What It Was Like to Witness the World’s First Self-Sustained Nuclear Chain Reaction

Scientists achieved the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction 75 years ago on Dec. 2, 1942, on an underground squash court beneath the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. The brains behind the discovery was Enrico Fermi, a leader of the Manhattan Project who had won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that led to the discovery of nuclear fission. Below is a narrative of th…

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