Question

What were main challenges that scientists and engineers faced during the process of the making of the atomic bomb?

Answer 1

When the chemical atomic theory was introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the atom was conceived of as the unanalyzable, uncuttable fundamental building block of all matter. Each of the chemical elements was composed of a different kind of atom, but each atom of a species was identical to every other. For example, all oxygen atoms were like all other oxygen atoms but different from the atoms of any other element-copper, zinc, hydrogen etc.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the expanding range of known phenomena made such a view untenable, and by the mid 1930s the atomic theory, while more secure than it had been earlier, was much more complex and sophisticated. The notion of the atom as uncuttable had been abandoned. In its place was a complex solar system-like model.

One of the most puzzling questions confronted by theoretical and experimental nuclear physics in the late 1930s was the nature of the forces which held the nucleus together.