Update - 22 January 2022
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Oppenheimer: Before and After – From a glass plate to the H-bomb
July 15 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
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If you saw the Oppenheimer movie, here is the prequel, and the story of what happened next.
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 source of atomic energy, 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.
Date: Tuesday 15th July
Time: 18:00 – 19:00
Venue: Lightbox Cafe Bar, Rutherford Avenue, Harwell Campus
Frank’s new book will be available for purchase at the talk.
Food and drink will be available for purchase from the venue.
Tickets are required for this event and are open to all (including non-campus members).
About 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. Author of 22 books on science including The Cosmic Onion, Trinity, and Elusive, the story of the elusive Peter Higgs and his boson, his latest book – Destroyer of Worlds, is the theme of today’s talk.
