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.)
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.