Freight Train to Eternity. Part 1

In the March of 1909 Albert Einstein was 30. He was, apparently, a striking young man, darkly handsome with a cropped black mustache. He had soft eyes that seemed focused on infinity. While he did not believe in a personal God to whom one prays, he believed in a God “who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.” In the order, beauty, and intelligibility of creation, he found signs of the ‘God’ he also heard throughout his life in music.

In the spring of 1909, the husband and father, was a rising star sought out by a growing number of European scientists. He was already amazingly absent minded. I remember reading of a day he spent holding up his pants in the classroom because he had forgotten to put on a belt.

His insights were about to plunge the world over the brink on a long, ultimately terrifying downhill run toward danger. He was propounding that there was so much energy in matter that to express it mathematically you would have to use an exponent of the speed of light. The speed of light is 299, 792, 458 m/s. e.g., it takes light 1 second to travel from the earth to the moon. It takes the light from the sun to travel the 153.6 million kilometers from the sun to the earth just 8 seconds.

Einstein began to postulate that the energy stored in matter involved the speed of light squared. What that meant was that the ratio of energy to mass is 34 Billion to 1. He said that if mankind could ever find a way to unlock this energy it would produce the biggest explosion history had ever seen. The theory began to draw attention from men who would take the abstract theory and translate it into hardware. We can be thankful that Einstein was Jewish and that he left Germany in 1932 just as Adolf Hitler was on the rise. He made the decision to emigrate to the United States, where he took a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He would never again enter the country of his birth.

In the USA, Germany, and Russia scientists began playing with this fascinating monster, poking at the atom with their mathematical formulas trying to see how the energy could be released. World War II came and in July 1945 America was ready to test their new weapon. On July 16, 1945, just before dawn the world’s first nuclear explosion was triggered on top of a 30-metre steel tower in the New Mexico desert. To quote an eyewitness, “The event beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with an intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, grey and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described.” (atomicarchive.com)

This was man’s first look at the now familiar mushroom cloud. The awestruck observers noticed that the 30-metre tower was vaporized. It had vanished. Beneath where it had been, the desert sand had turned to glass. Three weeks later the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Einstein was deeply shaken by the events of August 6 and Hiroshima. He died April 15, 1955 just after my first birthday.

As a postscript, in 1951 the first thing to be launched into space was not the Russian Sputnic. Underground testing of the atomic bomb was being conducted down a 150m deep concrete tunnel.  On top of the concrete column was a manhole. When the bomb was exploded a mounted camera, which was recording 1 frame every millisecond captured the manhole being launched at 5 times the escape velocity of a rocket. The manhole was never found!

Tomorrow I will share a parallel story that also began in 1909.