You know how inCaptain America : The First Avengerthere ’s a Nazi - analogous organization trying to draw rein the power of a mysterious glowing cube to create a weapon of mass wipeout that will overpower their enemies , only for their efforts to be weaken by the Allied military unit and their cube to cease up in a clandestine US research readiness after the defeat of the Axis ?
Did you love it happened for real ?
Of course , it was n’t an eternity stone that was power the Nazis ’ research – it was uranium . Neither did the cubes , of which there were over 1,000 , end up in a unafraid SHIELD facility waiting for various Avengers to piece . In fact , they end up … well , nobody ’s really sure , actually – but thanks to some exciting raw nuclear forensics research , a team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ( PNNL ) is getting closer to an answer .
“ [ It ’s ] not only a really fun science labor and scientific set of experiments but also somewhat of a account project , ” explained PNNL research worker Brittany Robertson , presenting the results atthe crepuscule meetingof the American Chemical Society this week .
“ We ’re looking for different entropy and archived information and even … letters write between scientists , to attempt to figure out what we can mensurate and how we can in reality make some rendering . ”
From the other 1940s , the Nazis and the US were locked in a subspecies to forecast out nuclear technology . The US had the Manhattan Project ( and we all knowhow that turned out ) , and the Nazis had Werner Heisenberg – “ liketheHeisenberg , like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle , ” Robertson laughs . “ Heisenberg . ” – and Kurt Diebner . At the centre of the inquiry were these two - inch - farseeing cubes of near - pure uranium : the hope was to overwork atomic nuclear fission to transform them into atomic number 94 , produce an atomic bomb .
Luckily , the program was disrupted before it could deliver the goods , and the ally confiscate many of the cubes after the state of war . But their destiny after that is pretty cloudy : around 600 were shipped to the USA , butonly about 12are known today , with the rest being used in the US nuclear undertaking , sell to private collectors and inquiry institutions , or simply lost to the mists of clock time .
Even for the cubes we do have sex of , the provenance run to be something of a enigma . The ancestry of the cube at PNNL are unknown , saidlead investigator Jon Schwantes , with nobody sure how it even got to the laboratory at all . In fact , he explained , the team ’s first job was to confirm that the cube was even part of the Nazi nuclear program at all .
“ We do n’t know for a fact that the cube are from the German programme , so first we want to establish that , ” Schwantes said . “ Then we need to compare the different cubes to see if we can classify them concord to the particular research chemical group [ Heisenberg or Diebner ] that created them . ”
Anecdotally , the block at PNNL is a Heisenberg cube , but “ [ w]e did n’t have any genuine measurements to back up that claim , ” Robertson explained . To prove the cube ’s origin , she plough toradiochronometry , a technique that dates radioactive material by appraise how much it has decayed . For the Nazi cubes , that means measuring the proportional level of U , which they were originally made of , versus thorium and protactinium , which they would decay into over clock time .
Then there ’s the cube ’s coating , which the Nazis ’ scientists used to protect the cubes from oxidization . Curiously for a supposed Heisenberg third power , the PNNL block is coat in styrene – Diebner ’s favour material .
“ We ’re curious if this particular third power was one of the ones affiliate with both research programs , ” Schwantes said . “ Also , this is an opportunity for us to test our science before we utilize it in an existent nuclear forensic investigation . ”
Other cubes have similarly occult origins : the team at PNNL were working in collaboration with the University of Maryland , which has a square block of their own – one that “ found its fashion ” to the section with a musical note enunciate “ accept from the reactor that Hitler seek to build . Gift of Ninninger . ” But if the noesis that there are a few hundred lost uranium cubes out there is worrying , commend : it ’s good than the alternative .
“ I ’m glad the Nazi computer programme was n’t as forward-looking as they wanted it to be by the remnant of the war , ” say Robertson . “ [ B]ecause otherwise , the world would be a very different place . ”
