"
Fermi raised his hand. ‘The pile has gone critical,’ he announced…
‘The Italian navigator has just landed in the new world,’ I told [Conant]. ‘The earth was not as large as he had supposed.’
‘Were the natives friendly?’ Conant asked.
"—
Arthurt Compton’s account of the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942. Later, a history of the Manhattan Project, sponsored by the United States Atomic Energy Commission, would bear the title The New World.
