Related papers: Physicists and the 1945 Decision to Drop the Bomb
The atomic bomb American program known as Manhattan Project has been studied in detail. Historians argue that the beginning of this program is rooted in the letter Einstein sent to American President Roosevelt in the summer of 1939. This…
Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard worked together at Columbia in 1939-40, just after nuclear fission was discovered, to ascertain the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction, and then on the construction of the first nuclear reactor. Szilard…
In this article, I trace the early historical developments that ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Even after the completion of weapons, many scientists continued to argue that nuclear armaments were indispensable for…
The results of a careful analysis of all the available information on the activities of Heisenberg and of his talks during the years 1939 to 1945 can be summarized in the following way. Like several other German physicists Heisenberg was…
The attempts to find the right (underlying) theory for the nuclear force have a long and stimulating history. Already in 1953, Hans Bethe stated that "more man-hours have been given to this problem than to any other scientific question in…
Nuclear physics advances in the US and Britain, from 1939-1945, are described. The Manhattan Project's work led to an explosion in our knowledge of nuclear science. A conference in April 1943 at Los Alamos provided a simple formula used to…
A personal account of work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago by one of the few remaining survivors of the war-time project is given, illustrating, among other things, how absurd things can happen at a time of great stress and concern.. As…
Though the majority of physicists would probably not support preemptive wars, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction would not exist without their contributions. Einstein's anti-militaristic position has been well-documented and the…
The Trinity test of July 16, 1945 marked the scientific apex of the Manhattan Project. Often recognized as the symbolic birth of the nuclear age, Trinity's multifaceted legacy remains just as captivating and complex as it did 75 years ago.…
As the Manhattan Project shifted to the theory of implosion assembly in 1944, plutonium was extremely rare and large uncertainties surrounded the function of the Gadget. For these reasons, a team within the Manhattan Project began another…
A complete history of early atomic models would fill volumes, but a reasonably coherent tale of the path from mechanical atoms to the quantum can be told by focusing on the relevant work of three great contributors to atomic physics, in the…
The dawning of the Space Age marked the start of an ongoing relationship between the professional astronomical community and both state and non-state actors that launch and operate spacecraft in near-Earth orbital space. While the Cold War…
In 1963-71, a group of people, myself included, formulated and perfected a new approach to physics problems, which eventually came to be known under the names of scaling, universality, and renormalization. This work formed the basis of a…
(transcript of a talk given by Prof.~Feshbach:) Nuclear physics has been and will be a major factor in science and technology. It makes unique and important contributions to medicine, to industry and to other sciences. Interaction with…
The Manhattan Project was one of the largest scientific collaborations ever undertaken. It operated thanks to a complex social network of extraordinary minds and it became undoubtedly one of the most remarkable intellectual efforts of human…
The September 11 terrorist attack against America has caused a lot of concern to the American public and the entire world, which is suspecting a new attack sooner or later. The most frightening scenario is the one involving the detonation…
Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse", facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to…
We outline the course of affairs in the experimental and theoretical fields of nuclear and particle physics which determined its finale, and give several fragmentary remarks on its present state. The essay tells about events and their…
During the past two decades, it has been demonstrated that chiral effective field theory represents a powerful tool to deal with nuclear forces in a systematic and model-independent way. Two-, three-, and four-nucleon forces have been…
It is seldom acknowledged the tremendous burden that the Nuclear Age leaves on future generations, and the environment, for an extremely long time. Nuclear processes, and products, are activated at energies millions of times higher than the…