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This introductory chapter begins with a brief history of alchemy. It then discusses the alchemical revival in occult circles, which helped inform and was profoundly shaped by the emerging science of radioactivity and radioactive transformation. An overview of the chapters included in the volume is presented.

This chapter presents Part II of a paper by Niels Bohr on systems containing a single nucleus. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 deals with the configuration and stability of the systems. Sections 3 and 4 show that, of the formation of the atoms, it is indicated that the arrangement of the electrons in rings is consistent with that which is suggested by the chemical properties of the corresponding element. Section 5 shows that it is possible to calculate the minimum velocity of cathode rays. Section 6 briefly considers the phenomena of radioactivity in relation to the theory.

This chapter surveys the intellectual and geographical terrain of early nuclear energy and introduces themes that will be at the core of the book. In setting the scene, it argues that international nuclear science became a fertile and attractive field from the turn of the twentieth century, and one that quickly encouraged a close intermingling with application and commerce. But the technical environments seeded by the Second World War brought scientists into closer contact with engineers and gestated new expertise, allowing it to grow rapidly into exotic forms at a few locations. These wartime hot-houses fostered unique national visions and specialists collaborating in a domain variously dubbed ‘atomic energy’, ‘nucleonics’, and ‘nuclear engineering’.

For practising engineers, the most pragmatic expression of technical identity was defined in the workplace. This chapter focuses on nuclear specialists via their jobs. During the 1950s, workers from a spectrum of disciplines expanded at sites specializing in reactor development, plutonium production, and power generation. By the early 1960s these specialists were emerging as a recognized occupational speciality in the USA, but not in Britain. For early nuclear workers, representation by American labour unions was a problem for security reasons, and existing British unions aligned with chemical industry traditions, but new occupational labels were supported in Canada. The characteristics that defined the work of the specialists were disputed, although the risks of radioactivity shaped working identities in each country.

This chapter examines crises and disasters that resulted from environmental pollution. It deals with pollution related to radioactivity and chemical wastes. In each of the pollution crises, people evacuated their homes temporarily or permanently, voluntarily or by force, but only after a lengthy exposure to the hazard. It describes key examples of these types of environmental pollution disasters, which include the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine, the Nevada Test Site, and the Love Canal in New York. This chapter provides tips for preventing disasters and crises from environmental pollution.

There is a broad spectrum (approximately 1700) of radioactive isotopes (or radionuclides) that are useful tools for measuring rates of processes on Earth. The term nuclide is commonly used interchangeably with atom. The major sources of radionuclides are: (1) primordial (e.g., 238U, 235U, and 234Th-series radionuclides); (2) anthropogenic or transient (e.g., 137Cs, 90Sr, 239Pu); and (3) cosmogenic (e.g., 7Be, 14C, 32P). These isotopes can be further divided into two general groups, the particle-reactive and non-particle-reactive radionuclides. Transport pathways of non-particle-reactive radionuclides in aquatic systems are more simplistic and primarily controlled by water masses. Conversely, particle-reactive radionuclides adsorb onto particles, making their fate inextricably linked with the particle. Consequently, these particle-bound radionuclides are very useful in determining sedimentation and mixing rates, as well as the overall fate of important elements in estuarine and coastal biogeochemical cycles. Radioactivity is defined as the spontaneous adjustment of nuclei of unstable nuclides to a more stable state. Radiation (e.g., alpha, beta, and gamma rays) is released in different forms as a direct result of changes in the nuclei of these nuclides. The general composition of an atom can simply be divided into the atomic number, which is the number of protons (Z) in a nucleus. The mass number (A) is the number of neutrons (N) plus protons in a nucleus (A = Z + N). Isotopes are different forms of an element that have the same Z value but a different N. Instability in nuclei is generally caused by having an inappropriate number of neutrons relative to the number of protons. Some of the pathways by which a nucleus can spontaneously transform are as follows: (1) alpha decay, or loss of an alpha particle (nucleus of a 4He atom) from the nucleus, which results in a decrease in the atomic number by two (two protons) and the mass number by four units (two protons and two neutrons); (2) beta (negatron) decay, which occurs when a neutron changes to a proton and a negatron (negatively charged electron) is emitted, thereby increasing the atomic number by one unit; (3) emission of a positron (positively charged electron) which results in a proton becoming a neutron and a decrease in the atomic number by one unit; and (4) electron capture, where a proton is changed to a neutron after combining with the captured extranuclear electron (from the K shell)—the atomic number is decreased by one unit.

This chapter discusses the conflicting views of male and female writers on the Cold War nuclear programme. It looks at the mothers's concern that the nuclear tests were releasing radioactivity into the air. Men, on the other hand, feature a different form of the gendered viral properties of the nuclear paranoia. The chapter takes a detailed look at the works of Grace Paley, William Burroughs, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath that feature nuclear testing and radioactivity. It also provides an alternative view, which is the metaphorical substantiation of the Cold War links between genetic research and nuclear energy.

Sometimes a crisis tests one's mettle and fires one's soul. This chapter presents a story of coping with fallout, Chernobyl-style. These reflections are offered from the author's journal, written while living in Germany during the Chernobyl disaster, which rained radioactivity throughout Europe, and especially in southern Germany. It was his American nuclear epiphany in Europe, which caused him to consider the whole culture of radiation he had been raised in since birth.

This chapter focuses on the initiatives of various physicists and chemists to explore the strange new rays called X-rays that were discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895. The decade of the 1890s was a time of great progress in science. No year in that decade was more eventful than 1895. In Sweden, Svante Arrhenius was calculating the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on global temperature, while in Britain John Perry was exposing the fallacy of Kelvin's assumptions about the age of the Earth. The Scottish chemist William Ramsay discovered helium, previously known only from the Sun's spectrum, in an earthly mineral. That same year, at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, Röntgen was investigating the properties of cathode rays that led to his discovery of X-rays. This chapter also looks at the work of Marie Curie on radioactivity and of Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy on radioactive decay.

This chapter takes a historical look at the experiments carried out by Ernest Rutherford to determine the age of the Earth. In 1903, Rutherford performed an experiment in which he separated the alpha and beta particles and measured the velocity of the alphas, finding that they travel at the fantastic speed of 24,000 kilometers per second, or about 54 million miles per hour. Rutherford was able to calculate the energy of the alphas, which he found to be far greater than that of the beta and gamma rays combined. By measuring the amount of uranium and helium in a mineral and by knowing the half-life of uranium, Rutherford had the amount of parent atom, the amount of daughter atom, and the rate at which parent changed to daughter: he had an hourglass. He presented the results of his experiments on radioactivity at the 1904 meeting of the Royal Society of London. The discovery of radioactivity both falsified Kelvin's calculations for the age of the Sun and provided the means of making a correct calculation of the age of the Earth.

This chapter considers the progress made by scientists in their efforts to calculate the age of the Earth. To Kelvin and Ernest Rutherford, the age of the Earth and its constituent rocks and minerals were of secondary interest. Kelvin was intent on correcting the great mistake of British popular geology—belief in Lyellian uniformitarianism—and the age of the Earth and the Sun provided the means. Rutherford wanted to use radioactivity to explore the atom. Bertram Boltwood's rough estimates of geologic ages using radioactivity gave results well beyond Kelvin's limit. Estimates of geological time had now swung back in Charless Lyell's direction, possibly measuring in the thousands of millions, with the upper limit unknown. This chapter also looks at the works of John Joly, George F. Becker, and Arthur Holmes.

Frédéric Joliot discovered artificial radioactivity on January 11, 1934, when he bombarded aluminum with polonium alpha particles and produced a radioactive isotope of phosphorus that decayed by emitting a positron. He detected it with a Geiger–Müller counter that Wolfgang Gentner had constructed for him. Two months later, Enrico Fermi, motivated in part by an insight of his first assistant, Gian Carlo Wick, decided to see if neutrons also could produce artificial radioactivity. The transformation of a neutron into a proton in a nucleus should create an electron, so to increase their number and hence the probability of creating an electron, he bombarded various elements with intense sources of neutrons, and on March 20, 1934, with aluminum he observed the created electrons and thereby discovered neutron-induced artificial radioactivity. Less than four months later, Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, at age sixty-six.

This chapter examines Alfred Wegener's theory on continental drift. Wegener's ideas are encapsulated in his 1929 book, in which he showed that contraction, permanence, and land bridges between continents were dead ends, falsified by radioactivity, isostasy, and the differences between oceanic and continental crust. According to Wegener, the supposition that “the relative position of the continents…has never altered must be wrong. The continents must have shifted.” He also argued that the forces which displace continents are the same as those which produce great fold-mountain ranges. “Continental drift, faults and compressions, earthquakes, volcanicity, transgression cycles and polar wandering are undoubtedly connected causally on a grand scale. However, what is cause and what effect, only the future will unveil”.

This chapter explores how the powerful association between radium and life first “came to life”: in the earliest biological metaphors and metaphysics of early radioactivity research; in pre-existing discursive traditions and popularization practices relating heat, light, electricity, thermodynamics, and notions of a “living atom” to life (all of which were easily subsumed under the new radioactive umbrella); in the popular radium craze of the first decade of the twentieth century; and in the aftermath of controversy regarding other types of rays supposedly produced by living things. Radium, in short order, became the living element: the element of choice not only for biological metaphors in a new realm of physics, but even for biological application.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between scientific publishing and scientific internationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Nature’s speed of publication made the journal an invaluable resource for scientists working in the rapidly advancing field of radioactivity. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford was instrumental in establishing the Letters to the Editor column as a venue for announcing new and exciting scientific findings even before a complete scientific paper had been written. The frequent contributions from physicists such as J.J. Thomson, Frederick Soddy, and most importantly Rutherford made Nature essential reading not just for British scientists but for anyone interested in the most recent advances in physics. Nature began to draw contributions on the subject from foreign scientists like Otto Hahn in Germany and Bertram Boltwood in the United States, and scientists elsewhere in the British Empire like Rutherford in Canada. Despite the growth in international contributions from physicists, however, Nature remained firmly grounded in its British roots. Other growing disciplines, such as genetics, did not attract nearly as many non-British contributors as radioactivity, and the journal remained focused on science and scientific issues in Great Britain.

If iridium, the nuclear subtext of Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950) is oblique from an atomic perspective, from another, generic perspective (say, the classic investigative narrative of film noir), it’s virtually nonexistent, an anamorphic trick to explore the fate of sexuality and marriage, infidelity and adultery, masculinity and femininity in the age of the atomic bomb. Although the stolen iridium in D.O.A. is more immaterial than the microfilm canister in Pickup on South Street and less apocalyptic than the Pandora’s Box in Kiss Me Deadly, it nevertheless evokes a determinate “structure of feeling,” a postwar world defined by the lingering anxiety about radioactivity as well as the mushrooming dread of instant nuclear annihilation.

In the prototypical ‘50s nuclear noir, the protagonist is an elite scientist—a nuclear physicist, to be precise—who’s either overtly opposed to or intimately aligned with the nation state and its institutional agencies. Although the FBI, as in the anticommunist noir, is the dominant investigative figure in these espionage films, it’s dramatically subordinated to other, more pressing issues and agencies such as treason, homosexuality, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (in The Thief), Native Americans, national security, and the nuclear family (in The Atomic City), and bombshells, bikinis, and “B” movies (in Shack Out on 101). While City of Fear is not an atomic espionage film—call it a nuclear-epidemiological noir--the film’s representation of the LAPD and metropolitan Los Angeles as well as the rhetoric of disease and contamination, contagion and radioactivity, renders it a quintessential late ‘50s “B” noir.

This chapter begins by discussing the content of the Three-Man Paper (3MP): In it, Nikolai Timoféeff-Ressovsky, the geneticist, outlined the biological problem concerning the nature of the mutation process and what it says about the nature of the gene. Karl Zimmer, the biophysicist, outlined an approach to the structure of the gene using physical experiments based on the recently discovered action of X-rays in causing mutations. Max Delbrück used the evidence and concepts from the target-theory experiments to construct a model of mutation and then a theory of gene mutation and structure. This chapter then focuses on the developments in physics leading up to this important paper and shows that one of its crucial aspects involved the application and appreciation of physical concepts growing out of the early work on radioactivity and the physical nature of X-rays. The tools of the “new physics” were important elements in this dawning of molecular biology.