Old Bearkat":2pd25qkn said:
Red_Devil_DDS":2pd25qkn said:
I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes last year. Utterly fascinating. At its height the Manhattan Project was larger than the US automobile industry.
I read that book too. It was interesting.
The professor I had for basic nuclear physics at UT had been a junior physicist on the Manhattan Project during the war. He was assigned to Los Alamos and had some really interesting stories about his time there. What I thought was most striking was his description of the computing section. It was a bunch of women with mechanical calculators who would take inputs from the mathematicians who took the physicists equations and broke them down into a series of basic arithmetic steps. There were several Quonset huts with 30-40 women in each one cranking out the calculations. He said it was quite noisy. There were a few primitive computers back then, but they were all employed doing ballistic calculations for the Army and Navy artillery. Slide rules were not exact enough so they used this method.
Wow I bet those huts got really hot with that many people in the Los Alamos desert.
The book didn’t have a ton of technical information, but the amount of research that went into all facets is staggering as evidenced by the hundred or so people just doing calculations. The explosive lens developed by von Neumann blows my mind.
All that culminated at Trinity when everyone kind of collectively wondered, “What have we done?!”
Did your prof witness the Trinity?
