ATOM BOMB | Tested, July 1945

On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 a.m., 77 years ago, the Manhattan Project tested the first atom bomb. It was in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the consensus was that it worked.

In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote to FDR supporting the idea that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction had potential as a weapon. Enrico Fermi had ideas how to do this. In February 1940, the federal government set aside $6,000 for research on it.

In early 1942, the United States was now at war with the Axis. Germany was believed to be working on a uranium bomb. The War Department took an interest in the U.S. project and limits on resources  were removed. Brigadier-General Leslie R. Groves, an engineer, was put in charge of the research effort, which was located initially in Manhattan and was therefore called the Manhattan Project.

The Project succeeded in the desert of New Mexico. In 1943, Robert J. Oppenheimer began directing Project Y at a laboratory at Los Alamos, along with Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, as well as  Fermi. My former headmaster, Rev. Leo van Winkle, a Yale Ph.D. in Physics, was working on the project.

The first atomic bomb was detonated as scientist observers watched from six miles away. The first mushroom cloud stretched up 40,000 feet. The explosion began with intense light and ended with had the destructive power of perhaps 20,000 tons of TNT, followed by radioactive fallout. The tower holding the bomb was vaporized.

Germany was the original target, but they had surrendered. The only belligerent remaining was Japan. Henry Kissinger said once:

"The greatest danger of war seems to me not to lie in the deliberate actions of wicked men, but in the inability of harassed men to manage events that have run away with them."

BIRTH | May 11–Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

This day in 1918 was born physicist Richard Phillips Feynman in Queens, N.Y. He went to New York City public schools. He was rejected by Columbia because his admission would have exceeded the Jewish quota of the time. 

Instead of Columbia, he went to MIT and then completed his doctorate at Princeton. He won the Nobel Prize in 1965 and is rated one of the greatest ten theoretical physicists of all time. 

He worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the nuclear bomb, and he was the youngest group leader in the project's theoretical division. When the first test bomb was detonated in 1945, he was excited and happy, but as soon as Germany ceased to be a threat to the world, he questioned his own work on the bomb. 

He made enormous contributions to the field of quantum mechanics. Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, The world-lines of the diagrams have developed to become tubes to allow better modeling of more complicated objects such as strings and membranes. But shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an interview that is frequently quoted by critics of the theory: 

I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, "Well, it still might be true."

He enjoyed his work and tried to convey the joys of physics to lay people. He said:

• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. 
• Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. 
• Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. 

He was married three times, the third time for 28 years until his death on February 15, 1988, in Los Angeles. He is survived by a son Karl and a daughter Michelle Louise.

Video (TED talk): https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_feynman