The Brilliant Mr. Feynman

才华横溢的费曼先生

Freakonomics Radio

社会与文化

2024-02-08

52 分钟
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单集简介 ...

What happens when an existentially depressed and recently widowed young physicist from Queens gets a fresh start in California? We follow Richard Feynman out west, to explore his long and extremely fruitful second act. (Part two of a three-part series.)

单集文稿 ...

  • On July 16, 1945, a team of us scientists based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, conducted what their leader, J.

  • Robert Oppenheimer, had named the Trinity test.

  • They were detonating a new kind of bomb way out in the desert, a couple hundred miles from the secret lab at Los Alamos where they had created it.

  • The US president Harry Truman seemed to fully grasp the magnitude of this moment.

  • It is an atomic bomb.

  • It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.

  • Oppenheimer had put together a dream team of experienced physicists, many of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany.

  • Also playing a minor but important role was a 24 year old physicist from Queens, New York, named Richard Feynman.

  • Years later, here is how Feynman described watching the Trinity test.

  • Okay, time comes, and this tremendous flash, so bright, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck, and I says, that ain't it.

  • That's an after image.

  • So I turn back up and I see this white light changing into yellow and into orange.

  • The clouds form and then they disappear again.

  • And then finally a big ball of orange has started to rise and billow a little bit and get a little bit black around the edges.

  • And then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire, going out the heat.

  • All this took about 1 minute.

  • Finally, after about a minute and a half, suddenly there's a tremendous noise.

  • Bang.

  • And then rumbles like thunder.

  • And that's what convinced me.