I just finished Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb. What a book—long and heavy, but I really enjoyed it. I already knew a lot about the Manhattan Project itself, but what stood out this time were the stories of the scientists as people. Seeing them not just as names in textbooks, but as real, human characters gave me a whole new appreciation.
I’ve especially connected with Ernest Rutherford—an experimentalist at heart, like me. Reading about him brought me back to the joy I felt doing chemistry experiments as a teenager in my garage lab. So now I’ve picked up Rhodes’ full Rutherford biography, A Force of Nature, to dive deeper.
Most of what became modern nuclear physics was uncovered well before the Manhattan Project—between 1910 and 1932—when Rutherford and his students were at the center of discovery. Reading about those experiments is reminding me why I fell in love with science in the first place.
