Oppenheimer - From Berkeley to Trinity via Manhattan

Robert Oppenheimer successfully directed the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the world’s first nuclear weapons. However, two other Berkeley faculty members played crucial roles in this development. Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron enabled Glenn Seaborg to discover plutonium and led to the development of uranium isotopic enrichment. In this talk I will describe this work and our group’s investigations to authenticate the first sample of plutonium that was large enough to be weighed and to determine the explosive yield of the "Gadget" through studies of trinitite.

Speaker: Eric Norman, UC Berkeley