Louis Slotin was a brilliant Canadian nuclear physicist who played a crucial role in assembling the first atomic bomb. By 1946, he was one of the few men trusted to handle the volatile plutonium cores, and though he understood the immense danger, he chose to demonstrate a risky criticality experiment in front of his colleagues. Using nothing but a screwdriver to keep two beryllium hemispheres from enclosing a plutonium core, he carefully manipulated the setup, knowing that the slightest mistake could unleash catastrophe.
That mistake came in an instant. The screwdriver slipped, the hemispheres touched, and the “demon core” went critical. A blinding blue flash filled the room, accompanied by a burst of heat and a sharp metallic taste. Slotin, acting with incredible reflexes, immediately separated the spheres, halting the reaction and saving the others in the room. But he knew the damage was done. Exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, he calmly instructed his colleagues to note their exact positions so scientists could study the effects. Nine agonizing days later, Slotin was dead—the second man claimed by the same core, after his colleague Harry Daghlian had perished in a nearly identical accident the year before.
The sphere became infamous as the “demon core,” a grim reminder of the razor’s edge between brilliance and tragedy. Slotin’s death has often been linked to another scientist’s final experiment centuries earlier: Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry. Condemned during the French Revolution, Lavoisier asked his assistant to watch his severed head and count how many times he blinked—fifteen, in total, proving that consciousness lingers even after decapitation. His friend, the mathematician Lagrange, later reflected: “It took them only a moment to cut off that head, and perhaps a hundred years will not suffice to produce another like it.”
See Also
death
Manhattan Project
Rad-energy
radiation
Y-12 Electromagnetic Separation Plant