That he had been freed, his discovery could not put him back in the bottle. He had to decide how best to use them. Tonights presentation of the age of radiance renovates the tab of the men and the din in much more rich and detailed form. The book tells him him many interwoven stories of scientists who interest in the area and sometimes killed them. Have hitlers adrianne persecution drove from germany the very scientists who discovered that have given him mastery of the world and of the twin pallets of the twin pallets of apocalyptic war and hes going Energy Sources taken by nuclear research. Story as told by the speaker tonight, the firemen who battled the disaster at your chernobyl loom. Like most human discovers, neither a good output evil or stuff. This is what we humans use. Booksnelson has written on many varied topics. Rocket men told the story of the apollo moon mentioned very thomas payne profile that philosopher. The first heroes was about the doolittle raid on japan in the early part of world war ii and lets get lost features the opposition traveled to unusual parts of the world and the odd experiences that accompanied them. Other things he has written have appeared in medicare, the wall heeet journal and so on, lives not too far from here in greenwich village. The author of the age of radiance. Craig nelson. Aig thank you someone. It is and is a part of my work and my own personal library, my Branch Library is mulder street and one of the first remember reading was a dr. Seuss book called to think i saw it on mulberry street. My libraries were david bowie. There is nothing in this book, this dr. Seuss book as good as seeing david bowie. Fold onow history itself and those are some of the things we will be talking about. Five years ago when i first started working on this book, if you asked me what radiation was, i wouldve said oh it is scary, dangerous, infectious, cancercausing, evil and this is what many of you think as well. I still think many of those things but they are tempered with a lot of other ideas. The very first thing i learned about was the fact that radiation was made up of caused by atoms that are little fat atoms. They are adorable. They are too fat for their own good, they are soaked that that they break the bonds of nature that create material word world. Create the material world. They are spitting out the subatomic particles or the gamma rays. You can think of them as being the hollywood starlets of the periodic table, they are unstable and bulimic. There they are, that is your little fat uranium atoms being all spinning. While they are spinning, they create this like how it was they create this time about them. When marie curie went to into lab, she would leave out uranium so it would low like aquatic fireflies on the wall. Someone noticed after she put them radium 08, the walls were still glowing. When you pick up the silvery plutonium that in reagan was making, it was one like a puppy and it was so strange to feed of this metal that you think would be called and instead it was one like a puppy. Those elementsr for holding that puppy too long was called high amputation. It is sort of a scary puppy we are talking about. Really, the entire subatomic world has this just disturbing quality. We talk about radiation overtime as a halflife and we think about this inert object that is sending out these rays that are dangerous to us and how disturbing that is. But really, the entire subatomic world is like that. Example, letsne say you are flying in a plane and you look at the window and you see a bunch of specs. Because you are a worldclass physicist, you take out your slide rule and you make a mathematical portrait of the way those specs appear and disappear , the speed of the specs and after a while you have created something of an idea mathematically. Then you take that your binoculars and you realize that you have been flying over water and the specs are whitecaps. And you know they are powered by waves and being a worldclass physicist, you know there is a music of the spheres, of nature and there isnt much melody to this music and there is a lot of rhythm. You can take a whole new set of calculations based on the waves. This is how in the subatomic world we can use two different different instruments, our eyes and almanac was in his example to knows particles, the whitecaps are ways this is how something in the abatomic world can be both part of like a photon and a way. So all of it is creepy and disturbing. But before we get too much of the science, i want to backup. One of the things that is sad about history the way we learned in school is that we learn things like the date of this and that when this great man was born, when he died, the date of that battle. But the guys started history had a different idea altogether. He said that history is about one thing and one thing only, and that is how i got a story for you , once upon a time, there was a little girl who was the youngest of five children of a family that had once been prosperous but had fallen on hard times. When she was 17 her own sister said lets make a deal, you go work and support me for two years while i go to university and then i will turn around and do the same thing for you. At thes a bizarre idea time because at that moment, in that time and in that ice it was illegal for women over the age of 12 to get an education. And they were getting around that by attending something called the Floating University which floated so the authorities could not track who was running it and throw them in a labor. This Floating University did a fantastic job. Because she got into medical school at the university of offs and off she went and money went to be a nanny into work of her. Blood jobs she gets, she is really unhappy and it is terrible but then she started working for the giraffe skis. They are a fantastic family, a run a sugarbeet presentation about 60 kilometers outside of warsaw. Their six kidsnd are just adorable. But the oldest son comes home from school and he is casimir. And they fall head over heels in love. For a year they are dating and finally he says im going to tell my parents that we will get married and he goes and does that. All the kids know about it and they think this is great, Everybody Loves her but the parents say no way. Youre not marrying this money was nobody, your marrying up and they refused to let them get married. Me, id please wait for will work this out and talk them into marrying you and they see each other secretly for six months and the parents find out and they fire her. So now she goes back to warsaw and she is living at her Fathers House and she is heartbroken, she is 19 and the letter comes from her. I finished school, and engaged to be married and now it is your turn to come to paris. But she is so in love she cant do it. She just cant give up her first love of her life. Arrives,the letter forget it, my parents will never let me married, or get it. Decades later, he would become a famous mathematician in warsaw. He would be frequently seen in the main square of that city staring up at the enormous statue of the National Hero roland marie curry which is who she grew up to be. Because she did not marry castor and because she liked paris. I love the store so much because it really shows you dont always follow your heart, especially if youre 19. But it shows you what would have happened if she stayed with him and never left poland, how our future would have been changed because as marie curie, she would go on to discover the fundamental forces of radioactivity area she would discover radium and polonium and realize that radiation was an atomic force, that it didnt come from the outside, it came from within. They would discover that because it had such an effect on fastgrowing cells, you can use it to treat cancer. But i do all of you have heard the wonderful story of marie and were fantastic couple they were and how perfect they were for each other but lets forget about that for a minute, lets talk about somebody else. After appeared died, marie had a incredible affair with paul langevin. These are the greatest minds of in 1927. She had an affair with paul on vin. Een paul lange she and paul have a fantastic relationship, their letters back and forth are so passionate, she comes back to life after being widowed by. An early death, he was run over by a cart and was affected by working with radioactive materials. So theyre madly in love and it is by she has a whole second life, except there is a problem in that paul is married and even of his wife doesnt mind that he had a mistress, she mines that it is the most famous woman in france. The wife has a brother and the brother rent a newspaper and they Start Talking about how marie curie is this homewrecker and mr. Say that she is jewish. He becomes such a scandal that when she gets ready to go off to sweden to get her second nobel she goes up einstein and says what should i do . He says go get the prize. That relationship falls apart as all of you women have guessed, paul goes back to his wife. Before that relationship and at breaks maries heart all over again, paul says i have this real gogetter named fred and you should hire him to work in your lab. And afteres hire fred a year you will never guess what happens, fred says marie, i want to marry her daughter irene and marie has a heart attack. Marryys no, you will not marie was wrong, fred and then have a fantastic marriage, they are more important to us today that marie if youre free because they discovered artificial radiation. That is a fundamental element of stability medicine and it is important to mention today as a microscope and the reason i told you this long, giant store is because the end of the story is womanarie was the first to win a nobel prize. And her daughter was the second. Good going, iran. Discoverd and iran artificial radiation, everybody around the world starts irradiating everything. Addedoup to become a good his villainous chemist, name was auto han otto han. And none of you have heard of her. I would like to tell you her story. The First University professor in the history of germany. She was the second woman to live received an advanced degree the 500 year history of the universe, she was running the Physics Institute for 12 years at the most Important Research institution in the world when she was kicked out or having jewish ancestry. He ends up in sweden there she is at the age of 60, all washed up, she doesnt speak swedish, her bosses gels of her and hates her, she has no quivering, no health, she is not being paid anything and she feels washed up and alone and she cant believe this has happened to her. Comes on christmas and they have something called this is like when you go to 7eleven hundred and five feet jerky except it is made of ash and it has the consistency of jello. It is the worst thing i have ever put in my mouth. They have christmas dinner of and and they go for a walk all she can talk about is her villainous chemist x partner auto han who and his mysterious findings. What he is doing is he is pointing a stream of neutrons at uranium and he is getting bizarre results that no one understands. And that they may be their instruments are wrong, maybe the chemistry is wrong, they dont what is going on. Sits down on a log in the middle of estoppel on Christmas Day in sweden and she takes out a pencil and a piece of april. Andtakes the uranium atom takes the stuff they are getting out of it, how much it weighs appliesly and then she the theory of relativity. She discovers fission. Ottoauto goes back, ack goes ba this triggers an incredible sensation among them who are fleeing hitlers. Thehe United States, all of angloamerican scientists are working on radar. They dont care about vision, they think this idea is just wacky. Everyone was fleeing hitlers is thinking to themselves what if it up hitlers gets the atomic bomb and we dont have it . Normally americans are told the story of the making of the atomic bomb as einstein wrote some decorations on a board and but in fact it took three of the most terrifying experiment in the history of science to make these in the first one happened in the middle of the city of chicago. He was supposed to create the first atomic reactor in the woods in the argonne would put the people building the facility had a strike and so the university of chicago president said we dont have football here anymore, so nobody is using our football stadium so you can use that and they found this little squash court inside the football stadium in the middle of the city of chicago and this is where he created the First Nuclear reactor. I called the third most dangerous experiment in American History since what if something had gone wrong with the first of the reactor but nothing went wrong, it was the most perfect experiment anyone had ever seen. He has the patent on Nuclear Reactors this out newly reactors. But one thing very funny spiesed in that soviet who were sending word of this back to moscow, there is a translation issue. Instead of squash courts which is where he was, for almost three decades, the soviet union thought the First Nuclear reactor was in a pocket patch. Now, i know that some of you came here because you heard theres going to be a reading and i know that some of you are angry that i havent read anything. So i will read a little bit for you at this time so you are disappointed and serious in 1921, a young woman named catherine was told she was not long for the earth and that since she would die. Catherine decided to spend the rest of her days as a wife to winthrop page, a chicago millionaire as old as her daddy and live that was on the page family ranch which they in a desert of lavender. This is between the pickles and the santa christo mountains. Named for their sunsets. The following year, a pale jewish boy would fetch a serious cough as doctors suspected tuberculosis but that his chainsmoking. And showed up to the ranch she taught them how to ride a horse and if in every kind of weather. Bob returned to mexico with his brother frank and this time, kathryn page whose death would not come for decades and whose husband would never come last took them 9500 feet into the peaks to a cavern with a fireplace made of clay, surrounded by 154 acres of alpine meadow, feels of clover and heart stopping abuse of the pecos river in these mounds. The tube was commenced their debt to rent the place, and this rubber would continue as an adult i taken by this for 10,000 in 1947, in frank went there is just that good, loving our great guy dreams of the american west, riding horseback, thousands of miles of its colorado, living on vienna sausages, cheese and whiskey, here we have a lesson in history teachers. If we have a man who was the object of your interest and youre not paying them in up tryntion, history teaches chocolate covered raisins, cheese and whiskey. His days at west, he brought back to a friend, my two great loves our physics at new mexico, it is a pity they cant be combined. One of the areas where he took a ride with catherine was to a volcanic crater and through a canyon with a stream along with this. The canyon was named for the trees, the next and work for those trees was los alamos and i grew up in a jungle town limits while people but i just love the southwest. I think it is beautiful. Two kinds of bombs were made at los alamos. The restaurant was made from uranium and it was so simple in the engineering that they never tested it before dropping it on hiroshima. The other time it was tested was when it was detonated. Carries a this bomb gun inside were a shot of uranium is thrown into ebola uranium. But the one problem they have was they didnt know how much uranium they needed in each end of this device. So, otto went out into the canyon and created this guillotine device. You could change the size of the plug and another set of washers were he to change the size of the ball and then he would drop the washers with his guillotine and they would pass through the evolve for a couple of seconds and create a very splitsecond. F super cut we were trying to come as close as we could to an atomic explosion without blowing ourselves up. I want you to notice what this bomb looks like, here comes the plutonium bomb which looks like that. There is quite a difference here between those two and that is when the physicist at los alamos first theoretical put together the idea for the plutonium bomb, they have the concept that the plutonium comingout of hanford, washington would be extremely pure and it was not that your. What they needed to do was to figure out how to compress it from the size of an orange to the size of a marble. The only to do that was to perfectly imploded on all of these, all these wires you see are the detonation charges that are all firing in pervasive finnish city to compress the plutonium. The guy who came up with this idea was my favorite hungarian and were scientist. He created the fundamentals of modern computing at a time when the most popular computer he called his computer maniac. He was such a good mathematician that his wife said he can count everything except calories. He upset people because he likes to play german pop music really loud on his record but he was the one who did the calculations that made the plutonium bomb and nagasaki bomb work. I love him because he was such a natty dresser that when everyone went bar writing in the grand canyon, he wore a three use it. There is a corner at princeton called the von nyman carter. He crashed so often into this corner that it is named for him to this day. The government explain to americans that the reason we had atomic bombs and nobody asked it was because we knew atomic secrets and everyone assumed this meant the geniuses at los alamos but it didnt mean that. What they were doing at los alamos was engineering area the real genius was being done at up ridge, tennessee at the largest building in the world at that time. Where because they were creating the fuel that goes inside the to do it withd all of these different methods, one method was a thermal diffusion method, another was a drip diffusion method and then they had a proton merrygoround, the cyclotron. That was going on there and they they had vision devices which was the plutonium. But the breaking became out of oak ridge was they had to discover a special sealant to make the material and that ended and enough in American Homes as teflon. One thing i am very sad about is the fact that the atomic age is ending, the bombs were very beautiful. Lets look at 13 of them together. So, now we have the most dangerous experiment in history of science in america, when in recovers made the Nuclear Reactor w