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May 1, 2019 12 tweets 6 min read Read on X
In 2013 Timothy Koeth of @UofMaryland received a metal cube with a note: “Taken from the reactor that Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.” The story of that uranium cube, by Koeth and Miriam Hiebert, is in the May issue of PT doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4… (thread) Uranium cube given to Timot...
@UofMaryland The cube is one of 664 that, during World War II, were strung together to form a “chandelier” that was to comprise the core of a nuclear reactor in Haigerloch, Germany. The leader of that experiment: Werner Heisenberg Werner Heisenberg
@UofMaryland In 1944 a group of American soldiers and scientists—the Alsos team—joined the front lines in Europe to gather information on the German nuclear program. In April 1945 they found Heisenberg’s lab, its entrance underneath a castle Location of Heisenberg’s nu...
@UofMaryland Heisenberg had already fled by bicycle with some of the cubes. After interrogating the remaining German scientists, the Alsos team found and dug up the rest of the uranium blocks in a nearby field Digging up the uranium cubes
@UofMaryland Approximately 400 additional cubes, of the exact size and shape of the Haigerloch ones, were used in another abandoned reactor experiment in Gottow, led by Kurt Diebner Kurt Diebner
None of the German experiments created a working nuclear reactor. But had Heisenberg and Diebner pooled their cubes, it’s possible they would have been successful
So what happened to all those cubes? Some may have been brought to @ORNL for processing. Others may have been sold on the black market. The whereabouts of only a handful are known today
@ORNL Koeth’s cube, he and Hiebert learned, was most likely from Robert Nininger, who worked with the Manhattan Project in NYC around the time that the Alsos team seized the cubes
@ORNL PT tracked down some other cubes, mostly in Germany and the US physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.… At least two are on display: At the Atomkeller museum in Haigerloch (at the site of Heisenberg’s lab) and at the @UniBonn Mineralogical Museum Atomkeller cube
@ORNL @UniBonn Do you have info about any of these uranium cubes? Let Koeth/Hiebert (uraniumcubes@umd.edu) and us (pteditors@aip.org) know! #histSTM Miriam Hiebert and Timothy ...
Photo credits: Cynthia Cummings/PT; AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (4); Vitold Muratov, CC BY-SA 3.0; John T. Consoli/UMD (end thread)
@ORNL @UniBonn Correction on the email address: uraniumcubes@gmail.com

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More from @PhysicsToday

May 19, 2022
A historian’s dream, the Farm Hall transcripts capture the secretly recorded conversations of Werner Heisenberg and 9 other German physicists discussing the atomic bomb in 1945. So why do scholars disagree on what they tell us? 🧵#histSTM #twitterstorians physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.…
The Farm Hall transcripts are among the most famous primary sources in 20th-century physics. They document conversations between 10 German physicists suspected of working on an atomic project for Nazi Germany, including Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.
The physicists were rounded up at the end of World War II by Allied intelligence and imprisoned in a luxurious English country mansion called Farm Hall, where their conversations were secretly recorded.

📷 AIP ESVA/NARA Farm Hall, in 1945 or 1946.
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Einstein actually employed a different type of German handwriting early in his life. Called Kurrent script, it looks quite different than the Latin cursive still taught in some English-language schools today. [2/5]

Credit: Der Damen-Briefsteller, 1866/Public Domain Kurrent script.
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