is probably representative of the mixture of cold contemplation and unfathomable violence that this story provides. It's rare that we can document so precisely the moment when a historically important idea arises, but in the case of nuclear fission (both controlled, for energy, and uncontrolled, for war), the simple key idea (the slow-neutron chain reaction) arrived for a single person at a very specific moment (in the middle of an extremely inconvenient historical era!). It's one of my favorite paragraphs, though I'm admittedly a sucker for this kind of melodramatic realism.

"In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid, and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come."