GR: Chicago races (doodah)

[Monte Davis]

I'm reading Craig Nelson's The Age of Radiance, a lightweight pop history
of nuclear physics, the arms race and nuclear power. Most of the story has
been told many times, but it does provide some detail I hadn't known on the
 fall 1942 construction of the first nuclear reactor, in the squash court
inside the University of Chicago's Stagg Field stadium.

The "pile" was 380 tons of graphite, arranged in a 3D lattice with 45 tons
of unenriched uranium metal and uranium oxide. The scientists -- among them
Italian Enrico Fermi, Hungarian Leo Szilard, and several German and
Austrian emigres -- worked hands-on with technicians to cut graphite bricks
from larger blocks and machine them to shape, generating so much dust that
concrete floors became slippery.

"Fermi, stripped to the waist, was black and glistening. One colleague
remarked that he could have played Othello... the squash court was so
filled with a smog of black dust that the scientists and the workers could
only be seen by the whites of their teeth and their eyes."

Had Pynchon decided to center GR on the Bomb rather than The Rocket,
imagine what he (not to mention von Goll and the psy-war scripters at the
White Visitation) could have done with THAT Euro-American minstrel show,
jes' cakewalkin' and hi-de-hoin' in our own combination Peenemunde and
Mittelwerk....
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