The sequel, _Dark Sun_, about the making of the hydrogen bomb, is OK but has a lot more Cold War espionage than science.

Both worth a read!

also, really fantastic photos in this! the copy could use a little work though.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16884.The_Making_of_the_...

Recently saw it on Steven Weinberg’s list:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/03/steven-weinber...

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb/dp/06848...

In the meantime, Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb[1] is both epic and quite readable.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16884.The_Making_of_the_A...

Any recommendations on biographies of Fermi?

A very, very good book. Also, mention should be made of Leo Szilard who was the first person that we know of to be aware of the nuclear chain reaction.

1. 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', R. Rhodes

2. 'Apollo: Race to the Moon', C. Murray, C. Cox

3. 'The Prize', D. Yergin

4. 'Are Your Lights On?', D. Gause, G. Weinberg

5. 'Becoming A Technical Leader', G. Weinberg

This reminds me to finally finish reading "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes.

I think "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" was one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read.

Hackers & Painters

The Design of Everyday Things

The Soul of a New Machine

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who...

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

All were great books, so I should probably add the others to my 'read this' list.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

A Latin/English dictionary for new company names

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...

    * This item: Uranium Ore by Images SI Inc. $39.95

    * Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner Hardcover $10.78

    * The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Paperback $14.28

Then I retract my comment (too late to edit it) -- Rhodes' book is first-rate, one of the best on its topic. I've enjoyed Rhodes' writing on this topic immensely, and I can't recommend it too highly. I didn't realize the comment came from that book (I found it in an online Szilárd biography).

This is one of my all-time favorite books, along with its sequel.

This Pulitzer prize winning book proves the adage "Truth is stranger than fiction". Surprisingly, you don't need to know any math or much of physics / chemistry to read this one.

It is the story of one of the most amazing achievements of human kind and its more engaging than all the Dan Brown novels put together. This is no exaggeration - the book will entertain, educate and enlighten you like no other book you have ever read.

About this book, David Eisenberg wrote thus on his blog...

> The Making of the Atomic Bomb is not only the best and most comprehensive treatment of the [Manhattan] project and its antecedents (and I’ve read a number of them), it is also possibly the single best history or non-fiction book that I have ever read, and that’s a lot of books.

> Of course, it is not for everyone. If you don’t like history or science (don’t panic, no math necessary), World War II stories, daring commando raids, hair raising escapes, behind the scene politics, mysterious conversations, intellectual battles between the world's greatest scientists, between scientists and soldiers, scientists and politicians, the interpersonal relationships of the great men of this century, incomparable drama, massive death, powerful explosions, personal sacrifice and “a ripping good yarn” as they used to say, then don’t read it. If you are interested, I promise you that there will be no disappointment.

From there, it follows the intense period of scientific discovery that captivated that era. It's a fantastic portrayal of the science and the lives of people behind the discoveries.

I learnt in highschool that electrons orbit around a nucleus of protons and neutrons. I had taken these facts for granted. This book opened up the world of technical innovations, leaps of imagination and the really amazing discoveries that the smartest people of the era had to grapple with in order to come up with that model of the atom.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...

From the Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Such an amazing book, and required reading for any scientist IMO.

Here's the article in Foreign Affairs he references in the clip (registration (free) required).[1]

[0]https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4639510/richard-rhodes-nuclea...

[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2000-01-01/need-nucl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project

Richard Rhodes is probably the definitive source for this history in The Making Of The Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun. Both excellent reads.

I don't say this to discount the abilities of the Soviet scientists working on the problem; it's an incredible achievement even with the extra "stolen" knowledge. But keep in mind that the US pursued four totally separate technologies for uranium separation and built massively expensive plants for each because they didn't know which was going to work out. The Soviets benefitted by avoiding a lot of very expensive and time-consuming dead ends.

[1] 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Richard Rhodes

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a classic, award-winning and relevant book. It's exactly the sort of thing a good community library should have, even if it circulates less than Danielle Steel. There is a big difference between what's important and what's popular.

Those Danielle Steel might provide some entertainment and comfort to people (nothing wrong with that). But The Making of the Atomic Bomb could launch a career or a movement, and possibly even -- we can only hope -- save the planet from destruction.

Truly obscure and unimportant books should of course be culled from circulation in a small community library. Their place is in research libraries, etc. But community libraries serve many purposes, the most important of which, in my mind, is to educate and facilitate discovery and personal growth.

Sometimes you have to give people what they don't know they need yet, not just what they think they want right now.

“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.” -- Andrew Carnegie

I don't think he was talking about romance novels.

Oppenheimer obviously also appears in Richard Rhodes' utterly superb "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", though he only becomes a main character in the sequel, "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", which is also great.

Oppenheimer was a highly skilled physicist, but Rhodes attributes his ability to lead the Manhattan Project to his gifts as a "synthesizer" of ideas and knowledge from many people and disparate branches of science. In my opinion he really came into his own, though, after the bomb, when he started formulating the US' atomic energy strategy, essentially inserting himself -- a scientist, not a statesman -- into the political elite by sheer force of will and charisma. Rhodes tells of Oppenheimer completely dominating meetings in early efforts that resulted in the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission (which became the US Department of Energy), essentially writing national policy recommendations on his own.

Oppenheimer realized the dangers of nuclear proliferation and detente early on, and wanted the world to own atomic energy as a force for good. He wanted an international organization (what became the IAEA) to control atomic energy and not let the US and UK have a monopoly on it. Oppenheimer also recommended against developing the hydrogen bomb, which he thought would dangerously escalate the destructive power of nuclear arms. This opposition ultimately led to Oppeheimer's trial that cost him his security clearance.

But it was his extensive writings on what the future of atomic energy could be that I think set him apart in this years. He was prescient about nuclear arms race and tried to steer the US and the world towards peaceful use of atomic energy. If his policies had been implemented we may have been in a different place today.

For this reason I avoid reading books for the most part, and probably read one book a year at best. My to-read list is short and highly scrutinized - I probably spend days making sure a book is worth the time and memory investment. Once I apply that logic, every book I've read has been extremely rewarding and I can at least write a few thousand word summary of each. I also constantly find instances in real life when I can use anecdotes from these books and people are surprised that I remember them. It also helps that for almost every book I deliberately sought out the best tome in the topic I wanted to learn more from.

My reading list from the past 5 years or so:

1. Making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes
2. Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman
3. On Writing by Stephen King
4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaccson
5. The Logic of Chance by Eugene Koonin
6. GEB (gave up on this one though)

It covers the physics, politics, motivation, cultural implications, and so much more. It's one of those books where being extremely long is a feature because it's unbelievably interesting. I highly recommend it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves were a fascinating team, Oppenheimer being a physicist and Groves an Army general.

A must for anyone in technical management.

If any of you enjoy biographies, stories of scientific and engineering heroism, and haven't read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," please do. It is an extraordinary story.

It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters?

I'm guessing (after having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb") that this would be about when the hydrogen bomb came along.

It was sobering to read how dramatically more powerful the fusion bomb was compared to the first fission bombs. Suddenly the idea of going into a basement shelter to "survive" the blast became laughable. If you were far enough from the blast though your only comfort could come from a shelter from the fallout.

On the other hand, this was made as a semi-joke by him, so I'm sure it has nothing to do with his memories of events back in 1919.

In particular:
The NIH experiment recapitulates many of the design aspects of a thermonuclear weapon, but does so in a highly controlled lab environment.

I'm a biophysicist. I know a fair amount of engineering, although I'm not a weapons physicist. Nonetheless, after years of reading about the NIF and various fusion projects I've come to believe that there is little justification for their expenditure. In particular, we can do stockpile stewardship without this device, more cheaply, nor does NIF present an economically viable method to production of power at a large scale in even the most rosy predictions.

I still think the experimental design is cool, but I can't see this as a rational expenditure (HUGE opex and capex) compared to other investments we could be making.

Most likely scenario I see in 20 years is that china will be mass-manufacturing small, safe fission reactors and making a mint selling them to the rest of the world. That's got far less reqiurement for massive capex and opex. It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission because OH GOD NUCLEAR MUTATIONS and stop investing in building more reliable, safer, and smaller plants.

1. An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India - Highly recommended to Indians. It covers various aspects of colonization that are not covered in our history curriculum.

2. The Making of the Atomic Bomb - You will love it if you enjoy a mix of history, science and engineering. It pretty much covers everything from the discovery of the electron to the dropping of atomic bombs.

3. Sapiens - I think this is well known to HN community. It's a good read if you want summary of human development.

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America - Colin Woodard;
I learned much about early US history.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman - Jon Krakauer

Find Me - Laura van den Berg

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

The Dog Stars - Peter Heller

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - Alfred Lansing;
I was fortunate enough to read this right before Seveneves, so the references made immediate sense. Endurance looks to be popular on this list/this year. How many were inspired by Seveneves?

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson

Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age - Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson;
I highly recommend this book. Like The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but for the transistor. Lots of background on John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain. I was unaware of the great legacy of John Bardeen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes;
If you have not read this book, read it, just for the summary of discoveries that lead to the atomic bomb.

Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank

The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage - Anthony Brandt

The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen - Stephen R. Bown

I am looking for other books similar to Crystal Fire and The Making of the Atomic Bomb, that cover the history of scientific and technological discoveries. Any recommendations?

The Swerve is about Epicurus and Lucretius — who both helped popularize atomism 2000+ years ago. I never thought much of the philosophical implications of the world being made of up small, somewhat interchangeable parts — but this idea was at the core of Epicureanism, and had many implications.

If you're interested in learning more about the history of atomic theory, I'd highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

It goes through the general history of science from the 1890s to the 1950s. There are brief biographies of people who played an important role — Ernest Rutherford, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein (to name a few). Those were exciting times to be a physicist.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707734-the-swerve

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16884.The_Making_of_the_...

Your comment about the paint instantly turning to ash and blowing away made me think of the book. At a certain distance from the bomb, the wave isn't strong enough to instantly kill you, but much like paint on a car, you're skin will instantly blister from the heat, and then be blown off by the shock wave.

Horrifying stuff, but a really, really interesting read.

Like this article, the book opens with a description of Szilárd thinking about a nuclear chain reaction while walking about London.

"Holy the Firm" by Annie Dillard. Not really about religion, more about our relationship to the world. A beautifully written little book.

"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. This one works on me at several levels: The physics (which are explained well), the sheer titanic scope of the Manhattan project, and the meta-knowledge that someone was able to write a book this good.

"The C Programming Language", by Kernighan and Ritchie. Probably the single most influential book on programming that I've read.

It's an excellent read, cover-to-cover. One of the few assigned books I read with excitement while in undergrad.

Empires of Light, by Jonnes. Titan, by Chernow. The Wright Brothers, by McCullough. His Excellency, by Ellis. The Wizard of Menlo Park, by Stross. I Invented the Modern Age, by Snow. Dealers of Lightning, by Hiltzik. Margin of Safety, by Klarman. Masters of Doom, by Kushner. Andrew Carnegie, by Nasaw. Infidel, by Hirsi Ali. Buffett, by Lowenstein. Where Wizards Stay Up Late, by Hafner. Shoe Dog, by Knight. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Rhodes.

However, the notion was disturbing enough that a formal report was requested. I believe this was later, in 1945 or 1946, during the development of the hydrogen bomb, but I'm not sure. The report [2], co-authored by Teller, is dated 1946. It was declassified in 1973.

On the night of the Trinity test, apparently with the notion of calming people down, Fermi (to the annoyance of Maj. General Leslie Groves) humorously started taking bets on whether the test would ignite the atmosphere or merely destroy the state of Mexico (page 664).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0...

[2] http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf

  The Iliad
  Shakespeare
  The Life of Johnson
  Federalist Papers
  Pride and Prejudice
  Ulysses
  The Waste Land
  The Selfish Gene
  The Making of the Atomic Bomb
  Infinite Jest

The US had already been ridiculously effective using firebombing to level Japanese cities with their B-29s - so much so, they actually had to consider slowing down/changing targets to leave enough behind to use the Atomic Bomb on: there was almost nothing left worth hitting in strategic terms. By the time the bomb was dropped Japan was largely a beaten nation already considering surrender, Tokyo a smoldering rubble pile save for the Imperial Palace.

"The bomb simply had to be used -- so much money had been expended on it. Had it failed, how would we have explained the huge expenditure? Think of the public outcry there would have been... The relief to everyone concerned when the bomb was finished and dropped was enormous." - AJP Taylor.

Of course no one can say with certainty, but I certainly don't consider the answer to this question to be a simple one.

He's more right about the Tokyo bombing. Richard Rhodes, in his fantastic "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", cites 100,000 dead and 1 million injured.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War...

[2] http://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/infoblaetter/Historikerkommi...

1. Delhi: A novel

2. The modern architecture of New Delhi

3. Train to Pakistan

4. Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found

5. City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

Currently reading -

1. Bauhas

2. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Though, I think I should read Making of the Atomic Bomb first)

The follow-up Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb is also good, but not as well done as the former.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance - Henry Petroski (Knopf, 1989)

Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean - David Gelernter (Oxford University Press, 1991)

A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, 2002)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979)

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham (O'Reilly, 2004)

The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman (Basic Books, 1988; paperback reprint, 2002)

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder (Little, Brown, 1981)

The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing - David Kahn (Macmillan, 1967; revised edition, Scribner, 1996)

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time - Dava Sobel (Walker, 1995)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 1986)

First, this totally fails to address the enormous industrial capacity required for enrichment of sufficient fissile material. It is implausible that 1943-1945 Japan could have achieved anything like this, regardless of technical expertise. The speculation of multiple stockpiled bombs and at least one test is far beyond feasible; even if they could have afforded the required scale of investment, the facilities and staff involved would be too large to have hidden: it likely would have required literally tens of percent of the entire Japanese industrial base over this period.

Second, the enriched uranium gun-based design (Little Boy) required more than 1000 tons of uranium oxide ore for the production of a single bomb, which is as much as the entire supply the author cites (maybe) reaching Japan.

Third, the speculation about bomber delivery seems extremely out of touch. Even the (much larger-capacity) B-29 required significant adaptation to deliver the 5-ton Mk 3 (Fat Man) and Little Boy, and, beyond mass, the designs could only barely fit within its fuselage dimensions.

Much more likely, all of the source reports were the result of rumors and misunderstandings. The most they could feasibly have built, tested, or hoped to deliver would have been small dirty bombs (a concept also well-known at the time). Perhaps they did, and this was the origin of the rumors; perhaps it was simply hearsay and speculation at a time of atomic fever.

The weapons are horrifying in their destructive power, but the Project is a testament to what we can accomplish in science and engineering if we apply virtually unlimited resources toward R&D to solve a problem. Beyond the obvious product of the Project, it led to the creation of the DOE national laboratory system, which has since served as a means of maintaining an able technical workforce in the US, with physicists, mathematicians, chemists, biologists, and computer scientists, among others, all working in the public interest (and on things beyond weapons). Investing in science can pay dividends well into the future.

For some perspective, the cost of the Manhattan Project was on the same order of magnitude as the Apollo Program in terms of inflation-adjusted cost, about $22-26 billion in 2016 dollars. Of course that amount does not include the environmental cost still being felt in Hanford and elsewhere, or the human cost.

Knowing the cost of those two programs really makes you question some other efforts, like the program to develop the F-35 aircraft, estimated to cost $380 billion before even considering the additional $1.1 trillion in operational cost. For comparison there, the Interstate Highway system cost about $500 billion to construct.

"There was a way to make individual alpha particles visible using zinc sulfide... A small glass plate coated with zinc sulfide and bombarded with alpha particles briefly fluoresced at the point where each particle struck, a phenomenon known as "scintillation" from the Greek word for spark. Under a microscope the faint scintillations in the zinc sulfide could be individually distinguished and counted. The method was tedious in the extreme. It required sitting for at least thirty minutes in a dark room to adapt the eyes, then taking counting turns of only a minute at a time -- the change signaled by a timer that rang a bell -- because focusing the eyes consistently on a small, dim screen was impossible for much longer than that. Even through the microscope the scintillations hovered at the edge of visibility; a counter who expected the experiment to produce a certain number of scintillations sometimes unintentionally saw imaginary flashes."

Thank god they invented the photomultiplier before I arrived on the scene.

I suspect much of our current technological age has its roots in the aftermath of the Manhattan project. Bombs led to use, led to other countries developing bombs, drove surveillance, drove space travel, drove the miniaturization of electronics in cycles that eventually gave us Hacker News on a smartphone [2].

[1] Richard Rhodes, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb'
[2] Steve Blank, 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

PhD students and postdoctoral research fellows may have been engaged (commonly for many years to someone back home), but were expected not to wed. You were supposed to throw yourself entirely at your field of research in the beginning of your career, and place the rest of your life entirely on hold.

More later, or email me (check my HN profile).

One thing I did take away: the military kept using more extreme and dangerous measures (mainly in my mind the fully loaded bombers circling 24x7 over Europe) with the military trying to install fail-deadly mission objectives (ie: circle Europe for your daily bombing run, and if you don't hear an all clear message, assume the USA is being attacked and bomb the Soviet Union). One point seemed to be made though was: for all of the idiocy and lack of control during the arms race there were no actual nuclear detonations, so were the weapons at the time actually safe (even though many improved safety mechanisms were ignored by the military), or was it just luck due to small-enough sample size and a luckily short enough time span?

I actually ordered off of Amazon these two books cited by Schossler and just received them in the last two weeks and am really looking forward to reading them:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes:

~900 page book that is supposed to be the seminal book about the history of the bomb; also is apparently very detailed in the physics of the endeavor which should be very interesting.

http://amzn.com/1451677618

American Prometheus - Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin (this just arrived at my house yesterday actually):

~700 pages and the definitive biography of Robert J. Oppenheimer:

http://amzn.com/0375412026

Things Fall Appart - because it helped me understand how religions like Christianity and other initially subversive beliefs spread, and the sudden impact of Western culture on other cultures.

Anthropology (Marvin Harris) - because it impacted the way I look at humanity, society and history, and also helped me understand that marxism is much more than an arguably failed political doctrine.

The Bernstein Tapes about Critique of Pure Reason - I am still working through this, but has already impacted my conception of what knowledge is

History of Western Philosophy (Bertrand Russel) - because it made me understand the interwining between ideas and history. A desert island book

Concepts Techniques Models of Computer Programming - still working through it, because ir is making me realize I had no clue about programming and design. Best programming book I have come across

The Prince (Maquiavelli) - because it completely changed the way I look at politics and society

The Making of The Atomic Bomb - because it is a great way to see the incremental progress of science, and made me realize how much those at the leading edge extract from a few crumbles of information. Also the starkest description of the impact of industrialized killing in WW1,