Making of the Atomic Bomb Author: Richard Rhodes | Language: English | ISBN:
B008TRU7SQ | Format: EPUB
Making of the Atomic Bomb Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Twenty-five years after its initial publication,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the seminal and complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan.
Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly—or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the bomb, with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers—Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and von Neumann—stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight.
Richard Rhodes gives the definitive story of man’s most awesome discovery and invention. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a narrative tour de force and a document with literary power commensurate with its subject.
- File Size: 51118 KB
- Print Length: 896 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Anv Rep edition (September 18, 2012)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B008TRU7SQ
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,549 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Physics > Nuclear Physics - #1
in Books > Science & Math > Physics > Nuclear Physics - #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Nuclear Physics
I will echo the other reviewers: this is one of the best, if not the best book I have read.
The book covers the subect on a number of levels. First is the factual story of the events leading up to the making of the bomb, which in themselves would be fascinating. For example, the fact that in two years the Manhattan Project built an industrial plant larger than the US automobile manufacturing base. That only in December of 1938 was the fission of Uranium first discovered, but the course of events were so rapid as to lead to the Trinity test in July of 1945. As a sometime program manager, but no General Groves, it was a fascinating account of the world's most significant projecct.
The second level is a very enjoyable history of nuclear physics as the reader is lead through the discovery process from the turn of the century to thermonuclear fusion. That discovery process is the vehicle for the third and fourth levels of the book. The stories and personalities of the scientists, around the world, who added to that knowledge, what shaped and motivated their lives and how they indiviually gained insight, brilliant insight, into the riddle that was physics. I felt I got to know people like Rutherford, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Teller. The fourth level was that the insight was not really individual but collaborative. This book is one of the finest descriptions of the scientific process and how this open, collaborative and communicative process works across boundaries.
The last level, the biggest surprise and the most profoundly unsettling, was the realization of how this event, inevitable, has "changed everything" about human history - an appreciation, I believe 55 years later, we who did not participate in the Manhattan Project, have yet to fully realize.
One of the most admirable qualities of this truly marvelous work is its ability to paint the story of the creation of the first atomic weapon on the broadest possible canvas, reaching back into the bowels of history to trace, with the fidelity of a seismographic needle, the rise of both the specific intellectuals as well as the critical scientific mass to make the work not only conceivable, but possible. This is indeed a work that one reads repeatedly, for there is so much to digest within the pages of this masterwork as to defy any easy such description. So both the cast of involved personalities is long and incredibly interesting to witness as the author develops it, but then again, so is his description of the rise of theoretical physics through the work of Albert Einstein and his colleagues within the mostly European academic orbit in the first third of the twentieth century. In that sense, it is not strictly speaking, merely a detailed exposition dealing with what happened in New Mexico under incredibly secret circumstances during World War Two, as the Manhattan Project, even though it eventually gravitates toward being exactly that.
Instead, the book opens as an exploration into the minds of some brilliantly eccentric professors and intellectuals struggling within theoretical physics on the very cutting edge of the unknown, and then stretching it in quite unsuspected and revolutionary ways. And as the critical mass of theoretical knowledge began to cluster within the fairly small community of like-minded souls, the scene changes based on world politics and the rise of fascism.
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