Skip to content More About Us Book Review by John Parrington,
December 2009 Amir D Aczel, Palgrave Macmillan, £18.99 This book
is about a substance that languished in obscurity for centuries,
yet today is far more sought after than gold. Uranium is the
heaviest natural element, heaviness in this case being
associated with another property: radioactive instability. This
instability makes uranium a potential source of energy for
peaceful uses but has also led to it being used to make the most
devastating weapons ever created by humanity. For me, the best
part of Amir D Aczel's account is the story he tells about the
scientific quest to understand radioactivity and the physical
processes underlying it - from Marie Curie stirring a cauldron
of uranium ore in the most primitive of laboratories in order to
identify the elements therein, to Lise Meitner, a refugee in
Sweden, penniless after fleeing the Nazis, having a eureka
moment in a snowy forest and thereby discovering the principle
of nuclear fission. A major f