Two events in 1938 proved critically important to the course of World War II. In the first, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission. In the second, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and his Jewish wife, Laura, left their home to avoid Italy’s new Racial Laws.
The co...
In the early days of the Manhattan Project, all roads led to the University of Chicago, where some of the 20th century’s most brilliant minds gathered at the Metallurgical Laboratory, the precursor of today’s Argonne National Laboratory. It was the site of the first nuclear reactor, a temporary c...
ORNL was built on Big Science—a term coined in 1961 by Alvin Weinberg—and 75 years later the lab is still dedicated to that approach. By gathering thousands of talented scientists and engineers and giving them access to uniquely powerful research facilities, ORNL accelerates both our access to fu...
“Maybe there is something new here,” Eugene Wigner said to Clifford Shull when Shull described a problem he and Ernest Wollan had encountered with their early neutron scattering experiments. Wigner was right, and subsequent development of the neutron diffraction technique earned Shull a Nobel Pri...
Although World War II ended in 1945, the study of nuclear energy had just begun. A federal agency was created in 1946 to manage the development of nuclear energy for both military and civilian purposes, and Gen. Leslie Groves handed over the keys for X-10 and its Graphite Reactor to the new Atomic E...
ORNL is proud of its role in fostering the next generation of scientists and engineers. We bring in talented young researchers, team them with accomplished scientists and engineers, and put them to work at the lab’s one-of-a-kind facilities. The result is research that makes us proud and prepares th...
Most of us grew up watching TV and movies that depicted artificial intelligence in a less than comforting light. From 1927’s “Metropolis” to last year’s “Blade Runner 2049,” Hollywood has imagined AI as a force for threatening the world, enslaving humanity and being an all-around bad actor. These...