This Is Drivel

A friend at work caught me reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb while I stood outside the main entrance of the office building, read the cover, and said, “Well, this can’t be good. Does it come with blueprints and directions?”

Funnily enough, when I bought the book I had the idea that it was going to be exactly that kind of techno-geek gadget fest, but it turns out to be a long, deep look at the beginnings of modern physics, starting with Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist who first realized that it should be possible to release the awesome energies that hold an atom together by starting a chain reaction. Not only that, when he was attending the University of Berlin he solved a problem in thermodynamics that one of his teachers, a certain Albert Einstein, thought was impossible, and took it to him to show him how it was done.

In the second chapter, J.J. Thomson pieces together a cathode ray tube and Ernest Rutherford’s experiments with it lead to the discovery of radioactivity. This little bit of backtracking is a way of explaining how Szilard twigged to the idea of chain reactions in the first place by first explaining how experimenters like Thomson and Rutherford noodled out the structure of the atom. All this was happening back in the late 1890′s and early 1900′s. That just kills me. Back when the trains were pulled by steam engines, these guys were learning how to split the atom.

I’ve just started chapter three where Niels Bohr has just made his big entrance, and may have to read it several times, because Bohr is laying the groundwork for quantum physics. Billiard balls smashing against each other I can handle, but there’s so much more to it that that now that I have to think about every single word. Still a great read, though.

We finally have a law allowing everyone in Wisconsin to stuff handguns down their pants if they want to. This is so very important that the fine people of our state legislature passed this law before they passed a budget.

And of course the law comes with the usual restrictions: You can’t take a gun into a courthouse, or into a school, or past the security checkpoints in an airport. I don’t get that. People who want to carry a concealed handgun have to undergo a background check and must show they’ve been trained, whatever that means. So they’re licensed, they’re trained and they have no criminal record. What’s the reason for restricting them?

As one of my coworkers passed me in the hallway yesterday, she grinned a knowing grin and asked, “Are you ready for next week?” Next Monday being, of course, the day after Jan retires, leaving me on my own as the supervisor of the business credentialing division.

I’m not exactly sure what my coworkers expect will happen to me. I get the idea that they think I’m that guy you see in war movies who ends up lying in a pile of guts on the beach head screaming, “Momma!”

I don’t get it. It’s just a job.

“Don’t tell them that,” My Darling B warned me. “Go ahead and let them think it’s an impossibly hard job.” Ah, B. You could’ve been such a good supervisor.