Dark sun ebook

CHERUB kids live in the real world, slipping under adult radar and getting information that sends criminals and terrorists to jail. For official purposes, these children do not exist.

In the ensuing chaos one survivor, Lydia De Jager, a white woman in her fo. There is a touching, dexterous humour about the tale. Fortunately the new-found confidence survived to enable him to pen ten further stories many with male protagonists and English settings: the chilling ghost story of the aborted child, the narcissistic actor and his breakdown on stage; the confessions of the serial philanderer.

There is horror, comedy and an elegant insightfulness here that keeps the reader turning the pages and asking for more. These stories will both enthral and delight. Modern psychology has seen darkness primarily as a negative force, something to move through and beyond, but it actually has an intrinsic importance to the human psyche.

In this book, Jungian analyst Stanton Marlan reexamines the paradoxical image of the black sun and the meaning of darkness in Western culture. In the image of the black sun, Marlan finds the hint of a darkness that shines. He shows that the black sun accompanies not only the most negative of psychic experiences but also the most sublime, resonating with the mystical experience of negative theology, the Kabbalah, the Buddhist notions of the void, and the black light of the Sufi Mystics.

An important contribution to the understanding of alchemical psychology, this book draws on a postmodern sensibility to develop an original understanding of the black sun. It offers insight into modernity, the act of imagination, and the work of analysis in understanding depression, trauma, and transformation of the soul. Score: 4. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.

Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work. Questions of identity and her own hybridism arise—where does she belong?

Dalal begins teaching at a public school, but when she becomes involved in the problems of a gifted student, her colleagues label her an outsider; her family members do not support her. Boundaries are challenged and traditions are explored as Dalal undergoes many challenges that threaten to push her to her absolute limits. In Kuwait, and in any other Arabian society, family bonds are sacred. Family is consulted when making any life changing decision.

Beneath a crimson sun lie wastelands of majestic desolation and cities of cruel splendor, where life hangs by a thread. Welcome to Athas! When an imprisoned gladiator named Grudvik escapes the city of Tyr, a part-time slave hunter and full-time dune trader is hired to bring back the fugitive.

But after crossing swords, the pair must join forces to survive the harsh desert. In such a world, the forces of good—and the heroes who emerge in this unforgiving land—fight not only for themselves, but for life of the world itself.

But nothing is simple in the city of Nibenay with it reclusive ruler known as the Shadow King. Enlisted by the Shadow King himself to seek out this cache of metal weaponry, Aric heads into the desert with a treacherous band of adventurers. She was beaten by the Mongol khans, she was beaten by Turkish beys, she was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all -- for her backwardness.

For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpunished. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: "Thou art poor and thou art plentiful, thou art mighty, and thou art helpless, Mother Russia. We must make good the lag in ten years.

Either we do it or they crush us. Soviet scientists felt a special burden of responsibility in the midst of such desperate struggle; the heat and light that radioactive materials such as radium generate for centuries without stint mocked their positions of privilege. Vernadski, who founded the State Radium Institute in Petrograd in , wrote hopefully that year that "it will not be long before man will receive atomic energy for his disposal, a source of energy which will make it possible for him to build his life as he pleases.

The nuclei of atoms held latent far more energy than all the falling water of the world, but the benchtop processes then known for releasing it consumed much more energy than they produced. Fiztekh had spun off provincial institutes in , most notably at Kharkov and Sverdlovsk; in , when the discovery of the neutron and of artificial radioactivity increased the pace of research into the secrets of the atomic nucleus, Ioffe decided to divert part of Fiztekh's effort specifically to nuclear physics.

The government shared his enthusiasm. Kurchatov was young for the job, but he was a natural leader, vigorous and self-confident. One of his contemporaries, Anatoli P. Alexandrov, remembers his characteristic tenacity: I was always struck by his great sense of responsibility, for whatever problem he was working on, whatever its dimensions may have been. A lot of us, after all, take a careless, haphazard attitude toward many aspects of life that seem secondary to us. There wasn't a bit of that attitude in Igor vasilievich At the same time, there was nothing pedantic about him.

He would throw himself into things with such evident joy and conviction that finally we, too, would get caught up in his energetic style We'd already nicknamed him "General. Within a year, justifying Ioffe's confidence in him, Kurchatov had organized and headed the First All-Union i.

With Abram I. Alikhanov, he built a small cyclotron that became, in , the first cyclotron operating outside the Berkeley, California, laboratory, of the instrument's inventor, Ernest O. He directed research at Fiztekh in and that resulted in twenty-four published scientific papers. Kurchatov was "the liveliest of men," Alexandrov comments, "witty, cheerful, always ready for a joke. Golovin writes, but by the s, after recovering from tuberculosis, he had developed "a powerful physique, broad shoulders and ever-rosy cheeks.

He never gave himself airs, never let his accomplishments go to his head. Three years later, in , Igor's older sister Antonina sickened with tuberculosis. For her health the family moved again, to the balmier climate of Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula. The relocation proved to be a forlorn hope; Antonina died within six months.

The two surviving Kurchatov children -- Igor and his brother Boris, two years younger -- thrived in the Crimea. Both boys did well in gymnasium, played soccer, traveled into the country with their father during the summer on surveying expeditions.

Igor ran a steam threshing machine harvesting wheat the summer he was fourteen. Another summer he worked as a laborer on the railroad. A chance encounter with Orso Corbino's Accomplishments of Modern Engineering encouraged the young gymnasium student to dream of becoming an engineer. The Italian physicist would influence Kurchatov's career again indirectly in the s when Corbino sponsored Enrico Fermi's Rome group that explored the newly discovered phenomenon of artificial radioactivity.

The discoveries of the Rome group would inspire and challenge Kurchatov's Fiztekh research. The Great War impoverished the Kurchatov family. Igor added night vocational school to his heavy schedule, qualified as a machinist and worked part-time in a machine shop while taking nothing but 5's -- straight A's -- during his final two years of gymnasium.

After the Revolution, in , when he was seventeen years old, Kurchatov matriculated in physics and mathematics at Crimean State, one of about seventy students at the struggling, recently nationalized university.

None of the foreign physics literature in the university library dated past and there were no textbooks, but the rector of the school was a distinguished chemist and managed to bring in scientists of national reputation for courses of lectures, among them Abram Ioffe, theoretical physicist Yakov I.

Frenkel and future physics Nobel laureate Igor E. In the wake of war and revolution there was barely enough to eat. After midday lectures, students at Crimean State got a free meal of fish soup thickened with barley so flinty they nicknamed it "shrapnel.

Kurchatov finished the four-year university course in three years. He chose, to prepare a thesis in theoretical physics because the university laboratory was not adequately equipped for original experimental work; he defended his dissertation in the summer of His physics professor, who was leaving for work at an institute in Baku, invited the new graduate to join him.

Drawn from childhood to ships and the sea, Kurchatov chose instead to enroll in a program in nautical engineering in Petrograd. He suffered through a winter short on resources in the bitter northern cold, eking out a living as a supervisor in the physics department of a weather station, sleeping on a table in the unheated instrument building in a huge black fur coat.

He returned to the Crimea in to help his family -- his father had been sentenced to three years of internal exile -- and later joined his former teacher in Baku. In the meantime, one of Kurchatov's physics classmates, his future brother-in-law Kirill Sinelnikov, had caught Ioffe's eye and accepted his invitation to work at Fiztekh.

Sinelnikov told the institute director about his talented friend. Off went another invitation. Kurchatov returned to Leningrad, this time to take up his life's work. He married Sinelnikov's sister Marina in Kurchatov quickly impressed Ioffe. Peter Kapitza explored cryogenics and strong magnetic fields at Cambridge University and became a favorite of Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand-born Nobel laureate who directed the Cavendish Laboratory.

So would theoretician Lev Landau, who worked in Germany during this period with his young Hungarian counterpart Edward Teller. Petersburg journalist and an actress in the Moscow Art Theater -- "compact, ascetically slight and very sprightly," a friend describes him -- worked at Fiztekh on chemical chain reactions with Semenov, their discoverer, before earning a doctorate in theoretical physics at the Cavendish in Alarmed by the growing mood of fascism he found in Germany on his return passage, Khariton at twenty-four organized an explosives laboratory in the new Institute of Physical Chemistry, a Fiztekh spinoff.

Their talents barely protected them from the Great Terror that began in the Soviet Union after the assassination of Central Committee member Sergei Mironovich Kirov in December as Stalin moved to eliminate all those m power whose authority preceded his imposition of one-man rule.

Of these 7 million were shot in prison, and a majority of the others died in camp. The British Royal Society had funded an expensive laboratory in its own dedicated building in the courtyard outside the Cavendish for Peter Kapitza.

Perhaps suspecting that he intended to defect, the Soviet government detained him during a visit home in the summer of and barred him from returning abroad. His detention shocked the British, and for a time he was too depressed to work, but the Soviet government bought his Cambridge laboratory equipment and built a new institute for him in Moscow.

A frustrated Kapitza had to order such unavailable consumer goods as wall clocks, extension telephones and door locks from England. Landau had been working at Kapitza's Institute for Physical Problems. Kapitza determined to save him, writes Medvedev: After a short meeting with Landau in prison, Kapitza took a desperate step. He presented Molotov and Stalin with an ultimatum: if Landau was not released immediately, he, Kapitza, would resign from all his positions and leave the institute It was clear that Kapitza meant business.

After a short time Landau was cleared of all charges and released. In old age, Edward Teller would cite his friend's arrest and imprisonment as one of three important early influences on his militant anti-Communism the other two, Teller said, were the Great Terror itself and Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon : "Lev Landau, with whom I published a paper, was an ardent Communist.

Shortly after he returned to Russia, he went to prison. After that he was no longer a Communist. Not even Ioffe escaped the general harrowing. Fiztekh and Ioffe himself were heavily criticized at the general assembly of the Academy of Sciences for 'loss of touch with practice. Everything was in constant turmoil.

People vanished like shadows in the night. He received weekly reports of That was the era when Osip Mandelstam suffered three years' exile and then five years in a gulag camp -- five years that killed him -- for writing a poem, "The Stalin Epigram," the most ferocious portrait of the dictator anyone ever devised: Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

At ten paces you can't hear our words. But whenever there's a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.

He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, one for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home. Igor Kurchatov organized the initial Soviet study of nuclear fission at Fiztekh in the early months of , following Joliot-Curie's letter to Ioffe and confirmation of the discovery in scientific journals.

Landau's remark to Peierls in about secondary neutrons points to one universal line of inquiry: examining whether the fission reaction, which a single neutron could initiate, would release not only hot fission fragments but additional neutrons as well. If so, then some of those secondary neutrons might go on to fission other uranium atoms, which might fission yet others in their turn.

If there were enough secondary neutrons, the chain reaction might grow to be self-sustaining. Joliot-Curie's team in Paris set up an experiment to look for secondary neutrons in late February; in April the French reported 3.

At a Fiztekh seminar in April, two young members of Kurchatov's Fiztekh team, Georgi Flerov and Lev Rusinov, reported similar results -- between two and four secondary neutrons per fission. In , Flerov and Konstantin A. Petrzhak would make a world-class discovery, the spontaneous fission of uranium, a consequence of uranium's natural instability and a phenomenon that would prove crucial to regulating controlled chain reactions in nuclear reactors.

Before the young Russians succeeded, the American radiochemist Willard F. Libby, later a Nobel laureate, had tried two different ways unsuccessfully to demonstrate spontaneous fission. Zeldovich, began exploring fission theory. Then we took it very seriously. We also understood that a bomb was possible. Theoretical physicist J.

But it was also soon obvious from work by Niels Bohr that a formidable obstacle stood in the way of making bombs: only one isotope of uranium, U, would sustain a chain reaction, and U constituted only 0.

There were then two difficult technical questions that needed to be resolved by any nation that proposed to explore building an atomic bomb: whether it might be possible to achieve a controlled chain reaction -- to build a nuclear reactor -- using natural uranium in combination with some suitable moderator, or whether the U content of the uranium would have to be laboriously enriched; and how to separate U from U on an industrial scale for bomb fuel when the only exploitable distinction between the two isotopes was a slight difference in mass.

Enrichment and separation were essentially identical processes "separated" bomb-grade uranium is natural uranium enriched to above 80 percent U and would use the same massive, expensive machinery that no one yet knew how to build; while a reactor fueled with natural uranium, if such would work, might be a straightforward enterprise.

Khariton and Zeldovich approached these questions from first principles, as it were, carefully calculating what was not possible as well as what might be. In the first of three pioneering papers they published in the Russian Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics in and papers that went unnoticed outside the Soviet Union they demonstrated that a fast-neutron chain reaction was not possible in natural uranium.

Isotope separation would therefore be necessary to build a uranium bomb. A second, longer paper, delivered a few weeks later on October 22, , developed important basic principles of reactor physics.

Khariton and Zeldovich correctly identified the crucial bottleneck that experimenters would have to bypass to build a natural-uranium reactor that worked. Visualize a stray neutron in a mass of natural uranium finding a U nucleus, entering it and causing it to fission. The two resulting fission fragments fly apart; a fraction of a second later they eject two or three secondary neutrons. If these fast secondary neutrons encounter other U nuclei they will continue and enlarge the chain of fissions.

But there is much more U than U in the mass of natural uranium, making an encounter with a U nucleus more likely, and U tends to capture fast neutrons. It is particularly sensitive to neutrons moving at a critical energy, twenty-five electron volts eV , a sensitivity which physicists call a "resonance.

To make a reactor, then, Khariton and Zeldovich realized, it would be necessary to slow the fast secondary neutrons from U fission quickly below U's twenty-five eV resonance. The way to do that, they proposed, was to make the neutrons give up some of their energy by bouncing them off the nuclei of light atoms such as hydrogen. But Khariton and Zeldovich demonstrated in this second paper that such a mixture would not sustain a chain reaction, because hydrogen and oxygen also capture slow neutrons, and in a reactor fueled with natural uranium such capture would subtract too many neutrons from the mix.

Important consequences followed from this conclusion. One was that instead of hydrogen in ordinary water it would apparently be necessary to use heavy hydrogen -- deuterium, H2 or D, an isotope of hydrogen with a smaller appetite for neutrons than ordinary hydrogen -- perhaps in the form of rare and expensive heavy water. In a review article published in , Khariton and Zeldovich proposed carbon and helium as other possible moderators, both materials that later proved to work.

Alternatively, wrote the two Soviet physicists, "another possibility lies in the enrichment of uranium with the isotope In a third paper submitted in March , Khariton and Zeldovich identified two natural processes that would make it easy and "completely safe" to initiate and control a chain reaction in a nuclear reactor.

The fissioning process would heat the mass of uranium and cause it to expand, which in turn would increase the distance the neutrons would have to travel to cause additional fissioning and would therefore slow down the chain reaction, allowing the mass of uranium to cool and the chain reaction to accelerate. This natural oscillation could be controlled by increasing or decreasing the volume of uranium.

Another natural process -- delayed neutrons released in fission which would "significantly increase" the oscillation period -- subsequently proved more significant for reactor control. Apparently critics within the Soviet scientific community had made safety a point of attack; in this third paper Khariton and Zeldovich vigorously disputed what they called "hasty conclusions The abundance and cost of uranium would certainly allow the realization of some applications of uranium.

Therefore, despite the difficulties and unreliability of the directions indicated, we may expect in the near future attempts to realize the process. At the annual All-Union Conference on Nuclear Physics, held in in November at Kharkov in the Ukraine, Khariton and Zeldovich reported their conclusion that carbon graphite and heavy water were possible neutron moderators.

They also reported that a controlled chain reaction even with heavy water would be possible in a homogeneous reactor only with uranium enriched in U Since uranium enrichment was notoriously difficult, and would require the development of an entirely new industry, their conclusion made the possibility of building a working nuclear reactor within a reasonable period of time and for a reasonable amount of money appear remote.

But there are other possible arrangements of natural uranium and graphite or heavy water that they overlooked, even though their second paper had offered an important clue. Why two such outstanding theoreticians should have overlooked more promising alternative arrangements is a question worth exploring.

The effectiveness of a moderator such as graphite or heavy water is limited crucially by its probability of capturing rather than reflecting neutrons. That probability, called a "cross section," can only be determined by experiment.

Physicists quantify capture cross sections and other such probabilities in extremely small fractions of a square centimeter, as if a cross section were the surface area of a target the incoming neutron might hit. They lacked the laboratory equipment they needed -- a powerful cyclotron and a large quantity of heavy water -- to measure the actual capture cross section of deuterium the entire Soviet supply of heavy water at that time amounted to no more than two to three kilograms.

For the All-Union Conference they must have offered an approximation drawn from the international physics literature. Apparently they continued to search the literature to see if someone had determined a more accurate value for the deuterium capture cross section.

They found an estimate in a letter to the editor of the American journal Physical Review published in April In that letter, University of Chicago physicists L.

Borst and William D. But the "small group of enthusiasts," which included Khariton, Zeldovich, Kurchatov and Flerov, was not deterred.

The cross sections were not very reliable and we felt that we had to dig through the material. Gaseous diffusion -- pumping a gaseous form of uranium against a porous barrier through which the lighter U isotope would diffuse faster than the heavier U, selectively enriching the product -- the physicists discounted as impractical. Instead they recommended separating U from U in gaseous form in a high-speed centrifuge, a method Khariton had studied in detail in but one for which the technology had not yet been developed.

These early discussions caught the attention of Leonid Kvasnikov, the head of the science and technology department of the state security organization, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, known by its Russian initials NKVD.

It maintained a network of spies throughout the world run by NKVD rezidents stationed in Soviet consulates and embassies. One important field of rezidency work was industrial espionage -- stealing industrial processes and formulas to save the Soviet Union the expense of licensing these technologies legitimately from their developers. The American industrial chemist Harry Gold, who began a long career of espionage for the Soviet Union in , mentions among such information "the various industrial solvents used in the manufacture of lacquers and varnishes According to Georgi Flerov, the early focus of Soviet concern was on German more than on Anglo-American work, just as it was in England and America: It seemed to us that if someone could make a nuclear bomb, it would be neither Americans, English or French but Germans.

The Germans had brilliant chemistry; they had technology for the production of metallic uranium; they were involved in experiments on the centrifugal separation of uranium isotopes.

And, finally, the Germans possessed heavy water and reserves of uranium. Our first impression was that Germans were capable of making the thing. It was obvious what the consequences would be if they succeeded. Espionage, then, accompanied the Soviet development of nuclear energy from its earliest days. Vernadski, an article about atomic energy published in the New York Times. Vernadski wrote a letter to the Soviet Academy of Sciences about the article, following which the academy created a Special Committee for the Problem of Uranium.

Khlopin, who had succeeded Vernadski as director of the State Radium Institute, was appointed to head the Uranium Committee, which also included Vernadski, Ioffe, the distinguished geologist A.

Fersman, Kapitza, Kurchatov and Khariton as well as a number of senior Soviet scientists. The committee was directed to prepare a scientific research program and assign it to the necessary institutes, to oversee the development of methods of isotope separation and to organize efforts toward achieving a controlled chain reaction -- that is, building a nuclear reactor. The decree that established the committee also ordered the construction, completion or improvement of no fewer than three Soviet cyclotrons, two already at hand in Leningrad and one to be built in Moscow; set up a fund for the acquisition of uranium metal, which Soviet industry at that time did not have the technology to produce; and appointed Fersman to lead an expedition into Central Asia to prospect for uranium.

There is no uranium in these waters. He believed it to be unduly conservative. Despite the expectation that uranium would have to be enriched, he wanted to move directly to building a nuclear reactor. At the Fifth All-Union Conference on Nuclear Physics in Moscow in late November, he analyzed fission studies published throughout the world to demonstrate that a controlled chain reaction was possible and listed the equipment and materials he would need.

In any case, as Frisch commented later, the cost of a plant for separating U "would be insignificant compared with the cost of the war. The workshop took place at the Communist Academy on Volkhonka Street, in a large hall with an amphitheater overcrowded by numerous participants. In the course of the presentation the excitement of the audience kept growing and by the end of it the general feeling was that we were on the eve of a great event.

When Kurchatov finished his talk, and, together with the chairman of the meeting, Khlopin, went to the adjacent room from the rostrum, Ioffe, Semenov, [A. Meanwhile, the discussion over Kurchatov's talk was continued in the hall The break was delayed.