It's a long way before we get to Manhattan....

Quite extraordinary really that just yesterday £64 million of a potential lottery win went unclaimed and will now be spent on charitable causes.

How far we have come, although of course the government has been raising funds through a lottery since the 18th century.

One of my carers mused as to how she would have spent the money if it had been in her own bank account, and because of some of the discussions we have had recently in our Shower Chronicles, she confided that one of her dreams [just a dream] would be to build a particle accelerator.

This is clearly not a sensible proposal. When pressed, Charlie was much more likely to invest significant sums in social housing, the kind of housing for which there is a chronic shortage, certainly in this country and likely in every developed country.

But this interest in particle physics demonstrates the impact that our discussions whilst I have been having a shower have had.

Beginning to discuss the standard model for the structure of the nucleus of the atom seems naturally to lead to a discussion of nuclear fission.

I have always had a great fascination for the history of how this knowledge came about, and it has surfaced for me in my creative writing.

The final piece of a complex puzzle arrived in the form of one of Alastair Cooke’s Letters From America.

I had already discovered a great deal about the personalities that had been involved in contributing in some way to the discovery of the potential for splitting the atom.

America’s development of the first usable nuclear device, which so dramatically brought the second world war to a conclusion, goes back well before the commencement of the war, and is linked inextricably with the exodus from Europe of so many Jewish intellectuals.

Hungary in particular seems to have been central to so many of the personalities that have been directly involved as physicists in determining the structure of the atom, and then later the potential for fission.

Einstein himself had originally fled from Hungary in the wake of persecution. Initially to London, and then eventually to the United States.

The community of physicists engaged in this particular field of work probably all knew each other and of each other’s work.

Another Hungarian refugee called Leo Szilard had found his way to London in the early 1930s, and it is to him that the credit must be given for imagining the possibilities for the release of energy that would lead inexorably to the detonation of the first atomic device over Hiroshima in 1945.

It is recorded that he came to the conclusion of the potential for splitting the atom and releasing vast amounts of energy as he was walking along The Kingsway, a street in central London, and he was aware of the potential dangers if such knowledge were to be pursued, as it almost inevitably would, by scientists working for the Nazis.

Leo shared his thoughts with a colleague, also a refugee in London, and they both agreed that they must consult with the Old Man, which is how they referred to Einstein. They knew that coming from them, warnings about such potential horrors would mean nothing. They were, after all, simply refugees in England, and although working on research in physics with some of the finest minds at the time in England like Ernest Rutherford, they knew that what they perceived as a possibility must be expressed by someone of Einstein’s stature.

Leo was aware that although uranium is found in many places around the world, the only place in Europe where it was found in significant quantities was in Czechoslovakia.

Germany’s expansionist preoccupations focused on first Austria, and Czechoslovakia would soon follow.

Leo and his colleague knew that Einstein spent his summers in a holiday retreat in the states, and although they knew roughly where it was, they did not want simply to write to him, but to put their ideas and their concerns directly to him, and to see what he thought.

 and so in 1938, they both traveled to the states to find the old man and lay their ideas before him in person.

They couldn’t find exactly where he was staying that first trip, but they returned the next year, early in 1939, and this time they did find him.

In his isolated summer retreat, Einstein agreed that what his countrymen and colleagues had to say was important, important enough for Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt. Which he did.

The consequence of that letter, signed also by Leo, was the setting up of what became known as the Manhattan Project, the scientists in which together developed those first devices that were used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

It was perhaps the fact that the Germans had stopped all exports of uranium after they had invaded Czechoslovakia that most concerned scientists that understood something of the potential for such elements.

There was no doubt that the Germans had many scientists capable of stumbling upon on what had already been discovered almost accidentally by one scientist, and if one person had spotted the potential for unleashing such prodigious amounts of energy, then sooner or later someone else would do so. That is the nature of science.