Evening star., 1947-08-18
By Thomos R. Henry

Behind the atomic age stands the
figure of bigbrowed, absent minded,
violin-playing Albert Einstein.
Out of his brain came the revolu-
tionary concept that mass and
energy were interchangeable, that
every gram of mass was the same
thing as so many ergs of energy.
He propounded it in a mathemat-
ical statement which has become one
of the major cornerstones of science
-e-mc2-c being the velocity of
light, or about 1S6, 900 miles second.
The first time I met DR.. Einstein
was at the winter meeting of the
American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science in Pittsburgh,
Christmas week. 1884. He was being
questioned about the possibility of
bringing about some conversion Of
mass into energy by splitting the
nuclei of atoms.
YES" the great physicist said,
"but it, would rot be practical.
1T would be like a blind man on
a dark night hunting ducks by fir
ing shot gun straight up in the
air in a country where there were
very few ducks"
Some said then that this state
ment made the attainment of atomic
energy seem too easy.
This was a little more than 10
years before Hiroshima.
r n
The first faint dawn of the atomic
age came one dismal, rainy Janu-
ary afternoon in 1899 in classroom
at George Washington University.
A few weeks ago during a meeting
of the American Physical Society
at the university, William Lawrence
of the New York Times asked me
to show him that classroom. hope
I took him to the right one. He
approached as a pilgram might ap-
proach a holy place.
would like to make a suggestion
to President Cloyd Heck Marvin.
Isn't 1t about time that an appro-
pirate tablet was placed on the wall
of that room? 1t was the birthplace
of the brave new world. For gener-
ations to come pilgrams in Washing
ton will seek 1t out.
Bob Potter, then on the staff OF
Science Service, and happened to
be the only reporters present at
that fateful conference on atomic
physics conducted each year under
the Joint auspices of the Carnegie
Institution of Washington and
George Washington University.
I remember the announcement by
Nils Bohr in his hardly compre-
hensible English of his communica-
tions with Dr. Lise Meintner; of the
frantic search over the city for a
German physical journal in which
Otto Hahn had misinterpreted his
strange findings at the Kaiser Will
helm Institute at Dahlgren; OF the
efforts of DR.. Merle Tuve, now di-
rector of the Terrestrial Magnetism
Laboratory of the Carnegie Insti-
tuition, to explain the phenomenon
to somebody who knew very little
OF atomic physics; of boyishly
excited DR.. Georg Gamov, who had
lately escaped from Russia and now
was on the George Washington
staff. writing incomprehensible
equations on the blackboard; of the
mathematically lind ed d, rather
phlegmatic. Dr. Edward Teller, a
fellow refugee, disputing these
equations with Gamov: of DR.. En-
rico Fermi. Italian refugee who a
few years ago had missed the same
findings, as it has been said, by
the thickness of a sheet of tin foil
DR.. Fermi left the meeting early and
returned to his laboratory at Co.
lumbia. I remember the thrill the
next morning when DR.. Tuve told
of working all night and finally
achieving the fission of the uran-
ium atom at sunrise.
Very misty was the future which
would result from the strange new
discovery on that gray January
afternoon. What I remember best
was the barely suppressed excitement
shown by some of the greatest
physicists in the world. They them
selves were as much in the dark as
anybody-but they realized that the
world would never be quite the
same again-that they, and they
alone for the time being, were at
one of the great turning points of
human history. This atmosphere
drowned out everything else. 1t
may be have misstated some of
the details. Mr.. Potter and oc-