this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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I know this is just a meme, but I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about something I think is super interesting. Physicists didn't build the bomb (edit: nor were they particularly responsible for its design).
David Kaiser, an MIT professor who is both a physicist and a historian (aka the coolest guy possible) has done extensive research on this, and his work is particularly interesting because he has the expertise in all the relevant fields do dig through the archives.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, but he concludes that the physics was widely known outside of secret government operations, and the fundamental challenges to building an atomic bomb are engineering challenges – things like refining uranium or whatever. In other words, knowing that atoms have energy inside them which will be released if it is split was widely known, and it’s a very, very, very long path engineering project from there to a bomb.
This cultural understanding that physicists working for the Manhattan project built the bomb is actually precisely because the engineering effort was so big and so difficult, but the physics was already so widely known internationally, that the government didn’t redact the physics part of the story. In other words, because people only read about physicists’ contributions to the bomb, and the government kept secret everything about the much larger engineering and manufacturing effort, we are left with this impression that a handful of basic scientists were the main, driving force in its creation.
That's how it is in almost every field, isn't it? The ones who designed the space shuttle were not the same ones turning wrenches and welding on the actual vehicle.
Yeah, I thought it was well known that Scientists discover new things, engineers do things with what’s discovered
Sometimes even engineers and scientists need it put in an understandable perspective.
No, the real engineers design and supervise everything. High skilled technicians assemble everything through the engineers guidance
Well, I should've said "build or design," maybe.
But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it's just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.
It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.
The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he's ever written.
Put another way, everyone in science and technololgy stands on the backs of giants.
Not Aperture Science! They do all their science from scratch - no hand-holding.
Nuclear bombs are actually extremly simple from a physics standpoint.
Make Uranium dense. Boom.
Sort of but ,its also reasonably well promoted that 130,000 people worked on the project. I suppose people think they are all physicists?
I think people see it the same way a movie is made by the director, even though a ton of people work on it, and, according to Kaiser, that is a misunderstanding of how it happened based on the information made available by the government.