The AI Doomsday Bible Is a Book About the Atomic Bomb

In December 1938, two German chemists working on the ground floor of a grand research institute in suburban Berlin accidentally ushered the nuclear era into existence. They were bombarding uranium with radiation to see what substances this process created--just another experiment in a long string of assays trying to figure out the strange physics of the radioactive metal. What Hahn and Strassman ended up discovering was nuclear fission--splitting uranium atoms in two and releasing the enormous energy locked up within the atomic nucleus. To nuclear physicists, the implications of this strange experiment were immediately obvious. In January 1939, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr carried the news across the Atlantic to a conference in Washington, DC, where scientists were stunned by the findings. "It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful.