Oh ya, I read about this guy. But he didn't die. His face swelled up, and peeled off like cooked turkey meat, revealing a normal face underneath. I didn't know he was John Cusack though.

This experiment was so risky that most scientists refused to perform it. This guy was brave/stupid enough that he did so dozens of times.

Fermi predicted he would be dead within a year when he heard about it.

Just realized that there are videos on YouTube of people's homemade fluoroscopes.

SCIENCE!

You'd think with the money and importance surrounding this project, that they could have afforded to break up a micrometer and use the screw portion to raise and lower the beryllium reflector w/ respect to the stationary half. You might actually get reproducible results from that. But fuck it, screwdrivers and cowboy boots boys, this is 'Murica!

When I first saw this film my immediate thought was how stupid a way to test the criticality this was and I was blown away they couldn't think of a better way to do it.
Of course, it turns out, that constructing a better way would have just taken too much time and these guys wanted to do their SCIENCE! shit as fast as possible just to prove they could do it.

The real guy, Slotin, is generally considered a hero because he could have very well just run away which would have probably resulted in far worse.

This has been here before:

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=56595

but this clip was better quality and lacked any Laura Dern crying face, which I think makes it better, but maybe it makes it worse.