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Here is a review of The Making of the Atomic Bomb I recently posted to MeFi Books. This is really a great book. I highly recommend you check it out. more…

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE BOOK
I did have a major problem with the way Rhodes kept jumping around in the time line. I understand that the author decided it would make for a more compelling narrative to focus on the individuals and their personal stories. It certainly was effective, so I can see why he made that choice. I also understand that while focusing on those individuals, to produce the most drama possible, Rhodes couldn’t really stay 100% chronological.

Still, I found the shifting time line very difficult to deal with. It may be a personal thing, but my brain absolutely refuses to even notice dates. I can keep track of events relative to other events in a series. I mean I know that the American Revolutionary War comes before the Civil War etc., but dates don’t always fit in so easily. So with the story jumping around sometimes decades at a time I found it very difficult to position myself within the discoveries and events.

Despite that, I did find that this book really put me into the period leading up to World War II more effectively than anything I’ve ever read. I haven’t read much from that time, but I found it fascinating. I loved the science of it, and I would have liked more of that. I found myself reading a discussion of lasers on Slashdot a few weeks ago, and they were talking about cross sections, and I knew what they were talking about (sort of).

And, I have to say, there were points where this book was just absolutely riveting. For instance when they first manage to sustain a chain reaction:

“It was 3:53 PM. Fermi had run the pile for 4.5 minutes at one-half watt and brought to fruition all the years of discovery and experiment. Men had controlled the release of energy from the atomic nucleus. The chain reaction was moonshine no more.”

Reading that the first time, and typing it now, I literally get chills. It’s an achievement that is just beyond comprehension. What we have accomplished as a species knows no limits. I get the same feeling every time I think about people who’ve escaped our planet to go into space (or the moon or mars). Say what you will about the cost of that relative to unmanned flights, and it’s all perfectly valid, the fact is unless we’re there it’s just academic. But, when we are there it’s magic. We’ve harnessed the universe – we may ultimately destroy ourselves, but just to have done it once, it’s amazing.

POSSIBLE POINTS OF DISCUSSION
Some things struck me as worthy of discussion. Rhodes goes out of his way to lay the groundwork for the escalation of war atrocities. From poison gas to fire bombing to the Nazi Final Solution. It becomes clear if it wasn’t before that War really is hell.

At one point, they are talking about precision bombing – which England would have preferred. But the technology wasn’t sufficient to allow for it, so they were forced to “de-house” the enemy in Churchill’s words. That struck me as interesting relative to terrorism that we’re dealing with today.

Given a choice I imagine terrorists would cripple military targets, but that’s beyond their reach so they fly planes into buildings. We would do the same. In fact when the US firebombed Japan, we did do the same killing 100,000 men women and children within the span of a few hours. The kids were making weapons, and the Japanese attacked the US, so the US was clearly right to respond as it did. Still, unless you are going to become a total pacifist can you look at any action from anybody on the global stage as being morally wrong? I suppose we’ve signed treaties not to engage in that kind of behavior anymore, but we have in the past, and those treaties are really a luxury for the strong. If we were the underdog, we’d break them in a minute wouldn’t we? Of course the terrorists aren’t a real state so it’s difficult to view or respond to them as an aggressor nation, but they’re fighting with whatever tools they have to advance goals that must seem perfectly rational to them, so is it really different?

On a completely unrelated note, I was also interested in Bohr’s idea of complimentary. It makes sense when you think in terms of light. Is it a wave or a particle? To measure it as one, you have to make impossible the measurement of it as the other. But Bohr tried to extend that theory into philosophy and life. You cannot be observer and observed – I think, therefore I can’t really know me. I don’t know – the theory doesn’t work for me as well there. Rhodes suggests that this kind of duality in thinking is a particularly Danish trait. Do we have any Danes on the list – can anybody make sense of that particular philosophy?

QUESTIONS
Also, a few things puzzled me, and I’m hoping we might have a scientist or two on the list that could fill in some knowledge gaps. First is the popular reduction of Einstein’s theory of relativity e=mc2. I’ve always generally known what that meant, but it never occurred to me until I saw Rhodes state that c is expressed as meters per second and m is expressed as kilograms that those units are pretty arbitrary. It just seems so convenient that we would happen to select just the perfect way to measure speed and mass to make that equation work out so elegantly. Does it work equally was well if you look at light expressed as rods per second and mass expressed as stones? Possibilities I’ve considered that might explain it in descending order of likelihood: 1. This is relativity after all, distance and mass and energy are so interrelated that the units you select to measure them don’t matter. The equation balances itself irrespective of how you choose to measure it. This seems like the most likely of the choices I’ve considered, but I don’t see how it’s possible. If this is the explanation, can anybody explain it in a way a layperson could understand? 2. The equation doesn’t perfectly balance, but the numbers we’re talking about are so large that any variance is a rounding error. 3. One or more of the units were specifically selected to make the equation work. 4. A major coincidence. 5. Divine inspiration.

Can anybody explain (or point to an explanation) of Fourier analysis? I understand it has something to do with reducing waveforms, but I don’t get much beyond that. As you explain it, could you assume basic algebra/geometry, but not much math beyond that?

COMMENTS
Finally, I found it remarkable that a nuclear reactor is such a low-tech kind of thing. In saying that, I realize that it’s really a very high tech thing, and discovery the right combination of materials and purifying them to the right level, and placing them in just the proper arrangement was undoubtedly a feat of tremendous engineering. Still, it’s really more like placing logs to build a fire than the pistons and gears of say a car engine. I guess I’m revealing myself as a product of a very mechanized view of the world, but nuclear power has always seemed to me to be a very futuristic kind of thing, and in my mind the future is really just the pinnacle of the industrial revolution. Something like a pile of rocks just doesn’t quite fit into that view.