A SQUASH COURT CAN BE USED to make things go much faster than a small rubber ball ...

On 2 December 1942, in a squash court in the basement of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a new technological era came into being. It was a technology born of war, yet one of its consequences was to make war so terrible in prospect that, slowly and hesitantly, war on a global scale became less and less likely. At Stagg Field, the Roman-born physicist Enrico Fermi and his team of scientists achieved the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. From it came the atomic bomb, and later, civilian nuclear power. But there was a far more significant consequence: the dawn of Big Science and a new style of technological change.

Nobody played squash in the basement of Stagg Field, not while the reactor was in place, but a lot of the people working in the squash court had the same attitudes as Ponder Stibbons ... mostly insatiable curiosity, coupled with periods of nagging doubt tinged with a flicker of terror. It was curiosity that started it all and terror that concluded it.

In 1934, following a lengthy series of discoveries in physics related to the phenomenon of radioactivity, Fermi discovered that interesting things happen when substances are bombarded with 'slow neutrons', subatomic particles emitted by radioactive beryl­lium, and passed through paraffin to slow them down. Slow neutrons, Fermi discovered, were just what you needed to persuade other elements to emit their own radioactive particles. That looked interesting, so he squirted streams of slow neutrons at everything he could think of, and eventually he tried the then obscure element uranium, up until then mostly used as a source of yellow pigment. By something apparently like alchemy, the uranium turned into something new when the slow neutrons cannoned into it, but Fermi couldn't work out what.

Four years later three Germans, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann, repeated Fermi's experiments, and being better chemists, they worked out what had happened to the uranium. Mysteriously, it had turned into barium, krypton, and a small quan­tity of other stuff. Meitner realized that this process of 'nuclear fission' produced energy, by a remarkable method. Everyone knew that chemistry could turn matter into other kinds of matter, but now some of the matter in uranium was being transformed into energy, something that nobody had seen before. It so happened that Albert Einstein had already predicted this possibility on theoretical grounds, with his famous formula, an equation which the orang­utan Librarian of Unseen University would render as 'Ook'. Einstein's formula tells us that the amount of energy 'contained' in a given amount of matter is equal to the mass of that matter, multi­plied by the speed of light and then multiplied by the speed of light again. As Einstein had immediately noticed, light is so fast it does­n't even appear to move, so its speed is decidedly big ... and the speed multiplied by itself is huge. In other words: you can get an awful lot of energy from a tiny bit of matter, if only you can find a way to do it. Now Meitner had worked out the trick.

A single equation may or may not halve your book sales, but it can change the world completely.

Hahn, Meitner and Strassmann published their discovery in the British scientific journal Nature in January 1939. Nine months later Britain was at war, a war which would be ended by a military appli­cation of their discovery. It is ironic that the greatest scientific secret of World War II was given away just before the war began, and it shows how unaware politicians then were of the potential -be it for good or bad, of Big Science. Fermi saw the implications of the Nature article immediately, and he called in another top-ranking physicist, Niels Bohr, who came up with a novel twist: the chain reaction. If a particular, rare form of uranium, called ura-nium-235, was bombarded with slow neutrons, then not only would it split into other elements and release energy, it would also release more neutrons. Which, in turn, would bombard more uranium-235 ... The reaction would become self-sustaining, and the potential release of energy would be gigantic.

Would it work? Could you get 'something for nothing' in this way? Finding out was never going to be easy, because uranium-235 is mixed up with ordinary uranium (uranium-238), and getting it out is like looking for a needle in a haystack when the needle is made of straw.

There were other worries too ... in particular, might the experi­ment be too successful, setting off a chain reaction that not only spread through the experiment's supply of uranium-235, but through everything else on Earth as well? Might the atmosphere catch fire? Calculations suggested: probably not. Besides, the big worry was that if the Allies didn't get nuclear fission working soon then the Germans would beat them to it. Given the choice between our blowing up the world and the enemy blowing up the world, it was obvious what to do.

That is, on reflection, not a happy sentence.

Loko is remarkably similar to Oklo in southeastern Gabon, where there are deposits of uranium. In the 1970s, French scientists unearthed evidence that some of that uranium had either been undergoing unusually intense nuclear reactions or was much, much older than the rest of the pknet.

It could have been an archaeological relic of some ancient civilization whose technology had got as far as atomic power, but a duller if more plausible expanation is that Oklo was a 'natural reac­tor'. For some accidental reason, that particular patch of uranium was richer than usual in uranium-235, and a spontaneous chain reaction ran for hundreds of thousands of years. Nature got there well ahead of Science, and without the squash court.

Unless, of course, it was an archaeological relic of some ancient civilization.

Until late in 1998, the natural reactor at Oklo was also the best evidence we could find to show that one of the biggest 'what if?' questions in science had an uninteresting answer. This question was 'What if the natural constants aren't?

Our scientific theories are underpinned by a variety of numbers, the 'fundamental constants'. Examples include the speed of light, Planck's constant (basic to quantum mechanics), the gravitational constant (basic to gravitational theory), the charge on an electron, and so on. AD of the accepted theories assume that these numbers have always been the same, right from the very first moment when the universe burst into being. Our calculations about that early uni­verse rely on those numbers having been the same; if they used to be different, we don't know what numbers to put into the calcula­tions. It's like trying to do your income tax when nobody will tell you the tax rates. From time to time maverick scientists advance the odd 'what if?' theory, in which they try out the possibility that one or more of the fundamental constants isn't. The physicist Lee Smolin has even come up with a theory of evolving universes, which bud off baby universes with different fundamental constants. According to this theory, our own universe is particularly good at producing such babies, and is also particularly suited to the devel­opment of life. The conjunction of these two features, he argues, is not accidental (the wizards at UU, incidentally, would be quite at home with ideas like this, in fact, sufficiently advanced physics is indistinguishable from magic).

Oklo tells us that the fundamental constants have not changed during the last two billion years, about half the age of the Earth and ten per cent of that of the universe. The key to the argument is a particular combination of fundamental constants, known as the 'fine structure constant'. Its value is very close to 1/137 (and a lot of ink was devoted to explanations of that whole number 137, at least until more accurate measurements put its value at 137.036). The advantage of the fine structure constant is that its value does not depend on the chosen units of measurement, unlike say, the speed of light, which gives a different number if you express it in miles per second or kilometres per second. The Russian physicist Alexander Shlyakhter analysed the different chemicals in the Oklo reactor's 'nuclear waste', and worked out what the value of the fine structure constant must have been two billion years ago when the reactor was running. The result was the same as today's value to within a few parts in ten million.