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Post by Deleted on Jul 13, 2020 19:27:06 GMT -5
I'm reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. I understand about 1/100 of it. Lots of names I know gaining some personality. Lots of names I did not know, like Leo Szilard.
Hungary. Who knew?
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Post by mln59 on Jul 15, 2020 18:35:40 GMT -5
I'm reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. I understand about 1/100 of it. Lots of names I know gaining some personality. Lots of names I did not know, like Leo Szilard. Hungary. Who knew? i've read american promethus, a biography of robert oppenheimer. lots of smart people involved with that project
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Post by mln59 on Jul 15, 2020 18:36:42 GMT -5
read about 130 pages last night. things are moving quickly. i have fewer than 100 pages remaining in the 2nd book of the trilogy. feels like competing forces are about to collide
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Post by mikegarrison on Jul 15, 2020 19:02:44 GMT -5
I'm reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. I understand about 1/100 of it. Lots of names I know gaining some personality. Lots of names I did not know, like Leo Szilard. Hungary. Who knew? Well, I did, actually.
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Post by mikegarrison on Jul 15, 2020 19:08:46 GMT -5
Just imagine what would have happened if Hitler and the Nazis hadn't been anti-Semitic? So many of the scientists and engineers who invented the atomic bomb were Jewish. If Fermi and Szilard and Einstein and Teller et al. had stayed in Europe....
(Fermi wasn't Jewish, but his wife was.)
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Post by Deleted on Jul 15, 2020 19:45:30 GMT -5
Just imagine what would have happened if Hitler and the Nazis hadn't been anti-Semitic? So many of the scientists and engineers who invented the atomic bomb were Jewish. If Fermi and Szilard and Einstein and Teller et al. had stayed in Europe.... (Fermi wasn't Jewish, but his wife was.) He still had plenty of talented people working on it. As did Russia and Japan. We are incredibly lucky one of the other countries was not first. Btw, I'm reading this because my grandfather was a security guard at Hanford. Died at the age of 44, which the government later admitted was due to the radiation he had been exposed to.
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Post by mikegarrison on Jul 15, 2020 21:20:07 GMT -5
Just imagine what would have happened if Hitler and the Nazis hadn't been anti-Semitic? So many of the scientists and engineers who invented the atomic bomb were Jewish. If Fermi and Szilard and Einstein and Teller et al. had stayed in Europe.... (Fermi wasn't Jewish, but his wife was.) He still had plenty of talented people working on it. As did Russia and Japan. We are incredibly lucky one of the other countries was not first. Btw, I'm reading this because my grandfather was a security guard at Hanford. Died at the age of 44, which the government later admitted was due to the radiation he had been exposed to. Sorry to hear that. Hanford during and after the war was a nightmare of unintentional and even intentional release of radioactive and toxic materials into the environment. It's still a huge cleanup problem. They did stuff like just dump nuclear waste into any handy available hole. Strangely, it did have one environmental benefit, however. The "Hanford Reach" is the only remaining free-flowing, undammed, undeveloped stretch of the Columbia.
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Post by mln59 on Jul 17, 2020 8:26:24 GMT -5
read about 130 pages last night. things are moving quickly. i have fewer than 100 pages remaining in the 2nd book of the trilogy. feels like competing forces are about to collide have 42 pages left. author has to wrap up the 2nd and set the seeds for the 3rd. good stuff so far
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Post by mln59 on Jul 20, 2020 7:21:27 GMT -5
i have fewer than 100 pages remaining in the 2nd book of the trilogy. feels like competing forces are about to collide have 42 pages left. author has to wrap up the 2nd and set the seeds for the 3rd. good stuff so far on to book 3, the kingdom of gods. over 600 pages.
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Post by mln59 on Aug 4, 2020 13:40:21 GMT -5
have 42 pages left. author has to wrap up the 2nd and set the seeds for the 3rd. good stuff so far on to book 3, the kingdom of gods. over 600 pages. have fewer than 100 pages left in book 3.
the next book is a novella sequel to the entire trilogy
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Post by mln59 on Aug 6, 2020 9:53:33 GMT -5
on to book 3, the kingdom of gods. over 600 pages. have fewer than 100 pages left in book 3.
the next book is a novella sequel to the entire trilogy
finished the final book of the trilogy.
the novella sequel, the awakened kingdom, is approximately 115 pages. once that is complete, i shall shift back to non-fiction
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Post by Deleted on Aug 6, 2020 11:29:18 GMT -5
Hmm. They are about to drop the bomb in my book. And here it is August 6. 75 years later.
Found out that Enola Gay was Tibbets' mother's name. Did not know that. Also don't know why I knew about Los Alamos, but not Oak Ridge or Hanford. Didn't know about Hanford in spite of the fact my grandfather was there.
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Post by mikegarrison on Aug 6, 2020 12:11:46 GMT -5
Hmm. They are about to drop the bomb in my book. And here it is August 6. 75 years later. Found out that Enola Gay was Tibbets' mother's name. Did not know that. Also don't know why I knew about Los Alamos, but not Oak Ridge or Hanford. Didn't know about Hanford in spite of the fact my grandfather was there. I knew about all those. Just sayin'. The Enola Gay is in the Udvar-Hazy just outside DC, but the Bockscar is closer to you, in Dayton. In Feynman's first autobiography (he wrote three of them), he talks a lot about his time in Los Alamos. He also tells a story about going to Oak Ridge to inspect their plant. They didn't know why they were doing what they were doing. They had been told to not store too much uranium in one place, but nobody had told them why. So they were storing it in separate rooms, but with only a thin wall between the storage containers, it was basically the same as storing them together. So Feynman had to explain that this was very dangerous, and they needed to pay attention to that actual separation distance between the containers, not just whether they were in the same room or not.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 6, 2020 12:27:14 GMT -5
I've been to the Dayton museum, a very long time ago. Back when we lived in Athens.
It's pretty amazing what was built and how much was spent in those 3-4 years. (Feynman just made his first appearance in my book, a couple of chapters back. Also amazing how much talent was assembled for this.)
They also just secured all the uranium the Germans had been warehousing, thus confirming the Germans were no where near having their own bomb, something they had been racing against.
I had forgotten Curtis LeMay's role in all of this, too. Just remembered him as Wallace's running mate.
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Post by mln59 on Aug 10, 2020 23:09:40 GMT -5
have fewer than 100 pages left in book 3.
the next book is a novella sequel to the entire trilogy
finished the final book of the trilogy.
the novella sequel, the awakened kingdom, is approximately 115 pages. once that is complete, i shall shift back to non-fiction
finished the novella. going to read soren kierkegaard's the sickness into death next
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