Curated playlist
Manhattan Project people
- James ChadwickJames Chadwick signed up for physics by mistake. He meant to study mathematics, then found the neutron.
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer gripped a post to steady himself as the first nuclear bomb went off.
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize partly for new elements that were really fission products.
- John Archibald WheelerJohn Archibald Wheeler spent decades calling a dying star a "gravitationally completely collapsed object."
- Nathan RosenNathan Rosen co-authored the first known wormhole paper in July 1935. He was Albert Einstein's assistant at the time.
- Richard FeynmanRichard Feynman's last words, spoken after a long coma, were "This dying is boring." The remark suited an American theoretical physicist who never lost his taste for blunt, irreverent honesty. He was a man who treated authority, ceremony…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann's father asked Theodore von Kármán to talk his son out of mathematics.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller stood and watched the Trinity test while nearly everyone else lay face-down.
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- Klaus FuchsKlaus Fuchs, a German-born theoretical physicist, gave a plain reason for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Rudolf Peierls, a fellow scientist, visited him in detention shortly after the news of his arrest broke and asked him…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr passed out in the bomb bay of a British plane over Norway. His flying helmet was too small for him to wear.
- Louis SlotinAt 3:20 on the afternoon of the 21st of May 1946, Louis Slotin stood in a laboratory at Los Alamos. The air around him suddenly glowed blue. Everyone in the room felt a wave of heat roll across them. Slotin tasted something sour, and his…