So I'm sitting there enjoying my witty fun little pop sci book, as you do, and then Bryson drops this fucking bombshell* on me:
....James Chadwick devoted eleven intensive years to hunting for neutrons before finally succeeding in 1932....As Boorse and his colleagues point out in their history of the subject, the delay in discovery was probably a very good thing as mastery of the neutron was essential to the development of the atomic bomb....Had the neutron been isolated in the 1920s, they note, it is "very likely the atomic bomb would have been developed first in Europe, undoubtedly by the Germans."
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST BILL DON'T DO THAT TO ME. //hyperventilates
*indeed
descensus Averno facilis est