Destroyer of Worlds
Was Marie Curie really the greatest female physicist of the early 20th century? Could the atomic energy contained in a gramme of radium really drive a ship across the Atlantic? Did a traffic light near the Royal Institution really give Leo Szilard his idea of the chain reaction? And was Oppenheimer really the “father of the atomic bomb”? This talk reveals how Henry Becquerel’s accidental discovery, in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age and reveals some of the myths that have grown around this saga.Based on Frank Close’s new book, Destroyer of Worlds, the talk is the story of how pursuit of this hidden nuclear power source, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere.
The world's first nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, known as the Jornada del Muerto.
Frank Close
Frank Close is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. He was one time head of theory at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and head of communications and public education at CERN. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and winner of their Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in science communication in 2013. He is the only professional scientist to have won the Association of British Science Writers Prize on 3 occasions.
