Product Description

The book abounds with fascinating anecdotes about fusion's rocky path: the spurious claim by Argentine dictator Juan Peron in 1951 that his country had built a working fusion reactor, the rush by the United States to drop secrecy and publicize its fusion work as a propaganda offensive after the Russian success with Sputnik; the fortune Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione sank into an unconventional fusion device, the skepticism that met an assertion by two University of Utah chemists in 1989 that they had created "cold fusion" in a bottle. Aimed at a general audience, the book describes the scientific basis of controlled fusion--the fusing of atomic nuclei, under conditions hotter than the sun, to release energy. Using personal recollections of scientists involved, it traces the history of this little-known international race that began during the Cold War in secret laboratories in the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and evolved into an astonishingly open collaboration between East and West.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1045338 in Books
• Published on: 1990-10-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 392 pages

Review
"...an informative and lively account of the history and growth of a worldwide, surprisingly unpoliticized, research effort." Trenton Times

"Herman, a former New York Times reporter, has done an excellent job of explaining how politics has repeatedly shaped the nation's efforts to develop nuclear fusion. She is a good storyteller and has woven together many fascinating anecdotes about the bright and bizarre characters who have sought to tame the fury of the sun." The Philadelphia Inquirer

"...an intriguing contemporary history of science as an integrated field of endeavor..." San Francisco Chronicle

" ...a readable and at times exciting account of fusion research from the point of view of a nonspecialist and aimed at the general reader." Philip Davenport, Nature

About the Author
Robin Herman is currently Assistant Dean for Communications at Harvard School of Public Health.