Worlds Within Worlds

Isaac Asimov turns the atom into a doorway to one of science's greatest revolutions, showing how nuclear energy grew from a mysterious possibility into a central question of modern physics. He begins with the shock of Einstein's special relativity, tracing the path from Michelson and Morley's failed light-speed experiment to the insight that mass is concentrated energy, expressed in E = mc². From there, Asimov explains why tiny mass losses in chemical and radioactive processes imply vast stores of energy inside matter, especially in the atomic nucleus. The book follows the rise and fall of early nuclear models, including the elegant but mistaken proton-electron theory, and shows how nuclear spin measurements, especially in nitrogen-14, exposed its flaws. The discovery of the neutron by Chadwick, building on work by Bothe, Becker, and the Joliot-Curies, replaced that model with Heisenberg's proton-neutron theory, which better explained isotopes, mass number, and radioactive decay. Asimov then explores particle bombardment, the first artificial nuclei, and the development of accelerators by Cockcroft, Walton, and Lawrence, while also introducing the deep problem of the force that binds protons together and the theories of Heisenberg and Yukawa that opened the search for nuclear interactions. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.