Author: John McPhee

Cited by

• Marianne Wiggins (1)
  • IN: Evidence of Things Unseen (2003) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The Material that destroyed Nagasaki was plutonium-239. Plutonium was the first man-made element produced in a quantity large enough to see. It was created in 1940 at the University of California at Berkeley. The idea of it had for many years been indicated by the periodic table of the elements, where a row of blanks paralleling the rare earths suggested the theoretical possibility of elements whose family characteristics -- like the characteristics of thorium, protactinium, and uranium -- would be similar to those of actinium. It was possible that unknown elements (with ninety-three protons, ninety-four protons, and so on) had long ago existed in our solar system but had vanished...
    FROM: The Curve of Binding Energy, (1974), Book, US