.jpg)
Several good articles on the Manhattan Project and nuclear history were published in October.
- How Einstein and Schrödinger Conspired to Kill a Cat: Historian David Kaiser explains how the famed “Schrödinger’s cat” fable was born out of letters between Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger. The article also explains how “Schrödinger’s cat served, in its day, as synecdoche for a broader world that had become too strange–and, at times, too threatening–to understand.”
- FDR and the bomb: Historian Alex Wellerstein attempts to piece together FDR’s thoughts on using the atomic bomb. “Would Roosevelt have dropped the bomb on Japan, had he not died? I suspect the answer is yes. One can see…a mind warming up to the idea of the atomic bomb as not just a deterrent, but a weapon, one that might be deployed as a first-strike attack.”
- Fallible pontiff of physics: “Nature” magazine reviewed a new biography of Enrico Fermi, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age by Gino Segre, nephew of Nobel Prize winner and Manhattan Project physicist Emilio Segre, and Bettina Hoerlin. Many Manhattan Project scientists found Fermi to be one of the most brilliant people they ever encountered. The Pope of Physics could become the definitive Fermi biography.
- What Happened to N.J.’s Missile Bases? An interesting photo essay on 14 missile bases that were built in New Jersey during the Cold War.