October \u2013 many weeks after the letter was written \u2013 that Sachs finally got to see Roosevelt.<\/p>\n He delivered his monologue badly. It was the evening \u2013 and Roosevelt was tired. He nodded off, and they had to finish off over breakfast the next morning. During the night. Sachs was really taking this very seriously; he wandered around his hotel room and he wandered out into the hotel garden to meditate. He sought divine inspiration on what he should say. And the next morning he trotted out an anecdote about how Napoleon had doomed himself to defeat by sending away an American who had invented a steam-powered boat, and that this had then set Napoleon up for defeat by the British Navy.<\/p>\n