GR: Chicago races (doodah)

[Doc Sportello]

Always forget the "reply all" button
On Jun 6, 2014 8:55 AM, "Doc Sportello" <coolwithdoc at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can't help but think of Zoolander as well, two different scenes actually.
> On Jun 6, 2014 8:38 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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