BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND S

Very good book who loves history. History of making of Atom Bomb and roles of countries amazing.

Wonderful reading experience

An excellent read...

A wonderful book!

This is a great book .Rare of its kind.. We lost it long back .. But find it again through Amazon.in... Amazon makes this possible !!! Thanks a ton..!!

An amazing book. Very relevant today

Great book. We had a copy which was procured by my father. But now with all three siblings establishing separate families, the absense of this book was deeply agonising. Amazon has solved the crisis.

The media could not be loaded. I feel like being cheated . I know what a book of price 1386 rs. Feels like . The paper quality is of 300 rupees book . If I would have bought this book from a book store ,I would not have considered this for buying if the price would be more than 400 rupees

love the book, but quite confusing

I first read “Brighter than a Thousand Suns” at the end of 1970. While remembering that I thought highly of the book then, I no longer have much recollection of its contents. Recently, after finishing a couple of books on the history of Maxwell equations, hydrodynamics and thermodynamics, it occurred to me that I would enjoy reading “Brighter than a Thousand Suns” again.The year 1970 was at the height of the cold war between superpowers with nuclear weapons that can wipe out civilization in seconds. The doomsday clock in 1971 was set by the Editors of the publication “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” to 23.50, or 10 minutes to midnight. Now in 2021, although the nuclear threat is still there, one would think that the world should be much further from midnight than in 1970, since, after all, it has been 36 years ago that the cold war was declared to have ended. To my great surprise, when I look it up, the doomsday clock in 2021 is only 100 seconds from midnight! This time, humankind faces not only nuclear bombs but also the devastating threat of climate change. At the beginning of 2021, The Bulletin stated that the current issues are "the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced."The book told the events before, during and after the second World War, covering not only the building of the atomic bomb but also the hydrogen bomb, which for a while was known as the Super. Most of the book is heavy reading, as it is filled with serious matters, as well as conflicts of various kinds. The exception is Chapter 2, with the exquisite title “The Beautiful Years 1923-32”. Here it described the time when scientists, students, and professors were free from politics, with stories which were amusing and nostalgic. Every reader who is not a physicist will smile at mathematician David Hilbert’s remark that “Physics is obviously too difficult for physicists.” Among the many heart-warming stories was the one about a young student in University of Gottingen in Germany. He was walking along in a dream, stumbled and fell flat on his face. When a fellow student rushed up and tried to help him to his feet, the fallen student, still on the ground, vigorously repulsed his helper’s efforts, shouting “Leave me alone will you? I’m busy!” Apparently. a new brilliant solution had just occurred to him.Unfortunately, the beautiful years soon came to an end. The Nazis took over Germany in 1933 and was poised to invade countries in Europe. When Einstein moved to the U.S. in the autumn of 1933, taking up the position in the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, the French Physicist Paul Langevin said that “The Pope of Physics has moved and the United States will now become the center of the natural sciences.”The main story was about why and how the American Government decided to build the atomic bomb, how the effort, designated as the Manhattan Project, was organized, and what life and work at Los Alamos and at Oak Ridge were like for the scientists. Particularly interesting were the episodes depicting the personalities of some famous scientists and mathematicians, including Oppenheimer, Feynman, Dirac, Bethe, Teller, Einstein, Hilbert, von Neumann, among others. The decision processes regarding whether to use the atomic bomb against Japan, whether to proceed with the hydrogen bomb etc. were documented in detail. It is somber to read “The widespread underestimation in the West, during the first four years after the war, of Russia’s capacity to construct atom bombs within a foreseeable time is almost more astonishing than the earlier overestimation of Germany’s atomic potential.“.There were brief descriptions of the state of atomic physics research in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, particularly the work of Hahn, Joliet-Curie, Frank, Frisch, Rutherford, and Szilard. The later part of the book detailed the origin, the debate, and the production and testing of the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer’s role in the tragedy of his friend Haakon Chevalier, and the hearing to take away the security clearance of Oppenheimer.In the chapter concerning Oppenheimer, the author made the following observation about the modern-day scientist: “His remarkable admission perhaps explains why the twentieth-century Faust allows himself, in his obsession with success and despite occasional twinges of conscience, to be persuaded into signing the pact with the Devil that confronts him: What is ‘technically sweet’ he finds nothing less than irresistible”.I found the above observation eerily similar to a recent remark a former comedian made on the show of a current comedian:“I love scientists and they do good work. But they are going to kill us all. Here’s how I believe the world ends, and I say this to you in sincerity…….The world ends, the last words man utters are somewhere in a lab, a guy goes, huh huh, it worked.”Comedians aside, “Brighter than a thousand suns” vividly described a unique and bitter/sweet page of human history. It should be a must read for anyone seeking to gain some understanding of the complicated modern world.

Relato histórico y político de un hecho científico aplicado a la guerra

In some pages there are twenty or more OCR errors. Why don’t publishers run a simple spell check and correct at least some of them? In a few places the text is garbled, including one where parts of a long footnote have been inserted into the main text without any sign of what is what. I feel cheated. It wasn’t worth the Kindle price. Recommend buying a used hard copy because it is worth reading.

A very good book.