Worlds Within Worlds, 3

Isaac Asimov's Worlds Within Worlds: The Story of Nuclear Energy turns the atom into a gripping journey from discovery to danger, and from laboratory curiosity to world-changing power. With clear, accessible explanation, it follows the path from Enrico Fermi's neutron-bombardment experiments and the search for element 93 to the birth of neptunium, plutonium, and the transuranium elements, where scientists learned that uranium could do far more than simply absorb particles. The narrative then builds to the startling realization that uranium was splitting apart. Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Otto Robert Frisch helped define nuclear fission, and Leo Szilard quickly saw its terrifying potential as a chain reaction. His alarm, shared by refugee physicists including Wigner, Teller, and Einstein, helped spur the warning to Roosevelt and the urgent wartime race to control fission. From Fermi's Chicago reactor to Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, Asimov traces the dawn of the atomic age, then widens the story to reactors, nuclear ships, breeder fuels, thorium, and the promise—and peril—of nuclear power. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.