July 16, 1945 The day the world changed forever

This is the anniversary of "Trinity" the first explosion of an Atomic Bomb. A complex theory became reality. I'm confident it saved lives in World War 2, but it's future history is frightening.

Right or wrong, the bomb made names for many scientist yet ruined many careers and reputations....

One of the most fascinating books I ever read was "Countdown To Hiroshima: The Day Of The Bomb", by Dan Kurzman.

 

E=MC2 complex? Yes you can fill two blackboards if you expand this out...but, thats as simple as it gets. I think the idea was simple...the degree of invention needed to bring to fruition was indeed complex. There is NO DOUBT it saved lives in the war...saved unknown lives by its existence (it could win a peace prize!)...The future is NOT nuclear in terms of weapons...of mass destruction or otherwise...we're too ingenious to be stuck with this much longer....something more powerful this way comes...

 

As a great admirer of Albert Einstein, I often weigh things a bit differently than we usually think of him. What do you think about this? I sometimes think the letter he wrote to the U.S. President may have been as important as his theories. He was not a habitual political activist, however he felt deeply the free world needed to have the bomb first. Hence he wrote a letter to the president and after weighing all things our president decided on a course. Politics and politicians were not objects of his admiration, although freedom for his thinking was very important to him. Just something to think about. I am not saying his theories were not as important....just that both were very important. I bring this up because there was much controversy about how much nuclear theory was a separate pursuit from his theories. I don't have the background to take a position on that but he certainly was a spur to new research. Again this is just something to think about.

 

Another good book is "American Prometheus", a biography J. Robert Oppenheimer.

 

The Trinity device actually tested the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the plutonium bomb. The Hiroshima bomb (uranium) was so ridiculously simple and they saw no need to test the complete bomb.

 

We all know about Teller, Fermi and Oppenheimer, but the father of the bomb, in my opinion, is Leo Szilard.

In 1929 he published the paper "Maxwell's Demon" which detailed out linear acceleration. Amazingly, he fought tooth and nail to build the bomb, yet fought tooth and nail to prevent Hiroshima during July and August of 1945.

Maybe the best General (non combat) of WW 2 was Lt. Gen Leslie Groves. He organized, implemented, and drove an extensive network of scientist, military and civilian workers to make The Manhattan project a reality. He also oversaw the construction of the Pentagon. A taskmaster that demanded success.....

 

For this, he was probably glad not to be known as the father of the atomic bomb. Did he argue for a demonstration off the shore of Japan?

 

Einstein didn't write the letter, he signed the letter he was presented by his old friend and fellow patent holder (refrigeration) Leo Szilard. When Szilard presented him with the concept of an "atomic fission bomb", Einstein said (paraphrasing); " I never thought of that". His famous equation was applicable to the fission reaction, but he had developed it to more clearly define his theory of how light is effected by gravity as it passes a massive object. Szilard decided to get his old friend Einstein to send the letter to the Whitehouse, because coming from the most well known physicist in the world would carry more weight than one coming from himself, a relative unknown. And even then it was ignored in large part for about a year.

It is entirely possible that Lisa Meitner and her nephew (cousin?) Otto Fritsch first applied Einstein's E=MC squared to the fission reaction (which they named) in February of 1939.

Dang, forgot to post the link to the story of the Szilard letter. D'oh...

Goto:

http://www.dannen.com/ae-fdr.html

 

As we often do on the forum....we split hairs.....there were actually 4 letters or so with these available reproductions of those and Mr. Szilard was with Einstein about it all. Sorry I do not remember Szilard so well, but it is other areas of Einstein's views of things that over the years has interested me....his philosophy, views of God and religion and such and I do confess to not knowing much about Szilard. This can lead one to these four letters and who may have authored or signed them. Einstein's Letters to Roosevelt

 

That was always Leo Szilard's problem, he was brilliant and a forward thinker whom nobody knew anything about. That is why he enjoined his good friend Einstein to sign and send the letter to FDR through Sachs. If it had simply come from Szilard it might never have been opened and read. A letter from Albert Einstein gets one's attention.