The Story of the Atom Bomb

The Story of the Atom Bomb: "Einstein advanced the idea that ordinary energy had been regarded as weightless through the centuries because the mass it represented was so infinitesimally small as to have been missed and ignored. For example, the amount of heat energy required to change 300,000 tons of water into steam is equivalent to less than 1/30 once of matter. Einstein published a mathematical equation to express the eqivalency of mass and energy. The equation is E=MC2 where E represents energy in ergs, M is mass in grams, and C is the velocity of light in cm/sec. This last unit is equal to 186,000 miles per second. When this number is multiplied by itself as indicated in the formula, we get a tremendously large number; hence, E becomes an astronomically huge equivalent. For example, one pound of matter (one pound of coal or uranium) is equivalent to about 11 billion kilowatt hours, if completely changed into energy. Compare this figure with the burning (chemical change rather than nuclear change) of the same pound of coal, which produces only about 8 kilowatt hours of energy. In terms of energy produced, therefore, a chemical change such as burning is an extremely inefficient energy-producing process in comparison to the release of energy locked up in the nucleus of an atom (nuclear reaction). In other words, the available nuclear energy of coal is about 2 billion times greater than the available chemical energy of an equal mass of coal."