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Themes: Gospel Opportunity L.C. "The luminosity was brilliant in the darkness," Ernest Rutherford thought as he viewed the strange glowing tube of liquid. It was the summer of 1903, and Pierre and Marie Curie were showing off two newly discovered elements, radium and polonium, at a dinner party in Paris. The elements were radioactive! Rutherford calculated that the energy being released was a million times greater than if the material was just burned. The next four decades marked the predawn of the nuclear age. By 1909, Rutherford had dissected the atom to prove it consisted of electrons surrounding a nucleus of protons. However in 1920, he speculated that a third building block of matter must exist to account for the weight of the heavier elements. He named this unknown matter the "neutron".
In 1932, news reached Rutherfords' Cambridge laboratory that Irene Curie and her husband Fredric' Joliot had knocked out protons from paraffin wax when they bombarded it with what they thought was gamma radiation. Rutherford and his assistant James Cavendish didn't believe gamma radiation could move the heavy proton. They repeated the Curie's experiment, but what Curie thought was gamma radiation was actually the elusive neutron! The neutron was like an atomic bullet-it could penetrate matter far more effectively than any other known particle.
One gray September morning in 1933, Leo Szilard, a student of Einstein, was crossing a London street when it dawned on him that there could be an element which upon absorbing one neutron would release two neutrons which could be absorbed by two other atoms to release four neutrons. Such a process would be a chain reaction. Szilard didn't know which elements might chain react but he worried that Nazi Germany might find out. By 1938, two German physicists reported that a uranium atom, when bombarded with neutrons, splits. When the news reached Szilard, he immediately realized the possibility of an explosive chain reaction. That night, he knew the world was headed for grief. In 1939, Albert Einstein sent a letter to President Roosevelt telling him that uranium may be turned into a new important source of energy and that extremely powerful bombs could be constructed.
The nuclear age was about to dawn. Szilard teamed up with Enrico Fermi to construct the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction which led to the development of the atom bomb. The "Manhattan Project", led by Robert Oppenheimer, was initiated by the army to build the atomic bomb. On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer's team succeeded. The place was Alamogordo, New Mexico. The time was just at dawn, 5:29 AM.
First came a burst of light "a great green supersun," wrote the only reporter allowed at the top secret site, "climbing...to a height of 8,000 feet," then spreading out into a vast mushroom cloud. The blast was estimated at 18,600 tons of TNT. The nuclear age had dawned.
Perhaps the most spectacular thing to dawn upon mankind is the nuclear age. Sad to say, it hasn't all been for the good of mankind. God's day of grace had a spectacular dawning, too. Unlike the nuclear age, God's day of grace has only been to mankind's good. For God is "...not willing that any should perish...," 2 Peter 3:8, but "will have all men to be saved..." 1 Timothy 2:4.
Our story tells of the dawn of God's day of Grace. It has brought salvation to mankind. Are you one of those who have been saved?
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Peter Orasuk
